St. Peter's Fair

by Ellis Peters

*

  A late boat coming up the Severn from Buildwas next day, and tying up at the bridge about nine in the morning, delayed its unloading of a cargo of pottery to ask first that a message be sent to the sheriff, for they had other cargo aboard, taken up out of a cove near Atcham, which would be very much the sheriff’s business. Gilbert Prestcote, busy with other matters, sent from the castle his own sergeant, with orders to report first to Hugh Beringar at the abbey.

  The particular cargo the potter had to deliver lay rolled in a length of coarse sail-cloth in the bottom of the boat, and oozed water in a dark stain over the boards. The boatman unfolded the covering, and displayed to Beringar’s view the body of a heavily-built man of some fifty to fifty-five years, fleshy, with thinning, grizzled hair and bristly, bluish jowls, his pouchy features sagging doughily in death. Master Thomas of Bristol, stripped of his elaborate capuchon, his handsome gown, his rings and his dignity, as naked as the day he was born.

  “We saw his whiteness bobbing under the bank,” said the potter, looking down upon his salvaged man, “and poled in to pick him up, the poor soul. I can show you the place, this side of the shallows and the island at Atcham. We thought best to bring him here, as we would a drowned man. But this one,” he said very soberly, “did not drown.”

  No, Thomas of Bristol had not drowned. That was already evident from the very fact that he had been stripped of everything he had on, and hardly by his own hands or will. But also, even more certainly, from the incredibly narrow wound under his left shoulder-blade, washed white and closed by the river, where a very fine, slender dagger had transfixed him and penetrated to his heart.

  The First Day Of The Fair

  Chapter 1

  THE FIRST DAY OF SAINT PETER’S FAIR was in full swing, and the merry, purposeful hum of voices bargaining, gossiping and crying wares came over the wall into the great court, and in at the gatehouse, like the summer music of a huge hive of bees on a sunny day. The sound pursued Hugh Beringar back to the apartment in the guest-hall, where his wife and Emma Vernold were very pleasurably comparing the virtues of various wools, and the maid Constance, who was an expert spinstress, was fingering the samples critically and giving her advice.

  On this domestic scene, which had brought back the fresh colour to Emma’s cheeks and the animation to her voice, Hugh’s sombre face cast an instant cloud. There was no time for breaking news circuitously, nor did he think that this girl would thank him for going roundabout.

  “Mistress Vernold, my news is ill, and I grieve for it. God knows I had not expected this. Your uncle is found. A boat coming up early this morning from Buildwas picked up his body from the river.”

  The colour ebbed from her face. She stood with frightened, helpless eyes gazing blindly before her. The prop of her life had suddenly been plucked away, and for a moment it seemed that all balance was lost to her, and she might indeed fall for want of him. But by the time she had drawn breath deep, and shaped soundlessly: “Dead!” it was clear that she was firm on her own feet again, and in no danger of falling. Her eyes, once the momentary panic and dizziness passed, looked straight at Hugh and made no appeal.

  “Drowned?” she said. “But he swam well, he was raised by the river. And if he drank at all, it was sparingly. I do not believe he could fall into Severn and drown. Not of himself!” she said, and her large eyes dilated.

  “Sit down,” said Hugh gently, “for we must talk a little, and then I shall leave you with Aline, for of course you must remain here in our care for this while. No, he did not drown. Nor did he come by his death of himself. Master Thomas was stabbed from behind, stripped, and put into the river after death.”

  “You mean,” she said, in a voice low and laboured, but quite steady, “he was waylaid and killed by mere sneak-thieves, for what he had on him? For his rings and his gown and his shoes?”

  “It is what leaps to the mind. There are no roads in England now that can be called safe, and no great fair that has not its probable underworld of hangers-on, who will kill for a few pence.”

  “My uncle was not a timid man. He has fought off more than one attack in his time, and he never avoided a journey for fear in his life. After all these years,” she said, her voice aching with protest, “why should he fall victim now to such scum? And yet what else can it be?”

  “There are some people recalling,” said Hugh, “that there was an ugly incident on the jetty last evening, and violence was done to a number of the merchants who were unloading goods and setting up stalls for the fair. It’s common knowledge there was bad blood between town and traders, of whom Master Thomas was perhaps the most influential. He was involved bitterly with the young man who led the raid. An attack made in revenge, by night, perhaps in a drunken rage, might end mortally, whether it was meant or no.”

  “Then he would have been left where he lay,” said Emma sharply. “His attacker would think only of getting clean away unseen. Those angry people were not thieves, only townsmen with a grievance. A grievance might turn them into murderers, but I do not think it would turn them into thieves.”

  Hugh was beginning to feel considerable respect for this girl, as Aline, by her detached silence and her attentive face, had already learned to do. “I won’t say but I agree with you there,” he admitted. “But it might well occur to a young man turned murderer almost by mishap, to dress his crime as the common sneak killing for robbery. It opens so wide a field. Twenty young men bitterly aggrieved and hot against your uncle for his scorn of them could be lost among a thousand unknown, and the most unlikely suspects among them, at that, if this passes as chance murder for gain.”

  Even in the bleak newness of her bereavement, this thought troubled her. She bit a hesitant lip. “You think it may have been one of those young men? Or more of them together? That they burned with their grudge until they followed him in the dark, and took this way?”

  “It’s being both thought and said,” owned Hugh, “by many people who witnessed what happened by the river.”

  “But the sheriff’s men,” she pointed out, frowning, “surely took up many of those young men long before my uncle went to the fairground. If they were already in prison, they could not have harmed him.”

  “True of most of them. But the one who led them was not taken until the small hours of the morning, when he came reeling back to the town gate, where he was awaited. He is in a cell in the castle now, like his fellows, but he was still at liberty long after Master Thomas failed to come back to you, and he is under strong suspicion of this death. The whole pack of them will come before the sheriff this afternoon. The rest, I fancy, will be let out on their fathers’ bail, to answer the charges later. But for Philip Corviser, I greatly doubt it. He will need to have better answers than he was able to give when they took him.”

  “This afternoon!” echoed Emma. “Then I should also attend. I was a witness when this turmoil began. The sheriff should hear my testimony, too, especially if my uncle’s death is in question. There were others—Master Corbière, and the brother of the abbey, the one you know well…”

  “They will be attending, and others besides. Certainly your witness would be valuable, but to ask it of you at such a time…”

  “I would rather!” she said firmly. “I want my uncle’s murderer caught, if indeed he was murdered, but I pray no innocent man may be too hurriedly blamed. I don’t know—I would not have thought he looked like a murderer… I should like to tell what I do know, it is my duty.”

  Beringar cast a brief glance at his wife for enlightenment, and Aline gave him a smile and the faintest of nods.

  “If you are resolved on that,” he said, reassured, “I will ask Brother Cadfael to escort you. And for the rest, you need have no anxieties about your own situation. It will be necessary for you to stay here until this matter is looked into, but naturally you will remain here in Aline’s company, and you shall have every possible help in whatever dispositions you need to make.”

  “I should like,” said Emma, �
��to take my uncle’s body back by the barge to Bristol for burial.” She had not considered, until then, that there would be no protector for her on the boat this time, only Roger Dod, whose mute but watchful and jealous devotion was more than she could bear, Warin who would take care to notice nothing that might cause him trouble, and poor Gregory, who was strong and able of body but very dull of wit. She drew in breath sharply, and bit an uncertain lip, and the shadow came back to her eyes. “At least, to send him back… His man of law there will take care of his affairs and mine.”

  “I have spoken to the prior. Abbot Radulfus sanctions the use of an abbey chapel, your uncle’s body can lie there when he is brought from the castle, and all due preparations will be made for his decent coffining. Ask for anything you want, it shall be at your disposal. I must summon your journeyman to attend at the castle this afternoon, too. How would you wish him to deal, concerning the fair? I will give him whatever instructions you care to send.”

  She nodded understanding, visibly bracing herself again towards a world of shrewd daily business which had not ceased with the ending of a life. “Be so kind as to tell him,” she said, “to continue trading for the three days of the fair, as though his master still presided. My uncle would scorn to go aside from his regular ways for any danger or loss, and so will I in his name.” And suddenly, as freely and as simply as a small child, she burst into tears at last.

  *

  When Hugh was gone about his business, and Constance had withdrawn at Aline’s nod, the two women sat quietly until Emma had ceased to weep, which she did as suddenly as she had begun. She wept, as some women have the gift of doing, without in the least defacing her own prettiness and without caring whether she did or no. Most lose the faculty, after the end of childhood. She dried her eyes, and looked up straightly at Aline, who was looking back at her just as steadily, with a serenity which offered comfort without pressing it.

  “You must think,” said Emma, “that I had no deep affection for my uncle. And indeed I don’t know myself that you would be wrong. And yet I did love him, it has not been only loyalty and gratitude, though those came easier. He was a hard man, people said, hard to satisfy, and hard in his business dealings. But he was not hard to me. Only hard to come near. It was not his fault, or mine.”

  “I think,” said Aline mildly, since she was being invited closer, “you loved him as much as he would let you. As he could let you. Some men have not the gift.”

  “Yes. But I would have liked to love him more. I would have done anything to please him. Even now I want to do everything as he would have wished. We shall keep the booth open as long as the fair lasts, and try to do it as well as he would have done. All that he had in hand, I want to see done thoroughly.” Her voice was resolute, almost eager. Master Thomas would certainly have approved the set of her chin and the spark in her eye. “Aline, shall I not be a trouble to you by staying here? I—my uncle’s men—there’s one who likes me too well…”

  “So I had thought,” said Aline. “You’re most welcome here, and we’ll not part with you until you can be sent back safely to Bristol, and your home. Not that I can find it altogether blameworthy in the young man to like you, for that matter,” she added, smiling.

  “No, but I cannot like him well enough. Besides, my uncle would never have allowed me to be there on the barge without him. And now I have duties,” said Emma, rearing her head determinedly and staring the uncertain future defiantly in the face. “I must see to the ordering of a fine coffin for him, for the journey home. There will be a master-carpenter, somewhere in the town?”

  “There is. To the right, halfway up the Wyle, Master Martin Bellecote. A good man, and a good craftsman. His lad was among these terrible rioters, as I hear,” said Aline, and dimpled indulgently at the thought, “but so were half the promising youth of the town. I’ll come in with you to Martin’s shop.”

  “No,” said Emma firmly. “It will all be tedious and long at the sheriff’s court, and you should not tire yourself. And besides, you have to buy your fine wools, before the best are taken. And Brother Cadfael—was that the name?—will show me where to find the shop. He will surely know.”

  “There’s very little to be known about this precinct and the town of Shrewsbury,” agreed Aline with conviction, “that Brother Cadfael does not know.”

  *

  Cadfael received the abbot’s dispensation to attend the hearing at the castle, and to escort the abbey’s bereaved guest, without question. A civic duty could not be evaded, whether by secular or monastic. Radulfus had already shown himself both an austere but just disciplinarian and a shrewd and strong-minded business man. He owed his preferment to the abbacy as much to the king as to the papal legate, and valued and feared for the order of the realm at least as keenly as for the state of his own cure. Consequently, he had a use for those few among the brothers who shared his wide experience of matters outside the cloister.

  “This death,” he said, closeted with Cadfael alone after Beringar’s departure, “casts a shadow upon our house and our fair. Such a burden cannot be shifted to other shoulders. I require of you a full account of what passes at this hearing. It was of me that the elders of the town asked a relief I could not grant. On me rests the load of resentment that drove those younger men to foolish measures. They lacked patience and thought, and they were to blame, but that does not absolve me. If the man’s death has arisen out of my act, even though I could not act otherwise, I must know it, for I have to answer for it, as surely as the man who struck him down.”

  “I shall bring you all that I myself see and hear, Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.

  “I require also all that you think, brother. You saw part of what happened yesterday between the dead man and the living youth. Is it possible that it could have brought about such a death as this? Stabbed in the back? It is not commonly the method of anger.”

  “Not commonly.” Cadfael had seen many deaths in the open anger of battle, but he knew also of rages that had bred and festered into killings by stealth, with the anger as hot as ever, but turned sour by brooding. “Yet it is possible. But there are other possibilities. It may indeed be what it first seems, a mere crude slaughter for the clothes on the body and the rings on the fingers, opportune plunder in the night, when no one chanced to be by. Such things happen, where men are gathered together and there is money changing hands.”

  “It is true,” said Radulfus, coldly and sadly. “The ancient evil is always with us.”

  “Also, the man is of great importance in his trade and his region, and he may have enemies. Hate, envy, rivalry, are as powerful motives even as gain. And at a great fair such as ours, enemies may be brought together, far from the towns where their quarrels are known, and their acts might be guessed at too accurately. Murder is easier and more tempting, away from home.”

  “Again, true,” said the abbot. “Is there more?”

  “There is. There is the matter of the girl, niece and heiress to the dead man. She is of great beauty,” said Cadfael plainly, asserting his right to recognise and celebrate even the beauty of women, though their enjoyment he had now voluntarily forsworn, “and there are three men in her uncle’s service, shut on board a river barge with her. Only one of them old enough, it may be, to value his peace more. One, I think, God’s simpleton, but not therefore blind, or delivered from the flesh. And one whole, able, every way a man, and enslaved to her. And this one it was who followed his master from the booth on the fairground, some say a quarter of an hour after him, some say a little more. God forbid I should therefore point a finger at an honest man. But we speak of possibilities. And will speak of them no more until, or unless, they become more than possibilities.”

  “That is my mind, also,” said Abbot Radulfus, stirring and almost smiling. He looked at Cadfael steadily and long. “Go and bear witness, brother, as you are charged, and bring me word again. In your report I shall set my trust.”

  *

  Emma had on, perforce, the s
ame gown and bliaut she had worn the evening before, the gown dark blue like her eyes, but the tunic embroidered in many colours upon bleached linen. The only concession she could make to mourning was to bind up her great wealth of hair, and cover it from sight within a borrowed wimple. Nevertheless, she made a noble mourning figure. In the severe white frame her rounded, youthful face gained in concentrated force and meaning what it lost in pure grace. She had a look of single-minded gravity, like a lance in rest. Brother Cadfael could not yet see clearly where the lance was aimed.

  When she caught sight of him approaching, she looked at him with pleased recognition, as the man behind the lance might have looked round at the fixed, partisan faces of his friends before the bout, but never shifted the focus of her soul’s intent, which reached out where he could not follow.

  “Brother Cadfael—have I your name right? It’s Welsh, is it not? You were kind, yesterday. Lady Beringar says you will show me where to find the master-carpenter. I have to order my uncle’s coffin, to take him back to Bristol.” She was quite composed, yet still as simple and direct as a child. “Have we time, before we must go to the castle?”

  “It’s on the way,” said Cadfael comfortably. “You need only tell Martin Bellecote, whatever you ask of him he’ll see done properly.”

  “Everyone is being very kind,” she said punctiliously, like a well brought-up little girl giving due thanks. “Where is my uncle’s body now? I should care for it myself, it is my duty.”

  “That you cannot yet,” said Cadfael. “The sheriff has him at the castle, he must needs see the body for himself, and have the physician also view it. You need be put to no distress on that account, the abbot has given orders. Your uncle will be brought with all reverence to lie in the church here, and the brothers will make him decent for burial. I think he might well wish, could he tell you so now, that you should leave all to us. His care for you would reach so far, and your obedience could not well deny him.”