St. Peter's Fair

by Ellis Peters

  These three were wreathed together in argumentative amity, passing jokes along the line; each seemed to be vaunting his own weapon. They had strolled no more than halfway across the court when Hugh emerged from the guest-hall with Ivo beside him. Ivo saw his archer crossing towards the stable-yard, and made him an imperious signal to stay.

  There was no fault to be found with Turstan’s service since his disastrous fall from grace on the first evening; motioned to hold aloof but remain at call, he obeyed without question, and went on amusing himself with his rivals. He must have done well at the butts for they seemed to be discussing his arbalest, and he braced a foot in the metal stirrup and drew the string to the alert for them, demonstrating that he lost little in speed against their instant arms. No doubt the dispute between speed and range would go on as long as both arms survived. Cadfael had handled both in his time, as well as the eastern bow, the sword, and the lance of the mounted man. Even at this grave moment he spared a long glance for the amicable wrangle going on a score of paces away.

  Then Ivo was there among them, and shaken out of his easy confidence and grace. His face was tense, his dark eyes large and wondering under the proudly raised auburn brows and golden cap of curls. “You wanted me, sir? Hugh has not been specific, but I took it this was urgent matter.”

  “It is a matter of a man of yours,” said the sheriff.

  “My men?” He shook a doubtful head, and gnawed his lip. “I know of nothing… Not since Turstan drank himself stiff and stupid, and he’s been a penitent and close to home ever since, and he did no harm then to any but himself, the dolt. But they all have leave to go forth, once their work’s done. The fair is every man’s treat. What’s amiss concerning my men?”

  It was left to the sheriff to tell him. Ivo paled visibly as he listened, his ruddy sunburn sallowing. “Then my man is suspect of the killing I brushed arms with—Good God, this very morning! That you may know, his name is Ewald, he comes from a Cheshire manor, and his ancestry is northern, but he never showed ill traits before, though he is a morose man, and makes few friends. I take this hard. I brought him here.”

  “You may resolve it,” said Prestcote.

  “So I may.” His mouth tightened. “And will! About this hour I appointed to ride, my horse has had little exercise here, and he’ll be bearing me hence tomorrow. Ewald is the groom who takes care of him. He should be saddling him up in the stables about this time. Shall I send for him? He’ll be expecting my summons. No!” he interrupted his own offer, his brows contracting. “Not send for him, go for him myself. If I sent Turstan, there, you might suspect that a servant would stand by a servant, and give him due warning. Do you think he has not been watching us, this short while? And do you think this colloquy has the look of simple talk among us?”

  Assuredly it had not. Turstan, dangling his braced bow, had lost interest in enlightening his rivals, and they, sensing that there was something afoot that did not concern them, were drawing off and moving away, though with discreet backward glances until they vanished into the grange court.

  “I’ll go myself,” said Ivo, and strode away towards the stable-yard at a great pace. Turstan, hesitant, let him pass, since he got no word out of him in passing, but then turned and hurried on his heels, anxiously questioning. For a little way he followed, and they saw Ivo turn his head and snap some hasty orders at his man. Chastened, Turstan drew back and returned towards the gatehouse, and stood at a loss.

  Some minutes passed before they heard the sharp sound of hooves on the cobbles of the stable-yard, brittle and lively. Then the tall, dusky bay, glowing like the darkest of copper and restive for want of work, danced out of the yard with the stocky, bearded groom holding his bridle, and Ivo stalking a yard or so ahead.

  “Here is my man Ewald,” he said shortly, and stood back, as Cadfael noted, between them and the open gateway. Turstan Fowler drew nearer by discreet inches, and silently, sharp eyes flicking from one face to another in quest of understanding. Ewald stood holding the bridle, uneasy eyes narrowed upon Prestcote’s unrevealing countenance. When the horse, eager for action, stirred and tossed his head, the groom reached his left hand across to take the bridle, and slid the right one up to the glossy neck, caressing by rote, but without for an instant shifting his gaze.

  “My lord says your honour has something to ask me,” he said in a slow and grudging voice.

  Under his left forearm the cobbled mend in his sleeve showed plainly, the cloth puckered between large stitches, and the end of linen thread shivered in sun and breeze like a gnat dancing.

  “Take off your coat,” ordered the sheriff. And as the man gaped in real or pretended bewilderment: “No words! Do it!”

  Slowly Ewald slipped out of his coat, somewhat awkwardly because he was at pains to retain his hold on the bridle. The horse had been promised air and exercise, and was straining towards the gate, the way to what he desired. He had already shifted the whole group, except Cadfael, who stood mute and apart, a little nearer the gate.

  “Turn back your sleeve. The left.”

  He gave one wild glance round, then lowered his head like a bull, set his jaw, and did it, his right arm through the bridle as he turned up the coarse homespun to the elbow. Brother Mark had bound up the gash in a strip of clean linen over his dressing. The very cleanness of it glared.

  “You have hurt yourself, Ewald?” said Prestcote, quietly grim.

  He has his chance now, thought Cadfael, if he has quick enough wit, to change his story and say outright that he took a knife-wound in a common brawl, and told Brother Mark the lie about a nail simply to cover up the folly. But no, the man did not stop to think; he had his story, and trusted it might still cover him. Yet if Mark, on handling the wound, could tell a cut from a tear, so at the merest glance could Gilbert Prescote.

  “I did it on a nail in the stables, my lord, reaching down harness.”

  “And tore your sleeve through at the same time? It was a jagged nail, Ewald. That’s stout cloth you wear.” He turned abruptly to Hugh Beringar. “You have the slip of cloth?”

  Hugh drew out from his pouch a folded piece of vellum, and opened it upon the insignificant strip of fabric, that looked like nothing so much as a blade of dried grass fretted into fibres and rotting at the edge. Only the wavy tendril of linen thread showed what it really was, but that was enough. Ewald drew away a pace, so sharply that the horse backed off some yards towards the gateway, and the groom turned and took both hands to hold and soothe the beast. Ivo had to spring hurriedly backwards to avoid the dancing hooves.

  “Hand here your coat,” ordered Prestcote, when the bay was appeased again, and willing to stand, though reluctantly.

  The groom looked from the tiny thing he had recognised to the sheriff’s composed but unrelenting face, hesitated only a moment, and then did as he was bid, to violent effect. He swung back his arm and flung the heavy cotte into their faces, and with a leap was over the bay’s back and into the saddle. Both heels drove into the glossy sides, and a great shout above the pricked ears sent the horse surging like a flung lance for the gateway.

  There was no one between but Ivo. The groom drove the bay straight at him, headlong. The young man leaped aside, but made a tigerish spring to grasp at the bridle as the horse hurtled by, and actually got a hold on it and was dragged for a moment, until the groom kicked out at him viciously, breaking the tenuous hold and hurling Ivo out of the way, to fall heavily and roll under the feet of the sheriff and Hugh as they launched themselves after the fugitive. Out at the gateway and round to the right into the Foregate went Ewald, at a frantic gallop, and there was no one mounted and ready to pursue, and for once the sheriff was without escort or archers.

  But Ivo Corbière was not. Turstan Fowler had rushed to help him to his feet, but Ivo waved him past, out into the Foregate, and heaving himself breathlessly from the ground, with grazed and furious face ran limping after. The little group of them stood in the middle of the highroad, helplessly watching the bay
and his rider recede into distance, and unable to follow. He had killed, and he would get clear away, and once some miles from Shrewsbury, he could disappear into forest and lie safe as a fox in its lair.

  In a voice half-choked with rage, Ivo cried: “Fetch him down!”

  Turstan’s arbalest was still braced and ready, and Turstan was used to jumping to his command. The quarrel was out of his belt, fitted and loosed, in an instant, the thrum and vibration of its flight made heads turn and duck and women shriek along the Foregate.

  Ewald, stooped low over the horse’s neck, suddenly jerked violently and reared up with head flung high. His hands slackened from the reins and his arms swung lax on either side. He seemed to hang for a moment suspended in air, and then swung heavily sidewise, and heeled slowly out of the saddle. The bay, startled and shocked, ran on wildly, scattering the frightened vendors and buyers on both sides, but his flight was uncertain now, and confused by this sudden lightness. He would not go far. Someone would halt and soothe him, and lead him back.

  As for the groom Ewald, he was dead before ever the first of the appalled stallholders reached him, dead, probably, before ever he struck the ground.

  Chapter 4

  “HE WAS MY VILLEIN,” asserted Ivo strenuously, in the room in the gatehouse where they had brought and laid the body, “and I enjoy the power of the high justice over my own, and this one had forfeited life. I need make no defence, for myself or my archer, who did nothing more than obey my order. We have all seen, now, that this fellow’s wound is no tear from a nail, but the stroke of a dagger, and the fret you took from the glover’s blade matches this sleeve past question. Is there doubt in any mind that this was a murderer?”

  There was none. Cadfael was there with them in the room, at Hugh’s instance, and he had no doubts at all. This was the man Euan of Shotwick had marked, before he himself died. Moreover, some of Euan of Shotwick’s goods and money had been found among the sparse belongings Ewald had left behind him; his saddle-roll held a pouch of fine leather full of coins, and two pairs of gloves made for the hands of girls, presents, perhaps, for wife or sister. This was certainly a murderer. Turstan, who had shot him down, obviously did not consider himself anything of the kind, any more than one of Prestcote’s archers would have done, had he been given the order to shoot. Turstan had taken the whole affair stolidly, as none of his business apart from his duty to his lord, and gone away to his evening meal with an equable appetite.

  “I brought him here,” said Ivo bitterly, wiping smears of blood from his grazed cheek. “It is my honour he has offended, as well as the law of the land. I had a right to avenge myself.”

  “No need to labour it,” said Prestcote shortly. “The shire has been saved a trial and a hanging, which is to the good, and I don’t know but the wretch himself might prefer this way out. It was a doughty shot, and that’s a valuable man of yours. I never thought it could be done so accurately at that distance.”

  Ivo shrugged. “I knew Turstan’s quality, or I would not have said what I did, to risk either my horse or any of the hundreds about their harmless business in the Foregate. I don’t know that I expected a death…”

  “There’s only one cause for regret,” said the sheriff. “If he had accomplices, he can never now be made to name them. And you say, Beringar, that there were probably two?”

  “You’re satisfied, I hope,” said Ivo, “that neither Turstan nor my young groom Arald had any part with him in these thefts?”

  Both had been questioned, he had insisted on that. Turstan had been a model of virtue since his one lapse, and the youngster was a fresh-faced country youth, and both had made friends among the other servants and were well liked. Ewald had been morose and taciturn, and kept himself apart, and the revelation of his villainy did not greatly surprise his fellows.

  “There’s still the matter of the other offences. What do you think? Was it this man in all of them?”

  “I cannot get it out of my mind,” said Hugh slowly, “that Master Thomas’s death was the work of one man only. And without reason or proof, by mere pricking of thumbs, I do not believe it was this man. For the rest—I don’t know! Two, the merchant’s watchman said, but I am not sure he may not be increasing the odds to excuse his own want of valour—or his very good sense, however you look at it. Only one, surely, would enter the barge in full daylight, no doubt briskly, as if he had an errand there, something to fetch or something to bestow. Where there were two, this must surely be one of them. Who the other was, we are still in the dark.”

  *

  After Compline Cadfael went to report to Abbot Radulfus all that had happened. The sheriff had already paid the necessary courtesy visit to inform the abbot, but for all that Radulfus would expect his own accredited observer to bring another viewpoint, one more concerned with the repute and the standards of a Benedictine house. In an order which held moderation in all things to be the ground of blessing, immoderate things were happening.

  Radulfus listened in disciplined silence to all, and there was no telling from his face whether he deplored or approved such summary justice.

  “Violence can never be anything but ugly,” he said thoughtfully, “but we live in a world as ugly and violent as it is beautiful and good. Two things above all concern me, and one of them may seem to you, brother, a trivial matter. This death, the shedding of this blood, took place outside our walls. For that I am grateful. You have lived both within and without, what must be accepted and borne is the same to you, within or without. But many here lack your knowledge, and for them, and for the peace we strive to preserve here as refuge for others beside ourselves, the sanctity of this place is better unspotted. And the second thing will matter as deeply to you as to me: Was this man guilty? Is it certain he himself had killed?”

  “It is certain,” said Brother Cadfael, choosing his words with care, “that he had been concerned in murder, most likely with at least one other man.”

  “Then harsh though it may be, this was justice.” He caught the heaviness of Cadfael’s silence, and looked up sharply. “You are not satisfied?”

  “That the man took part in murder, yes, I am satisfied. The proofs are clear. But what is justice? If there were two, and one bears all, and the other goes free, is that justice? I am certain in my soul that there is more, not yet known.”

  “And tomorrow all these people will depart about their own affairs, to their own homes and shops, wherever they may be. The guilty and the innocent alike. That cannot be the will of God,” said the abbot, and brooded a while in silence. “Nevertheless, it may be God’s will that it should be taken out of our hands. Continue your vigil, brother, through the morrow. After that others, elsewhere, must take up the burden.”

  *

  Brother Mark sat on the edge of his cot, in his cell in the dortoire, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and grieved. From a child he had lived a hard life, privation, brutality and pain were all known to him as close companions until he came into this retreat, at first unwilling. But death was too monstrous and too dark for him, coming thus instant in terror, and without the possibility of grace. To live misused, ill-fed, without respite from labour, was still life, with a sky above it, and trees and flowers and birds around it, colour and season and beauty. Life, even so lived, was a friend. Death was a stranger.

  “Child, it is with us always,” said Cadfael, patient beside him. “Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.”

  “I know,” said Brother Mark between his fingers, loyal but uncomforted. “But to be cut off without trial…”

  “So were the ninety-four
last year,” said Cadfael gently, “and the ninety-fifth was murdered. Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust.”

  “And unshriven!” cried Brother Mark.

  “So went his victim also. And he had neither robbed nor killed, or if he had, only God knows of it. There has many a man gone through that gate without a safe-conduct, who will reach heaven ahead of some who were escorted through with absolution and ceremony, and had their affairs in order. Kings and princes of the church may find shepherds and serfs preferred before them, and some who claim they have done great good may have to give place to poor wretches who have done wrong and acknowledge it, and have tried to make amends.”

  Brother Mark sat listening, and at least began to hear. Humbly he recognised and admitted the real heart of his grievance. “I had his arm between my hands, I saw him wince when I cleansed his wound, and I felt his pain. It was only a small pain, but I felt it. I was glad to help him, it was pleasure to anoint the cut with balm, and wrap it clean, and know he was eased. And now he’s dead, with a cross-bow bolt through him…” Briefly and angrily, Brother Mark brushed away tears, and uncovered his accusing face. “What is the use of mending a man, if he’s to be broken within a few hours, past mending?”

  “We were speaking of souls,” said Cadfael mildly, “not mere bodies, and who knows but your touch with ointment and linen may have mended to better effect the one that lasts the longer? There’s no arrow cleaves the soul but there may be balm for it.”