by Ellis Peters
Margaret looked up from serving with a somewhat anxious face. “No, no sign of him since. I was getting worried about him. What can possibly have kept him this long?”
“He’ll have fallen foul of the theologians,” said Jevan, shrugging, “and serve him right for throwing the other lad to them, like a bone to a pack of dogs. He’ll be still at the abbey, and his turn to answer awkward questions. But they’ll turn him loose when they’ve wrung him dry. Whether they’ll do as much for Elave there’s no knowing. Well, I shall lock up the house as usual before I go to my bed. If he creeps back later than that he’ll have to lie in the stable loft for the night.”
“Conan’s not back, either,” said Margaret, shaking her head over the distressful day that should have been all celebration. “And I thought Girard would have been home before this. I hope nothing has happened to him.”
“Nothing will have happened,” Jevan assured her firmly, “but some matter of business to his profit. You know he can take very good care of himself, and he has excellent relations all along the border. If he meant to be back for the festival, and has missed his day, it will be because he’s added a couple of new customers to his tally. It takes time to strike a bargain with a Welsh sheepman. He’ll be back home safe and sound in a day or so.”
“And what will he find when he does get home?” she sighed ruefully. “Elave in this trouble as soon as he shows his face here again, Uncle William dead and buried, and now Aldwin getting himself still deeper into so bad a business. Truly I hope you’re right, and he has done well with the wool clip. It will be some comfort at least if one thing has gone right.”
She rose to clear away the supper dishes, still shaking her head over undefined misgivings, and Fortunata was left alone with Jevan.
“Uncle,” she said hesitantly, after some minutes of silence, “I wanted to talk to you. Whether I like it or not, I have been drawn into this terrible charge against Elave. He will not believe he is in grave danger, but I know he is. I want to help him. I must help him.”
The solemnity of her voice had caused him to turn and regard her long and attentively, with those black, penetrating eyes that saw deep into her now as in her childhood, and always with detached affection.
“I think this matters to you,” he said, “more than might appear, when you have barely seen him again, and after years.”
It was not a question, but she answered it. “I think I love him. What else can this be? It is not so strange. There were years before the years of his absence. I liked him then, better than he knew.”
“And you talked with him today, as I remember,” he said keenly, “after this hearing at the abbey.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And thereafter, I fancy, he knows better how well you like him! And has he given you cause to be as certain of his liking for you?”
“Cause enough. He said that if there were no other reason, I should be reason enough to hold him fast, in despite of whatever danger there may be to him here. Uncle, you know I have a dowry now from William. When my father comes home, and that box is opened, I want to use whatever he has given me to help Elave. To offer for his fine, if a fine is allowed to pay off his debt, to bargain for his liberty if they hold him, yes, even to corrupt his guards if the worst comes, and get him away over the border.”
“And you’d feel no guilt,” said Jevan with his sharp, dark smile, “at defying the law and flouting the Church?”
“None, because he has done no wrong. If they condemn him, it’s they who are guilty. But I mean to ask Father to speak up for him. As one who knows him, and is respected by everyone, law, Church, and all. If Girard of Lythwood stood guarantor for his future behavior, I believe they might listen.”
“So they might,” agreed Jevan heartily. “At least that and every other means can be tried. I told youif you want him, then Elave can and shall count as a man of ours. There, you be off to your bed and sleep easy. Who knows what magic may be discovered when William’s box is opened?”
Late but not too late, Conan came home just before the door was locked, only a little tipsy after celebrating the end of the day, as he freely admitted, with half a dozen boon companions at the alehouse in Mardol.
Aldwin did not come home at all.
Chapter Seven
Brother cadfael arose well before prime, took his scrip, and went out to collect certain waterside plants, now in their full summer leaf. The morning was veiled with a light covering of cloud, through which the sun shimmered in pearly tints of faint rose and misty blue. Later it would clear and be hot again. As he went out from the gatehouse a groom was just bringing up Serlo’s mule from the stableyard, and the bishop’s deacon came out from the guest hall ready for his journey, and paused at the top of the steps to draw deep breath, as though the solitary ride to Coventry held out to him all the delights of a holiday, by comparison with riding in Canon Gerbert’s overbearing company. His errand, perhaps, was less pleasurable. So gentle a soul would not enjoy reporting to his bishop an accusation that might threaten a young man’s liberty and life, but by his very nature he would probably make as fair a case as he could for the accused. And Roger de Clinton was a man of good repute, devout and charitable if austere, a founder of religious houses and patron of poor priests. All might yet go well for Elave, if he did not let his newly discovered predilection for undisciplined thought run away with him.
I must talk to Anselm about some books for him, Cadfael reminded himself as he left the dusty highroad and began to descend the green path to the riverside, threading the bushes now at the most exuberant of their summer growth, rich cover for fugitives or the beasts of the woodland. The vegetable gardens of the Gaye unfolded green and neat along the riverside, the uncut grass of the bank making a thick emerald barrier between water and tillage. Beyond were the orchards, and then two fields of grain and the disused mill, and after that trees and bushes leaning over the swift, silent currents, crowding an overhanging bank, indented here and there by little coves, where the water lay deceptively innocent and still, lipping sandy shallows. Cadfael wanted comfrey and marsh mallow, both the leaves and the roots, and knew exactly where they grew profusely. Freshly prepared root and leaf of comfrey to heal Elave’s broken head, marsh mallow to sooth the surface soreness, were better than the ready-made ointments or the poultices from dried materia in his workshop. Nature was a rich provider in summer. Stored medicines were for the winter.
He had filled his scrip and was on the point of turning back, in no hurry since he had plenty of time before Prime, when his eye caught the pallor of some strange water flower that floated out on the idle current from under the overhanging bushes, and again drifted back, trailing soiled white petals. The tremor of the water overlaid them with shifting points of light as the early sun came through the veil. In a moment they floated out again into full view, and this time they were seen to be joined to a thick pale stem that ended abruptly in something dark.
There were places along this stretch of the river where the Severn sometimes brought in and discarded whatever it had captured higher upstream. In low water, as now, things cast adrift above the bridge were usually picked up at that point. Once past the bridge, they might well drift in anywhere along this stretch. Only in the swollen and turgid floods of winter storms or February thaws did the Severn hurl them on beyond, to fetch up, perhaps, as far downstream as Attingham, or to be trapped deep down in the debris of storms, and never recovered at all. Cadfael knew most of the currents, and knew now from what manner of root this pallid, languid flower grew. The brightness of the morning, opening like a rose as the gossamer cloud parted, seemed instead to darken the promising day.
He put down his scrip in the grass, kilted his habit, and clambered down through the bushes to the shallow water. The river had brought in its drowned man with just enough impetus and at the right angle to lodge him securely under the bank, from drifting off again into the current. He lay sprawled on his face, only the left arm in deep enough wat
er to be moved and cradled by the stream, a lean, stoop-shouldered man in dun-colored coat and hose, indeed with something dun-colored about him altogether, as though he had begun life in brighter colors and been faded by the discouragement of time. Grizzled, straggling hair, more grey than brown, draped a balding skull. But the river had not taken him; he had been committed to it with intent. In the back of his coat, just where its ample folds broke the surface of the water, there was a long slit, from the upper end of which a meager ooze of blood had darkened and corroded the coarse homespun. Where his bowed back rose just clear of the surface, the stain was even drying into a crust along the folds of cloth.
Cadfael stood calf-deep between the body and the river, in case the dead man should be drawn back into the current when disturbed, and turned the corpse face upward, exposing to view the long, despondent, grudging countenance of Girard of Lythwood’s clerk, Aldwin.
There was nothing to be done for him. He was sodden and bleached with water, surely dead for many hours. Nor could he be left lying here while help was sought to move him, or the river might snatch him back again. Cadfael took him under the arms and drew him along through the shallows to a spot where the bank sloped gently down, and there pulled him up into the grassy shelf above. Then he set off at speed, back along the riverside path to the bridge. There he hesitated for a moment which way to take, up into the town to carry the news to Hugh Beringar, or back to the abbey to inform abbot and prior, but it was towards the town he turned. Canon Gerbert could wait for the news that the accuser would never again testify against Elave, in the matter of heresy or any other offense. Not that this death would end the case! On the contrary, it was at the back of Cadfael’s mind that an even more sinister shadow was closing over that troublesome young man in a penitent’s cell at the abbey. He had no time to contemplate the implications then, but they were there in his consciousness as he hurried across the bridge and in at the town gate, and he liked them not at all. Better, far better, to go first to Hugh, and let him consider the meaning of this death, before other and less reasonable beings got their teeth into it.
“How long,” asked Hugh, looking down at the dead man with bleak attention, “do you suppose he’s been in the water?”
He was asking, not Cadfael, but Madog of the Dead-Boat, summoned hastily from his hut and his coracles by the western bridge. There was very little about the ways of the Severn that Madog did not know; it was his life, as it had been the death of many of his generation in its treacherous flood-times. Given a hint as to where an unfortunate had gone into the stream, Madog would know where to expect the river to give him back, and it was to him everyone turned to find what was lost. He scratched thoughtfully at his bushy beard, and viewed the corpse without haste from head to foot. Already a little bloated, grey of flesh, and oozing water and weed into the grass, Aldwin peered back into the bright sky from imperfectly closed eyes.
“All last night, certainly. Ten hours it might be, but more likely less, for it would still have been daylight then. Somewhere, I fancy,” said Madog, “he was laid up dead until dark, and then cast into the river. And not far from here. Most of the night he’s lain here where Cadfael found him. How else would there still be blood to be seen on him? If he had not washed up within a short distance, facedown as you say he was, the river would have bleached him clean.”
“Between here and the bridge?” Hugh suggested, eyeing the little dark, hairy Welshman with respectful attention. Sheriff and waterman, they had worked together before this, and knew each other well.
“With the level as it is, if he’d gone in above the bridge I doubt if he’d ever have passed it.”
Hugh looked back along the open green plain of the Gaye, lush and sunny, through the fringe of bushes and trees. “Between here and the bridge nothing could happen in open day. This is the first cover to be found beside the water. And though this fellow may be a lightweight, no one would want to carry or drag him very far to reach the river. And if he’d been cast in here, whoever wanted to be quit of him would have made sure he went far enough out for the current to take him down the next reach and beyond. What do you say, Madog?”
Madog confirmed it with a jerk of his shaggy head.
“There’s been no rain and no dew,” said Cadfael thoughtfully. “Grass and ground are dry. If he was hidden until nightfall, it would be close where he was killed. A man needs privacy and cover both to kill and hide his dead. Somewhere there may be traces of blood in the grass, or wherever the murderer bestowed him.”
“We can but look,” agreed Hugh, with no great expectation of finding anything. “There’s the old mill offers one place where murder could be done without a witness. I’ll have them search there. We’ll comb this belt of trees, too, though I doubt there’ll be anything here to find. And what should this fellow be doing at the mill, or here, for that matter? You’ve told me how he spent the morning. What he did afterward we may find out from the household up there in the town. They know nothing of this yet. They may well be wondering and enquiring about him by this time, if it’s dawned on them yet that he’s been out all night. Or perhaps he often was, and no one wondered. I know little enough about him, but I know he lived there with his master’s family. But beyond the mill, upstreamno, the whole stretch of the Gaye lies open. There’s nothing from here on could give shelter to a killing. Nothing until the bridge. But surely, if the man was killed by daylight, and left in the bushes there even a couple of hours until dark, he might be found before he could be put into the river.”
“Would that matter?” wondered Cadfael. “A little more risky, perhaps, but still there’d be nothing to show who slipped the dagger into his back. Sending him downriver does but confuse place and time. And perhaps that was important to whoever did it.”
“Well, I’ll take the news up to the wool merchants myself, and see what they can tell me.” Hugh looked round to where his sergeant and four men of the castle garrison stood a little apart, waiting for his orders in attentive silence. “Will can see the body brought up after us. The fellow has no other home, to my knowledge. They’ll need to take care of his burying. Come back with me, Cadfael. We’ll at least take a look among the trees by the bridge, and under the arch.”
They set off side by side, out of the fringe of trees into the abbey wheatfields and past the abandoned mill. They had reached the waterside path that hemmed the kitchen gardens when Hugh asked, slanting a brief, oblique, and burdened smile along his shoulder: “How long did you say that heretical pilgrim of yours was out at liberty yesterday? While Canon Gerbert’s grooms went puffing busily up and down looking for him to no purpose?”
It was asked quite lightly and currently, but Cadfael understood its significance, and knew that Hugh had already grasped it equally well. “From about an hour before Nones until Vespers,” he said, and clearly heard the unacknowledged but unmistakable reserve and concern in his own voice.
“And then he walked into the enclave in all conscious innocence. And has not accounted for where he spent those hours?”
“No one has yet asked him,” said Cadfael simply.
“Good! Then do my work for me there, will you? Tell no one in the abbey yet about this death, and let no one question Elave until I do it myself. I’ll be with you before the morning’s out, and we’ll talk privately with the abbot before anyone else shall know what’s happened. I want to see this lad for myself, and hear what he has to say for himself before any other gets at him. For you know, don’t you,” said Hugh with detached sympathy, “what his inquisitors are going to say?”
Cadfael left them to their search of the grove of trees and the bushes that cloaked the path down to the riverside, and made his way back to the abbey, though with some reluctance at abandoning the hunt even for a few hours. He was well aware of the immediate implications of Aldwin’s death, and uneasily conscious that he did not know Elave well enough to discount them out of hand. Instinctive liking is not enough to guarantee any man’s integrity, let alone hi
s innocence of murder, where he had been basely wronged, and was by chance presented with the opportunity to avenge his injury. A high and hasty temper, which undoubtedly he had, might do the rest almost before he could think at all, let alone think better of it.
But in the back!
No, that Cadfael could not imagine. Had there been such an encounter it would have been face-to-face. And what of the dagger? Did Elave even possess such a weapon? A knife for all general purposes he must possess; no sensible traveler would go far without one. But he would not be carrying it on him in the abbey, and he certainly had not taken the time to go and collect it from his belongings in the guest hall, before hurrying out at the gate after Fortunata. The porter could testify to that. He had come rushing straight up from the chapter house without so much as a glance aside. And if by unlikely chance he had had it on him at that hearing, then it must be with him now in his locked cell. Or if he had discarded it, Hugh’s sergeants would do their best to find it. Of one thing Cadfael was certain: he did not want Elave to be a murderer.
Just as Cadfael was approaching the gatehouse, someone emerged from it and turned towards the town. A tall, lean, dark man, frowning down abstractedly at the dust of the Foregate as he strode, and shaking his head at some puzzling frustration of his own, probably of no great moment but still puzzling. He jerked momentarily out of his preoccupation when Cadfael gave him good-day, and returned the greeting with a vague glance and an absent smile before withdrawing again into whatever matter was chafing at his peace of mind.
It was altogether too apt a reminder, that Jevan of Lythwood should be calling in at the abbey gatehouse at this hour of the morning, after his brother’s clerk had failed to come home the previous night. Cadfael turned to look after him. A tall man with a long, ardent stride, making for home with his hands clasped behind his back, and his brows knotted in so-far-unenlightened conjecture. Cadfael hoped he would cross the bridge without pausing to look down over the parapet towards the level, sunlit length of the Gaye, where at this moment Will Warden’s men might be carrying the litter with Aldwin’s body. Better that Hugh should reach the house first, both to warn the household and to harvest whatever he could from their bearing and their answers, before the inevitable burden arrived to set the busy and demanding rites of death in motion.