by Ellis Peters
“All the same,” said Hugh, reflecting, “there’s justification in the Rule for leaving all doors open. After everything else has been visited on the incorrigible, what does the Rule say? “If the faithless brother leaves you, let him go.”“
Cadfael walked with him to the gatehouse when the long afternoon was stilling and chilling into the relaxed calm of the pre-Vesper hour, with the day’s manual work done. He had said no word of Bénezet’s bridle, and his visit to the Horse Fair stable, in presenting the mute witness of Tutilo’s breviary. Where there was no certainty, and nothing of substance to offer, he hesitated to advance a mere unsupported suspicion against any man. And yet he was loth to let pass any possibility of further discovery. To be left in permanent doubt is worse than unwelcome knowledge.
“You’ll be coming down tomorrow,” he said at the gate, “to see the earl’s party on their way? At what hour his lordship proposes to muster I’ve heard no word, but they’ll want to make good use of the light.”
“He’ll hear the first Mass before he goes,” said Hugh. “So I’m instructed. I’ll be here to see him leave.”
“Hugh… bring three or four with you. Enough to keep the gate if there should be any move to break out. Not enough for comment or alarm.”
Hugh had halted sharply, and was studying him shrewdly along his shoulder. “That’s not for the little brother,” he said with certainty. “You have some other quarry in mind?”
“Hugh, I swear to you I know nothing fit to offer you, and if anyone is to venture a mistaken move and make a great fool of himself, let it be me. But be here! A feather fluttering in the wind is more substantial than what I have, as at this moment. I may yet find out more. But make no move until tomorrow. In Robert Bossu’s presence we have a formidable authority to back us. If I venture, and fall on my nose pointing a foolish finger at an innocent man, well, a bloody nose is no great matter. But I do not want to call a man a murderer without very hard proof. Leave me handle it my way, and let everyone else sleep easy.”
Hugh was in two minds then about pressing him for every detail of what he had it in mind to do, and whatever flutter of a plume in the wind was troubling his mind; but he thought better of it. Himself and three or four good men gathered to see the distinguished guest depart, and two stout young squires besides their formidable lord —with such a guard, what could happen? And Cadfael was an old and practiced hand, even without a cohort at his back.
“As you think best,” said Hugh, but thoughtfully and warily. “We’ll be here, and ready to read your signs. I should be lettered and fluent in them by now.”
His rawboned dapple-grey favorite was tethered at the gate. He mounted, and was off along the highway towards the bridge into the town. The air was very still, and there was enough lambent light to gleam dully like pewter across the surface of the mill pond. Cadfael watched his friend until the distant hooves rang hollow on the first stage of the bridge, and then turned back into the great court as the bell for Vespers chimed.
The young brother entrusted on this occasion with feeding the prisoners was just coming back from their cells to restore the keys to their place in the gatehouse, before repairing, side by side with Brother Porter, to the church for Vespers. Cadfael followed without haste, and with ears pricked, for there was undoubtedly someone standing close in shadow in the angle of the gate-pillar, flattened against the wall. She was wise, she did not call a goodnight to him, though she was aware of him. Indeed she had been there, close and still, watching him part from Hugh in the gateway. It could not be said that he had actually seen her, or heard any sound or movement; he had taken good care not to.
He spared a brief prayer at Vespers for poor, wretched Brother Jerome, seethed in his own venom, and shaken to a heart not totally shriveled into a husk. Jerome would be taken back into the oratory in due course, subdued and humbled, prostrating himself at the threshold of the choir until the abbot should consider satisfaction had been made for his offence. He might even emerge affrighted clean out of his old self. It was a lot to ask, but miracles do sometimes happen.
Tutilo was sitting on the edge of his cot, listening to the ceaseless and hysterical prayers of Brother Jerome in the cell next to his. They came to him muffled through the stone, not as distinct words but as a keening lamentation so grievous that Tutilo felt sorry for the very man who had tried, if not to kill, at least to injure him. For the insistence of this threnody in his ears. Tutilo was deaf to the sound the key made, grating softly in the lock, and the door was opened with such aching care, for fear of creaks, that he never turned his head until a muted voice behind him said: “Tutilo!”
Daalny was standing framed in the doorway. The night behind her was still luminous with the last stored light from pale walls opposite, and from a sky powdered with stars as yet barely visible, in a soft blue scarcely darker than their pinpoint silver. She came in, hasty but silent, until she had closed the door behind her, for within the cell the small lamp was lit, and a betraying bar of light falling through the doorway might bring discovery down upon them at once. She looked at him and frowned, for he seemed to her a little grey and discouraged, and that was not how she thought of him or how she wanted him.
“Speak low,” she said. “If we can hear him, he might hear us. Quickly, you must go. This time you must go. It is the last chance. Tomorrow we leave, all of us. Herluin will take you back to Ramsey into worse slavery than mine, if it rests with him.”
Tutilo came to his feet slowly, staring at her. It had taken him a long, bemused moment to draw himself back from the unhappy world of Brother Jerome’s frenzied prayers, and realize that the door really had opened and let her in, that she was actually standing there before him, urgent, tangible, her black hair shaken loose round her shoulders, and her eyes like blue-hot steady flames in the translucent oval of her face.
“Go, now, quickly,” she said. “I’ll show you. Through the wicket to the mill. Go westward, into Wales.”
“Go?” repeated Tutilo like a man in a dream, feeling his way in an unfamiliar and improbable world. And suddenly he burned bright, as though he had taken fire from her brightness. “No,” he said, “I will go nowhere without you.”
“Fool!” she said impatiently. “You’ve no choice. If you don’t stir yourself you’ll go to Ramsey, and as like as not in bonds once they get you past Leicester and out of Robert Bossu’s hands. Do you want to go back to be flayed and starved and tormented into an early grave? You never should have flown into that refuge, for you it’s a cage. Better go naked into Wales, and take your voice and your psaltery with you, and they’ll know a gift from God, and take you in. Quickly, come, don’t waste what I’ve done.”
She had picked up the psaltery, which lay in its leather bag on the prayer-desk, and thrust it into his arms, and at the touch of it he quivered and clasped it to his heart, staring at her over it with brilliant golden eyes. He opened his lips, she thought to protest again, and to prevent it she shut one palm over his mouth, and with the other hand drew him desperately towards the door. “No, say nothing, just go. Better alone! What could you do with a runaway slave tangling your feet, crippling you? He won’t leave go of me, the law won’t leave go. I’m property, you’re free. Tutilo, I entreat you! Go!”
Suddenly the springy steel had come back into his spine, and the dazzling audacity into his face, and he went with her, no longer holding back, setting the pace out at the door, and along the shadowy passage, the key again turned in the lock, the night air cool and scented with young leafage about them. There were no words at parting, far better silence. She thrust him through the wicket in the wall, out of the abbey pale, and closed the door between. And he had the sullen pewter shield of the mill pond before him, and the path out to the Foregate, and to the left, just before the bridge into the town, was the narrow road bearing westward towards Wales.
Without a glance behind, Daalny set off back towards the great court. She had a thing to do next morning of which he knew nothing, a thi
ng that would, if it prospered, call off all pursuit,and leave him free. Secular law can move at liberty about even a realm divided. Canon law has not the same mobility. And half-proof pales beside irrefutable proof of guilt and innocence.
She heard the voices still chanting in the choir, so she took time to let herself into his cell again, to put out the little lamp. Better and safer if it should be thought he had gone to his bed, and would sleep through the night.
Chapter Thirteen
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The morning of departure dawned moist and still, the sun veiled, and every green thing looked at its greenest in the soft, amorphous light. Later the veil would thin and vanish, and the sun come forth in its elusive spring brightness. A good day to be riding home. Daalny came out into the great court from a sleepless bed, making her way to Prime, for she needed all her strength for the thing she had to do, and prayer and quietness within the huge solitude of the nave might stiffen her will to the act. For it seemed to her that no one else knew or even suspected what she suspected, so there was no one else to take action.
And still she might be wrong. The chink of coin, the weight of some solid bundle shifting against the pressure of her foot with that soft, metallic sound—what was that to prove anything? Even when she added to it the strange circumstances Brother Cadfael had recounted, the lie about Rémy’s harness being forgotten in the outer stable. Yet he had lied, and what business, therefore, had he in that place, unless he had gone to recover something secret of his own—or, of course, of someone else’s, or why keep it secret?
Well, Tutilo was out and gone, she hoped a good way west by now. The Benedictines had no great hold in Wales, the old, less rigidly organized Christianity of the Celtic Church lingered stubbornly there, even though the Roman rite had prevailed. They would accept a runaway novice, all the more when they heard him sing and play; they would provide him a patron and a house harp, and strip him of his skirts and find him chausses and shirt and cotte in payment for his music. And she, whatever it might cost her, would lift from him the last shadow of suspicion of murder, so that wherever he went he would go a free and vindicated man. And as for his other and lesser sins, they would be forgiven him.
There was an ache within her at his going, but she would not regard it, or regret his leaving her, though he had said in his haste that he would go nowhere without her. Now all that mattered to make her achievement complete was that he should never be recaptured, never subjected to narrow stone walls cramping his wings, or a halter crushing the cords of his throat into silence.
All through Prime she prayed unworded prayers for him, and waited and listened for the first outcry of his loss. It came only when Brother Porter had carried the breakfast bread and thin ale to Brother Jerome, and returned for the like repast for Tutilo, and even then it was hardly an outcry at all, since Brother Porter was not an exclaiming man, and scarcely recognized a crisis when he blundered into one. He emerged quickly from the cell, detached one hand from the wooden tray he was carrying to lock the door behind him, and then, recalling that there was no one within to need the precaution, in recoil not only left it unlocked but flung it wide open again. Daalny, keeping a wary eye on that corner of the court from the doorway of the guesthall, for some reason found this reaction perfectly logical. So did Cadfael, emerging at the same moment from the garden. But in view of this want of surprise and consternation on the custodian’s part, it behoved someone else to supply the deficiency. Daalny slipped back to her preparations within, and left them to deal with it as they thought best.
“He’s gone!” said Brother Porter. “Now, how is that possible?”
It was a serious question, not a protest. He looked at the large, heavy key on his tray, and back to the open door, and knitted his thick grizzled brows.
“Gone?” said Cadfael, very creditably astonished. “How could he be gone, and the door locked, and the key in your lodge?”
“Look for yourself,” said the porter. “Unless the devil has fetched his own away, then someone else has laid hands on this key in the night to good purpose and turned him loose in this world. Empty as a pauper’s purse in there, and the bed hardly dented. He’ll be well away by this. Sub-Prior Herluin will be out of his mind when he hears. He’s with Father Abbot at breakfast now, I’d best go and spoil his porridge for him.” He did not sound greatly grieved about it, but not exactly eager to bear the news, either.
“I’m bound there myself,” said Cadfael, not quite mendaciously, for he had just conceived the intention. “You get rid of the tray and follow me down, I’ll go before and break the news.”
“I never knew,” observed the porter, “that you had a bent for martyrdom. But lead the way and welcome. And I’ll come. Praise God, his lordship is set to leave this day, if he wants a safe journey Herluin and his fellows would be fools to lose the chance for the sake of hunting a slippery lad like that, with a night’s start into the bargain. We’ll be rid of them all before noon.” And he went off amiably to free his hands of the tray. He was in two minds whether he should return the key to its nail, but in the end he took it with him, as some manner of corroborative evidence, and followed Cadfael down towards the abbot’s lodging, but in no haste.
It was a different matter when Herluin heard the news. He surged up from the abbot’s table in his deprivation and loss, bereft now not only of his treasure gleaned here in Shrewsbury, but of his vengeance also, enraged beyond measure at having to go back to Ramsey almost empty-handed. For a short time, even though he himself did not know the whole of it, he had been on his way back a triumphant success, with generous largesse for the restoration, and the immeasurable blessing of a miracle-working saint. All gone now, and the culprit slipped through his fingers, so that he was left to trail home a manifest failure, meagerly re-paid for his travels, and short of a novice not, perhaps, exemplary in his behavior, but valued for his voice, and therefore also in his way profitable.
“He must be pursued!” said Herluin, biting off every word with snapping, irregular teeth in his fury. “And, Father Abbot, surely your guard upon his captivity has been lax in the extreme, or how could any unauthorized person have gained possession of the key to his cell? I should have taken care of the matter myself rather than trust to others. But he must be pursued and taken. He has charges to answer, offences to expiate. The delinquent must not be allowed to go uncorrected.”
The abbot in evident and formidable displeasure, though whether with the absconding prisoner, his unwary guardians, or this fulminating avenger deprived of his scapegoat, there was no knowing, said acidly: “He may be sought within my premises, certainly. My writ does not presume to pursue men for punishment in the outside world.”
Earl Robert was also a guest at the abbot’s table on this last morning, but thus far he had remained seated equably in his place, saying no word, his quizzical glance proceeding silently from face to face, not omitting Cadfael, who had shot his disruptive bolt without expression and in the flattest of voices, to be backed up sturdily by the porter, still gripping the key that must have been lifted from its nail during Vespers, or so he judged, and put back again before the office ended. Since such interference with the abbatial orders here on monastic ground was unheard-of, he had taken no precautions against it, though most of the time the lodge was manned, and the whole range of keys under the occupant’s eye, and safe enough. The porter excused himself manfully. His part was to see to it that the prisoners were properly fed, if austerely; with the authorities rested the overseeing of their incarceration, and the judgment of their causes.
“But there is still a suspicion of murder against him,” cried Herluin, aggressively triumphant as he recalled the secular charge. “He cannot be allowed to evade that. The king’s law has a duty to recover the criminal, if the Church has not.”
“You are mistaken,” said Radulfus, severely patient. “The sheriff has already assured me, yesterday, that he is satisfied on the proofs he holds that Brother Tutilo did not kill the young man
Aldhelm. The secular law has no charge to bring against him. Only the Church can accuse him, and the Church has no sergeants to dispatch about the country in pursuit of its failures.”
The word ‘failure’ had stung sharp color into Herluin’s face, as if he felt himself personally held to blame for being unable to keep his subordinates in better control. Cadfael doubted if any such significance had been intended. Radulfus was more likely to accuse himself of inadequate leadership than to make the same charge against any other. Even now that might well be his meaning. But Herluin took to himself, while he strenuously denied, every failure that had cropped his dignity and authority, and threatened to send him home humbled and in need of tolerance and consolation.
“It may be, Father Abbot,” he said, stiffly erect and smoldering with doomladen prophecy, “that in this matter the Church will need to examine itself closely, for if it fail to contend against the evildoers wherever they may be found, its authority may fall into disrepute. Surely the battle against evil, within or without our pale, is as noble a Crusade as the contention within the Holy Land. It is not to our credit if we stand by and let the evildoer go free. This man has deserted his brotherhood and abandoned his vows. He must be brought back to answer for it.”
“If you esteem him as a creature so fallen from grace,” said the abbot coldly, “you should observe what the Rule has to say of such a case, in the twenty-eighth chapter, where it is written: ‘Drive out the wicked man from among you.’ ”
“But we have not driven him out,” persisted Herluin, still incandescent with rage, “he has not waited the judgment nor answered for his offences, but taken himself off secretly in the night to our discomfiture.”
“Even so,” murmured Cadfael as to himself but very audibly, unable to resist the temptation, “in the same chapter the Rule commands us: “If the faithless brother leaves you, let him go.”“