Potter's Field bc-17

by Ellis Peters

Their plans had been made, of course, last night or this morning, in the solar at Longner where the truth came forth so far as truth was known, or on the journey at dawn, before they ever reached the ferry over Severn, where Cadfael had met them. A conspiracy of women had been hatched in Eudo’s hall, that kept due consideration of Eudo’s rights and needs, of his wife’s contented pregnancy, even as it nurtured and advanced Pernel Otmere’s determined pursuit of a truth that would set Sulien Blount free from every haunted and chivalrous burden that weighed him down. The young one and the old one—old not in years, only in the rapidity of her advance upon death—they had come together like lodestone and metal, to compound their own justice.

  Hugh came back into the room smiling, though the smile was invisible to all but Cadfael. A burdened smile, none the less, for he, too, was in pursuit of a truth which might not be Pernel’s truth. He closed the door firmly on the world without.

  ‘Now, madam, in what particular can we be of service to you?’

  She had composed herself into a settled stillness which could be sustained through a long conference. Without her cloak she made so slight a figure, it seemed a man could have spanned her body with his hands.

  ‘I must thank you, my lords,’ she said, ‘for granting me this audience. I should have asked for it earlier, but only yesterday did I hear of this matter which has been troubling you both. My family are too careful of me, and their intent was to spare me any knowledge that might be distressing. A mistake! There is nothing more distressing than to find out, very late, that those who rearrange circumstances around you to spare you pain have themselves been agonising day and night. And needlessly, to no purpose. It is an indignity, would not you think, to be protected by people you know, in your own mind, to be more in need of protection than you have ever been, or ever will be? Still, it is an error of affection. I cannot complain of it. But I need no longer suffer it. Pernel has had the good sense to tell me what no one else would. But there are still things I do not know, since she did not yet know them herself. May I ask?’

  ‘Ask whatever you wish,’ said the abbot. ‘In your own time, and tell us if you need to rest.’

  ‘True,’ said Donata,’there is no haste now. Those who are dead are safe enough”, and those still living and wound into this coil, I trust, are also safe. I have learned that my son Sulien has given you some cause to believe him guilty of this death which is come to judgement here. Is he still suspect?’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh without hesitation. ‘Certainly not of murder. Though he has said, and maintains, and will not be persuaded to depart from it, that he is willing to confess to murder. And if need be, to die for it.’

  She nodded her head slowly, unsurprised. The stiff folds of linen rustled softly against her cheeks. ‘I thought it might be so. When Brother Cadfael here came for him yesterday, I knew nothing to make me wonder or question. I thought all was as it seemed, and that you, Father, had still some doubts whether he had not made a wrong decision, and should not be advised to think more deeply about abandoning his vocation. But when Pernel told me how Generys had been found, and how my son had set himself to prove Ruald blameless, by proving this could not in fact be Generys

  And then how he exerted himself, once again, to find the woman Gunnild alive

  Then I understood that he had brought in evitable suspicion upon himself, as one knowing far too much. So much wasted exertion, if only I had known! And he was willing to take that load upon him? Well, but it seems you have already seen through that pretence, with no aid from me. May I take it, Hugh, that you have been in Peterborough? We heard that you were newly back from the Fen country, and since Sulien was sent for so promptly after your return, I could not fail to conclude the two were connected.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hugh, ‘I went to Peterborough.’

  ‘And you found that he had lied?’

  ‘Yes, he had lied. The silversmith lodged him overnight, true. But he never gave him the ring, never saw the ring, never bought anything from Generys. Yes, Sulien lied.’

  ‘And yesterday? Being found out in his lies, what did he tell you yesterday?’

  ‘He said that he had the ring all along, that Generys had given it to him.’

  ‘One lie leads to another,’ she said with a deep sigh. ‘He felt he had good cause, but there is never cause good enough. Always lies come to grief. I can tell you where he got the ring. He took it from a small box I keep in my press. There are a few other things in it, a pin for fastening a cloak, a plain silver torque, a ribbon

  All trifles, but they could have been recognised, and given her a name, even after years.’

  ‘Are you saying,’ asked Radulfus, listening incredulously to the quiet, detached tone of the voice that uttered such things,’that these things were taken from the dead woman? That she is indeed Generys, Ruald’s wife?’

  ‘Yes, she is indeed Generys. I could have named her at once, if anyone had asked me. I would have named her. I do not deal in lies. And yes, the trinkets were all hers.’

  ‘It is a terrible sin,’ said the abbot heavily,’to steal from the dead.’

  “There was no such intent,’ she said with unshakable calm. ‘But without them, after no very long time, no one would be able to name her. As you found, no one was. But it was not my choice, I would not have gone to such lengths. I think it must have been when Sulien brought my lord’s body back from Salisbury, after Wilton, and we buried him and set all his affairs and debts in order, that Sulien found the box. He would know the ring. When he needed his proof, to show that she still lived, then he came home and took it. Her possessions no one has ever worn or touched, otherwise. Simply, they are in safe keeping. I will readily deliver them up to you, or to anyone who has a claim. Until last night I had not opened the box since first it was laid there. I did not know what he had done. Neither did Eudo. He knows nothing about this. Nor never shall.’

  From his preferred corner, where he could observe without involvement, Cadfael spoke for the first time. ‘I think, also, you may not yet know all you would wish to know about your son Sulien. Look back to the time when Ruald entered this house, abandoning his wife. How much did you know of what went on in Sulien’s mind then? Did you know how deeply he was affected to Generys? A first love, the most desperate always. Did you know that in her desolation she gave him cause for a time to think there might be a cure for his? When in truth there was none?’

  She had turned her head and fixed her gaunt dark eyes earnestly on Cadfael’s face. And steadily she said: ‘No, I did not know it. I knew he frequented their croft. So he had from a small child, they were fond of him. But if there was so extreme a change, no, he never said word or gave sign. He was a secret child, Sulien. Whatever ailed Eudo I always knew, he is open as the day. Not Sulien!’

  ‘He has told us that it was so. And did you know that because of this attachment he still went there, even when she had thought fit to put an end to his illusion? And that he was there in the dark,’ said Cadfael with rueful gentleness, ‘when Generys was buried?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I did not know. Only now had I begun to fear it. That or some other knowledge no less dreadful to him.’

  ‘Dreadful enough to account for much. For why he made up his mind to take the cowl, and not here in Shrewsbury, but far away in Ramsey. What did you make of that, then?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘It was not so strange in him,’ she said, looking into distance and faintly and ruefully smiling. ‘That was something that could well happen to Sulien, he ran deep, and thought much. And then, there was a bitterness and a pain in the house, and I know he could not choose but feel it and be troubled. I think I was not sorry that he should escape from it and go free, even if it must be into the cloister. I knew of no worse reason. That he had been there, and seen—no, that I did not know.’

  ‘And what he saw,’ said Hugh, after a brief and heavy silence, ‘was his father, burying the body of Generys.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It must have been so.’r />
  ‘We could find no other possibility,’ said Hugh, ‘and I am sorry to have to set it before you. Though I still cannot see what reason there could be, why or how it came about that he killed her.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Donata. ‘No, not that. He buried her, yes. But he did not kill her. Why should he? I see that Sulien believed it, and would not at any cost have it known to the world. But it was not like that.’

  ‘Then who did?’ demanded Hugh, confounded. ‘Who was her murderer?’

  ‘No one,’ said Donata. ‘There was no murder.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  OF THE unbelieving silence that followed, Hugh’s voice asked: ‘If this was not murder, why the secret burial, why conceal a death for which there could be no blame?’

  ‘I have not said,’ Donata said patiently,’that there was no blame. I have not said that there was no sin. It is not for me to judge. But murder there was none. I am here to tell you truth. The judgement must be yours.’

  She spoke as one, and the only one, who could shed light on all that had happened, and the only one who had been kept in ignorance of the need. Her voice remained considerate, authoritative and kind. Very simply and clearly she set out her case, excusing nothing, regretting nothing.

  ‘When Ruald turned away from his wife, she was desolated and despairing. You will not have forgotten, Father, for you must have been in grave doubt concerning his decision. She, when she found she could not hold him, came to appeal to my husband, as overlord and friend to them both, to reason with Ruald and try to persuade him he did terrible wrong. And truly I think he did his best for her, and again and again went to argue her case, and tried also, surely, to comfort and reassure her, that she should not suffer loss of house and living by reason of Ruald’s desertion. My lord was good to his people. But Ruald would not be turned back from the way he had chosen. He left her. She had loved him out of all measure,’ said Donata dispassionately, speaking pure truth, ‘and in the same measure she hated him. And all these days and weeks my lord had contended for her right, but could not win it. He had never before been so often and so long in her company.’

  A moment she paused, looking from face to face, presenting her own ruin with wide, illusionless eyes.

  ‘You see me, gentlemen. Since that time I may, perhaps, have moved a few short paces nearer the grave, but the change is not so great. I was already what I am now. I had been so for some few years. Three at least, I think, since Eudo had shared my bed, for pity of me, yes, but himself in abstinence to starvation, and without complaint. Such beauty as I ever had was gone, withered away into this aching shell. He could not touch me without causing me pain. And himself worse pain, whether he touched or abstained. And she, you will remember if ever you saw her, she was most beautiful. What all men said, I say, also. Most beautiful, and enraged, and desperate. And famished, like him. I fear I distress you, gentlemen,’ she said, seeing them all three held in frozen awe at her composure and her merciless candour, delivered without emphasis, even with sympathy. ‘I hope not. I simply wish to make all things plain. It is necessary.’

  ‘There is no need to labour further,’ said Radulfus. “This is not hard to understand, but very hard to hear as it must be to tell.’

  ‘No,’ she said reassuringly, ‘I feel no reluctance. Never fret for me. I owe truth to her, as well as to you. But enough, then. He loved her. She loved him. Let us make it brief. They loved, and I knew. No one else. I did not blame them. Neither did I forgive them. He was my lord, I had loved him five-and-twenty years, and there was no remission because I was an empty shell. He was mine, I would not endure to share him.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I must tell something that had happened more than a year earlier. At that time I was using the medicines you sent me, Brother Cadfael, to ease my pain when it grew too gross. And I grant you the syrup of poppies does help, for a tune, but after a while the charm fails, the body grows accustomed, or the demon grows stronger within.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Cadfael soberly. ‘I have seen it lose its hold. And beyond a certain strength treatment cannot go.’

  “That I understood. Beyond that there is only one cure, and we are forbidden to resort to that. None the less,’ said Donata inexorably, ‘I did consider how to die. Mortal sin, Father, I knew it, yet I did consider. Oh, never look aside at Brother Cadfael, I would not have come to him for the means, I knew he would not give them to me if I did. Nor did I ever intend to give my life away easily. But I foresaw a time when the load would become more than even I could bear, and I wished to have some small thing about me, a little vial of deliverance, a promise of peace, perhaps never to use, only to keep as a talisman, the very touch of it consolation to me that at the worst

  at the last extreme, there was left to me a way of escape. To know that was to go on enduring. Is that reproach to me, Father?’

  Abbot Radulfus stirred abruptly out of a stillness so long sustained that he emerged from it with a sharp indrawn breath, as if himself stricken with a shadowy insight into her suffering.

  ‘I am not sure that I have the right to pronounce. You are here, you have withstood that temptation. To overcome the lures of evil is all that can be required of mortals. But you make no mention of those other consolations open to the Christian soul. I know your priest to be a man of grace. Did you not allow him the opportunity to lift some part of your burden from you?’

  ‘Father Eadmer is a good man and a kind,’ said Donata with a thin, wry smile, ‘and no doubt my soul has benefited from his prayers. But pain is here in the body, and has a very loud voice. Sometimes I could not hear my own voice say Amen! for the demon howling. Howbeit, rightly or wrongly, I did look about me for other aid.’

  ‘Is this to the present purpose?’ Hugh asked gently. ‘For it cannot be pleasant to you, and God knows it must be tiring you out.’

  ‘It is very much to the purpose. You will see. Bear with me, till I end what I have begun. I got my talisman,’ she said. ‘I will not tell you from whom. I was still able to go about, then, to wander among the booths at the abbey fair, or in the market. I got what I wanted from a traveller. By now she may herself be dead, for she was old. I have not seen her since, nor ever expected to. But she made for me what I wanted, one draught, contained in so small a vial, my release from pain and from the world. Tightly stoppered, she said it would not lose its power. She told me its properties, for in very small doses it is used against pain when other things fail, but in this strength it would end pain for ever. The herb is hemlock.’

  ‘It has been known,’ said Cadfael bleakly,’to end pain for ever even when the sufferer never meant to surrender life. I do not use it. Its dangers are too great. There is a lotion can be made to use against ulcers and swellings and inflammations, but there are other remedies safer.’

  ‘No doubt!’ said Donata. ‘But the safety I sought was of a different kind. I had my charm, and I kept it always about me, and often I set my hand to it when the pain was extreme, but always I withdrew without drawing the stopper. As if the mere having it was buttress to my own strength. Bear with me, I am coming to the matter in hand. Last year, when my lord gave himself utterly to the love of Generys, I went to her cottage, at a time in the afternoon when Eudo was elsewhere about his manor. I took with me a flask of a good wine, and two cups that matched, and my vial of hemlock. And I proposed to her a wager.’

  She paused only to draw breath, and ease slightly the position in which she had been motionless so long. None of her three hearers had any mind to break the thread now. All their presuppositions were already blown clean away in the wind of her chill detachment, for she spoke of pain and passion in tones level and quiet, almost indifferent, concerned only with making all plain past shadow of doubt.

  ‘I was never her enemy,’ she said. ‘We had known each other many years, I felt for her rage and despair when Ruald abandoned her. This was not in hate or envy or despite. We were two women impossibly shackled together by the cords of our rights in one
man, and neither of us could endure the mutilation of sharing him. I set before her a way out of the trap. We would pour two cups of wine, and add to one of them the draught of hemlock. If it was I who died, then she would have full possession of my lord, and, God knows, my blessing if she could give him happiness, as I had lost the power to do. And if it was she who died, then I swore to her that I would live out my life to the wretched end unsparing, and never again seek alleviation.’

  ‘And Generys agreed to such a bargain?’ Hugh asked incredulously.

  ‘She was as bitter, bold and resolute as I, and as tormented by having and not having. Yes, she agreed. I think, gladly.’

  ‘Yet this was no easy thing to manage fairly.’

  ‘With no will to cheat, yes, it was very easy,’ she said simply. ‘She went out from the room, and neither watched nor listened, while I filled the cups, evenly but that the one contained hemlock. Then I went out, far down the Potter’s Field, while she parted and changed the cups as she thought fit, and set the one on the press and the other on the table, and came and called me hi, and I chose. It was June, the twenty-eighth day of the month, a beautiful midsummer. I remember how the meadow grasses were coming into flower, I came back to the cottage with my skirts spangled with the silver of their seeds. And we sat down together, there within, and drank our wine, and were at peace. And afterwards, since I knew that the draught brought on a rigor of the whole body, from the extremities inward to the heart, we agreed between us to part, she to remain quiet where she was, I to go back to Longner, that whichever of us God—are I say God, Father, or must I say only chance, or fate?—whichever of us was chosen should die at home. I promise you, Father, I had not forgotten God, I did not feel that he had stricken me from his book. It was as simple as where you have it written: of two, one shall be taken and the other left. I went home, and I span while I waited. And hour by hour—for it does not hurry—I waited for the numbness in the hands to make me fumble at the wool on the distaff, and still my fingers span and my wrist twisted, and there was no change in my dexterity. And I waited for the cold to seize upon my feet, and climb into my ankles, and there was no chill and no clumsiness, and my breath came without hindrance.’