Dead Man's Ransom

by Ellis Peters

  Rave Reviews for Cadfael

  ‘A more attractive and prepossessing detective would be hard to find.’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Gripping and knowledgeable’

  Spectator

  ‘Peters is a beguiling writer.’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Cosy as a teapot.’

  The Times

  ‘Charmingly and humourously told.’

  TLS

  ‘A cult series.’

  Daily Mail

  by

  Chapter 1

  ON THAT DAY, which was the seventh of February of the year of Our Lord 1141, they had offered special prayers at every office, not for the victory of one party or the defeat of another in the battlefields of the north, but for better counsel, for reconciliation, for the sparing of blood-letting and the respect of life between men of the same country—all desirable consummations, as Brother Cadfael sighed to himself even as he prayed, but very unlikely to be answered in this torn and fragmented land with any but a very dusty answer. Even God needs some consideration and support from his material to make reasoning and benign creatures of men.

  Shrewsbury had furnished King Stephen with a creditable force to join his muster for the north, where the earls of Chester and Lincoln, ambitious half-brothers, had flouted the king’s grace and moved to set up their own palatine, and with much in their favour, too. The parish part of the great church was fuller than usual even at the monastic offices, with anxious wives, mothers and grandsires fervent in praying for their menfolk. Not every man who had marched with Sheriff Gilbert Prestcote and his deputy, Hugh Beringar, would come home again unscathed to Shrewsbury. Rumours flew, but news was in very poor supply. Yet word had filtered through that Chester and Lincoln, long lurking in neutrality between rival claimants for the crown, having ambitious plans of their own in defiance of both, had made up their minds in short order when menaced by King Stephen’s approach, and sent hotfoot for help from the champions of his antagonist, the Empress Maud. Thus committing themselves for the future, perhaps, so deep that they might yet live to regret it.

  Cadfael came out from Vespers gloomily doubting the force, and even the honesty, of his own prayers, however he had laboured to give them heart. Men drunk with ambition and power do not ground their weapons, nor stop to recognise the fellow-humanity of those they are about to slay. Not here—not yet. Stephen had gone rampaging north with his muster, a huge, gallant, simple, swayable soul roused to rage by Chester’s ungrateful treachery, and drawn after him many, and many a wiser and better balanced man who could have done his reasoning for him, had he taken a little more time for thought. The issue hung in the balance and the good men of Shropshire were committed with their lord. So was Cadfael’s close friend, Hugh Beringar of Maesbury, deputy sheriff of the shire, and his wife must be anxiously waiting there in the town for news. Hugh’s son, a year old now, was Cadfael’s godson, and he had leave to visit him whenever he wished, a godfather’s duties being important and sacred. Cadfael turned his back on supper in the refectory, and made his way out of the abbey gates, along the highway between the abbey mill and mill-pond on his left, and the belt of woodland sheltering the main abbey gardens of the Gaye on his right, over the bridge that spanned the Severn, glimmering in the wintry, starlit frost, and in through the great town gate.

  There were torches burning at the door of Hugh’s house by Saint Mary’s church and beyond, at the High Cross, it seemed to Cadfael that there were more folk abroad and stirring than was usual at this hour of a winter evening. The faintest shiver of excitement hung in the air, and as soon as his foot touched the doorstone Aline came flying to the doorway with open arms. When she knew him her face remained pleased and welcoming, but nonetheless lost in an instant its special burning brightness.

  “Not Hugh!” said Cadfael ruefully, knowing for whom the door had been thus thrown wide. “Not yet. Is there news, then? Are they homing?”

  “Will Warden sent word an hour ago, before the light was quite gone. They sighted steel from the towers, a good way off then, but by now they must be in the castle foregate. The gate’s open for them. Come in to the fire, Cadfael, and stay for him.” She drew him in by the hands, and closed the door resolutely on the night and her own aching impatience. “He is there,” she said, catching in Cadfael’s face the reflection of her own partisan love and anxiety. “They caught his colours. And the array in good order. Yet it cannot be quite as it went forth, that I know.” No, never that. Those who go forth to the battle never return without holes in their ranks, like gaping wounds. Pity of all pities that those who lead never learn, and the few wise men among those who follow never quite avail to teach. But faith given and allegiance pledged are stronger than fear, thought Cadfael, and that, perhaps, is virtue, even in the teeth of death. Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.

  “He’s sent no word ahead,” he asked, “of how the day went?”

  “None. But the rumour is it did not go well.” She said it firmly and freely, putting back with a small hand the pale gold hair from her forehead. A slender girl, still only twenty-one years old and mother of a year old son and as fair as her husband was black-avised. The shy manner of her girlhood years had matured into a gentle dignity. “This is a very wanton tide that flows and carries us all, here in England,” she said. “It cannot always run one way, there must be an ebb.” She was brisk and practical about it, whatever that firm face cost her. “You haven’t eaten, you can’t have stayed for supper,” she said, the housewife complete. “Sit there and nurse your godson a little while, and I’ll bring you meat and ale.”

  The infant Giles, formidably tall for a year old when he was reared erect by holding to benches and trestles and chests to keep his balance, made his way carefully but with astonishing rapidity round the room to the stool by the fireside, and clambered unaided into Cadfael’s rusty black lap. He had a flow of words, mostly of his own invention, though now and then a sound made sudden adult sense. His mother talked to him much, so did her woman Constance, his devoted slave, and this egg of the nobility listened and made voluble response. Of lordly scholars, thought Cadfael, rounding his arms to cradle the solid weight comfortably, we can never have too many. Whether he takes to the church or the sword, he’ll never be the worse for a quick and ready mind. Like a pair of hound puppies nursed in the lap, Hugh’s heir gave off glowing warmth and the baked bread scent of young and untainted flesh.

  “He won’t sleep,” said Aline, coming with a wooden tray to set it on the chest close to the fire, “for he knows there’s something in the wind. Never ask me how, I’ve said no word to him, but he knows. There, give him to me now, and take your meal. We may have a long wait, for they’ll see all provided at the castle before ever Hugh comes to me.”

  It was more than an hour before Hugh came. By then Constance had whisked away the remains of Cadfael’s supper, and carried off a drooping princeling, who could not keep his eyes open any longer for all his contrivances, but slept in sprawled abandon in her arms as she lifted him. For all Cadfael’s sharp hearing, it was Aline who first pricked up her head and rose, catching the light footsteps in the doorway. Her radiant smile faltered suddenly, for the feet trod haltingly.

  “He’s hurt!”

  “Stiff from a long ride,” said Cadfael quickly. “His legs serve him. Go, run, whatever’s amiss will mend.” She ran, and Hugh entered into her arms. As soon as she had viewed him from head to foot, weary and weather-stained as he was, and found him whole, whatever lesser injuries he might be carrying, she became demure, brisk and calm, and would make no extravagant show of anxiety, though she watched him every moment from behind the fair shield of her wifely face. A small man
, lightly built, not much taller than his wife, black-haired, black- browed. His movements lacked their usual supple ease, and no wonder after so long in the saddle, and his grin was brief and wry as he kissed his wife, drove a fist warmly into Cadfael’s shoulder, and dropped with a great, hoarse sigh on to the cushioned bench beside the fire, stretching out his booted feet gingerly, the right decidedly with some pain. Cadfael kneeled, and eased off the stiff, ice- rimmed boots that dripped melting rivulets into the rushes.

  “Good Christian soul!” said Hugh, leaning to clap a hand on his friend’s tonsure. “I could never have reached them myself. God, but I’m weary! No matter, that’s the first need met—they’re home and so am I.”

  Constance came sailing in with food and a hot posset of wine, Aline with his gown and to rid him of his leather coat. He had ridden light the last stages, shedding his mail. He scrubbed with both hands at cheeks stiffened from the cold, twitched his shoulders pleasurably in the warmth of the fire, and drew in a great, easing breath. They watched him eat and drink with hardly a word spoken. Even the voice stiffens and baulks after long exertion and great weariness. When he was ready the cords of his throat would soften and warm, and words find their way out without creaking.

  “Your man-child held open his eyelids,” said Aline cheerfully, eyeing his every least move as he ate and warmed, “until he could prop them up no longer, even with his fingers. He’s well and grown even in this short while—Cadfael will tell you. He goes on two feet now and makes nothing of a fall or two.” She did not offer to wake and bring him; clearly there was no place here tonight for matters of childhood, however dear.

  Hugh sat back from his meal, yawned hugely, smiled upwards suddenly at his wife, and drew her down to him in his arm. Constance bore away the tray and refilled the cup, and closed the door quietly on the room where the boy slept.

  “Never fret for me, love,” said Hugh, clasping Aline to his side. “I’m saddle-sore and bruised, but nothing worse. But a fall or two we have certainly taken. No easy matter to rise, neither. Oh, I’ve brought back most of the men we took north with us, but not all—not all! Not the chief—Gilbert Prestcote’s gone. Taken, not dead, I hope and think, but whether it’s Robert of Gloucester or the Welsh that hold him—I wish I knew.”

  “The Welsh?” said Cadfael, pricking his ears. “How’s that? Owain Gwynedd has never put his hand in the fire for the empress? After all his careful holding off, and the gains it’s brought him? He’s no such fool! Why should he aid either of his enemies? He’d be more like to leave them free to cut each other’s throats.”

  “Spoke like a good Christian brother,” said Hugh, with a brief, grey smile, and fetched a grunt and a blush out of Cadfael to his small but welcome pleasure. “No, Owain has judgement and sense, but alas for him, he has a brother. Cadwaladr was there with a swarm of his archers, and Madog ap Meredith of Powys with him, hot for plunder, and they’ve sunk their teeth into Lincoln and swept the field clear of any prisoner who promises the means of ransom, even the half-dead. And I doubt they’ve got Gilbert among the rest.” He shifted, easing his stiff, sore body in the cushions. “Though it’s not the Welsh,” he said grimly, “that have got the greatest prize. Robert of Gloucester is halfway to his own city this night with a prisoner worth this kingdom to deliver up to the Empress Maud. God knows what follows now, but I know what my work must be. My sheriff is out of the reckoning, and there’s none now at large to name his successor. This shire is mine to keep, as best I may, and keep it I will, till fortune turns her face again. King Stephen is taken at Lincoln, and carried off prisoner to Gloucester.”

  Once his tongue was loosed he had need to tell the whole of it, for his own enlightenment as much as theirs. He was the sole lord of a county now, holding and garrisoning it on the behalf of a king in eclipse, and his task was to nurse and guard it inviolate within its boundaries, until it could serve again beyond them for an effective lord.

  “Ranulf of Chester slipped out of Lincoln castle and managed to get out of a hostile town before ever we got near, and off to Robert of Gloucester in a great hurry, with pledges of allegiance to the Empress in exchange for help against us. And Chester’s wife is Robert’s daughter, when all’s said, and he’d left her walled up in the castle with the earl of Lincoln and his wife, and the whole town in arms and seething round them. That was a welcome indeed, when Stephen got his muster there, the city fawned on him. Poor wretches, they’ve paid for it since. Howbeit, there we were, the town ours and the castle under siege, and winter on our side, any man would have said, with the distance Robert had to come, and the snow and the floods to hold him. But the man’s none so easily held.”

  “I never was there in the north,” said Cadfael, with a glint in his eye and a stirring in his blood that he had much ado to subdue. His days in arms were over, forsworn long since, but he could not help prickling to the sting of battle, when his friends were still venturing. “It’s a hill city, Lincoln, so they say. And the garrison penned close. It should have been easy to hold the town, Robert or no Robert. What went astray?”

  “Why, granted we under-valued Robert as always, but that need not have been fatal. The rains there’d been up there, the river round the south and west of the town was up in flood, the bridge guarded, and the ford impassable. But Robert passed it, whether or no! Into the flood with him, and what could they do but come after? ‘A way forward, but no way back!’ he says—so one of our prisoners told us. And what with the solid wall of them, they got across with barely a man swept away. Oh, surely they still had the uphill way, out of that drowned plain to our hilltop—if Stephen were not Stephen! With the mass of them camped below in the wet fields and all the omens at Mass against him—you know he half regards such warnings—what say you he’ll do? Why, with that mad chivalry of his, for which God knows I love him though I curse him, he orders his array down from the height into the plain, to meet his enemy on equal terms.”

  Hugh heaved his shoulders back against the solid brace of the wall, hoisted his agile brows and grinned, torn between admiration and exasperation.

  They’d drawn up on the highest and driest bit of land they could find, in what was a half-frozen marsh. Robert had all the disinherited, Maud’s liegemen who had lost lands eastward for her sake, drawn up in the first line, horsed, with nothing to lose and all to gain, and vengeance the first of all. And our knights had every man his all to lose and nothing to gain, and felt themselves far from their homes and lands, and aching to get back and strengthen their own fences. And there were these hordes of Welsh, hungry for plunder, and their own goods and gear safe as sanctuary in the west, with no man threatening. What should we look for? When the disinherited hit our horse five earls broke under the shock and ran. On the left Stephen’s Flemings drove the Welshmen back: but you know their way, they went but far enough and easily enough to mass again without loss, and back they came, archers almost to a man, able to pick their ground and their prey, and when the Flemish footmen ran, so did their captains—William of Ypres and Ten Eyck and all. Stephen was left unhorsed with us, the remnant of his horse and foot, around him. They rolled over us. It was then I lost sight of Gilbert. No marvel, it was hand to hand chaos, no man saw beyond the end of his sword or dagger, whatever he had in his hand to keep his head. Stephen still had his sword then. Cadfael, I swear to you, you never saw such a man in battle once roused, for all his easy goodwill takes so much rousing. It was rather the siege of a castle than the overcoming of a man. There was a wall round him of the men he had slain, those coming had to clamber over it, and went to build it higher. Chester came after him—give him his due, there’s not much can frighten Ranulf—and he might have been another stone in the rampart, but that the king’s sword shattered. There was one somewhere close to him thrust a Danish axe into his hand in its place, but Chester had leaped back out of reach. And then someone clear of the melee grubbed a great stone out of the ground, and hurled it at Stephen from aside. It struck him down flatlings, clean out of
his wits, and they swarmed over him and pinned him hand and foot while he was senseless. And I went down under another wave,” said Hugh ruefully, “and was trampled below better men’s bodies, to come to myself in the best time to make vantage of it, after they’d dragged the king away and swarmed into the town to strip it bare, and before they came back to comb the battlefield for whatever was worth picking up. So I mustered what was left of our own, more than ever I expected, and hauled them off far enough to be out of reach, while I and one or two with me looked for Gilbert. We did not find him and when they began to come back sated out of the city, scavenging, we drew off to bring back such as we had. What else could we have done?”

  “Nothing to any purpose,” said Cadfael firmly. “And thanks to God you were brought out man alive to do so much. If there’s a place Stephen needs you now, it’s here, keeping this shire for him.”

  He was talking to himself. Hugh knew that already, or he would never have withdrawn from Lincoln. As for the slaughter there, no word was said. Better to make sure of bringing back all but a few of the solid townsfolk of Shrewsbury, his own special charge, and so he had done.

  “Stephen’s queen is in Kent, and mistress of Kent, with a strong army, all the south and the east she holds,” said Hugh. “She will shift every stone between her and London, but she’ll get Stephen out of captivity somehow. It is not an ending. A reverse can be reversed. A prisoner can be loosed from prison.”

  “Or exchanged,” said Cadfael, but very dubiously. There’s no great prize taken on the king’s side? Though I doubt if the empress would let go of Stephen for any three of her best lords, even Robert himself, helpless as she’d be without him. No, she’ll keep a fast hold of her prisoner, and make headlong for the throne. And do you see the princes of the church standing long in her way?”

  “Well,” said Hugh, stretching his slight body wincingly, discovering new bruises, “my part at least I know. It’s my writ that runs here in Shropshire now as the king’s writ, and I’ll see to it this shire, at least, is kept for the king.”