Dead Man's Ransom

by Ellis Peters

  Cadfael went with her in perplexity as great as hers. Murder is murder, but if a life can pay the debt for a life, there was Elis to level the account. Was yet another life demanded? Another death justifiable? He sat down with her beside the bed, confronted by an Elis wide awake and in full possession of his senses, for all he hesitated on the near edge of fever.

  “Melicent has told me,” said Elis, clutching agitatedly at Cadfael’s sleeve. “But is it true? You don’t know him as I do! Are you sure he is not making up this story, because he fears I may yet be charged? May he not even believe I did it? It would be like him to shoulder all to cover me. So he has done in old times when we were children, so he might even now. You saw, you saw what he has already done for me! Should I be here alive now but for Eliud? I can’t believe so easily…”

  Cadfael went about hushing him the most practical way, by examining the dressing on his arm and finding it dry, unstained and causing him no pain, let well alone for the time being. The tight binding round his damaged rib had caused him some discomfort and shortness of breath, and might be slightly slackened to ease him. And whatever dose was offered him he swallowed almost absently, his eyes never shifting from Cadfael’s face, demanding answers to desperate questions. And there would be small comfort for him in the naked truth.

  “Son,” said Cadfael, “there’s no virtue in fending off truth. The tale Eliud has told fits in every particular and it is truth. Sorry I am to say it, but true it is. Put all doubts out of your head.”

  They received that with the same white calm and made no further protest. After a long silence Melicent said: “I think you knew it before.”

  “I did know it, from the moment I set eyes on Einon ab Ithel’s brocaded saddle-cloth. That, and nothing else, could have killed Gilbert, and it was Eliud whose duty it was to care for Einon’s horse and harness. Yes, I knew. But he made his confession willingly, eagerly, before I could question or accuse him. That must count to him for virtue, and speak on his side.”

  “God knows,” said Melicent, shutting her pale face hard between her hands, as if to hold her wits together, “on what side I dare speak, who am so torn. All I know is that Eliud cannot, does not carry all the guilt. In this matter, which of us is innocent?”

  “You are!” said Elis fiercely. “How did you fail? But if I had taken a little thought to see how things were with him and with Cristina… I was too easy, too light, too much in love with myself to take heed. I’d never dreamed of such a love, I didn’t know… I had all to learn.” It had been no easy lesson for him, but he had it by heart now.

  “If only I had had more faith in myself and my father,” said Melicent, “we could have sent word honestly into Wales, to Owain Gwynedd and to my father, that we two loved and entreated leave to marry…”

  “If only I had been as quick to see what ailed Eliud as he always was to put trouble away from me…”

  “If none of us ever fell short, or put a foot astray,” said Cadfael sadly, “everything would be good in this great world, but we stumble and fall, every one. We must deal with what we have. He did it, and all we must share the gall.”

  Out of a drear hush Elis asked: “What will become of him? Will there be mercy? Surely he need not die?”

  “It rests with the law, and with the law I have no weight.”

  “Melicent relented to me,” said Elis, “before ever she knew I was clean of her father’s blood…”

  “Ah, but I did know!” she said quickly. “I was sick in mind that ever I doubted.”

  “And I love her the more for it. And Eliud has made confession when no man was accusing, and that must count for virtue to him, as you said, and speak on his side.”

  “That and all else that speaks for him,” promised Cadfael fervently, “shall be urged in his defence. I will see to that.”

  “But you are not hopeful,” said Elis bleakly, watching his face with eyes all too sharp.

  He would have liked to deny it, but to what end, when Eliud himself had accepted and embraced, with resignation and humility, the inevitable death? Cadfael made what comfort he could, short of lying, and left them together. The last glimpse, as he closed the door, was of two braced, wary faces following his going with a steady, veiled stare, their minds shuttered and secret. Only the fierce alliance of hand clasping hand on the brychan betrayed them.

  *

  Hugh Beringar came next day in a hurry, listened in dour silence as Eliud laboured with desolate patience through the story yet again, as he had already done for the old priest who said Mass for the sisters. As Eliud’s soul faced humbly toward withdrawal from the world, Cadfael noted his misused body began to heal and find ease, very slowly, but past any doubt. His mind consented to dying, his body resolved to live. The wounds were clean, his excellent youth and health fought hard, whether for or against him who could say?

  “Well, I am listening,” said Hugh somewhat wearily, pacing the bank of the brook with Cadfael at his side. “Say what you have to say.” But Cadfael had never seen his face grimmer.

  “He made full and free confession,” said Cadfael, “before ever a finger was pointed at him, as soon as he felt he might die. He was in desperate haste to do justice to all, not merely Elis, who might lie under the shadow of suspicion because of him. You know me, I know you. I have said honestly, I was about to tell him that I knew he had killed. I swear to you he took that word clean out of my mouth. He wanted confession, penance, absolution. Most of all he wanted to lift the threat from Elis and any other who might be overcast.”

  “I take your word absolutely,” said Hugh, “and it is something. But enough? This was no hot-blood squall blown up in a moment before he could think, it was an old man, wounded and sick, sleeping in his bed.”

  “It was not planned. He went to reclaim his lord’s cloak. That I am sure is true. But if you think the blood was cold, dear God, how wrong you are! The boy was half, mad with the long bleeding of hopeless love, and had just come to the point of rebellion, and the thread of a life—one he had been nursing in duty!—cut him off from the respite his sudden courage needed. God forgive him, he had hoped Gilbert would die! He has said so honestly. Chance showed him a thread so thin it could be severed by a breath, and before ever he took thought, he blew! He says he has repented of it every moment that has passed since that moment, and I believe it. Did you never, Hugh, do one unworthy thing on impulse, that grieved and shamed you ever after?”

  “Not to the length of killing an old man in his bed,” said Hugh mercilessly.

  “No! Nor nothing to match it,” said Cadfael with a deep sigh and briefer smile. “Pardon me, Hugh! I am Welsh and you are English. We Welsh recognise degrees. Theft, theft absolute, without excuse, is our most mortal offence, and therefore we hedge it about with degrees, things which are not theft absolute—taking openly by force, taking in ignorance, taking without leave, providing the offender owns to it, and taking to stay alive, where a beggar has starved three days—no man hangs in Wales for these. Even in dying, even in killing, we acknowledge degrees. We make a distinction between homicide and murder, and even the worst may sometimes be compounded for a lesser price than hanging.”

  “So might I make distinctions,” said Hugh, brooding over the placid ford. “But this was my lord, into whose boots I step, for want of my king to give orders. He was no close friend of mine, but he was fair to me always, he had an ear to listen, if I was none too happy with some of his more austere judgments. He was an honourable man and did his duty by this shire of mine as he best knew, and his death fetters me.”

  Cadfael was silent and respectful. It was a discipline removed now from his, but once there had been such a tie, such a fealty, and he remembered it, and they were none so far apart.

  “God forbid,” said Hugh, “that I should hurl out of the world any but such as are too vile to be let live in it. And this is no such monster. One mortal error, one single vileness, and a creature barely—what’s his age? Twenty-one? And driven hard, but whic
h of us is not? He shall have his trial and I shall do what I must,” said Hugh hardly. “But I would to God it was taken out of my hands!”

  Chapter 15

  BEFORE HE LEFT THAT EVENING he made his will clear for the others. “Owain may be pressed, if Chester moves again, he wants his men. I have sent to say that all who are clear now shall leave here the day after tomorrow. I have six good men-at-arms belonging to him in Shrewsbury. They are free, and I shall equip them for their journey home. The day after tomorrow as early as may be, around dawn, they will be here to take Elis ap Cynan with them, back to Tregeiriog.”

  “Impossible,” said Cadfael flatly. “He cannot yet ride. He has a twisted knee and a cracked rib, besides the arm wound, though that progresses well. He will not ride in comfort for three or four weeks. He will not ride hard or into combat for longer.”

  “He need not,” said Hugh shortly. “You forget we have horses borrowed from Tudur ap Rhys, rested and ready for work now, and Elis can as well ride in a litter as could Gilbert in far worse condition. I want all the men of Gwynedd safely out of here before I move against Powys, as I mean to. Let’s have one trouble finished and put by before we face another.”

  So that was settled and no appeal. Cadfael had expected the order to be received with consternation by Elis, both on Eliud’s account and his own, but after a brief outcry of dismay, suddenly checked, there was a longer pause for thought, while Elis put the matter of his own departure aside, not without a hard, considering look, and turned only to confirm that there was no chance of Eliud escaping trial for murder and very little of any sentence but death being passed upon him. It was a hard thing to accept, but in the end it seemed Elis had no choice but to accept it. A strange, embattled calm had taken possession of the lovers, they had a way of looking at each other as though they shared thoughts that needed no words to be communicated, but were exchanged in a silent code no one else could read. Unless, perhaps, Sister Magdalen understood the language. She herself went about in thoughtful silence and with a shrewd eye upon them both.

  “So I am to be fetched away early, the day after tomorrow,” said Elis. He cast one brief glance at Melicent and she at him. “Well, I can and will send in proper form from Gwynedd, it’s as well the thing should be done openly and honestly when I pay my suit to Melicent. And there will be things to set right at Tregeiriog before I shall be free.” He did not speak of Cristina, but the thought of her was there, desolate and oppressive in the room with them. To win her battle, only to see the victory turn to ash and drift through her fingers. “I’m a sound sleeper,” said Elis with a sombre smile, “they may have to roll me in my blankets and carry me out snoring, if they come too early.” And he ended with abrupt gravity: “Will you ask Hugh Beringar if I may have my bed moved into the cell with Eliud these last two nights? It is not a great thing to ask of him.”

  “I will,” said Cadfael, after a brief pause to get the drift of that, for it made sense more ways than one. And he went at once to proffer the request. Hugh was already preparing to mount and ride back to the town, and Sister Magdalen was in the yard to see him go. No doubt she had been deploying for him, in her own way, all the arguments for mercy which Cadfael had already used, and perhaps others of which he had not thought. Doubtful if there would be any harvest even from her well-planted seed, but if you never sow you will certainly never reap.

  “Let them be together by all means,” said Hugh, shrugging morosely, “if it can give them any comfort. As soon as the other one is fit to be moved I’ll take him off your hands, but until then let him rest. Who knows, that Welsh arrow may yet do the solving for us, if God’s kind to him.”

  Sister Magdalen stood looking after him until the last of the escort had vanished up the forested ride.

  “At least,” she said then, “it gives him no pleasure. A pity to proceed where nobody’s the gainer and every man suffers.”

  “A great pity! He said himself,” reported Cadfael, equally thoughtfully, “he wished to God it could be taken out of his hands.” And he looked along his shoulder at Sister Magdalen, and found her looking just as guilelessly at him. He suffered a small, astonished illusion that they were even beginning to resemble each other, and to exchange glances in silence as eloquently as did Elis and Melicent.

  “Did he so?” said Sister Magdalen in innocent sympathy. “That might be worth praying for. I’ll have a word said in chapel at every office tomorrow. If you ask for nothing, you deserve nothing.”

  They went in together, and so strong was this sense of an agreed understanding between them, though one that had better not be acknowledged in words, that he went so far as to ask her advice on a point which was troubling him. In the turmoil of the fighting and the stress of tending the wounded he had had no chance to deliver the message with which Cristina had entrusted him, and after Eliud’s confession he was divided in mind as to whether it would be a kindness to do so now, or the most cruel blow he could strike.

  “This girl of his in Tregeiriog—the one for whom he was driving himself mad—she charged me with a message to him and I promised her he should be told. But now, with this hanging over him… Is it well to give him everything to live for, when there may be no life for him? Should we make the world, if he’s to leave it, a thousand times more desirable? What sort of kindness would that be?”

  He told her, word for word, what the message was. She pondered, but not long.

  “Small choice if you promised the girl. And truth should never be feared as harm. But besides—from all I see, he is willing himself to die, though his body is determined on life, and without every spur he may win the fight over his body, turn his face to the wall, and slip away. As well, perhaps, if the only other way is the gallows. But if—I say if!—the times relent and let him live, then pity not to give him every armour and every weapon to survive to hear the good news.” She turned her head and looked at him again with the deep, calculating glance he had observed before, and then she smiled. “It is worth a wager,” she said.

  “I begin to think so, too,” said Cadfael and went in to see the wager laid.

  *

  They had not yet moved Elis and his cot into the neighbouring cell; Eliud still lay alone. Sometimes, marking the path the arrow had taken clean through his right shoulder, but a little low, Cadfael doubted if he would ever draw bow again, even if at some future time he could handle a sword. That was the least of his threatened harms now. Let him be offered as counter, balance the greatest promised good.

  Cadfael sat down beside the bed, and told how Elis had asked leave to join him and been granted what he asked. That brought a strange, forlorn brightness to Eliud’s thin, vulnerable face. Cadfael refrained from saying a word about Elis’s imminent departure, however, and wondered briefly why he kept silent on that matter, only to realise hurriedly that it was better not even to wonder, much less question. Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it.

  “And there is also a word I promised to bring you and have had no quiet occasion until now. From Cristina when I left Tregeiriog.” Her name caused all the lines of Eliud’s face to contract into a tight, wary pallor, and his eyes to dilate in sudden bright green like stormy sunlight through June leaves. “Cristina sends to tell you, by me, that she has spoken with her father and with yours and soon, by consent, she will be her own woman to give herself where she will. And she will give herself to none but you.”

  An abrupt and blinding flood drowned the green and sent the sunlight sparkling in sudden fountains, and Eliud’s good left hand groped lamely after anything human he might hold by for comfort, closed hungrily on the hand Cadfael offered, and drew it down against his quivering face, and lower into the bed, against his frantically beating heart. Cadfael let him alone thus for some moments, until the storm passed. When the boy was still again, he withdrew his hand gently.

  “But she does not know,” whispered Eliud wretchedly, “what I am… what I have done…”

&n
bsp; “What she knows of you is all she needs to know, that she loves you as you love her, and there is not nor ever could be any other. I do not believe that guilt or innocence, good or evil can change Cristina towards you. Child, by the common expectation of man you have some thirty years at least of your life to live, which is room for marriage, children, fame, atonement, sainthood. What is done matters, but what is yet to do matters far more. Cristina has that truth in her. When she does know all, she will be grieved, but she will not be changed.”

  “My expectation,” said Eliud faintly through the covers that hid his ravaged face, “is in weeks, months at most, not thirty years.”

  “It is God fixes the term,” said Cadfael, “not men, not kings, not judges. A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there’s no escape from either. Who knows the length of the penance, or the magnitude of the reparation, that may be required of you?”

  He rose from his place then, because John Miller and a couple of other neighbours, nursing the small scars of the late battle, carried in Elis, cot and all, from the next cell and set him down beside Eliud’s couch. It was a good time to break off, the boy had the spark of the future already alive in him, however strongly resignation prompted him to quench it, and now this reunion with the other half of his being came very aptly. Cadfael stood by to see them settled and watch John Miller strip down the covers from Eliud and lift and replace him bodily, as lightly as an infant and as deftly as if handled by a mother. John had been closeted with Elis and Melicent, and was grown fond of Elis as of a bold and promising small boy from among his kin. A useful man, with his huge and balanced strength, able to pick up a sick man from his sleep—provided he cared enough for the man!—and carry him hence without disturbing his rest. And devoted to Sister Magdalen, whose writ ran here firm as any king’s.