by Ellis Peters
“This very morning,” said Hugh, “just such a ring was taken during Mass from a pilgrim at the abbey. Abbot Radulfus sent word up to the provost, after they had searched thoroughly within the pale, in case it should be offered for sale in the market. I had the description of it in turn from the provost. This is the device and inscription of the bishop of Winchester, and it was given to the bearer to secure him safe-conduct on the road.”
“But I bought it in good faith,” protested Daniel, dismayed. “I paid the man what he asked, the ring is mine, honestly come by.”
“From a thief. Your misfortune, lad, and it may teach you to be more wary of sudden kind acquaintances in the future who offer you rings to buy—wasn’t it so?—at somewhat less than you know to be their value? Travelling men rattling dice give nothing for nothing, but take whatever they can get. If they’ve emptied your purse for you, take warning for the next time. This must go back to the lord abbot in the morning. Let him deal with the owner.” He saw the goldsmith draw angry breath to complain of his deprivation, and shook his head to ward off the effort, not unkindly. “You have no remedy. Bite your tongue, Daniel, and go make your peace with your wife.”
*
The empress’s envoy rode gently up the Wyle in the deepening dark, keeping pace with Hugh’s smaller mount. His own was a fine, tall beast, and the young man in the saddle was long of body and limb. Afoot, thought Hugh, studying him sidelong, he will top me by a head. Very much of an age with me, I might give him a year or two, hardly more.
“Were you ever in Shrewbury before?”
“Never. Once, perhaps, I was just within the shire, I am not sure how the border runs. I was near Ludlow once. This abbey of yours, I marked it as I came by, a very fine, large enclosure. They keep the Benedictine Rule?”
“They do.” Hugh expected further questions, but they did not come. “You have kinsmen in the Order?”
Even in the dark he was aware of his companion’s grave, musing smile. “In a manner of speaking, yes, I have. I think he would give me leave to call him so, though there is no blood-kinship. One who used me like a son. I keep a kindness for the habit, for his sake. And did I hear you say there are pilgrims here now? For some particular feast?”
“For the translation of Saint Winifred, who was brought here four years ago from Wales. Tomorrow is the day of her arrival.” Hugh had spoken by custom, quite forgetting what Cadfael had told him of that arrival, but the mention of it brought his friend’s story back sharply to mind. “I was not in Shrewsbury then,” he said, withholding judgement. “I brought my manors to King Stephen’s support the following year. My own country is the north of the shire.”
They had reached the top of the hill, and were turning towards Saint Mary’s church. The great gate of Hugh’s courtyard stood wide, with torches at the gateposts, waiting for them. His message had been faithfully delivered to Aline, and she was waiting for them with all due ceremony, the bedchamber prepared, the meal ready to come to table. All rules, all times, bow to the coming of a guest, the duty and privilege of hospitality.
She met them at the door, opening it wide to welcome them in. They stepped into the hall, and into a flood of light from torches at the walls and candles on the table, and instinctively they turned to face each other, taking the first long look. It grew ever longer as their intent eyes grew wider. It was a question which of them groped towards recognition first. Memory pricked and realisation awoke almost stealthily. Aline stood smiling and wondering, but mute, eyeing first one, then the other, until they should stir and shed a clearer light.
“But I know you!” said Hugh. “Now I see you, I do know you.”
“I have seen you before,” agreed the guest. “I was never in this shire but the once, and yet…”
“It needed light to see you by,” said Hugh, “for I never heard your voice but the once, and then no more than a few words. I doubt if you even remember them, but I do. Six words only. “Now have ado with a man!” you said. And your name, your name I never heard but in a manner I take as it was meant. You are Robert, the forester’s son who fetched Yves Hugonin out of that robber fortress up on Titterstone Clee. And took him home with you, I think, and his sister with him.”
“And you are that officer who laid the siege that gave me the cover I needed,” cried the guest, gleaming. “Forgive me that I hid from you then, but I had no warranty there in your territory. How glad I am to meet you honestly now, with no need to take to flight.”
“And no need now to be Robert, the forester’s son,” said Hugh, elated and smiling. “My name I have given you, and the freedom of this house I offer with it. Now may I know yours?”
“In Antioch, where I was born,” said the guest, “I was called Daoud. But my father was an Englishman of Robert of Normandy’s force, and among his comrades in arms I was baptised a Christian, and took the name of the priest who stood my godfather. Now I bear the name of Olivier de Bretagne.”
They sat late into the night together, savouring each other now face to face, after a year and a half of remembering and wondering. But first, as was due, they made short work of Olivier’s errand here.
“I am sent,” he said seriously, “to urge all sheriffs of shires to consider, whatever their previous fealty, whether they should not now accept the proffered peace under the Empress Maud, and take the oath of loyalty to her. This is the message of the bishop and the council: This land has all too long been torn between two factions, and suffered great damage and loss through their mutual enmity. And here, I say that I lay no blame on that party which is not my own, for there are valid claims on both sides, and equally the blame falls on both for failing to come to some agreement to end these distresses. The fortune at Lincoln might just as well have fallen the opposing way, but it fell as it did, and England is left with a king made captive, and a queen-elect free and in the ascendant. Is it not time to call a halt? For the sake of order and peace and the sound regulation of the realm, and to have a government in command which can and must put down the many injustices and tyrannies which you know, as well as I, have set themselves up outside all law. Surely any strong rule is better than no rule at all. For the sake of peace and order, will you not accept the empress, and hold your county in allegiance to her? She is already in Westminster now, the preparations for her coronation go forward. There is a far better prospect of success if all sheriffs come in to strengthen her rule.”
“You are asking me,” said Hugh gently, “to go back on my sworn fealty to King Stephen.”
“Yes,” agreed Olivier honestly, “I am. For weighty reasons, and in no treasonous mind. You need not love, only forbear from hating. Think of it rather as keeping your fealty to the people of this county of yours, and this land.”
“That I can do as well or better on the side where I began,” said Hugh, smiling. “It is what I am doing now, as best I can. It is what I will continue to do while I have breath. I am King Stephen’s man, and I will not desert him.”
“Ah, well!” said Olivier, smiling and sighing in the same breath. “To tell you truth, now I’ve met you, I expected nothing less. I would not go from my oath, either. My lord is the empress’s man, and I am my lord’s man, and if our positions were changed round, my answer would be the same as yours. Yet there is truth in what I have pleaded. How much can a people bear? Your labourer in the fields, your little townsman with a bare living to be looted from him, these would be glad to settle for Stephen or for Maud, only to be rid of the other. And I do what I am sent out to do, as well as I can.”
“I have no fault to find with the matter or the manner,” said Hugh. “Where next do you go? Though I hope you will not go for a day or two, I would know you better, and we have a great deal to talk over, you and I.”
“From here north-east to Stafford, Derby, Nottingham, and back by the eastern parts. Some will come to terms, as some lords have done already. Some will hold to their own king, like you. And some will do as they have done before, go back and forth like
a weather-cock with the wind, and put up their price at every change. No matter, we have done with that now.”
He leaned forward over the table, setting his wine-cup aside. “I had—I have—another errand of my own, and I should be glad to stay with you a few days, until I have found what I’m seeking, or made certain it is not here to be found. Your mention of this flood of pilgrims for the feast gives me a morsel of hope. A man who wills to be lost could find cover among so many, all strangers to one another. I am looking for a young man called Luc Meverel. He has not, to your knowledge, made his way here?”
“Not by that name,” said Hugh, interested and curious. “But a man who willed to be lost might choose to doff his own name. What’s your need of him?”
“Not mine. It’s a lady who wants him back. You may not have got word, this far north,” said Oliver, “of everything that happened in Winchester during the council. There was a death there that came all too near to me. Did you hear of it? King Stephen’s queen sent her clerk there with a bold challenge to the legate’s authority, and the man was attacked for his audacity in the street by night, and got off with his life only at the cost of another life.”
“We have indeed heard of it,” said Hugh with kindling interest. “Abbot Radulfus was there at the council, and brought back a full report. A knight by the name of Rainald Bossard, who came to the clerk’s aid when he was set upon. One of those in the service of Laurence d’Angers, so we heard.”
“Who is my lord, also.”
“By your good service to his kin at Bromfield that was plain enough. I thought of you when the abbot spoke of d’Angers, though I had no name for you then. Then this man Bossard was well known to you?”
“Through a year of service in Palestine, and the voyage home together. A good man he was, and a good friend to me, and struck down in defending his honest opponent. I was not with him that night, I wish I had been, he might yet be alive. But he had only one or two of his own people, not in arms. There were five or six set on the clerk, it was a wretched business, confused and in the dark. The murderer got clean away, and has never been traced. Rainald’s wife… Juliana… I did not know her until we came with our lord to Winchester, Rainald’s chief manor is nearby. I have learned,” said Olivier very gravely, “to hold her in the highest regard. She was her lord’s true match, and no one could say more or better of any lady.”
“There is an heir?” asked Hugh. “A man grown, or still a child?”
“No, they never had children. Rainald was nearly fifty, she cannot be many years younger. And very beautiful,” said Olivier with solemn consideration, as one attempting not to praise, but to explain. “Now she’s widowed she’ll have a hard fight on her hands to evade being married off again—for she’ll want no other after Rainald. She has manors of her own to bestow. They had thought of the inheritance, the two of them together, that’s why they took into their household this young man Luc Meverel, only a year ago. He is a distant cousin of Dame Juliana, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, I suppose, and landless. They meant to make him their heir.”
He fell silent for some minutes, frowning past the guttering candles, his chin in his palm. Hugh studied him, and waited. It was a face worth studying, clean-boned, olive-skinned, fiercely beautiful, even with the golden, falcon’s eyes thus hooded. The blue-black hair that clustered thickly about his head, clasping like folded wings, shot sullen bluish lights back from the candle’s waverings. Daoud, born in Antioch, son of an English crusading soldier in Robert of Normandy’s following, somehow blown across the world in the service of an Angevin baron, to fetch up here almost more Norman than the Normans… The world, thought Hugh, is not so great, after all, but a man born to venture may bestride it.
“I have been three times in that household,” said Olivier, “but I never knowingly set eyes on this Luc Meverel. All I know of him is what others have said, but among the others I take my choice which voice to believe. There is no one, man or woman, in that manor but agrees he was utterly devoted to Dame Juliana. But as to the manner of his devotion… There are many who say he loved her far too well, by no means after the fashion of a son. Again, some say he was equally loyal to Rainald, but their voices are growing fainter now. Luc was one of those with his lord when Rainald was stabbed to death in the street. And two days later he vanished from his place, and has not been seen since.”
“Now I begin to see,” said Hugh, drawing in cautious breath. “Have they gone so far as to say this man slew his lord in order to gain his lady?”
“It is being said now, since his flight. Who began the whisper there’s no telling, but by this time it’s grown into a bellow.”
“Then why should he run from the prize for which he had played? It makes poor sense. If he had stayed there need have been no such whispers.”
“Ah, but I think there would have been, whether he went or stayed. There were those who grudged him his fortune, and would have welcomed any means of damaging him. They are finding two good reasons, now, why he should break and run. The first, pure guilt and remorse, too late to save any one of the three of them. The second, fear—fear that someone had got wind of his act, and meant to fetch out the truth at all costs. Either way, a man might break and take to his heels. What you kill for may seem even less attainable,” said Olivier with rueful shrewdness, “once you have killed.”
“But you have not yet told me,” said Hugh, “what the lady says of him. Hers is surely a voice that should be heeded.”
“She says that such a vile suspicion is impossible. She did, she does, value her young cousin, but not in the way of love, nor will she have it that he has ever entertained such thoughts of her. She says he would have died for his lord, and that it is his lord’s death which has driven him away, sick with grief, a little mad—who knows how deluded and haunted? For he was there that night, he saw Rainald die. She is sure of him. She wants him found and brought back to her. She looks upon him as a son, and now more than ever she needs him.”
“And it’s for her sake you’re seeking him. But why look for him here, northwards? He may have gone south, west, across the sea by the Kentish ports. Why to the north?”
“Because we have just one word of him since he was lost from his place, and that was going north on the road to Newbury. I came by that same way, by Abingdon and Oxford, and I have enquired for him everywhere, a young man travelling alone. But I can only seek him by his own name, for I know no other for him. As you say, who knows what he may be calling himself now!”
“And you don’t even know what he looks like—nothing but merely his age? You’re hunting for a spectre!”
“What is lost can always be found, it needs only enough patience.” Olivier’s hawk’s face, beaked and passionate, did not suggest patience, but the set of his lips was stubborn and pure in absolute resolution.
“Well, at least,” said Hugh, considering, “we may go down to see Saint Winifred brought home to her altar, tomorrow, and Brother Denis can run through the roster of his pilgrims for us, and point out any who are of the right age and kind, solitary or not. As for strangers here in the town, I fancy Provost Corviser should be able to put his finger on most of them. Every man knows every man in Shrewsbury. But the abbey is the more likely refuge, if he’s here at all.” He pondered, gnawing a thoughtful lip. “I must send the ring down to the abbot at first light, and let him know what’s happened to his truant guests, but before I may go down to the feast myself I must send out a dozen men and have them beat the near reaches of the woods to westward for our game birds. If they’re over the border, so much the worse for Wales, and I can do no more, but I doubt if they intend to live wild any longer than they need. They may not go far. How if I should leave you with the provost, to pick his brains for your quarry here within the town, while I go hunting for mine? Then we’ll go down together to see the brothers bring their saint home, and talk to Brother Denis concerning the list of his guests.”
“That would suit me well,” said Olivier gl
adly. “I should like to pay my respects to the lord abbot, I do recall seeing him in Winchester, though he would not notice me. And there was a brother of that house, if you recall,” he said, his golden eyes veiled within long black lashes that swept his fine cheekbones, “who was with you at Bromfield and up on Clee, that time… You must know him well. He is still here at the abbey?”
“He is. He’ll be back in his bed now after Lauds. And you and I had better be thinking of seeking ours, if we’re to be busy tomorrow.”
“He was good to my lord’s young kinsfolk,” said Olivier. “I should like to see him again.”
No need to ask for a name, thought Hugh, eyeing him with a musing smile. And indeed, should he know the name? He had not mentioned any, when he spoke of one who was no blood-kin, but who had used him like a son, one for whose sake he kept a kindness for the Benedictine habit.
“You shall!” said Hugh, and rose in high content to marshal his guest to the bedchamber prepared for him.
Chapter 8
ABBOT RADULFUS WAS UP long before Prime on the festal morning, and so were his obedientiaries, all of whom had their important tasks in preparation for the procession. When Hugh’s messenger presented himself at the abbot’s lodging the dawn was still fresh, dewy and cool, the light lying brightly across the roofs while the great court lay in lilac-tinted shadow. In the gardens every tree and bush cast a long band of shade, striping the flowerbeds like giant brush-strokes in some gilded illumination.
The abbot received the ring with astonished pleasure, relieved of one flaw that might have marred the splendour of the day. “And you say these malefactors were guests in our halls, all four? We are well rid of them, but if they are armed, as you say, and have taken to the woods close by, we shall need to warn our travellers, when they leave us.”
“My lord Beringar has a company out beating the edges of the forest for them this moment,” said the messenger. “There was nothing to gain by following them in the dark, once they were in cover. But by daylight we’ll hope to trace them. One we have safe in hold, he may tell us more about them, where they’re from, and what they have to answer for elsewhere. But at least now they can’t hinder your festivities.”