Dead Man's Ransom (10 page)

Chapter Eight

ANION THE CATTLE MAN, for want of calf or lamb to keep his hand in within the abbey enclave, had taken to spending much of his time in the stables, where at least there was horseflesh to be tended and enjoyed. Very soon now he would be fit to be sent back to the grange where he served, but he could not go until Brother Edmund discharged him. He had a gifted hand with animals, and the grooms were on familiar and friendly terms with him.

Brother Cadfael approached him somewhat sidelong, unwilling to startle or dismay him too soon. It was not difficult. Horses and mules had their sicknesses and injuries, as surely as men, and called frequently for remedies from Cadfael’s store. One of the ponies the lay servants used as pack, horses had fallen lame and was in need of Cadfael’s rubbing oils to treat the strain, and he brought the flask himself to the to-do, as good as certain he would find Anion there. It was easy enough to entice the practised stockman into taking over the massage, and to linger to watch and admire as he worked his thick but agile fingers into the painful muscles. The pony stood like a statue for him, utterly trusting. That in itself had something eloquent to say.

“You spend less and less time in the infirmary now,” said Cadfael, studying the dour, dark profile under the fall of straight black hair. “Very soon we shall be losing you at this rate. You’re as fast on a crutch as many of us are with two sturdy legs that never suffered a break. I fancy you could throw the prop away anytime you pleased.”

“I’m told to wait,” said Anion shortly. “Here I do what I’m told. It’s some men’s fate in life, brother, to take orders.”

“Then you’ll be glad to be back with your cattle again, where they do obedience to you for a change.”

“I tend and care for them and mean them well,” said Anion, “and they know it.”

“So does Edmund to you, and you know it.” Cadfael sat down on a saddle beside the stooping man, to come down to his level and view him on equal terms. Anion made no demur, it might even have been the faint shadow of a smile that touched his firmly-closed mouth. Not at all an ill, looking man, and surely no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. “You know the thing that happened there in the infirmary,” said Cadfael. “You may well have been the most active man in there that dinner time. Though I doubt if you stayed long after you’d eaten. You’re over-young to be shut in there with the ailing old. I’ve asked them all, did they hear or see any man go in there, by stealth or any other way, but they slept after they’d eaten. That’s for the aged, not for you. You’d be up and about while they drowsed.”

“I left them snoring,” said Anion, turning the full stare of his deep, set eyes on Cadfael. He reached for a rag to wipe his hands, and rose nimbly enough, the still troublesome leg drawn up after him.

“Before we were all out of the refectory? And the Welsh lads led in to their repast?”

“While it was all quiet. I reckon you brothers were in the middle of your meal. Why?” demanded Anion pointblank.

“Because you might be a good witness, what else? Do you know of anyone who made his way into the infirmary about that time that you left it? Did you see or hear aught to give you pause? Any man lurking who should not have been there? The sheriff had his enemies,” said Cadfael firmly, “like the rest of us mortals, and one of them deadly. Whatever he owed is paid now, or shortly to pay. God send none of us may take with him a worse account.”

“Amen!” said Anion. “When I came forth from the infirmary, brother, I met no man, I saw no man, friend or enemy, anywhere near that door.”

“Where were you bound? Down here to view the Welsh horses? If so,” explained Cadfael easily, warding off the sharp glance Anion gave him, “you’d be a witness if any of those lads went off and left his fellows about that time.” Anion shrugged that off disdainfully. “I never came near the stables, not then. I went through the garden and down to the brook. With a west wind it smells of the hills down there,” said Anion. “I grow sick of the shut-in smell of tired old men, and their talk that goes round and round.”

“Like mine!” said Cadfael tolerantly, and rose from the saddle. His eye lingered upon the crutch that was laid carelessly aside against the open door of a stall, a good fifty paces from where its owner was working. “Yes, I see you’re about ready to throw it away. You were still using it yesterday, though, unless Brother Rhys was mistaken. He heard you tap your way out for your walk in the garden, or thought he did.”

“He well might,” said Anion, and shook back his shaggy black mane from his round brown forehead. “It’s habit with me, after so long, even after the need’s gone. But when there’s a beast to see to, I forget, and leave it behind me in corners.” He turned deliberately, laid an arm over the pony’s neck, and led him slowly round on the cobbles, to mark his gait. And that was the end of the colloquy.

Brother Cadfael was fully occupied with his proper duties all that day, but that did not prevent him from giving a great deal of thought to the matter of Gilbert Prestcote’s death. The sheriff had long ago requested space for his tomb in the abbey church of which he had been a steady patron and benefactor, and the next day was to see him laid to rest there. But the manner of his death would not allow any rest to those who were left behind him. From his distracted family to the unlucky Welsh suspects and prisoners in the castle, there was no one who did not find his own life disrupted and changed by this death.

The news was surely making its way about the countryside by this time, from village to village and assart to manor round the shire, and no doubt men and women in the streets of Shrewsbury were busily allotting the blame to this one and that one, with Elis ap Cynan their favourite villain. But they had not seen the minute, bright fragments Cadfael nursed in his little box, or hunted in vain through the precinct for any cloth that could show the identical tints and the twisted gold thread. They knew nothing about the massive gold pin that had vanished from Gilbert’s death-chamber and could not be found within the pale.

Cadfael had caught glimpses of Lady Prestcote about the court, moving between the to-do and the church, where her husband lay in the mortuary chapel, swathed for his burial. But the girl had not once shown her face. Gilbert the younger, a little bewildered but oblivious of misfortune, played with the child oblates and the two young pupils, and was tenderly shepherded by Brother Paul, the master of the children. At seven years old he viewed with untroubled tolerance the eccentricities of grown-up people, and could make himself at home wherever his mother unaccountably conveyed him. As soon as his father was buried she would certainly take him away from here, to her favourite among her husband’s manors, where his life would resume its placid progress untroubled by bereavement.

A few close acquaintances of the sheriff had begun to arrive and take up residence ready for the morrow. Cadfael lingered to watch them, and fit noble names to the sombre faces. He was thus occupied, on his way to the herbarium, when he observed one unexpected but welcome face entering. Sister Magdalen, on foot and alone, stepped briskly through the wicket, and looked about her for the nearest known face. To judge by her brightening eye and prompt advance, she was pleased that it should be Cadfael’s.

“Well, well!” said Cadfael, going to meet her with equal pleasure. “We had no thought of seeing you again so soon. Is all well in your forest? No more raiders?”

“Not so far,” said Sister Magdalen cautiously, “but I would not say they might not try again, if ever they see Hugh Beringar looking the other way. It must have gone much against the grain with Madog ap Meredith to be bested by a handful of foresters and cottars, he may well want his revenge when he feels it safe to bid for it. But the forest men are keeping a good watch. It’s not we who are in turmoil now, it seems. What’s this I’ve been hearing in the town? Gilbert Prestcote dead, and that Welsh youngster I sent you blamed for the deed?”

“You’ve been in the town, then? And no stout escort with you this time?”

“Two,” she said, “but I’ve left them up in the Wyle, where we shall lie overnight. If it’s true the sheriff is to be buried tomorrow I must stay to do him honour among the rest. I’d no thought of such a thing when we set out this morning. I came on quite different business. There’s a reat-niece of Mother Mariana, daughter to a cloth-merchant here in Shrewsbury, who’s coming to take the veil among us. A plain child, none too bright, but willing, and knows she has small hopes of a pleasing marriage. Better with us than sold off like an unpromising heifer to the first that makes a grudging offer for her. I’ve left my men and horses in their yard, where I heard tell of what had happened here. Better to get the tale straight, there are any number of versions up there in the streets.”

“If you have an hour to spare,” said Cadfael heartily, “come and share a flask of wine of my own making in the herb-garden, and I’ll tell you the whole truth of it, so far as any man knows what’s truth. Who knows, you may find a pattern in it that I have failed to find.”

In the wood—scented dimness of the workshop in the herbarium he told her, at leisure and in detail, everything he knew or had gathered concerning the death of Gilbert Prestcote, everything he had observed or thought concerning Elis ap Cynan. She listened, seated with spread knees and erect back on the bench against the wall, with her cup nursed in both hands to warm it, for the wine was red and full. She no longer exerted herself to be graceful, if ever she had, but her composed heaviness had its own impressive grace.

“I would not say but that boy might kill,” she said at the end of it. “They act before they think and regret only too late. But I don’t think he would kill his girl’s father. Very easy, you say, and I believe it, to ease the man out of the world, so that even one not given to murder might do it before ever he realised. Yes, but those a man kills easily are commonly strangers to him. Hardly people at all. But this one would be armoured in identity—her father, no less, the man that begot her. And yet,” she owned, shaking her head, “I may be wrong about him. He may be the one of his kind who does what his kind does not do. There is always one.”

“The girl believes absolutely that he is guilty,” said Cadfael thoughtfully, “perhaps because she is all too well aware of what she feels to be her own guilt. The sire returns and the lovers are to be torn apart—no great step to dream of his failure to return, and only one more leap to see death as the final and total cause of that failure. But dreams they surely were, never truly even wished. The boy is on firmer ground when he swears he went to try and win her father to look kindly on his suit.

“For if ever I saw a lad sunlit and buoyed up with hope by nature, Elis is the one.”

“And this girl?” wondered Sister Magdalen, twirling her wine, cup between nursing palms. “If they’re of an age, then she must be the more mature by some years. So it goes! Is it anyway possible that she…?”

“No,” said Cadfael with certainty. “She was with the lady, and Hugh, and the Welsh princelings, throughout. I know she left her father living, and never came near him again until he was dead, and then in Hugh’s company. No, she torments herself vainly. If you had her in your hands,” said Cadfael with conviction, “you would soon find her out for the simple, green child she is.”

Sister Magdalen was in the act of saying philosophically: “I’m hardly likely to get the chance,” when the tap on the door came. So light and tentative a sound, and yet so staunchly repeated, they fell silent and still to make sure of it.

Cadfael rose to open it and peer out through the narrowest possible chink, convinced there was no one there; and there she stood, her hand raised to knock again, pallid, wretched and resolute, half a head taller than he, the simple, green child of his description, with a steely core of Norman nobility forcing her to transcend herself. Hastily he flung the door wide. “Come within from the cold. How can I serve you?”

“The porter told me,” said Melicent, “that the sister from Godric’s Ford came a while ago, and might be here wanting remedies from your store. I should like to speak with her.”

“Sister Magdalen is here,” said Cadfael. “Come, sit with her by the brazier, and I’ll leave you to talk with her in private.” She came in half afraid, as though this small, unfamiliar place held daunting secrets. She stepped with fastidious delicacy, almost inch by inch, and yet with that determination in her that would not let her turn back. She looked at Sister Magdalen eye to eye, fascinated, doubtless having heard her history both ancient and recent, and found some difficulty in reconciling the two.

“Sister,” said Melicent, going arrow, straight to the point, “when you go back to Godric’s Ford, will you take me with you?” Cadfael, as good as his word, withdrew softly and with alacrity, drawing the door to after him, but not so quickly that he did not hear Sister Magdalen reply simply and practically: “Why?” She never did or said quite what was expected of her, and it was a good question. It left Melicent in the delusion that this formidable woman knew little or nothing about her, and necessitated the entire retelling of the disastrous story, and in the retelling it might fall into truer proportion, and allow the girl to reconsider her situation with somewhat less desperate urgency. So, at any rate, Brother Cadfael hoped, as he trotted away through the garden to go and spend a pleasant half-hour with Brother Anselm, the precentor, in his carrel in the cloister, where he would certainly be compiling the sequence of music for the burial of Gilbert Prestcote.

“I intend,” said Melicent, rather grandly because of the jolt the blunt question had given her, “to take the veil, and I would like it to be among the Benedictine sisters of Polesworth.”

“Sit down here beside me,” said Sister Magdalen comfortably, “and tell me what has turned you to this withdrawal, and whether your family are in your confidence and approve your choice. You are very young, and have the world before you…”

“I am done with the world,” said Melicent.