Dead Man's Ransom (9 page)

“I take back every evidence of love,” raged Melicent, her voice like a cry of pain. “I hate you, I loathe you… I hate myself for ever loving you. You have so mistaken me, you have killed my father.” He wrenched himself out of his stupor then, and made a wild move towards her. “Melicent! For God’s sake, what are you saying?” She drew back violently out of his reach. “No, don’t touch me, don’t come near me. Murderer!”

“This shall end,” said Hugh, and took her by the shoulders and put her into Sybilla’s arms. “Madam, I had thought to spare you any further distress today, but you see this will not wait. Bring her! And sergeant, have these two into the gatehouse, where we may be private. Edmund and Cadfael, go with us, we may well need you.”

“Now,” said Hugh, when he had herded them all, accused, accuser and witnesses, into the anteroom of the gatehouse out of the cold and out of the public eye, “now let us get to the heart of this. Brother Edmund, you say you found this man in the sheriff’s chamber, standing beside his bed. How did you read it? Did you think, by appearances, he had been long in there? Or that he had but newly come?”

“I thought he had but just crept in,” said Edmund. “He was close to the foot of the bed, a little stooped, looking down as though he wondered whether he dared wake the sleeper.”

“Yet he could have been there longer? He could have been standing over a man he had smothered, to assure himself it was thoroughly done?”

“It might be interpretable so,” agreed Edmund very dubiously, “but the thought did not enter my mind. If there had been anything so sinister in him; would it not have shown? It’s true he started when I touched him, and looked guilty, but I mean as a boy caught in mischief, nothing that caused me an ill thought. And he went, when I ordered him, as biddable as a child.”

“Did you look again at the bed, after he was gone? Can you say if the sheriff was still breathing then? And the coverings of the bed, were they disarranged?”

“All was smooth and quiet as when we left him sleeping. But I did not look more closely,” said Edmund sadly. “I wish to God I had.”

“You knew of no cause, and his best cure was to be let alone to sleep. One more thing—had Elis anything in his hands?”

“No, nothing. Nor had he on the cloak he has on his arm now.” It was of a dark red cloth, smooth, surfaced and close-woven.

“Very well. And you have no knowledge of any other who may have made his way into the room?”

“No knowledge, no. But at any time entry was possible. There may well have been others.”

Melicent said with deadly bitterness: “One was enough! And that one we do know.” She shook Sybilla’s hand from her arm, refusing any restraint but her own. “My lord Beringar, hear me speak. I say again, he has killed my father. I will not go back from that.”

“Have your say,” said Hugh shortly.

“My lord, you must know that this Elis and I learned to know each other in your castle where he was prisoner, but with the run of the wards on his parole, and I was with my mother and brother in my father’s apartments waiting for news of him. We came to see and touch—my bitter regret that I am forced to say it, we loved. It was not our fault, it happened to us, we had no choice. We came to extreme dread that when my father came home we must be parted, for then Elis must leave in his place. And you, my lord, who best knew my father, know that he would never countenance a match with a Welshman. Many a time we talked of it, many a time we despaired. And he said—I swear he said so, he dare not deny it!—he said he would kill for me if need be, kill any man who stood between us. Anything, he said, to hold us together, even murder. In love men say wild things. I never thought of harm, and yet I am to blame, for I was as desperate for love as he. And now he has done what he threatened, for he has surely killed my father.”

Elis got his breath, coming out of his stunned wretchedness with a heave that almost lifted him out of his boots. “I did not! I swear to you I never laid hand on him, never spoke word to him. I would not for any gain have hurt your father, even though he barred you from me. I would have reached you somehow, there would have been a way… You do me terrible wrong!”

“But you did go to the room where he lay?” Hugh reminded him equably. “Why?”

“To make myself known to him, to plead my cause with him, what else? It was the only present hope I had, I could not let it slip through my fingers. I wanted to tell him that I love Melicent, that I am a man of lands and honour, and desire nothing better than to serve her with all my goods and gear. He might have listened! I knew, she had told me, that he was sworn enemy to the Welsh, I knew it was a poor hope, but it was all the hope I had. But I never got the chance to speak. He was deep asleep, and before I ventured to disturb him the good brother came and banished me. This is the truth, and I will swear to it on the altar.”

“It is truth!” Eliud spoke up vehemently for his friend. He stood close, since Elis had refused a seat, his shoulder against Elis’s shoulder for comfort and assurance. He was as pale as if the accusation had been made against him, and his voice was husky and low. “He was with me in the cloister, he told me of his love, and said he would go to the lord Gilbert and speak to him man to man. I thought it unwise, but he would go. It was not many minutes before I saw him come forth, and Brother Infirmarer making sure he departed. And there was no manner of stealth in his dealings,” insisted Ehud stoutly, “for he crossed the court straight and fast, not caring who might see him go in.”

“That may well be true,” agreed Hugh thoughtfully, “but for all that, even if he went in with no ill intent, and no great hope, once he stood there by the bedside it might come into his mind how easy, and how final, to remove the obstacle—a man sleeping and already very low.”

“He never would!” cried Eliud. “His is no such mind.”

“I did not,” said Elis, and looked helplessly at Melicent, who stared back at him stonily and gave him no aid. “For God’s sake, believe me! I think I could not have touched or roused him, even if there had been no one to send me away. To see a fine, strong man so—quite defenceless…”

“Yet no one entered there but you,” she said mercilessly.

“That cannot be proved!” flashed Eliud. “Brother Infirmarer has said that the way was open, anyone might have gone in.”

“Nor can it be proved that anyone did,” she said with aching bitterness.

“But I think it can,” said Brother Cadfael.

He had all eyes on him in an instant. All this time some morsel of his memory had been worrying at the flaw he could not quite identify. He had picked up the folded sheepskin cloak from the chest, where he had watched Edmund lay it, and there had been something different about it, though he could not think what it could be. And then the encounter with death had driven the matter to the back of his mind, but it had lodged there ever since, like chaff in the throat after eating porridge. And suddenly he had it. The cloak was gone now, gone with Einon ab Ithel back to Wales, but Edmund was there to confirm what he had to say. And so was Eliud, who would know his lord’s belongings.

“When we disrobed and bedded Gilbert Prestcote,” he said, “the cloak that wrapped him, which belonged to Einon ab Ithel, was folded and laid by, Brother Edmund will remember it, in such case as to leave plain to be seen in the collar a great gold pin that fastened it. When Eliud, here, came to ask me to show him the room and hand out his lord’s cloak to him and I did so, the cloak was folded as before, but the pin was gone. Small wonder if we forgot the matter, seeing what else we found. But I knew there was something I should have noted, and now I have recalled what it was.”

“It is truth!” cried Eliud, his face brightening eagerly. “I never thought! And I have let my lord go without it, never a word said. I fastened the collar of the cloak with it myself, when we laid him in the litter, for the wind blew cold. But with this upset, I never thought to look for it again. Here is Elis and has never been out of men’s sight since he came from the infirmary—ask all here! If he took it, he has it on him still. And if he has it not, then someone else has been in there before him and taken it. My foster-brother is no thief and no murderer—but if you doubt, you have your remedy.”

“What Cadfael says is truth,” said Edmund. “The pin was there plain to be seen. If it is gone, then someone went in and took it.” Elis had caught the fierce glow of hope, in spite of the unchanging bitterness and grief of Melicent’s face. “Strip me!” he demanded, glittering. “Search my body! I won’t endure to be thought thief and murderer both.”

In justice to him, rather than having any real doubts in the matter, Hugh took him at his word, but allowed only Cadfael and Edmund to be witnesses with him in the borrowed cell where Elis, with sweeping, arrogant, hurt gestures, tore off his clothes and let them fall about him, until he stood naked with braced feet astride and arms outspread, and dragged disdainful fingers painfully through his thick thatch of curls and shook his head violently to show there was nothing made away there. Now that he was safe from the broken, embittered stare of Melicent’s eyes the tears he had defied came treacherously into his own, and he blinked and shook them proudly away.

Hugh let him cool gradually and in considerate silence.

“Are you content?” the boy demanded stiffly, when he had his voice well in rein.

“Are you?” said Hugh, and smiled.

There was a brief, almost consoling silence. Then Hugh said mildly: “Cover yourself, then. Take your time.” And while Elis was dressing, with hands that shook now in reaction: “You do understand that I must hold you in close guard, you and your foster-brother and the others alike. As at this moment, you are no more in suspicion than many who belong here within the pale, and will not be let out of it until I know to the last moment where they spent this morn and noon. This is no more than a beginning, and you but one of many.”

“I do understand,” said Elis and wavered, hesitant to ask a favour. “Need I be separated from Eliud?”

“You shall have Eliud,” said Hugh.

When they went out again to those who still waited in the anteroom the two women were on their feet, and plainly longing to withdraw. Sybilla had but half her mind here in support of her step, daughter, the better half was with her son; and if she had been a faithful and dutiful wife to her older husband and mourned him truly now after her fashion, love was much too large a word for what she had felt for him and barely large enough for what she felt for the boy he had given her. Sybilla’s thoughts were with the future, not the past.

“My lord,” she said, “you know where we may be found for the days to come. Let me take my daughter away now, we have things which must be done.”

“At your pleasure, madam,” said Hugh. “You shall not be troubled more than is needful.” And he added only: “But you should know that the matter of this missing pin remains. There has been more than one intruder into your husband’s privacy. Bear it in mind.”

“Very gladly I leave it all in your hands,” said Sybilla fervently. And forth she went, her hand imperative at Melicent’s elbow. They passed close by Elis in the doorway, and his starving stare fastened on the girl’s face. She passed him by without a glance, she even drew aside her skirts for fear they should brush him in departing. He was too young, too open, too simple to understand that more than half the hatred and revulsion she felt for him belonged rather to herself, and her dread that she had gone far towards desiring the death she now so desperately repented.

Chapter Seven

IN THE DEATH CHAMBER, with the door closed fast, Hugh Beringar and Brother Cadfael stood beside Gilbert Prestcote’s body and turned back the brychan and sheet to the sunken breast. They had brought in lamps to set close where they would burn steadily and cast a strong light on the dead face. Cadfael took the small saucer lamp in his hand and moved it slowly across the bruised mouth and nostrils and the grizzled beard, to catch every angle of vision and pick out every mote of dust or thread.

“No matter how feeble, no matter how deep asleep, a man will fight as best as he can for his breath, and whatever is clamped over his face, unless so hard and smooth it lacks any surface pile, he will inhale. And so did this one.” The dilated nostrils had fine hairs within, a trap for tiny particles of thread. “Do you see colour there?” In an almost imperceptible current of air a gossamer wisp quivered, taking the light. “Blue,” said Hugh, peering close, and his breath caused the cobweb strand to dance. “Blue is a difficult and expensive dye. And there’s no such tint in these brychans.”

“Let’s have it forth,” said Cadfael, and advanced his small tweezers, used for extracting thorns and splinters from unwary labouring fingers, to capture a filament almost too delicate to be seen. There was more of it, however, when it emerged, two or three fine strands that had the springy life of wool.

“Hold your breath,” said Cadfael, “till I have this safe under a lid from being blown away.” He had brought one of the containers in which he stored his tablets and lozenges when he had moulded and dried them, a little polished wooden box, almost black in colour, and against the glossy dark surface the shred of wool shone brightly, a full, clear blue. He shut the lid upon it carefully, and probed again with the tweezers. Hugh shifted the lamp to cast its light at a new angle, and there was a brief gleam of red, the soft, pale red of late summer roses past their prime. It winked and vanished. Hugh moved the light to find it again. Barely two frail, curling filaments of the many that must have made up this wool that had woven the cloth, but wool carries colour bravely.

“Blue and rose. Both precious colours, not for the furnishings of a bed.” Cadfael captured the elusive thing after two or three casts, and imprisoned it with the blue. The light, carefully deployed, found no more such traces in the stretched nostrils. “Well, he also wore a beard. Let us see!” There was a clear thread of the blue fluttering in the greying beard. Cadfael extracted it, and carefully combed the grizzled strands out into order to search for more. When he shook and stroked out the dust and hairs from the comb into his box, two or three points of light glimmered and vanished, like motes of dust lit by the sun. He tilted the box from side to side to recover them, for they were invisible once dimmed, and one single gold spark rewarded him. He found what he sought caught between the clenched teeth. One strand had frayed from age or use, and the spasm of death had bitten and held it. He drew it forth and held it to the light in his tweezers. A first finger-joint long, brittle and bright, glinting in the lamplight, the gold thread that had shed those invisible, scintillating particles.

“Expensive indeed!” said Cadfael, shutting it carefully into his box. “A princely death, to be smothered under cloth of fine wool embroidered with thread of gold. Tapestry? Altar-cloth? A lady’s brocaded gown? A piece from a worn vestment? Certainly nothing here within the infirmary, Hugh. Whatever it may have been, some man brought it with him.”

“So it would seem,” agreed Hugh, brooding.

They found nothing more, but what they had found was puzzling enough.

“So where is the cloth that smothered him?” wondered Cadfael, fretting. And where is the gold pin that fastened Einon ab Ithel’s cloak?”

“Search for the cloth,” said Hugh, “since it has a richness that could well be found somewhere within the abbey walls. And I will search for the pin. I have six Welshmen of the escort and Eliud yet to question and strip, and if that fails, we’ll burrow our way through the entire enclave as best we can. If they are here, we’ll find them.”

They searched, Cadfael for a cloth, any cloth which could show the rich colours and the gold thread he was seeking, Hugh for the gold pin. With the abbot’s leave and the assistance of Prior Robert, who had the most comprehensive knowledge of the riches of the house and demonstrated its treasures with pride, Cadfael examined every hanging, tapestry and altar-cloth the abbey possessed, but none of them matched the quivering fragments he brought to the comparison. Shades of colour are exact and consistent. This rose and this blue had no companions here.

Hugh, for his part, thoroughly searched the clothing and harness of all the Welshmen made prisoners by this death, and Prior Robert, though with disapproval, sanctioned the extension of the search into the cells of the brothers and novices, and even the possessions of the boys, for children may be tempted by a bright thing, without realising the gravity of what they do. But nowhere did they find any trace of the old and massive pin that had held the collar of Einon’s cloak close to keep the cold away from Gilbert Prestcote on his journey.

The day was spent by then and the evening coming on, but after Vespers and supper Cadfael returned to the quest. The inhabitants of the infirmary were quite willing to talk; they had not often so meaty a subject on which to debate. Yet neither Cadfael nor Edmund got much information out of them. Whatever had happened had happened during the half-hour or more when the brothers were at dinner in the refectory, and at that time the infirmary, already fed, was habitually asleep. There was one, however, who, being bedridden, slept a great deal at odd times, and was well able to remain wakeful if something more interesting than usual was going on.

“As for seeing,” said Brother Rhys ruefully, “I’m as little profit to you, brother, as I am to myself. I know if another inmate passes by me and I know which of them it is, and I know light from dark, but little more. But my ears, I dare swear, have grown sharper as my eyes have grown dimmer. I heard the door of the chamber opposite, where the sheriff lay, open twice, now you ask me to cudgel my memory. You know it creaks, opening. Closing, it’s silent.”

“So someone entered there or at least opened the door. What more did you hear? Did anyone speak?”

“No, but I heard a stick tapping—very lightly—and then the door creaked. I reckoned it must be Brother Wilfred, who helps here when he’s needed, for he’s the only brother who walks with a stick, being lame from a young man.”

“Did he go in?”

“That you may better ask him, for I can’t tell you. All was quiet a while, and then I heard him tap away along the passage to the outer door. He may only have pushed the door open to look and listen if all was well in there.”

“He must have drawn the door to again after him,” said Cadfael, “or you would not have heard it creak again the second time. When was it Brother Wilfred paid his visit?” But Rhys was vague about time. He shook his head and pondered. “I did drowse for a while after my dinner. How should I know for how long? But they must have been still in the refectory some time after that, for it wasn’t until later that Brother Edmund came back.”

“And the second time?”

“That must have been some while later, it might be as much as a quarter, hour. The door creaked again. He had a light step, whoever came, I just caught the fall of his foot on the threshold, and then nothing. The door making no sound, drawn to, I don’t know how long he was within there, but I fancy he did go in. Brother Wilfred might have a proper call to peer inside to see all was well, but this other one had none.”

“How long was he within there? How long could he have been? Did you hear him leave?”

“I was in a doze again,” admitted Rhys regretfully. “I can’t tell you. And he did tread very soft, a young man’s tread.” So the second could have been Elis, for there had been no word spoken when Edmund followed him in and expelled him, and Edmund from long sojourning among the sick trod as silently as a cat. Or it might have been someone else, someone unknown, coming and going undisturbed and deadly, before ever Elis intruded with his avowedly harmless errand.

Meantime, he could at least find out if Brother Wilfred had indeed been left here to keep watch, for Cadfael had not numbered the brothers in the refectory at dinner, or noticed who was present and who absent. He had another thought.

“Did anyone from within here leave this room during all that time? Brother Maurice, for one, seldom sleeps much during the day, and when others are sleeping he may well be restless, wanting company.”

“None of them passed by me to the door while I was waking,” said Rhys positively. “And I was not so deep asleep but I think I should have awakened if they had.” Which might very well be true, yet could not be taken for granted. But of what he had heard he was quite certain. Twice the door had creaked open wide enough to let somebody in.

Brother Maurice had spoken up for himself without even being asked, as soon as the sheriff’s death was mentioned, as daily it would be now until the truth was known and the sensation allowed to fade away into oblivion. Brother Edmund reported it to Cadfael after Compline, in the half-hour of repose before bed.

“I had prayers said for his soul, and told them tomorrow we should say a Mass for him—an honourable officer who died here among us and had been a good patron of our house. Up stands Maurice and says outright that he will faithfully put up prayers for the man’s salvation, for now at last his debts are fully paid, and divine justice has been done. I asked him by whose hand, seeing he knew so much,” said Edmund with uncharacteristic bitterness, but even more resignation, “and he reproved me for doubting that the hand was God’s. Sometimes I question whether his ailment of the mind is misfortune or cunning. But try to pin him down and he’ll slip through your fingers every time. He is certainly very content with this death. God forgive us all our backslidings and namely those into which we fall unwitting.”

“Amen!” said Cadfael fervently. “And he’s a strong, able man, and always in the right, even if it came to murder. But where would he lay hands on such a cloth as I have in mind?” He remembered to ask: “Did you leave Brother Wilfred to keep a close eye on things here, when you went to dinner in the refectory?”

“I wish I had,” owned Edmund sadly. “There might have been no such evil then. No, Wilfred was at dinner with us, did you never see him? I wish I had set a watch, with all my heart. But that’s hindsight. Who was ever to suppose that murder would walk in and let loose chaos on us? There was nothing to give me warning.”

“Nothing,” agreed Cadfael and brooded, considering. “So Wilfred is out of the reckoning. Who else among us walks with a stick? None that I know of.”

“There’s Anion is still on a crutch,” said Edmund, “though he’s about ready to discard it. He rather flies with it now than hobbles, but for the moment it’s grown a habit with him, after so stubborn a break. Why, are you looking for a man with a prop?”

Now there, thought Cadfael, going wearily to his bed at last, is a strange thing. Brother Rhys, hearing a stick tapping, looks for the source of it only among the brothers; and I, making my way round the infirmary, never give a thought to any but those who are brothers, and am likely to be blind and deaf to what any other may be up to even in my presence. For it had only now dawned on him that when he and Brother Edmund entered the long room, already settling for the evening, one younger and more active soul had risen from the corner where he sat and gone quietly out by the door to the chapel, the leather, shod tip of his crutch so light upon the stones that it seemed he hardly needed it, and could only have taken it away with him, as Edmund said, out of habit or in order to remove it from notice.

Well, Anion would have to wait until tomorrow. It was too late to trouble the repose of the ageing sick tonight.

In a cell of the castle, behind a locked door, Elis and Eliud shared a bed no harder than many they had shared before and slept like twin babes, without a care in the world. They had care enough now. Elis lay on his face, sure that his life was ended, that he would never love again, that nothing was left to him, even if he escaped this coil alive, but to go on Crusade or take the tonsure or undergo some barefoot pilgrimage to the Holy Land from which he would certainly never return. And Eliud lay patient and agonising at his back, with an arm wreathed over the rigid, rejecting shoulders, fetching up comfort from where he himself had none. This cousin, brother of his was far too vehemently alive to die for love, or to succumb for grief because he was accused of an infamy he had not committed. But his pain, however curable, was extreme while it lasted.

“She never loved me,” lamented Elis, tense and quivering under the embracing arm. “If she had, she would have trusted me, she would have known me better. If ever she’d loved me, how could she believe I would do murder?” As indignantly as if he had never in his transports sworn that he would! That or anything.

“She’s shocked to the heart for her father,” pleaded Eliud stoutly. “How can you ask her to be fair to you? Only wait, give her time. If she loved you, then still she does. Poor girl, she can’t choose. It’s for her you should be sorry. She takes this death to her own account, have you not told me? You’ve done no wrong and so it will be proved.”

“No, I’ve lost her, she’ll never let me near her again, never believe a word I say.”

“She will, for it will be proven you’re blameless. I swear to you it will! Truth will come out, it must, it will.”

“If I don’t win her back,” Elis vowed, muffled in his cradling arms, “I shall die!”

“You won’t die, you won’t fail to win her back,” promised Eliud in desperation. “Hush, hush and sleep!” He reached out a hand and snuffed out the failing flame of their tiny lamp. He knew the tensions and releases of this body he had slept beside from childhood, and knew that sleep was already a weight on Elis’s smarting eyelids. There are those who come brand-new into the new day and have to rediscover their griefs. Eliud was no such person. He nursed his griefs, unsleeping, into the small hours, with the chief of them fathoms deep under his protecting arm.