The Leper of Saint Giles (5 page)

“Mind the bellows! There, draw it out, you’ve given me all the fire I want. Lay it by on the stone there. Good lad! A name for a name is fair exchange. My name is Cadfael, a Welsh brother of this house, born at Trefriw.” Cadfael was pounding honey and a morsel of vinegar into his powdered herbs, and warming his pot by the fire. “Now who may you be?”

“My name is Joscelin Lucy. My father is Sir Alan Lucy, and has two manors in the Hereford borders. He sent me as page to Domville when I was fourteen, as the custom is, to learn my squire-craft in a greater household. And I won’t say my lord has been so hard a man to serve. I could not complain for myself. But for his tenants and villeins, and such as fall under his justice…” He hesitated. “I have my letters, I can read Latin hand. I was at school with monks, it stays with a man. I don’t say my lord’s worse than his kind, but God knows he’s no better. I should have asked my father to take me away to another lord, if…”

If this courtship, to dignify it by that name, had not begun to be mooted between Domville and the Massard heiress. If the boy had not seen, marvelled at, been captivated by, that tiny, fragile, virginal creature between her two dragons. His lord’s entry where she was had been entry also, at whatever hopeless distance, for his esquires.

“By staying with him,” said the youth, wrenching at the insoluble complications of his predicament, “I could at least see her. If I left him, how could I ever get near? So I stayed. And I do try to serve honestly, since I so promised. But oh, Brother Cadfael, is this just? Is it right? For the love of God, she is eighteen years old, and she shrinks from him, and yet, for all I can see, he is better than what she now has. She has no happiness now, and can look for none in her marriage. And I love her! But that’s by the way. Of small account, if she could be happy.”

“Hmmm!” said Cadfael with mild skepticism, and stirred his gently bubbling pot, which began to fill the hut with a heady aromatic sweetness as it simmered. “So many a lover has probably vowed, but with one eye on his own advantage, all the same. I suppose you’ll tell me you’re willing to die for her.”

Joscelin melted suddenly into a boy’s grin. “Well, not with any great eagerness! I’d liefer live for her, if it can be arranged. But if you mean, would I do all in my power to set her free to take another of her own choice, yes, I would. For this match is not of her choice, she dreads and loathes it, she is being forced into it utterly against her will.”

There was no need to labor it; the first glimpse of her face and bearing had said it all for him.

“And those who should most guard her and work for her good are using her for their own ends, and nothing more. Her mother—she was Picard’s sister—died when Iveta was born, and her father when she was ten years old, and she was given over into her uncle’s ward as her nearest kin, which is natural enough, if her kin had proved natural to her! Oh, I am not so blind as not to know there’s nothing new in a guardian making the best profit for himself out of his ward, instead of using his own substance on her behalf, and plundering her lands instead of nourishing them for her future good. I tell you, Brother Cadfael, Iveta is being sold to my lord for his voice and countenance with the king, and advancement under his shadow—but for more than that. She has great lands. She is the only Massard left, all that great honor goes with her hand. And I suspect that the bargain they’ve struck over her means the carving up of what was once a hero’s portion. A great swathe out of those lands of hers will surely stay with Picard, and some of what goes with her to Domville will have been milked hard for years before it passes. A very fine arrangement for both of them, but crying wrong to Iveta.”

And every word could all too well be true. Such things happen when a child is left orphan and heiress to great estates. Even if the child be a boy, and young enough, thought Cadfael, and with no one to protect him, he can be married off to make a profitable alliance for his guardian, to join up lands convenient for exploitation, to spite a rival, just as nimbly and irresistibly as can a girl; but with a girl the thing is more usual, and less to be questioned. No, no one in authority between baron and king will lift a finger to interfere with Iveta’s destiny. Only, perhaps, some rash young hothead like this one, at his own risk and hers.

He did not ask what they had been whispering together about, when he stumbled in upon their embrace. However fretted and angry, young Lucy had still something, some faint, hoarded hope in his sleeve, so much was clear. Better not to ask, not to let him utter it, even if he offered. But there was one thing Cadfael needed to know. The only Massard left, he had said.

“What was the name of her father?” he asked, stirring his thickening brew. Before Compline he would be able to set it aside to cool gradually.

“Hamon FitzGuimar de Massard.”

He stressed the patronymic with ceremony and pride. There were still some among the young, it seemed, who had been taught a proper regard for the great names of the dead.

“Her grandsire was that Guimar de Massard who was at the taking of Jerusalem, and was captured afterwards at the battle of Ascalon, and died of his wounds. She has his helm and his sword. She treasures them. The Fatimids sent them back after his death.”

Yes, so they had, in courtesy to a brave enemy. They had been asked also to return his body from its temporary burial, and had received the request graciously, but then the intermittent squabbling among the Crusader leaders had cost them the chance of securing the port of Ascalon, and the negotiations for the return of the paladin’s body had been neglected and forgotten. Chivalrous enemies had buried him with honor, and there he rested. It was all very long ago, years before these young people were ever born.

“I remember,” said Cadfael.

“And now it’s great shame that the last heiress of such a house should be so misused and defrauded of her happiness.”

“So it is,” said Cadfael, lifting his pot from the fire and standing it aside on the beaten earth of the floor.

“And it must not continue,” said Joscelin emphatically. “It shall not continue.” He rose, with a vast sigh. “I must go back, no help for it.” He eyed the array of bottles and jars, and the dangling bunches of herbs that furnished the workshop with infinite possibilities. “Have you not something among all these wonders that I could slip into his cup? His or Picard’s, what does it matter which? Either removed from this world would set Iveta free. And leave the world the sweeter!”

“If that is seriously meant,” said Cadfael firmly, “you are in peril of your soul, boy. And if it is mere levity, you deserve a great clout on the ear for it. If you were not so big, I might attempt it.”

The flashing smile came and went in an instant, warmly if ruefully. “I could stoop,” he offered.

“You know as well as I do, child, that you would not touch such foul methods as murder, and you do yourself great wrong to misuse words.”

“Would I not?” said Joscelin softly, the smile clean gone. “You do not know, brother, how far I would put my soul in peril to make all safe for Iveta.”

Cadfael fretted about it all through Compline, and into the warming-room for the last quiet half-hour before bed. Of course there had been nothing for it but to take the boy sternly to task, tell him firmly and truly that he must abjure all such black thoughts, out of which nothing good could come. None but knightly measures were open to him, since he was destined for knighthood, and he should, he must, forswear all others. The trouble was that the boy had shown very sound sense in retorting that he would be a great fool to challenge his lord to honest combat, after the manner of knighthood, since Domville would not even take such an impertinence seriously, but simply throw him out of his household and be done with him. And how would Iveta be helped then?

But need that mean that he was really capable of contemplating the use of murder? Remembering the open brown face, very poorly provided for dissembling, and the headlong manner, surely not adapted to going roundabout, Cadfael could hardly believe it. And yet there was that fragile golden miniature of a girl with her sad, resigned face and empty eyes, two days from her hated marriage, and her fate was a weighty enough matter to demand, if it could not justify, a death or two.

The urgency touched Cadfael, no less than Joscelin Lucy. For here was Guimar de Massard’s granddaughter, stripped of all her kin but these two who hedged her in like guardian dragons. And how could the last of the Massards be left to her fate, without a finger raised from all those who had known her grandfather, and reverenced his memory? As well abandon a comrade wounded and surrounded in battle.

Brother Oswin crept diffidently to Cadfael’s side in the warming-room. “Is the linctus already prepared, brother? The fault was mine, let me do something to make amends. I will rise early and bottle it for you. I have caused you such extra travail, I should make some repayment.”

He had caused more travail than he knew, and more perplexity of mind, but at least he had recalled Cadfael to the remembrance of his first duty here; after, of course, the observance of the rule.

“No, no,” said Cadfael hastily. “The boiling is very well, and it will cool overnight and thicken, after Prime is time enough before bottling. You are reader tomorrow, you must keep the offices strictly, and think only of your reading.”

And leave my brew alone, he thought, as he went to his cell and his prayers. It came clear to him suddenly how like were Brother Oswin’s large hands to those of Joscelin Lucy, and yet how the one pair made a havoc of whatever they touched, and the other pair, for all their size, moved with delicate dexterity, whether on the reins of a speckled gray horse, or sword and lance, or circling the tender body of a heart-heavy girl.

And with equal adroitness, thus driven, on the means of murder?

Cadfael arose well before Prime next morning, and went to bottle his overnight brew, and take a measure of it to Brother Edmund at the infirmary. The day had dawned misty and mild, without wind. In the still air sounds were muted and movements softened, and the great court presented an ordinary picture of routine activities from Prime to breakfast, through the first Mass and the chapter that followed, on this occasion cut short and briskly conducted, there being so much following business to be seen to for the next day’s marriage. There was therefore a rather longer interval left for relaxation before High Mass at ten, and Cadfael took the opportunity of returning to the herb-gardens, and earmarking for Brother Oswin’s afternoon duty those tasks which seemed best proofed against his knack of well-intentioned devastation. Autumn was a good time, since there was digging to be done, to make the cleared ground ready for the operation of the frosts to come.

Cadfael returned to the great court before ten o’clock, when brothers, pupils, guests and townsmen were beginning to gather for High Mass. The Picards were just issuing forth from the guest-hall, Iveta forlornly small and mute between uncle and aunt, but looking, or so Cadfael thought, resolutely composed, as though a faint, reviving wind had blown through the heavy stillness of her despair, and given her heart at least to hope for a miracle. The elderly maidservant, as forbidding of visage as Agnes herself, walked close behind. The child was hemmed in securely every way.

They were moving at leisure towards the cloister and the south door, with Brother Denis the hospitaller in attendance, when the decorous quiet was rudely broken by a furious clatter of hooves at the gatehouse, and into the court galloped a rider on a speckled gray horse, at such headlong speed that he almost rode down the porter, and scattered the servants like hens before the fox. Reining round abruptly with great slithering of hooves on the moist cobbles, he flung the bridle on his horse’s neck, and leaped down with flaxen hair erected and blue eyes blazing, to plant himself squarely in Godfrid Picard’s path, feet spread and jaw jutting, a young man in a formidable rage.

“My lord, it’s you have done this thing to me! I am cast off from my service, thrown out without reason, without fault, with nothing but horse and saddle-bags, and ordered to quit this town before night. This in a moment, and no word of mine will be heard in excuse! And well I know to whom I owe the favor! You, you have complained of me to my lord, and got me turned off like a dog, and I will have satisfaction from you for the favor, man to man, before ever I turn my back on Shrewsbury !”

Chapter Three

LIKE A FLUNG STONE IN A PLACID POOL, this violent invasion cast out flurries of ripples in all directions, to beat against gatehouse and guest-hall and cloister. Brother Denis fluttered uncertainly at gaze, unaware even of the identity of this large and very angry youth, and desirous only of restoring peace in the court, but without the least notion of how to set about it. Picard, brought up almost breast to breast with the solid young body and grim face, flamed red to the cheekbones, and then blanched white with answering fury. He could not go forward, he would not go aside, and even if the startled cluster of servants had not been pressing close behind, he would not have given back an inch. Agnes glared outrage, and quickly reached to grip Iveta by the arm, for the girl had started forward with a faint, desolate cry, the subdued stillness of her face broken, and for one moment sparkling with frantic emotion, as shattered ice takes the light and dazzles. Just for that instant she would have forgotten everything but the boy, sprung to his side without conceal, flung her arms round him, if her aunt’s grasp had not plucked her back without gentleness, drawn her close to a rigid, somberly gowned side, and held her there with steely fingers. Whether from long submission or from newly alerted wit, she shrank and was still, and the light, but not the pain, ebbed out of her face. Cadfael saw it, and was inextricably caught. No young thing hardly out of her nurse’s care should so suffer.

He remembered that look later. At this moment he was held by the impact of Joscelin Lucy’s wildly unwise youth and Godfrid Picard’s subtle, experienced maturity. It was not so unequal a combat as might have been expected. The boy was above himself, and unquestionably a man of his hands, and a son of confident, if minor, privilege.

“I may not ask you to draw, here,” he said high and clearly. Anger raised his voice, as though to reach a marshal in the lists. “I challenge you to name the place and time where we may draw, to good effect. You have done me an offense, I am cast off by reason of your persuasion, do me right, and stand to what you have urged against me.”

“Insolent rogue!” Picard spat back at him disdainfully. “I am more likely to set my hounds on you than dignify you by crossing swords with you. If you are dismissed for a profitless, treacherous, meddling, ill-conditioned wretch, you are rightly served, be thankful your lord did not have you whipped from his door. You have got off lightly. Take care you don’t provoke worse usage than you already have. Now stand out of my way, and get you gone homewards, as you were ordered.”

“Not I!” vowed Joscelin through his teeth. “Not until I have said all that I have to say, here before all these witnesses. Nor will I go for being ordered. Does Huon de Domville own the ground I stand on and the air I breathe? His service he can keep, there are other households at least as honorable as his. But to run with mean tales to him, and blacken my name, was that fair dealing?”

Picard gave vent to a wordless bellow of impatient rage, and turned to snap imperious fingers at his menservants, half a dozen of whom, solid men-at-arms of an age to be experienced in rough play, came forth blithely enough, three on either side, closing in a half-circle.

“Take this wastrel out of my sight. The river is handy. Put him to cool in the mud!”

The women drew back in a flurry of skirts. Agnes and the maid dragging Iveta away by both wrists. The men-at-arms advanced, grinning but wary, and Joscelin was obliged to take some paces back, to avoid being encircled.

“Stand clear!” he warned, glaring. “Let the coward do his own work, for if you lay hand on me there’ll be blood let.”

He had so far forgotten himself as to lay hand to hilt, and draw the blade some inches from the scabbard. Cadfael judged that it was high time to intervene, before the young man put himself hopelessly in the wrong, and both he and Brother Denis were starting forward to thrust between the antagonists, when from the cloister surged the tall presence of Prior Robert, monumentally displeased, and from the direction of the abbot’s lodging, swift and silent and thus far unnoticed, the equally tall and far more daunting figure of Abbot Radulfus himself, hawk-faced, shrewd-eyed, and coldly but composedly angry.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Robert spread long, elegant hands between. “You do yourselves and our house great dishonor. Think shame to touch weapon or threaten violence within these walls!”

The men-at-arms recoiled thankfully into the crowd. Picard stood smouldering but controlled. Joscelin shot his sword very hastily back into the sheath, but stood breathing heavily and cherishing his fury. He was not an easy young men to abash, and harder still to silence. He made a half-turn that brought him eye to eye with the abbot, who had reached the borders of the dispute, and stood lofty, dark and calm, considering all the offenders at leisure. There fell a silence.

“Within the bounds of this abbey,” said Radulfus at last, without raising his voice, “men do not brawl. I will not say we never hear an angry word. We are also men. Sir Godfrid, keep your men at heel on these premises. And you, young man, so much as touch your hilt again, and you shall lie in a penitent’s cell overnight.”

Joscelin bent head and knee, though the abbot might well have thought the gesture somewhat perfunctory. “My lord abbot, I ask your pardon! Threatened or no, I was at fault.” But owning his fault, he kept his rage. A close observer might even have wondered if he was not contemplating the possible advantages of offending again, and being cast as promised into a cell within these walls. Locks may be picked, lay brothers suborned or tricked—yes, there were possibilities! He was disadvantaged, however, by a fair-minded disposition not to offend those who had committed no offense against him. “I stand in your mercy,” he said.

“Good, we understand each other. Now, what is this dispute that troubles the peace here?”

Both Joscelin and Picard began to talk at once, but Joscelin, for once wise, drew back and left the field to his elder. He stood biting a resolute lip and regarding the abbot’s face, as Picard brushed him contemptuously aside in the terms he had expected.

“Father, this impertinent squire has been turned off by his lord for a negligent, ill-conditioned fellow, and he credits me with so advising my lord Domville, as indeed I felt it my duty to do. For I have found him presumptuous, pressing his company upon my niece, and in all ways a troubler of the peace. He came here to brawl with me, resenting his well-deserved dismissal. He has no more than his due, but he will not be schooled. And that is all the matter,” he said scornfully.

Brother Cadfael marvelled how Joscelin kept his mouth shut on the flood of his grievance, and his eyes fixed respectfully upon Radulfus, until he was invited to speak. He must surely have acquired in these few moments a healthy respect for the abbot’s fairness and shrewd sense, so to contain himself. He had confidence that he would not be judged unheard, and it was worth an effort at self-control to manage his defense aright.

“Well, young sir?” said Radulfus. It could not be asserted that he smiled, his countenance remained judicially remote and calm; but there might have been the suggestion of indulgence in his voice.

“Father Abbot,” said Joscelin, “all of us of these two houses came here to see a marriage performed. The bride you have seen.” She had been hustled away out of sight, into the guest-hall, long before this. “She is eighteen years old. My lord—he that was my lord!—is nearing sixty. She has been these last eight years orphaned and in her uncle’s care, and she has great lands, long in her uncle’s administration.” Some indication of his unexpected drift had penetrated by then, Picard was boiling and voluble. But Radulfus dipped a frowning brow, and raised a silencing hand, and they gave way perforce.

“Father Abbot, I pray your help for Iveta de Massard!” Joscelin had gained his moment, and could not hold back. “Father, the honor of which she is lady spans four counties and fifty manors, it is an earl’s portion. They have farmed it between them, uncle and bridegroom, they have parceled it out, she is bought and sold, without her will—Oh, God, she has no will left, she is tamed!—against her will! My offense is that I love her, and I would have taken her away out of this prison…”

The latter half of this, though Cadfael had drawn close enough to hear all, was certainly lost to most others under a shrill clamor of refutation, in which Agnes played the loudest part. She had a voice that rode high over opposition, Joscelin could not cry her down. And in the midst of the hubbub, suddenly there were crisp hoofbeats in the gatehouse, and horsemen pacing into the court with the authority of office, and in numbers calculated to draw ear and eye. The thread alike of Joscelin’s appeal and Picard’s refutation was broken abruptly; every eye turned to the gate.

First came Huon de Domville, the muscles of his face set like a wrestler’s biceps, his small, black, malevolent eyes alertly bright. Close at his elbow rode Gilbert Prestcote, sheriff of Shropshire under King Stephen, a lean, hard, middle-aged knight browed and nosed like a falcon, his black, forked beard veined with gray. He had a sergeant and seven or eight officers at his back, an impressive array. He halted them within the gage, and dismounted as they did.

“And there he stands!” blared Domville, eyes glittering upon Joscelin, who stood startled and gaping. “The rascal himself! Did I not say he’d be stirring up trouble everywhere possible before he took himself off? Seize him, sheriff! Lay hold on the rogue and make him fast!”

He had been so intent on his quarry that he had not immediately observed that the abbot himself was among those present. His eye lit on the austere and silent figure belatedly, and he dismounted and doffed in brusque respect. “By your leave, Father Abbot! We have dire business here, and I am all the sorrier that this young rogue should have brought it within your walls.”

“Such disturbance as he has so far caused us,” said Radulfus coolly, “does not seem of a sort to require the attendance of sheriff and sergeant. I gather that if he has offended, he has also been brought to book for it. To dismiss him your service is your right. To pursue him further seems somewhat excessive. Unless you have further complaint to make against him?” He looked to Prestcote for his answer.

“There is indeed more,” said the sheriff. “I am instructed by my lord Domville that since this squire was ordered to pack and go, a thing of great value has been missed, and looked for in vain within the household. There is ground for suspicion that this man may have stolen it in despite of his lord, and in revenge for his dismissal. He stands so charged.”

Joscelin was staring in astonished derision, not yet even angry on this count, and certainly not afraid. “I, steal?” he gasped in huge contempt. “I would not touch the meanest thing that belonged to him, I would not willingly take away on my shoes the dust of his courtyard. Go, he bade me, and so I did, out of his house, and have not even stopped to gather together everything that was mine there. All that I brought away is here on my body or in the saddle-bags there.”

The abbot raised a restraining hand. “My lord, what is this valuable thing which is lost? How does it bulk? When was it missed?”

“It is the wedding gift I intended for my bride,” said the baron, “a collar of gold and pearls. It could lie in the palm of a man’s hand, once out of its case. I meant to bring it to the girl today, after Mass, but when I went to take it, and looked within the case, I found it empty. Nigh on an hour ago, I suppose, for we wasted time hunting for it, though the leaving of the empty case should have told us it was not lost, but stolen. And but for this turbulent boy, who was turned off for good reason and took it very defiantly, no one else has left my household. I charge him with the theft, and I will have the remedy of law, to the last particle.”

“But did this young man know of this collar, and where to lay hand on it?” demanded the abbot.

“I did, Father,” Joscelin acknowledged readily. “So did all three of us who served him as squires.”

Still more horsemen had appeared in the gateway, several of Domville’s outridden retinue, and among them Simon and Guy, by the look of their faces by no means eager to be noticed or take any part in this encounter. They looked on from the background, uncertain and unhappy, as well they might.

“But I have not touched it,” Joscelin went on firmly. “And here am I, just as I left the house, take me away and strip me if you will, you’ll find never a thread that is not mine. And there is my horse and my saddle-bags, turn out whatever you find, and let the lord abbot be witness. But no,” he added vehemently, seeing Domville himself make a move toward the gray horse, “not you, my lord! I will not have my accuser’s hands pawing my belongings. Let an impartial judge do the searching. Father Abbot, I appeal to your justice!”

“That is but fair,” said the abbot. “Robert, will you do what is needful?”

Prior Robert received the request with a dignified inclination of the head, and made a solemn procession of his advance upon the duty allotted him. Two of Prestcote’s men-at-arms unbuckled the saddle-bags from their place, and when the horse, nervous at the press of people, sidled unhappily, Simon impulsively slipped down from his mount and ran to take the bridle and soothe the fidgety gray. The saddle-bags lay open on the cobbles of the court. Prior Robert plunged his hands into the first, and began to hand out the simple items of clothing and accouterment their raging owner had stuffed unceremoniously within, barely an hour previously. The sergeant received them solemnly, Prestcote standing close by. Linen shirts, crumpled in a furious fist, chausses, tunics, shoes, a few items of spare harness, gloves…

Prior Robert ran his long hand about the interior to show that it was empty. He leaned to the second. Joscelin stood braced on long, shapely legs, barely attentive, his bold brown face arrogantly smiling. Though his mother, Cadfael thought, watching, would have something pithy to say about the way he handled the shirts she made for him, when he got home. If he got home…