The Raven in the Foregate (10 page)

Brother Cadfael intercepted a startled and solemn Benet
at the edge of the dispersing crowd. The boy had a distracted look about him,
between mild guilt and deep bewilderment. He jutted a dubious underlip at
Cadfael, and shook his head vehemently, as if to shake off some clinging
illusion that made no sense, and yet would not be ignored.

“You won’t need me today. I’d best go with them.”

“No,” said Cadfael decidedly. “You stay here and look
after Mistress Hammet. Take her home if she’ll go, or find her a warm corner in
the gatehouse and stay with her. I know where I met with the priest, and I’ll
see the hunt started. If anyone wants me, you can answer for me that I’ll be
back as soon as may be.”

“But you’ve been up the better part of the night,”
protested Benet, hesitating.

“And you?” said Cadfael, and made off towards the
gatehouse before Benet could reply.

Ailnoth had passed by in the evening like a black
arrow from a war-bow, so blind, so deaf that he had neither seen Brother
Cadfael nor heard his greeting, called clearly into a brazen frost that rang
like bells. At that point in the Foregate he could have been making for the
bridge, in which case his urgent business was with someone in the town itself,
or for any of the paths which diverged from the Foregate beyond this point. Of
these there were four, one to the right, down into the riverside level of the
Gaye, where the abbey’s main gardens spread for almost half a mile in plots,
fields and orchards, and gave place at last to woodland, and a few scattered
homesteads; three to the left, a first path turning in on the near side of the
mill-pond, to serve the mill and the three small houses fringing the water
there, the second performing the same function for the three on the opposite
side. Each of these paths was prolonged alongside the water, but to end blindly
at the obstacle of the Meole Brook. The third was the narrow but well-used road
that turned left just short of the Severn bridge, crossed the Meole Brook by a
wooden foot-bridge where it emptied into the river, and continued south-west
into woodland country leading towards the Welsh border.

And why should Father Ailnoth be hurtling like the
wrath of God towards any one of these paths? The town had seemed a likelier
aim, but others were taking care of enquiries there, whether the watch at the
gate had seen him, whether he had stopped to enquire for anyone, whether a
black, menacing shadow had passed by under the gatehouse torches. Cadfael
turned his attention to the more devious ways, and halted to consider, on the
very spot, so far as he could judge, where Ailnoth had passed him by.

The Foregate parish of Holy Cross embraced both sides
of the road, on the right stretching well into the scattered hamlets beyond the
suburb, on the left as far as the brook. Had Ailnoth been bent upon visiting
someone in a country croft, he would have started directly eastward from his
house in the alley opposite the abbey gatehouse, and never entered the Foregate
highway at all, unless his goal was one of the few dwellings beyond the Gaye.
Small ground to cover there. Cadfael deployed two parties in that direction,
and turned his attention towards the west. Three paths here, one that became a
regular road and would take time, two that were near, short and could surely be
cleared up with little delay. And in any case, what would Ailnoth be doing at
that late hour, setting out on a longer journey? No, he was on his way to some
place or person close by, for what purpose only he knew.

The path on the near side of the mill-pond left the
road as a decent cart track, since it had to carry the local corn to the mill,
and bring the flour homeward again. It passed by the three small houses that
crowded close to the highway, between their doors and the boundary wall of the
abbey, reached the small plateau by the mill, where a wooden bridge crossed the
head-race, and thence wandered on as a mere footpath in rough meadow grass by
the edge of the water, where several pollarded willows leaned crookedly from
the high bank. The first and second cottages were occupied by elderly people
who had purchased bed and board for life by the grant of their own property to
the abbey. The third belonged to the miller, who had been in the church
throughout the night offices, to Cadfael’s knowledge, and was here among the
searchers now in mid morning. A devout man, as well as sedulous in preserving
the favour he enjoyed with the Benedictines, and the security of his
employment.

“Not a soul did I see along the waterside,” said the
miller, shaking his head, “when I came out last night to go to church, and that
must have been much the same time as Brother Cadfael met with Father Ailnoth on
the road. But I went straight through the wicket into the great court, not
along the track, so he could have been bound this way only a matter of minutes
later, for all I know. The old dame in the house next mine is house-bound once
the frosts begin, she’d be home.”

“And deaf as a stone,” said Brother Ambrose flatly.
“Any man who called for help outside her door, no matter how loudly, would call
in vain.”

“I meant, rather,” said the miller,”that Father
Ailnoth may have set out to visit her, knowing she dared not stir out even as
far as the church. It’s his duty to visit the aged and infirm, for their
comfort…”

The face Cadfael had glimpsed in the frosty night,
flaring and fading as it surged past the torches, had not looked to him as if
its errand was one of comfort, but he did not say so. Even the miller,
charitably advancing the possibility, had sounded dubious.

“But even if he did not,” he said, rallying
stoutly,”the maidservant who looks after the old dame has sharp enough ears,
and may have heard or seen him if he did pass this way.”

They separated into two parties, to comb the paths on
either side the water, Brother Ambrose taking the far side, where it was but a
narrow, beaten footpath serving the three little houses and continuing along
the waterside under their sloping gardens, Cadfael the cart track that led to
the mill, and there dwindled into a footpath in its turn. On both the white
sheen of frost was dimpled and darkened by a few footprints, but those belonged
all to the morning. The rime had silvered and concealed any that might have
been made by night.

The elderly couple living retired in the first house
had not been out of their door since the previous day, and had heard nothing of
the priest being missing. Such sensational news had them gaping in an
excitement partly pleasurable, and set their tongues wagging in exclamation and
lamentation, but elicited no information at all. They had shuttered their
window and barred their door early, made up a steady fire, and slept
undisturbed. The man, once a forester in the abbey’s portion of the forest of
Eyton, went in haste to pull on his boots and wrap himself in a sacking cape,
and join the hunt.

At the second house the door was opened to them by a
pretty slattern of about eighteen, with a mane of dark hair and bold,
inquisitive eyes. The tenant was merely a high, querulous voice from the inner
room, demanding why the door stood open to let in the cold. The girl whisked
away for a moment to reassure her, speaking in a loud screech and perhaps with
much gesture, for the complaint sank to a satisfied mumble. The girl came back
to them, swathing a shawl about her and closing the door behind her to
forestall further complaint.

“No,” she said, shaking her dark mane vigorously, “not
a soul that I know of came along here in the night, why should they? Never a
sound did I hear after dark, and she was in her bed as soon as the daylight
went, and she’d sleep through the trump of doom. But I was awake until later,
and there was nothing to hear or see.”

They left her standing on the doorstone, curious and
eager, gazing after them along the track as they passed the third house and
came to the tall bulk of the mill. Here, with no houses in between, the still
surface of the mill-pond opened on their right hand, dull silver, widening and
shallowing into a round pool towards the road from which they had come,
tapering gradually before them into the stream that carried the water back to
the Meole Brook and the river. Rimy grass overhung the high bank, undercut here
by the strength of the tail-race. And still no sign of any black form anywhere
in the wintry pallor. The frost had done no more than form a thin frill of ice
in the shallows, where the reed beds thickened and helped to hold it. The track
reached the mill and became a narrow path, winding between the steep-roofed
building and the precinct wall, and crossing the head-race by a little wooden
bridge with a single hand-rail. The wheel was still, the sluice above it
closed, and the overflow discharging its steady stream aside into the tail-race
deep below, and so out into the pool, a silent force perceptible only as a shudder
along the surface, which otherwise lay so still.

“Even if he came here,” said the miller, shaking his
head, “he would not go further. There’s nothing beyond.”

No, nothing beyond but the path ambling along the
grassy plain of the narrow meadow, to dwindle into nothing above the junction
of brook and outflow. Fishermen came there sometimes, in season, children
played there in the summer, lovers walked there in the twilight, perhaps, but
who would walk that way on a frosty night? None the less, Cadfael walked on a
little way. Here a few willows grew, leaning out over the water at a drunken
angle by reason of the current which was gnawing under the bank. The younger
ones had never yet been trimmed, but there were also two or three pollarded
trunks, and one cut right down to a stump and bristling with a circle of new
wands fine and springy as hairs on a giant, tonsured head. Cadfael passed by
the first trees, and stood in the tufted wintry grass on the very edge of the
high bank.

The motion of the tail-race, flowing out into the
centre of the pool, continued its rippling path through the leaden stillness.
Its influence, diminished but present, caused the faintest tremor under the
bank on either side for a matter of perhaps ten paces, dying into the metallic
lustre just beneath where Cadfael stood. It was that last barely perceptible
shimmer that first drew his eyes down, but it was the dull fold of underlying
darkness, barely stirring, that held his gaze. An edge of dark cloth,
sluggishly swaying beneath the jutting grass of the bank. He went on his knees
in the lingering rime, parting the grass to lean over and peer into the water.
Black cloth, massed against the naked soil and the eroded willow roots, where
the thrust of the tail-race had pushed it aside and tidied it out of the way,
and almost out of sight. Twin pallors swayed gently, articulated like strange
fish Cadfael had once seen drawn in a traveller’s book. Open and empty, Father
Ailnoth’s hands appealed to a clearing sky, while a fold of his cloak half-covered
his face.

Cadfael rose to his feet, and turned a sombre face
upon his companions, who were standing by the plank bridge, gazing across the
open water to where the other party was just appearing below the gardens of the
townward cottages.

“He is here,” said Cadfael. “We have found him.”

It was no small labour to get him out, even when
Brother Ambrose and his fellows, hailed from their own fruitless hunt by the
miller’s bull’s bellow and excited waving, came hurrying round from the road to
lend a hand in the work. The high, undercut bank, with deep water beneath it,
made it impossible to reach down and get a hold on his clothing even when the
lankiest of them lay flat on his face and stretched long arms down, to grope
still short of the surface. The miller brought a boat hook from among his store
of tools, and with care they guided the obdurate body along to the edge of the
tail-race, where they could descend to water level and grasp the folds of his
garments.

The black, ominous bird had become an improbable fish.
He lay in the grass, when they had carried him up to level ground, streaming
pond-water from wiry black hair and sodden black garments, his uncovered face
turned up to the chill winter light marbled blue and grey, with lips parted and
eyes half-open, the muscles of cheeks and jaw and neck drawn tight with a
painful suggestion of struggle and terror. A cold, cold, lonely death in the
dark, and mysteriously his corpse bore the marks of it even when the combat was
over. They looked down at him in awe, and no one had anything to say. What they
did they did practically, without fuss, in blank silence.

They took a door from its hinges in the mill, and laid
him on it, and carried him away through the wicket in the wall into the great
court, and thence to the mortuary chapel. They dispersed then about their
various businesses, as soon as Abbot Radulfus and Prior Robert had been
apprised of their return, and what they brought with them. They were glad to
go, to be off to the living, and to the festival the living were still keeping,
glad to have the sanction of the season to feel happiness and have a great
thing to celebrate.

The word went round the Foregate almost furtively,
whispered from ear to ear, without exclaim, without many words, taking its time
to reach the outer fringes of the parish, but by nightfall it was known to all.
The thanksgiving made no noise, no one acknowledged it or mentioned it, no one
visibly exulted. Nevertheless, the parishioners of the Foregate kept Christmas
with the heartfelt fervour of a people from whom an oppressive shadow had been
lifted overnight. In the mortuary chapel, where even at this end of the year no
warmth could be employed, those gathered about the bier shivered and blew into
their bunched fingers wringing the rough, fingerless mittens to set the chill
blood flowing and work off the numbness. Father Ailnoth, colder than them all,
nevertheless lay indifferent to the gathering frost even in his nakedness, and
on his bed of stone.