The Raven in the Foregate (20 page)

Melting snow dripped from the handle and ran down the
shaft. Carrying it by the middle of the shaft, Cadfael turned back on his
tracks, and circled the reedy shallows back to the mill. He was not yet ready
to share his prize with anyone, not even Hugh, until he had had a close look at
it, and extracted from it whatever it had to tell him. His hopes were not high,
but he could not afford to let any hint slip through his fingers. He hurried
through the wicket in the precinct wall, and across the great court, and went
to earth in his own workshop. He left the door open for the sake of light, but
also lit a wooden spill at the brazier and kindled his little lamp to make a
close examination of the trophy.

The hand-long piece of horn, pale brown furrowed with
wavy ruts of darker brown, was heavy and polished from years of use, and its
slight curve fitted well into the hand. The band of silver was a thumb joint
wide, and the half-eroded vine leaves with which it was engraved reflected the
yellow light of the lamp from worn highlights as Cadfael carefully dabbed off
the moisture and held it close to the flame. The silver had worn thin as gauze,
and grown so pliant to every touch that both rims had frayed up into rough
edges here and there, sharp as knife blades. Cadfael had scratched a finger in
drying the metal before he realised the danger.

This was the formidable weapon with which Father
Ailnoth had lashed out at the vexatious urchins who played games against the
wall of his house, and no doubt prodded the ribs or thumped the shoulders of
the unlucky pupils who were less than perfect in their lessons. Cadfael turned
it slowly in his hands in the close light of the lamp, and shook his head over
the sins of the virtuous. It was while he was so turning it that his eye was
caught by the brief, passing gleam of a drop of moisture, spinning past an inch
or more from the rim of silver. Hastily he checked, and turned the staff
counterwise, and the bead of brightness reappeared. A single minute drop,
clinging not to the metal, but to a fine thread held by the metal, something
that appeared and vanished in a silvery curve. He uncoiled on his finger-end a
long, greying hair, drawing it forth until it resisted, caught in a sharp edge
of silver. Not one hair only, for now a second was partly drawn forth with it,
and a third made a small, tight ring, stuck fast in the same tiny nick.

It took him some little time to detach them all from
the notch in the lower rim of the band, five of them in all, as well as a few
tangled ends. The five were all of fine hair, some brown, some greying to
silver, and long, too long for any tonsure, too long for a man, unless he wore
his hair neglected and untrimmed. If there had ever been any further mark, of
blood, or grazed skin, or thread from a cloth, the water had soaked it away,
but these hairs, caught fast in the worn metal, had held their place, to give
up their testimony at last.

Cadfael ran a careful hand up the shaft of the staff,
and felt the needle-stabs of three or four rough points in the silver. In the
deepest of these five precious hairs had been dragged by violence from a head.
A woman’s head!

Diota opened the door to him, and on recognising her
visitor seemed to hesitate whether to open it wider and step aside to let him
in, or hold her ground and discourage any lengthy conversation by keeping him
on the doorstep. Her face was guarded and still, and her greeting resigned
rather than welcoming. But the hesitation was only momentary. Submissively she
stepped back into the room, and Cadfael followed her within and closed the door
upon the world. It was early afternoon, the light as good as it would be this
day, and the fire in the clay hearth bright and clear, almost without smoke.

“Mistress Hammet,” said Cadfael, with no more than a
yard of dim warm air between their faces, “I must talk with you, and what I
have to say concerns also the welfare of Ninian Bachiler, whom I know you
value. I am in his confidence, if that helps me to yours. Now sit, and listen
to me, and believe in my goodwill, as you have nothing on your conscience but
the heart’s affection. Which God saw clearly, before ever I held a key to it.”

She turned from him abruptly, but with a suggestion
rather of balance and resolution than shock and dread, and sat down on the
bench where Sanan had been sitting on his former visit. She sat erect, drawn up
with elbows tight at her sides and feet firmly planted.

“Do you know where he is?” she asked in a low voice.

“I do not, though he made to tell me. Rest easy, I
talked with him only last night, I know he is well. What I have to say has to
do with you, and with what happened on the eve of the Nativity, when Father
Ailnoth died, and you… had a fall on the ice.”

She was already certain that he had knowledge she had
hoped to keep from the light, but she did not know what it was. She kept
silence, her eyes lifted steadily to his face, and left it to him to continue.

“A fall—yes! You won’t have forgotten. You fell on the
icy road and struck your head on the doorstone. I dressed the wound then, I saw
it again yesterday, and it has healed over, but it still shows the bruise, and
the scar where the skin was broken. Now hear what I have found this morning, in
the mill-pond. Father Ailnoth’s staff, drifted across to the far shore, and
caught in the worn silver band, where the thin edges have turned, and are rough
and sharp, five long hairs, the like of yours. Yours I saw closely, when I
bathed your wound, I know there were broken ends there. I have the means to
match them now.”

She had sunk her head into her hands, the long,
work-worn fingers clutched cheek and temple hard.

“Why should you hide your face?” he said temperately.
“That was not your sin.”

In a little while she raised a tearless face, blanched
and wary, and peered at him steadily between her supporting hands. “I was
here,” she said slowly, “when the nobleman came. I knew him again, I knew why
he was here. Why else should he come?”

“Why, indeed! And when he was gone, the priest turned
upon you. Reviled you, perhaps cursed you, for an accomplice in treason, for a
liar and deceiver… We have learned to know him well enough to know that he
would not be merciful, nor listen to excuse or pleading. Did he threaten you?
Tell you how he would crush your nurseling first, and discard you with ignominy
afterwards?”

Her back stiffened. She said with dignity: “I nursed
my lamb at this breast after my own child was born dead. He had a sickly
mother, poor sweet lady. When he came to me, it was as if a son of my own had
come home in need. Do you think I cared what he—my master—might do against me?”

“No, I believe you,” said Cadfael. “Your thought was
all of Ninian when you went out after Father Ailnoth that night, to try to turn
him from his purpose of challenge and betrayal. For you did follow him, did you
not? You must have followed him. How else have I teased your hairs out of the worn
band of his staff? You followed and pleaded with him, and he struck you.
Clubbed his staff and struck out at your head.”

“I clung to him,” she said, with stony calm now, “fell
on my knees in the frosty grass there by the mill, and clung to the skirts of
his gown to hold him, and would not let go. I prayed him, I pleaded, I begged
him for mercy, but he had none. Yes, he struck me. He could not endure to be so
held and crossed, it enraged him, he might well have killed me. Or so I dreaded
then. I tried to fend off his blows, but I knew he would strike again if he
could not rid himself of me. So I loosed hold and got to my feet, God knows
how, and ran from him. And that was the last I ever saw of him living.”

“And you neither saw nor heard any other creature
there? You left him whole, and alone?”

“I tell you truth,” she said, shaking her head, “I
neither heard nor saw any other soul, not even when I reached the Foregate. But
neither my eyes nor my ears were clear, my head so rang, and I was in such sick
despair. The first I was truly aware of was blood running down my forehead, and
then I was in this house, crouched on the floor by the hearth, and shivering
with the cold of fear, with no notion how I got here. I ran like an animal to
its den, and that was all I knew. Only I am sure I met no one on the way,
because if I had I should have had to master myself, walk like a woman in her
senses, even give a greeting. And when you have to, you can. No, I know nothing
more after I fled from him. All night I waited in fear of his return, knowing
he would not spare me, and dreading he had already done his worst against
Ninian. I was sure then that we were both lost—that everything was lost.”

“But he did not come,” said Cadfael.

“No, he did not come. I bathed my head, and stanched
the blood, and waited without hope, but he never came. It was no help to me.
Fear of him turned about into fear for him, for what could he be doing, out in
the frost all night long? Even if he had gone up to the castle and called out
the guard there, still it could not have kept him so long. But he didn’t come.
Think for yourself what manner of night I spent, sleepless in his house,
waiting.”

“There was also, perhaps worst of all,” said Cadfael
gently, “your fear that he had indeed met with Ninian at the mill after you
fled, and come to grief at Ninian’s hands.”

She said, “Yes,” in a dry whisper, and shivered. “It
could have been so. A boy of such spirit, challenged, accused, perhaps
attacked… It could have been so. Thanks be to God, it was not so!”

“And in the morning? You could not leave it longer or
leave it to others to raise an alarm. So you came to the church.”

“And told half a story,” she said with a brief,
twisted smile, like a contortion of pain. “What else could I do?”

“And while we went searching for the priest, Ninian
stayed with you, and told you, doubtless, how he had spent the night, knowing
nothing at all of what had happened after he left the mill. As doubtless you
told him the rest of your story. But neither of you could shed light on the
man’s death.”

“That is true,” said Diota, “I swear it. Neither then
nor now. And now what do you intend for me?”

“Why, simply that you should do what Abbot Radulfus
charged you, continue here and keep this house in readiness for another priest,
and trust his word that you shall not be abandoned, since the church brought
you here. I must be free to make use of what I know, but it shall be done with
as little harm to you as possible, and only when I have understood more than
now I understand. I wish you could have helped me one more step on the road,
but never mind, truth is there to be found, and there must be a way to it.
There were three people, besides Ailnoth, went to the mill that night,” said
Cadfael, pausing at the door. “Ninian was the first, you were the second. I
wonder—I wonder!—who was the third?”

Chapter Ten

CADFAEL HAD BEEN BACK IN HIS WORKSHOP NO MORE THAN
HALF AN HOUR, and the light was only just beginning to dim towards the Vesper
office, when Hugh came seeking him, as he usually did if shire affairs brought
him to confer with the abbot. He brought in with him a gust of moist, chill air
and the quiver of a rising breeze that might bring more snow, now that the hard
frost had eased, or might blow away the heavy cloud and clear the sky for the
morrow.

“I’ve been with Father Abbot,” said Hugh, and sat down
on the familiar bench by the wall and spread his feet appreciatively towards
the brazier. “Tomorrow, I hear, you’re burying the priest. Cynric has the grave
dug for him so deep you’d think he feared the man might break out of it without
six feet of earth on top of him to hold him down. Well, he’s going to his
funeral unavenged, for we’re no nearer knowing who killed him. You said from
the first that the entire Foregate would turn blind, deaf and dumb. A man would
think the whole parish had been depeopled on Christmas Eve, no one will admit
to having been out of his own house but to hurry to church, and not a man of
them set eyes on any other living being in the streets that night. It took a
stranger to let fall even one little word of furtive comings and goings at an
ungodly hour, and I place no great credence in that. And how have you been
faring?”

Cadfael had been wondering the same thing in his own
mind ever since leaving Diota, and could see no possibility of keeping back
from Hugh what he had learned. He had not promised secrecy, only discretion,
and he owed help to Hugh as surely as to the woman caught in the trap of her
own devotion.

“Better, perhaps, than I deserve,” he said sombrely,
and put aside the tray of tablets he had just set out to dry, and went to sit
beside his friend. “If you had not come to me, Hugh, I should have had to come
to you. Last night it was brought back to me what I had seen in Ailnoth’s
possession that night, and had not found nor thought to look for again the next
day, when we brought him back here dead. Two things, indeed, though the first I
did not find myself, but got it from the little boys who went down hopefully to
the pool on Christmas morning, thinking it might be frozen over. Wait a moment,
I’ll bring both, and you shall hear.”

He brought them, and carried the lamp closer, to show
the detail that might mean so much or so little.

“This cap the children found among the reeds of the
shallows. You see how the stitches are started in the one seam, and the binding
ripped loose. And this staff—this I found only this morning, almost opposite
the place where we found Ailnoth.” He told that story simply and truthfully,
but for omitting any mention of Ninian, though that, too, might have to come.
“You see how the silver band is worn into a mere wafer from age, and crumpled
at the edges, being so thin. This notch here…” He set a fingertip to the
razor-sharp points. “From this I wormed out these!”