Virgin in the Ice (11 page)

“That shall be seen to,” said Beringar shortly. “Josce de Dinan has a household full of women, I’ll get from them whatever is needed. But you had better get out of those wet skirts, madam, if it must needs be into habit and sandals. You have nothing with you but what you wear?”

“I gave what I have in exchange for what I wear,” she said with composure, “and for the hospitality that was given me without thought of reward. But some money I still have about me. I can pay for a gown.”

They left her to strip beside the fire, and provided her the habit and shoes of a novice. When she opened the door to them again, and bade them in, it was with the grace of a countess welcoming guests. She had let down and combed her mass of dark hair, it was drying into curls on her shoulders, and swung like heavy, lustrous curtains either side of her face. Wrapped in the black habit, and girdled close about the waist, she returned to her chair and braced herself, facing the squarely, the most beautiful novice Bromfield had ever housed. She had spread out her wet clothes to dry on a bench beside the fire.

“My lord,” she said, “and Father Prior, to say this briefly, I have been the cause of great trouble and cost to you and many others, and I am sensible of it. It was not intended, but I did it. Now that I am come to make what amends I may, I hear that my brother, who was here in safety, and whom I hoped to join here, has gone forth overnight and vanished again. I cannot but lay this, with the rest, to my own charge, and I am sorry. If there is anything I can do to help in the search for him…”

“There is but one thing you can do to help us all,” said Hugh firmly, “and take one anxiety, at least, off our hands. You can remain here, not setting a foot outside these walls, until we find and bring your brother to join you. Let us at least be sure that you are safe, and cannot be lost again.”

“I could wish better, but what you order, I will do. For this while,” she added, and jutted her lip at him.

“Then there are things I need to know from you, now, shortly, and the rest can wait. You are but a part of my business here. The king’s peace is also my business, and you, I think, have good reason to know that the king’s peace is being flouted in these parts. We know from Yves you left him and Sister Hilaria at Cleeton, and sent word to Evrard Boterei to come and fetch you away to his manor of Callowleas. We have seen what is left of Callowleas, and we have been to Ledwyche looking for you, and heard from Boterel that you reached there with him safely, but rode out while he lay in fever from his wounds got in the fighting, and went to look for the companions you had left behind. What had befallen Callowleas could well befall others, no wonder you were in desperate anxiety.”

She sat gnawing her underlip and staring at him with unwavering eye, her brows drawn close. “Since Evrard has told you all this, I need only confirm it. He is recovered, I trust? Yes, I did fear for them. There was good cause.”

“What happened to you? Boterel had already told us that you did not return, and from the time he recovered his wits and found you were gone, he has been searching for you constantly. It was folly to set out alone.”

Surprisingly, her lips contorted in a wry smile. She had already admitted to folly. “Yes, I am sure he has been hunting high and low for me. We may set his mind at rest now. No, I did not reach Cleeton. I don’t know these ways, and I was benighted, and then the snow came… In the dark I lost myself utterly, and had a fall, and the horse bolted. I was lucky to be found and taken in by a forester and his wife, lifelong I shall be grateful to them. I told them about Yves, and how I feared for him, and the forester said he would send up to Cleeton and find out what had happened, and so he did. He brought word how poor John’s holding was ravaged, the night after Callowleas, and how Yves was lost even before— the same night I committed my greatest fault and folly.” Her head reared proudly and her back stiffened as she declared her regret, and with fiery stare dared anyone else here present either to echo her self-condemnation, or attempt to deprecate it. “Thanks be to God, John and his family escaped alive. And as for their losses, I take them as my debts, and they shall be repaid. But one relief they brought me from Cleeton,” she said, quickening into warmth and affection, “for they told me Sister Hilaria that was gone, well before the raiders came, for the good brother of Pershore came back, in his anxiety over us, and he brought her away safely.”

The dead silence passed unnoticed, she was so glad of that one consolation. One innocent escaped from the landslide her light-hearted escapade had set in motion.

“All this time, while I stayed with them, we have been sending about for news of Yves, for how could I make any move until I knew how he fared? And only yesterday morning we heard at last that he was here, safe. So I came.”

“Only in time,” owned Hugh, “to find him lost again just as you are found. Well, I trust he need not be lost for long, and if I leave you without ceremony, it is to look for him.”

Cadfael asked mildly: “You found you own way here, alone?”

She turned her head sharply, and gave him the wide, challenging gaze of her dark eyes, her face still calm and wary.

“Robert showed me the way—the forester’s son.”

“My business,” said Hugh, “is also with these outlaws who have set up house somewhere in the hills, and hunted you out of Callowleas and Druel out of his holding. I mean to have out enough men to smoke out every last yard of those uplands. But first we’ll find the two we’ve lost.” He rose briskly, and with a meaningful gesture of his dark head and lift of an urgent eyebrow drew Cadfael away with him out of the room.

“For all I can see, the girl knows nothing of what happened to Sister Hilaria, and nothing of Brother Elyas. I have my men and as many of Dinan’s mustering to take up this hunt, and small time to break unpleasant news gently. Stay here with her, Cadfael, make sure she doesn’t elude us again—and tell her! She’ll have to know. The more truths we can put together, the nearer we shall be to clearing out this nest of devils once for all, and going home for Christmas to Aline and my new son.”

She was hungry, and had a healthy appetite, Cadfael judged, at any time. It was plenteous activity that kept her slender as a young hind. She ate with pleasure, though her face remained guarded, thoughtful and withdrawn. Cadfael let her alone until she sat back with a sigh of physical content. Her brows were still drawn close, and her eyes looked rather inward than outward. Then, quite suddenly, she was looking at him, and with sharp attention.

“It was you who found Yves and brought him here? So Father Prior said.”

“By chance it was,” said Cadfael.

“Not only chance. You went to look for him.” That commended him; her face warmed. “Where was it? Was he very cold and wretched?”

“He was in all particulars a young gentleman very much in command of himself. And he had found, as you did, that simple country people can be hospitable and kind without thought of reward.”

“And since then both you and he have been looking for me! While I was looking for him! Oh, God!” she said softly and with dismayed reverence. “All this I began. And so mistakenly! I did not know even myself. I am not now the same woman.”

“You no longer wish to marry Evrard Boterei?” asked Cadfael placidly.

“No,” she said as simply. “That is over. I thought I loved him. I did think so! But that was children’s play, and this bitter winter is real, and those birds of prey in that eyrie up there are real, and death is real, and very close at every step, and I have brought my brother into danger by mere folly, and now I know that my brother is more to me by far than ever was Evrard. But never say I said so,” she flared, “when he comes back. He is vain enough already. It was he told you what I had done?”

“It was. And how he tried to follow you, and lost himself, and was sheltered in the forest assart where I found him.”

“And he blamed me?” she said.

“In his shoes, would not you?”

“It seems to me so long ago,” she said, wondering, “and I have changed so much. How is it that I could do so much harm, and mean none? At least I was thankful when they told me that that good brother from Pershore—how I wish I had listened to him!—had come back to look for us, and taken Sister Hilaria away with him. Were they still here when you came from Shrewsbury? Did she go on, or turn back to Worcester?”

She had arrived at what was for her a simple question before he was ready, and the flat silence fell like a stone. She was very quick. The few seconds it took him to marshal words lasted too long. She had stiffened erect, and was staring at him steadily with apprehensive eyes.

“What is it I do not know?”

There was no way but forward, and plainly. “What will give you no comfort in the hearing, and me no joy in the telling,” said Brother Cadfael simply. “On the night when your upland wolves sacked Druel’s house, they had already done as much to a lonely hamlet nearer here, barely two miles from Ludlow. Between the two, on their way back to their lair, it seems that they encountered, by cruel ill-luck, the two after whom you ask. It was already evening when they left Druel’s holding, and the night was wild, with high winds and blinding snow. It may be they went astray. It may be they tried to take shelter somewhere through the worst. They fell in the way of thieves and murderers.”

Her face was marble. Her hands gripped desperately at the arms of her chair, the knuckles bone-white. In a mere thread of a whisper she asked: “Dead?”

“Brother Elyas was brought back here barely alive. Your brother was watching with him last night when they both went out into the snow, who can guess why? Sister Hilaria we found dead.”

There was no sound from her for a long moment, no tear, no exclamation, no protest. She sat containing whatever grief and guilt and hopeless anger possessed her, and would show none of it to the world. After a while she asked in a low and level voice: “Where is she?”

“She is here, in the church, coffined and awaiting burial. In this iron frost we cannot break the ground, and it may be the sisters at Worcester will want to have her taken back to them when that is possible. Until then Father Prior will find her a tomb in the church.”

“Tell me,” said Ermina with bleak but quiet urgency, “all that befell her. Better to know the whole of it than to guess.”

In simple and plain words he told her the manner of that death. At the end of it she stirred out of her long stillness, and asked: “Will you take me to her? I should like to see her again.”

Without a word and without hesitation he rose, and led the way. His readiness she accepted thankfully; he knew that he had gained with her. She would not be hemmed in, or sheltered from what was her due. In the chapel where Sister Hilaria lay in her new coffin, made in the brothers’ own workshop and lined with lead, it was almost as cold as out in the frost, and the body had not suffered any flawing of its serene beauty. She was not yet covered. Ermina stood motionless by the trestles a long time, and then herself laid the white linen face-cloth back over the delicate face.

“I loved her very much,” she said, “and I have destroyed her. This is my work.”

“It is nothing of the kind,” said Cadfael firmly. “You must not take to yourself more than your due. What you yourself did, that you may rue, and confess, and do penance for, to your soul’s content, but you may not lift another man’s sins from his shoulders, or usurp God’s right to be the only judge. A man did this, ravisher and murderer, and he, and only he, must answer for it. Whatever action of any other creature may have thrown our sister in his way, he had command of the hands that killed and outraged her, he and no other. It’s of him her blood will be required.”

For the first time she shook, and when she would have spoken she had not her voice under control, and was forced to wait and wrestle for clear speech.

“But if I had not set my heart on that foolish marriage, if I had consented to go with Brother Elyas straight here to Bromfield, she would be living now…”

“Do we know that? Might not you, too, have fallen into such hands? Child, if men had not done as they did, any time these five centuries, of course things would have gone on differently, but need they have been better? There is no profit in ifs. We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil, and leave to God our good.”

Ermina wept, suddenly and irresistibly, but would not be seen to weep. She swept away from him to kneel trembling at the altar, and remained there a long time. He did not follow her, but waited patiently until she chose to rejoin him. When she came back her face was drained but calm. She looked very tired, and very young and vulnerable.

“Come back to the fire,” said Cadfael. “You’ll take cold here.”

She went with him docilely, glad to settle beside the hearth again. The shivering left her, she lay back and half-closed her eyes, but when he made a move as if to leave her she looked up quickly. “Brother Cadfael, when they sent from Worcester to ask for news of us, was there word said of our uncle d’Angers being in England?”

“There was. Not only in England but in Gloucester, with the empress.” That was what she had meant, though she had been feeling her way towards it cautiously. “Openly and fairly he asked leave to come into the king’s territories himself to look for you, and leave was refused. The sheriff promised a search by his own men, but would not admit any of the empress’s party.”

“And should any such be found here and taken—in the search of us—what would happen to him?”

“He would be held prisoner of war. It is the sheriff’s duty to deny to the king’s enemies the service of any fighting man who falls into his hands, you must not wonder at it. A knight lost to the empress is a knight’s gain to the king.” He saw how doubtfully and anxiously she eyed him, and smiled. “It is the sheriff’s duty. It is not mine. Among men of honor and decent Christian life I see no enemies, on either side. Mine is a different discipline. With any man who comes only to rescue and fetch away children to their proper guardian, I have no quarrel.”

She frowned momentarily at the word children, and then laughed, with angry honesty, at the very instinct that showed her still a child. “Then you would not betray such a man even to your friend?”