The Raven in the Foregate bc-12 Page 10

  “What was your intent when you came over from Normandy?” asked Cadfael.

  “Why, to make contact with any friends of the Empress who might be lying very low in the south and east, where she’s least loved, and urge them to be ready to rise if FitzAlan should think the time ripe for a return. It looked well for her chances then. But when the wind changed, someone—God knows which of those we’d spoken with—took fright and covered himself by betraying us. You know we were two?”

  “I know it,” said Cadfael. “Indeed I know the second. He was of FitzAlan’s household here in Shrewsbury before the town fell to the King. He got off safely from an eastern port, as I heard. You were not so lucky.”

  “Is Torold clean away? Oh, you do me good!” cried Ninian, flushed with joy. “We were separated when they almost cornered us near Bury. I feared for him! Oh, if he’s safe home

  ” He caught himself up there, wincing at the thought of calling Normandy home. “For myself, I can deal! Even if I do end in the King’s prison—but I won’t! Fending for one is not so hard as fretting for two. And Torold’s a married man!”

  “And the word is, he’s gone, back to his wife. And what,” wondered Cadfael, “is your intention now? Plainly the one you came with is a lost cause. What now?”

  “Now,” said the boy with emphatic gravity, “I mean to get across the border into Wales, and make my way down to join the Empress’s army at Gloucester. I can’t bring her FitzAlan’s army, but I can bring her one able-bodied man to fight for her—and not a bad hand with sword or lance, though I do say it myself.”

  By the lift of his voice and the sparkle in his eyes he meant it ardently, and it was a course much more congenial to him than acting as agent to reluctant allies. And why should he not succeed? The Welsh border was not so far, though the journey to Gloucester through the ill-disciplined wilds of Powys might be long and perilous. Cadfael considered his companion thoughtfully, and beheld a young man somewhat lightly clad for winter travelling afoot, without weapons, without a horse, without wealth to grease his journeying. None of which considerations appeared to discourage Ninian.

  “An honest enough purpose,” said Cadfael, “and I see nothing against it. We have a few adherents of your faction even in these parts, though they keep very quiet these days. Could not one of them be of use to you now?”

  The bait was not taken. The boy closed his lips firmly, and stared Cadfael out with impregnable composure. If he had indeed attempted to contact one of the Empress’s partisans here, he was never going to admit it. With his own confidences he might favour his too perceptive mentor, but he was not going to implicate any other man.

  “Well,” said Cadfael comfortably, “it seems that you are not being hunted here with any great zeal, and your position with us is well established, no reason why Benet should not continue to do his work here quietly and modestly, and never be noticed. And if this iron frost goes on as it’s begun, your work will be here among the medicines, so we may as well go on with your lesson. Look lively, now, and pay attention to what I show you.”

  The boy burst into a soft, half-smothered peal of laughter in sheer relief and pleasure, like a child, and bounded to Cadfael’s elbow at the mortar like a hound puppy excited by a fresh scent.

  “Good, then tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll be half an apothecary before I leave you. Nothing learned,” said Ninian, with an impudently accurate imitation of Cadfael’s more didactic style, “is ever quite wasted.”

  “True, true!” agreed Cadfael sententiously. “Nothing observed, either. You never know where it may fit into a larger vision.”

  Exactly as certain details were beginning to fit together and elaborate for him the picture he had of this venturesome, light-hearted, likeable young man. A destitute young man, urgently in need of the means to make his way undetected to Gloucester, one who had come to England, no doubt, with a memorised list of names that should prove sympathetic to the Empress’s cause, a few of them even here in Shropshire. A devoted woman all anxiety for her nurseling, bringing honey cakes and carrying away a small token thing that slipped easily into the breast of her gown, from the breast of Benet’s cotte. And shortly thereafter, the lady Sanan Berničres, daughter of a father dispossessed for his adherence to Maud, and step-daughter to another lord of the same party, paying a brief visit from Giffard’s house near Saint Chad’s to buy herbs for her Christmas kitchen, and pausing in the garden to speak to the labouring boy, and look him up and down, as though, as the boy himself had reported, she were in need of a page, ‘and thought I might do, given a little polishing’.”

  Well, well! So far everything in harmony. But why, then, was the boy still here at all, if aid had been asked and given?

  Upon this incomplete picture the sudden death of Father Ailnoth intruded like a black blot in a half-written page, complicating everything, relating, apparently, to nothing, a bird of as ill omen dead as alive.

  Chapter Seven

  The hunt for ninian bachiler, as a proscribed agent of the empress maud at large in Stephen’s territory, was duly proclaimed in Shrewsbury, and the word went round in voluble gossip, all the more exuberantly as a relief from the former sensation of Ailnoth’s death, concerning which no one in the Foregate had been voluble, unless in privacy. It was good to have a topic of conversation which departed at so marked a tangent from what really preoccupied the parishioners of Holy Cross. Since none of the gossips cared a pin how many dissident agents were at large in the county, none of the talk was any threat to the fugitive, much less to Mistress Hammet’s dutiful nephew Benet, who came and went freely between abbey and parsonage.

  In the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of December, Cadfael was called out to the first sufferers from coughs and colds in the Foregate, and extended his visits to one elderly merchant in the town itself, a regular chest patient of his in the winter. He had left Ninian sawing and splitting wood from the pruning of the trees, and keeping cautious watch on a pot of herbs in oil of almonds, which had to warm on the edge of the brazier without simmering, to make a lotion for the frost-nipped hands too tender to endure the hog’s fat base of the ointment. The boy could be trusted to abide by his instructions, and whatever he did he did with his might.

  Cadfael’s errands had taken him rather less time than he had expected, and the weather was not such as to encourage him to linger. He re-entered at the gatehouse with more than an hour still in hand before Vespers, and made his way across the great court and out into the garden, rounding the box hedge into the alley that led to his herbarium. In the frost he had wrapped woollen cloths about his boots to give him a grip on the icy roads, and the same sensible precaution made his steps silent on the path. So it happened that he heard the voices before he himself was heard, rapid and soft and vehement from within his workshop. And one of the voices was Ninian’s, a tone above its usual pitch by reason of some fierce but subdued excitement. And the other was a girl’s, insistent and agitated. Curious that she, too, should convey this same foolhardy sense of enjoyment in the experience of danger and dread. A good match! And what other girl had had to do with this place and this youth, but Sanan Berničres?

  “Oh, but he would!” she was saying emphatically. “He’s there by now, he’ll tell them everything, where to find you, how you sent to him—all! You must come now, quickly, before they come to take you.”

  “Impossible by the gatehouse,” said Ninian, “we should run into their arms. But I can’t believe—why should he betray me? Surely he knows I’d never mention his name?”

  “He’s been in dread,” said the girl impatiently, “ever since your message came, but now you’re cried publicly as a wanted man, he’ll do anything to shake off his own danger. He’s not evil—he does as other men do, protects his own life and lands, and his son’s, too—he lost enough before

  “

  “So he did,” said Ninian, penitent. “I never should have drawn him in. Wait, I must lift this aside, I can’t leave it to boil. Cadfael
/>   “

  The shameless listener, who at least had heard one motion of consideration towards him and his art, in that last utterance, suddenly came to his senses, and to the awareness that in a matter of seconds these two would be issuing forth from the hut and taking to flight, by what ever road this resourceful girl had devised. Just as soon as Ninian had lifted the soothing oil from the heat and laid it carefully in a secure spot. Bless the boy, he deserved to reach Gloucester in safety! Cadfael made haste to dart round behind the barrier of the box hedge, and freeze into stillness there. He had not time to withdraw completely, but it is not certain, in any case, that he would have done so.

  They burst out of the workshop hand in hand, she leading, for she knew by what route she had entered here unobserved. Through the garden she drew him, over the rim of the slope, and down towards the Meole Brook. A dark little figure swathed in a cloak, she vanished first, dwindling rapidly out of sight down the field; Ninian followed. They were gone, along the edge of the newly ploughed and manured pease fields and out of sight. So the brook was frozen over, and so must the mill-pond be. That way she had come, straight to where she knew he would be. Yet she might, just as easily, have found Cadfael there as well. Which meant, surely, that she had had converse with Ninian since he had confided in Cadfael, and saw no reason to fear the encounter, when the need was great.

  Well, they were gone. No sound came up from the hollow of the brook, and there were trees quite close on the further side for cover, and all they had to do after that was wait for the right moment, cross the brook again by the bridge that carried the westward road, and make their way discreetly to whatever hiding place she had devised for her hostage, whether in the town or out of it. If out of it, surely to the west, since that was the way he desired, at last, to go. But would Ninian consent to depart until he knew that Dame Diota was safe and suspect of nothing in connection with his own expedition? If his cover was stripped from him, then she was also exposed to question. He would not leave her so. Cadfael had begun to know this young man well enough to be certain of that.

  It had grown profoundly quiet, as if the very air waited for the next and inevitable alarm. Cadfael spared a moment to peer into his workshop, saw his pot of oil placed carefully on the stone cooling slab close to the brazier, and withdrew again in some haste to the great court, and across it into the cloister, but hovering anxiously where he could watch for any invasion at the gatehouse, without himself being immediately observed.

  They were longer in coming than he had expected, and for that he was grateful. Moreover, a sudden flurry of fine snow had begun to fall, and that would soon cover up the footsteps crossing the brook, and in the rising wind of evening even disguise any tracks left in the garden. Until this moment he had not had time to consider the implications of what he had overheard. Clearly Ninian’s appeal had gone to Ralph Giffard, who had turned a deaf ear, all too conscious of his own danger if he responded. But the girl, born into another family no less devoted to the Empress’s cause, had taken up the charge and made it her own. And now, affrighted by the public crying of an enemy spy, Giffard had thought it best to ensure his own position by carrying the whole story to Hugh Beringar. Who would not be grateful for the attention, but would be forced to act upon it, or at least to put up a fair show of doing so.

  All of which left one curious point at issue: Where had Ralph Giffard been going in such purposeful haste on Christmas Eve, striding across the bridge towards the Foregate almost as impetuously as Father Ailnoth had been hastening in the opposite direction an hour or so later? The two intent figures began to look like mirror images of the same man. Giffard, perhaps, the more afraid, Ailnoth the more malevolent. There was a link somewhere there, though the join was missing.

  And here they came, in at the gatehouse arch, all of them on foot, Hugh with Ralph Giffard hard and erect at his elbow, Will Warden and a couple of young officers in arms following. No need here for mounted men, they were in search of a youngster horseless and penniless, labouring in the abbey gardens, and the prison that waited for him was only walking distance away.

  Cadfael took his time about appearing. Others were there first, and so much the better. Brother Jerome did not love the cold, but kept a watchful eye on the outer world whenever he hopped into the warming room on such frosty days, ready to appear at any moment, dutiful and devout. Moreover, he always knew where to find Prior Robert at need. By the time Cadfael emerged innocently from the cloister they were both there, confronting the visitors from the secular world, and a few other brethren had noted the gathering, and halted within earshot in pure human curiosity, forgetting their chilled hands and feet.

  “The boy Benet?” Prior Robert was saying in tones of astonishment and disdain as Cadfael approached. “Father Ailnoth’s groom? The good father himself asked employment for this young man. What absurdity is this? The boy is scarcely better than a simpleton, a mere country lad! I have often spoken with him, I know him for an innocent. My lord sheriff, I fear this gentleman wastes your time in a mistake. This cannot be true.”

  “Father Prior, by your leave,” Ralph Giffard spoke up firmly, “it is only too true, the fellow is not what he seems. I received a message, written in a fair hand, from this same simpleton, sealed with the seal of the traitor and outlaw FitzAlan, the Empress’s man who is now in France, and asking me for help in FitzAlan’s name—an appeal I rightly left unanswered. I have kept the leaf, the lord sheriff has seen it for himself. He was here, he said, come with the new priest, and he needed help, news and a horse, and laid claim to my aid to get what he wanted. He begged me to meet him at the mill an hour short of midnight on Christmas Eve, when all good folk would be making ready for church. I did not go, I would not touch such treason against our lord the King. But the proof I’ve given to the sheriff here, and there is not nor cannot be any mistake. Your labourer Benet is FitzAlan’s agent Ninian Bachiler, for so he signed himself with his own hand.”

  “I fear it’s true enough, Father Prior,” said Hugh briskly. “There are questions to be asked later, but now I must ask your leave at once to seek out this Benet, and he must answer for himself. There need be no disturbance for the brothers, I am asking access only to the garden.”

  It was at this point that Cadfael ambled forward out of the cloister, secure across the glazed cobbles, since his feet were still swathed in wool. He came with ears benignly pricked and countenance open as the air. The snow was still falling, in an idle, neglectful fashion, but every flake froze where it fell.

  “Benet?” said Cadfael guilelessly. “You’re looking for my labouring boy? I left him not a quarter of an hour since in my workshop. What do you want with him?”

  He went with them, all concern and astonishment, as they proceeded into the garden, and threw open the workshop door upon the soft glow of the brazier, the pot of herbal oil drawn close on its stone slab, and the aromatic emptiness, and from that went on to quarter the whole of the garden and the fields down to the brook, where the helpful snow had obliterated every footprint. He was as mystified as the best of them. And if Hugh avoided giving him a single sidelong look, that did not mean he had not observed every facet of this vain pursuit, rather that he had, and was in little doubt as to the purveyor of mystification. There was usually a reason for Brother Cadfael’s willing non-cooperation. Moreover, there were other points to be pursued before the search was taken further.

  “You tell me,” said Hugh, turning to Giffard,”that you received this appeal for your help a day or so before Christmas Eve, when a meeting at the mill was requested, somewhat before midnight. Why did you not pass it on at once to my deputy? Something might have been done about it then. Plainly he had wind of us now, since he’s fled.”

  If Giffard was uneasy at this dereliction of a loyal subject’s duty, he gave no sign of it, but stared Hugh fully and firmly in the face. “Because he was merely your deputy, my lord. Had you been here

  You got your office first after the siege of Shrewsbury, yo
u know how we who had taken the oath to the Empress fared then, you know of my losses. Since then I have submitted to King Stephen, and held by my submission faithfully. But a young man like Herbard, new here, left in charge and liable to stand on his dignity and status—one ignorant of the past, and what it cost me

  I was afraid of being held still as one attainted, even if I told honestly all that I knew. And recollect, we had then heard nothing about this Bachiler being hunted in the south, the name meant nothing to me. I thought him probably of no importance, and with no prospect of any success in whipping up support for a lost cause. So I held my peace, in spite of FitzAlan’s seal. There were several of his knights held such seals in his name. Do me justice, as soon as you made public the hue and cry, and I understood what was afoot, I came to you and told you the truth.”

  “I grant you did,” said Hugh, “and I understand your doubts, though it’s no part of my office to hound any man for what’s past and done.”

  “But now, my lord

  ” Giffard had more to say, and had plainly taken great encouragement from his own eloquence and Hugh’s acquiescence, for he had burned into sudden hopeful fervour. “Now I see more in this than either you or I have thought. For I have not quite told you all, there has hardly been time to think of everything. For see, it was this young man who came here under the protection of Father Ailnoth, vilely deceiving the priest in the pretence that he was a harmless youth seeking work, and kin to the woman who kept the priest’s household. And is not Father Ailnoth, who brought him here in all innocence, now done to death and waiting for burial? Who is more likely to stand guilty of his murder than the man who took wicked advantage of his goodness, and made him an unwitting accomplice in treason?”