Dead Man's Ransom bc-9 Read online

  ‘I would not say but that boy might kill,’ she said at the end of it. ‘They act before they think and regret only too late. But I don’t think he would kill his girl’s father. Very easy, you say, and I believe it, to ease the man out of the world, so that even one not given to murder might do it before ever he realised. Yes, but those a man kills easily are commonly strangers to him. Hardly people at all. But this one would be armoured in identity, her father, no less, the man that begot her. And yet,’ she owned, shaking her head, ‘I may be wrong about him. He may be the one of his kind who does what his kind does not do. There is always one.’ The girl believes absolutely that he is guilty,’ said Cadfael thoughtfully, ‘perhaps because she is all too well aware of what she feels to be her own guilt. The sire returns and the lovers are to be torn apart, no great step to dream of his failure to return, and only one more leap to see death as the final and total cause of that failure. But dreams they surely were, never truly even wished. The boy is on firmer ground when he swears he went to try and win her father to look kindly on his suit.

  ‘For if ever I saw a lad sunlit and buoyed up with hope by nature, Elis is the one.’ ‘And this girl?’ wondered Sister Magdalen, twirling her wine, cup between nursing palms. ‘If they’re of an age, then she must be the more mature by some years. So it goes! Is it anyway possible that she …?’ ‘No,’ said Cadfael with certainty. ‘She was with the lady, and Hugh, and the Welsh princelings, throughout. I know she left her father living, and never came near him again until he was dead, and then in Hugh’s company. No, she torments herself vainly. If you had her in your hands,’ said Cadfael with conviction, ‘you would soon find her out for the simple, green child she is.’ Sister Magdalen was in the act of saying philosophically: ‘I’m hardly likely to get the chance,’ when the tap on the door came. So light and tentative a sound, and yet so staunchly repeated, they fell silent and still to make sure of it.

  Cadfael rose to open it and peer out through the narrowest possible chink, convinced there was no one there; and there she stood, her hand raised to knock again, pallid, wretched and resolute, half a head taller than he, the simple, green child of his description, with a steely core of Norman nobility forcing her to transcend herself. Hastily he flung the door wide. ‘Come within from the cold. How can I serve you?’ ‘The porter told me,’ said Melicent,’that the sister from Godric’s Ford came a while ago, and might be here wanting remedies from your store. I should like to speak with her.’ ‘Sister Magdalen is here,’ said Cadfael. ‘Come, sit with her by the brazier, and I’ll leave you to talk with her in private.’ She came in half afraid, as though this small, unfamiliar place held daunting secrets. She stepped with fastidious delicacy, almost inch by inch, and yet with that determination in her that would not let her turn back. She looked at Sister Magdalen eye to eye, fascinated, doubtless having heard her history both ancient and recent, and found some difficulty in reconciling the two.

  ‘Sister,’ said Melicent, going arrow, straight to the point, ‘when you go back to Godric’s Ford, will you take me with you?’ Cadfael, as good as his word, withdrew softly and with alacrity, drawing the door to after him, but not so quickly that he did not hear Sister Magdalen reply simply and practically: ‘Why?’ She never did or said quite what was expected of her, and it was a good question. It left Melicent in the delusion that this formidable woman knew little or nothing about her, and necessitated the entire retelling of the disastrous story, and in the retelling it might fall into truer proportion, and allow the girl to reconsider her situation with somewhat less desperate urgency. So, at any rate, Brother Cadfael hoped, as he trotted away through the garden to go and spend a pleasant half, hour with Brother Anselm, the precentor, in his carrel in the cloister, where he would certainly be compiling the sequence of music for the burial of Gilbert Prestcote.

  ‘I intend,’ said Melicent, rather grandly because of the jolt the blunt question had given her,’to take the veil, and I would like it to be among the Benedictine sisters of Polesworth.’ ‘Sit down here beside me,’ said Sister Magdalen comfortably, ‘and tell me what has turned you to this withdrawal, and whether your family are in your confidence and approve your choice. You are very young, and have the world before you…’ ‘I am done with the world,’ said Melicent.

  ‘Child, as long as you live and breathe you will not have done with this world. We within the pale live in the same world as all poor souls without. Come, you have your reasons for wishing to enter the conventual life. Sit and tell me, let me hear them. You are young and fair and nobly born, and you wish to abandon marriage, children, position, honours, all… Why?’ Melicent, yielding, sank beside her on the bench, hugged her slenderness in the warmth of the brazier, and let fall the barriers of her bitterness to loose the flood. What she had vouchsafed to the preoccupied ears of Sybilla was no more than the thread on which this confession was strung. All that heady dream of minstrels’ love, tales poured out of her.

  ‘Even if you are right in rejecting one man,’ said Magdalen mildly, ‘you may be most unjust in rejecting all. Let alone the possibility that you mistake even this Elis ap Cynan. For until it is proved he lies, you must bear in mind he may be telling truth.’ ‘He said he would kill for me,’ said Melicent, relentless, ‘he went to where my father lay, and my father is dead. There was no other known to have gone near. As for me, I have no doubts. I wish I had never seen his face, and I pray I never may again.’ ‘And you will not wait to make your peace with one betrayal, and still show your countenance to others who do not betray?’ ‘At least I do know,’ said Melicent bitterly,’that God does not betray. And I am done with men.’ ‘Child,’ said Sister Magdalen, sighing, ‘not until the day of your death will you have done with men. Bishops, abbots, priests, confessors, all are men, blood, brothers to the commonest of sinful mankind. While you live, there is no way of escape from your part in humanity.’ ‘I have finished, then, with love,’ said Melicent, all the more vehemently because a morsel of her heart cried out to her that she lied.

  ‘Oh, my dear soul, love is the one thing with which you must never dispense. Without it, what use are you to us or to any? Granted there are ways and ways of loving,’ said the nun come late to her celibacy, recalling what at the time she had hardly recognised as deserving the title, but knew now for one aspect of love, ‘yet for all there is a warmth needed, and if that fire goes out it cannot be rekindled. Well,’ she said, considering, ‘if your stepmother approve your going with me, then you may come, and welcome. Come and be quiet with us for a while, and we shall see.’ ‘Will you come with me to my mother, then, and hear me ask her leave?’ ‘I will,’ said Sister Magdalen, and rose and plucked her habit about her ready to set forth.

  She told Brother Cadfael the gist of it when she stayed to attend Vespers before going back to the cloth, merchant’s house in the town.

  ‘She’ll be better out of here, away from the lad, but left with the image of him she already carries about with her. Time and truth are what the pair of them most need, and I’ll see she takes no vows until this whole matter is resolved. The boy is better left to you, if you can keep an eye on him now and then.’ ‘You don’t believe,’ said Cadfael with certainty,’that he ever did violence to her father.’ ‘Do I know? Is there man or woman who might not kill, given the driving need? A proper, upstanding, impudent, open, hearted lad, though,’ said Sister Magdalen, who had never repented anything she did, ‘one that I might have fancied, when my fancying days were.’ Cadfael went to supper in the refectory, and then to Collations in the chapter-house, which he often missed if he had vulnerable preparations brewing in his workshop. In thinking over such slight gains as he had made in his quest for the truth, he had got nowhere, and it was good to put all that aside and listen with good heart to the lives of saints who had shrugged off the cares of the world to let in the promises of a world beyond, and viewed earthly justice as no more than a futile shadow, play obscuring the absolute justice of heaven, for which no man need wait l
onger than the life, span of mortality.

  They were past St Gregory and approaching St Edward the Confessor and St Benedict himself, the middle days of March, and the blessed works of spring beginning, with everything hopeful and striving ahead. A good time. Cadfael had spent the hours before Sister Magdalen came digging and clearing the fresh half of his mint, bed, to give it space to proliferate new and young and green, rid of the old and debilitated. He emerged from the chapter, house feeling renewed, and it came at first as no more than a mild surprise when Brother Edmund came seeking him before Compline, looking almost episcopal as he brandished in one hand what at first sight might have been a crozier, but when lowered to the ground reached no higher than his armpit, and was manifestly a crutch.

  ‘I found it lying in a corner of the stable, yard. Anion’s! Cadfael, he did not come for his supper tonight and he is nowhere in the infirmary, neither in the common room, nor in his bed, nor in the chapel. Have you seen him anywhere this day?’ ‘Not since morning,’ said Cadfael, thinking back with something of an effort from the peace of the chapter, house. ‘He came to dinner at midday?’.

  ‘So he did, but I find no man who has seen him since. I’ve looked for him everywhere, asked every man, and found nothing more of him than this, discarded. Anion is gone! Oh, Cadfael, I doubt he has fled his mortal guilt. Why else should he run from us?’ It was well past Compline when Hugh Beringar entered his own hall, empty, handed and discontented from his enquiries among the Welshmen, and found Brother Cadfael sitting by the fireside with Aline, waiting for him with a clouded brow.

  ‘What brings you here so late?’ wondered Hugh. ‘Out without leave again?’ It had been known to happen, and the recollection of one such expedition, before the austere days of Abbot Radulfus, was an old and private joke between them.

  ‘That I am not,’ said Cadfael firmly. ‘There’s a piece of unexpected news even Prior Robert thought had better come to your ears as soon as possible. We had in our infirmary, with a broken leg mending and all but ready to leave us, a fellow named Anion. I doubt if the name means much to you, it was not you had to do with his brother. But do you remember a brawl in the town, two years ago now, when a gatekeeper on the bridge was knifed? Prestcote hanged the Welshman that did it, well, whether he did it or not, and naturally he’d say he didn’t, but he was blind drunk at the time and probably never knew the truth of it himself. However it was, he was hanged for it. A young fellow who used to trade in fleeces to the town market from somewhere in Mechain. Well, this Anion is his brother born the wrong side of the brychan, when the father was doing the trading, and there was no bad blood between the two. They got to know each other and there was a fondness.’ ‘If ever I knew of this,’ said Hugh, drawing up to the fire with him, ‘I had forgot it.’ ‘So had not Anion. He’s said little, but it’s known he’s nursed his grudge, and there’s enough Welsh in him to make him look upon revenge as a duty, if ever the chance came his way.’ ‘And what of him now?’ Hugh was studying his friend’s face intently, foreseeing what was to come. ‘Are you telling me this fellow was within the pale now, when the sheriff was brought there helpless?’ ‘He was, and only a door ajar between him and his enemy, if so he held him, as rumour says he did. Not the only one with a grudge, either, so that’s no proof of anything more than this, that the opportunity was there. But tonight there’s another mark against him. The man’s gone. He did not come for his supper, he’s not in his bed, and no man has seen him since dinner. Edmund missed him at the meal and has been looking for him ever since, but never a sign. And the crutch he was still using, though more from habit than need, was lying in the stable, yard. Anion has taken to his heels. And the blame, if blame there is,’ said Cadfael honestly, ‘is mine. Edmund and I have been asking every man in the infirmary if he saw or heard anything of note about the sheriff’s chamber, any traffic in or out. It was but the same asking with Anion, indeed I was more cautious with him than with any when I spoke with him this morning in the stables. But for all that, no question, I’ve frightened him away.’ ‘Not necessarily a proof of guilt, to take fright and run,’ said Hugh reasonably. ‘Men without privilege are apt to suppose they’ll be blamed for whatever’s done amiss. Is it certain he’s gone? A man just healed of a broken leg? Has he taken horse or mule? Nothing stolen?’ ‘Nothing. But there’s more to tell. Brother Rhys, whose bed is by the door, across the passage from where the sheriff lay, heard the door creak twice and the first time he says someone entered, or at least pushed the door open, who walked with a stick. The second time came later, and may have been the time the Welsh boy went in there. Rhys is hazy about time, and slept before and after, but both visitors came while the court was quiet, he says, while we of the house were in the refectory. With that, and now he’s run, even Edmund is taking it for granted Anion is your murderer. They’ll be crying his guilt in the town by morning.’ ‘But you are not so sure,’ said Hugh, eyeing him steadily.

  ‘Something he had on his mind, surely, something he saw as guilt, or knew others would call guilt, or he would not have run. But murderer…? Hugh, I have in that pill, box of mine certain proof of dyed wools and gold thread in whatever cloth was used to kill. Certain, whereas flight is uncertain proof of anything worse than fear. You know as I know that there was no such woven cloth anywhere in that room, or in the infirmary, or in the entire pale so far as we can discover. Whoever used it brought it with him. Where would Anion get hold of any such rich material? He can never have handled anything better than drab homespun and unbleached flax in his life. It casts great doubt on his guilt, though it does not utterly rule it out. It’s why I did not press him too far, or thought I had not!’ he added ruefully.

  Hugh nodded guarded agreement, and put the point away in his mind. ‘But for all that, tomorrow at dawn I must send out search parties between here and Wales, for surely that’s the way he’ll go. A border between him and his fear will be his first thought. If I can take him, I must and will. Then we may get out of him whatever it is he does know. A lame man cannot yet have got very far.’ ‘But remember the cloth. For those threads do not lie, though a mortal man may, guilty or innocent. The instrument of death is what we have to find.’ The hunt went forth at dawn, in small parties filtering through the woods by all the paths that led most directly to Wales; but they came back with the dark, empty, handed. Lame or no, Anion had contrived to vanish within half a day.

  The tale had gone forth through the town and the Foregate by then, every shop had it and every customer, the ale, houses discussed it avidly, and the general agreement was that neither Hugh Beringar nor any other man need look further for the sheriff’s murderer. The dour cattle, man with a grudge had been heard going into and leaving the death, chamber, and on being questioned had fled. Nothing could be simpler.

  And that was the day when they buried Gilbert Prestcote, in the tomb he had had made for himself in a transept of the abbey church. Half the nobility of the shire was there to do him honour, and Hugh Beringar with an escort of his officers, and the provost of Shrewsbury, Geoffrey Corviser, with his son Philip and his son’s wife Emma, and all the solid merchants of the town guild. The sheriff’s widow came in deep mourning, with her small son round, eyed and awed at the end of her arm. Music and ceremony, and the immensity of the vault, and the candles and the torches, all charmed and fascinated him; he was good as gold throughout the service.

  And whatever personal enemies Gilbert Prestcote might have had, he had been a fair and trusted sheriff to this county in general, and the merchant princes were well aware of the relative security and justice they had enjoyed under him, where much of England suffered a far worse fate.

  So in his passing Gilbert had his due, and his people’s weighty and deserved intercession for him with his God.

  ‘No,’ said Hugh, waiting for Cadfael as the brothers came out from Vespers that evening, ‘nothing as yet. Crippled or not, it seems young Anion has got clean away. I’ve set a watch along the border, in case he’s lying in co
vert this side till the hunt is called off, but I doubt he’s already over the dyke. And whether to be glad or sorry for it, that’s more than I know. I have Welsh in my own manor, Cadfael, I know what drives them, and the law that vindicates them where ours condemns. I’ve been a frontiersman all my life, tugged two ways.’ ‘You must pursue it,’ said Cadfael with sympathy. ‘You have no choice.’ ‘No, none. Gilbert was my chief,’ said Hugh, ‘and had my loyalty. Very little we two had in common, I don’t know that I even liked him overmuch. But respect, yes, that we had. His wife is taking her son back to the castle tonight, with what little she brought here. I’m waiting now to conduct her.’ Her stepdaughter was already departed with Sister Magdalen and the cloth, merchant’s daughter, to the solitude of Godric’s Ford. ‘He’ll miss his sister,’ said Hugh, diverted into sympathy for the little boy.