A Virgin In The Ice Read online

  “So you,” said Prestcote after a daunting pause, “are acting on his behalf—the king’s enemy.”

  “With respect, my lord,” said Herward with spirit, “I am acting on behalf of a young girl and a boy of tender years, who have done nothing to make them enemies to king or empress. I am not concerned with faction, only with the fate of two children who were in the charge of our order until this evil befell. Is it not natural that we should feel responsible for them, and do all we can in conscience to find them?”

  “Natural enough,” allowed the sheriff dryly, “and moreover, as a man of Worcester yourself you’re hardly likely to feel any great warmth towards the king’s enemies, or want to give them aid or comfort.”

  “We suffered from them, like the rest of Worcester, my lord. King Stephen is our sovereign, and as such we acknowledge him. The only duty I feel here is to the children. Consider what must be the dismay, the anxiety, of their natural guardian! All he asks—all we ask for him—is leave to enter the king’s lands, not in arms, and search for his niece and nephew without hindrance. I do not say such a man, however innocent of this murderous raid, and even with his Grace’s safe-conduct and countenance, would be utterly safe among the men of our shire or yours, but that risk he is willing to take. If you will give him safe-conduct, he pledges himself to pursue this quest, and no other end. He will go unarmed, and with only one or two attendants to help him. He will take no action but to find his wards. My lord, I entreat it of you, for their sake.”

  Abbot Radulfus added his own plea, very restrainedly. “From a Crusader of unblemished repute, I believe such a pledge may be accepted without question.”

  The sheriff considered, darkly and in frowning silence, for some minutes, and then said with chill deliberation: “No. I will issue no safe-conduct, and if the king himself were here and minded to grant it, I would urge him to the contrary. After what has happened, any man of that faction found in any part of my territory will be treated as a prisoner of war, if not as a spy. If he be taken in any ill circumstances, his life may be forfeit, and even if on no wrong errand, his liberty. It is not a matter of his intent alone. Even a man so pledged, and true enough to his pledge, might take back with him knowledge of castles and garrisons that would stand the enemy in good stead later. Also, and above all, it is my duty to combat the king’s enemies and reduce their forces wherever chance offers, and if I can pluck away a good knight from them I will do it. No affront to Sir Laurence d’Angers, whose reputation, as far as I know it, is honorable enough, but he shall not have his safe-conduct, and if he ventures without it, let him look to his head. No doubt he did not come home from Palestine to rot in a prison. If he risks it, it is his own choice.”

  “But the girl Ermina,” began Herward in dismayed appeal, “and her brother, a mere child—are they to be left unsought?”

  “Have I said so? Sought they shall be, to the best I can provide, but by my own men. And if found, they shall be delivered safely to their uncle’s care. I will send out orders to all my castellans and officers, to look out for such a company of three, and make due inquiries after them. But I will not admit the empress’s knight to the lands I administer for the king.”

  It was all they would get from him, and they knew it by voice and face, and made the best of it.

  “It would help,” suggested Radulfus mildly, “if Brother Herward gives you some description of the three. Though I do not know if he is well acquainted with the girl, or the nun, her tutor…”

  “They came several times to visit the boy,” said Herward. “I can picture them all three. Your officers should inquire after these—Yves Hugonin, thirteen years old, heir to a considerable portion of his father, is not over-tall for his age, but sturdy and well-set-up, with a round, rosy face, and both hair and eyes dark brown. I saw him the morning this coil began, in bright blue cotte, cloak and capuchon, and grey hose. For the women—Sister Hilaria will be known best by her habit, but I should tell you that she is young, not above five and twenty, and well-favored, a slender woman and graceful. And the girl Ermina…” Brother Herward hesitated, gazing beyond the sheriff’s shoulder, as if to recall more perfectly someone but seldom seen, yet vividly impressed on his vision.

  “She will be eighteen very shortly, I do not know the precise day. Darker than her brother, almost black of hair and eye, tall, vigorous… They report her quick of mind and wit, and of strong will.”

  It was hardly a detailed description of her physical person, yet it established her with surprising clarity. All the more when Brother Herward ended almost absently, as if to himself: “She would be reckoned very beautiful.”

  *

  Brother Cadfael heard about it from Hugh Beringar, after the couriers had ridden out to the castles and manors, and carried the word to the towns, to be cried publicly. What Prescote had promised, that he performed to the letter before he took himself off to the peace of his own manor to keep Christmas with his family. The very announcement of the sheriff’s interest in the missing siblings should cast a protecting shadow over them if anyone in this shire did encounter them. Herward had set off back to Worcester with a guarded party by then, his errand only partially successful.

  “Very beautiful!” repeated Hugh, and smiled. But it was a concerned and rueful smile. Such a creature, wilful, handsome, daring, let loose in a countryside waiting for winter and menaced by discord, might all too easily come to grief.

  “Even sub-priors,” said Cadfael mildly, stirring the bubbling cough linctus he was simmering over his brazier in the workshop, “have eyes. But with her youth, she would be vulnerable even if she were ugly. Well, for all we know they may be snug and safe in shelter this moment. A great pity this uncle of theirs is of the other persuasion, and cannot get countenance to do his own hunting.”

  “And newly back from Jerusalem,” mused Hugh, “no way to blame for what his faction did to Worcester. He’ll be too recent in the service to be known to you, I suppose?”

  “Another generation, lad. It’s twenty-six years since I left the Holy Land.” Cadfael lifted his pot from the brazier, and stood it aside on the earth floor to cool gradually overnight. He straightened his back carefully. He was not so far from sixty, even it he did not look it by a dozen years. “Everything will be changed there now, I doubt. The lustre soon tarnished. From which port did they say he sailed?”

  “Tripoli, according to Herward. In your unregenerate youth I suppose you must have known that city well? It seems to me there’s not much of that coast you haven’t covered in your time.”

  “It was St. Symeon I favored myself. There were good craftsmen in the shipyards there, a fine harbor, and Antioch only a few miles upriver.”

  He had good cause to remember Antioch, for it was there he had begun and ended his long career as a crusader, and his love affair with Palestine, that lovely, inhospitable, cruel land of gold and sand and drought. From this quiet, busy harbor in which he had chosen at last to drop anchor, he had had little time to hark back to those remembered haunts of his youth. The town came back to him now vividly, the lush green of the river valley, the narrow, grateful shade of the streets, the babel of the market. And Mariam, selling her fruits and vegetables in the Street of the Sailmakers, her young, fine-boned face honed into gold and silver by the fierce sunlight, her black, oiled hair gleaming beneath her veil. She had graced his arrival in the east, a mere boy of eighteen, and his departure, a seasoned soldier and seafarer of thirty-three. A widow, young, passionate and lonely, a woman of the people, not to everyone’s taste, too spare, too strong, too scornful. The void left by her dead man had ached unbearably, and drawn in the young stranger heart and soul into her life, to fill the gap. For a whole year he had known her, before the forces of the Cross had moved on to invest Jerusalem.

  There had been other women, before her and after. He remembered them with gratitude, and with no guilt at all. He had given and received pleasure and kindness. None had ever complained of him. If that was a poor defense
from the formal viewpoint, nevertheless he felt secure behind it. It would have been an insult to repent of having loved a woman like Mariam.

  “They have alliances there that ensure peace now, if only for a time,” he said reflectively, “I suppose an Angevin lord might well feel he’s more needed here than there, now it’s his own liege lady in the lists. And the man bears a good name, from all I hear. A pity he comes when hate’s at its height.”

  “A pity there should be cause for hate between decent men,” agreed Hugh wryly. “I am the king’s man, I chose him with my eyes open. I like Stephen, and am not likely to leave him for any lure. But I can see just as plainly why a baron of Anjou should rush home to serve his lady every whit as loyally as I serve Stephen. What a bedevilment of all our values, Cadfael, is this civil war!”

  “Not all,” said Cadfael sturdily. “There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful. Your boy will grow up into a better ordered world. There, I’ve finished here for tonight, and it must be nearly time for the bell.”

  They went out together into the cold and dark of the garden, and felt on their faces the first flakes of the first snow of the winter. The air was full of a drifting unease, but the fall was light and fitful here. Further south it set in heavily, borne on a north-westerly wind, dry, fine snow that turned the night into a white, whirling mist, shrouding outlines, burying paths, blown into smooth, breaking waves only to be lifted and hurled again into new shapes. Valleys filled to a treacherous level, hillsides were scoured clean. Wise men stayed within their houses, clapped to shutter and door, and stopped the chinks between the boards, where thin white fingers reached through. The first snow, and the first hard frost. Thank God, thought Cadfael, hastening his steps as he heard the Compline bell begin to sound, Herward and his company will be far on their way home now, they’ll weather this well enough.

  But what of Ermina and Yves Hugonin, astray somewhere between here and Worcester, and what of the young Benedictine sister who had offered, in her gallant innocence, to go with them and see them safe into sanctuary?

  Chapter 2

  ON THE FIFTH DAY OF DECEMBER, about noon, a traveller from the south, who had slept the night at Bromfield Priory, some twenty-odd miles away, and had the good fortune to find the highroad, at least, in passable condition, brought an urgent message into Shrewsbury abbey. Prior Leonard of Bromfield had been a monk of Shrewsbury until his promotion, and was an old friend of Brother Cadfael’s, and familiar with his skills.

  “In the night,” the messenger reported, “some decent fellows of that country brought in a wounded man to the priory, found by the wayside stripped and hacked, and left for dead. And half-dead he is, and his case very bad. If he had lain out all night in the frost he’d have been frozen stiff by morning. And Prior Leonard asked would I bring word here to you, for though they’ve some knowledge of healing, this case is beyond them, and he said you have experience from the wars, and may be able to save the man. If you could come, and bide until he mends—or until the poor soul’s lost!—it would be a great comfort and kindness.”

  “If abbot and prior give me leave,” said Cadfael, concerned, “then most gladly. Footpads preying on the roads so close to Ludlow? What are things come to, there in the south?”

  “And the poor man a monk himself, for they knew him by his tonsure.”

  “Come with me,” said Cadfael, “and we’ll put it to Prior Robert.”

  Prior Robert heard the plea with sympathy, and raised no objection, since it was not he who must ride out all those miles in haste, in what was now the shrewd grip of winter. He took the request in his turn to the abbot, and came again with his approval granted.

  “Father Abbot bids you take a good horse from the stables, for you’ll need him. You have leave for as long as may be necessary, and we’ll send and have Brother Mark come in from Saint Giles in the meantime, for I think Brother Oswin is not yet practiced enough to be left in charge alone.”

  Cadfael agreed, fervently but demurely. A willing and devoted soul, but hardly competent to look after all the winter ailments that might crop up in his tutor’s absence. Mark would leave his lepers on the outskirts of the town with regret, but God willing it need not be for very long.

  “What of the roads?” he asked the messenger, who was stabling his own beast as Cadfael chose his. “You made good time here, and so must I back.”

  “The worst is the wind, brother, but it’s blown the highroad almost clear in all but a few bad places. It’s the byways that are clean buried. If you leave now you won’t fare too badly. Better going south than north, at least you’ll have the wind at your back.”

  Cadfael took some thought over filling his scrip, for he had medicines, salves and febrifuges not to be found in every infirmary cupboard, and the commoner sorts Bromfield could provide. The less weight he carried, the better speed he would make. He took stout boots and a thick travelling cloak over his habit and belted the folds securely about his waist. If the errand had not been so grim, he would have relished the prospect of a justified trip back into the world, and the rare permission to take his pick of the stables. He had campaigned in wintry conditions as well as in burning sun, the snow did not daunt him, though he was shrewd enough to respect it, and treat it with caution.

  All these four days since the first snow the weather had followed a fixed pattern, with brief sunshine around noon, gathering cloud thereafter, fresh snow falling late in the evening and well into the night, and always iron frost. Around Shrewsbury the snowfalls had been light and powdery, the pattern of white flakes and black soil constantly changing as the wind blew. But as Cadfael rode south the fields grew whiter, the ditches filled. The branches of trees sagged heavily towards the ground under their load, and by mid-afternoon the leaden sky was sagging no less heavily earthwards, in swags of blue-black cloud. If this went on, the wolves would be moving down from the hills and prowling hungrily among the haunts of men. Better to be an urchin under a hedgerow, sleeping the winter away, or a squirrel holed up snugly with his hoarded stores. It had been a good autumn for nuts and acorns.

  Riding was pleasure to him, even riding alone and in the bitter cold. The chance seldom came his way now, it was one of the delights he had given up for the quiet of the cloister and the sense of having discovered his true place. In every decision there must be some regrets. He hunched his back solidly against the malice of the wind, and saw the first driven flakes, fine as dust, whirl by him and outpace his horse, while he felt nothing in his shroud of cowl and cloak. He was thinking of the man who waited for him at the end of this journey.

  Himself a monk, the messenger had said. Of Bromfield? Surely not. If he had been one of theirs they would have named him. A monk loose and alone about the roads in the mid of the night? On what errand? Or in flight from what, before he fell into the mercies of robbers and murderers? Others must have ranged through the same countryside, in flight from the rape of Worcester, and where were they now? Perhaps this cowled wanderer had made his way painfully out of the same holocaust?

  The snow thickened, two fine curtains of spume driving past him one on either side, cloven by his sturdy body and waving away ahead of him like the ends of a gauze scarf, drawing him forward. Perhaps four times on this ride he had exchanged greetings in passing with other human creatures, and all of them close to home. In such a season only the desperate travel.

  It was dark by the time he reached the gatehouse of Bromfield, crossing the foot-bridge over the little River Onny. His horse had had enough by then, and was blowing frostily, and twitching irritable shoulders and flanks. Cadfael lighted down gladly between the torches in the gateway, and let a lay brother take the bridle. Before him the familiar court opened, straighter than at Shrewsbury, and the shapes of the monastic buildings gilded here and there by the flame of a torch. The church of Saint Mary loomed dark in darkness, large and noble for such a modest foundation. And striding out of shadows across the court came Prior Leonard him
self, a long, loose-jointed heron of a man, pointed beak anxiously advanced, arms flapping like wings. The court under his feet, surely swept during the day, already bore a smooth, frail coating of snow. By morning it would be crisp and deep underfoot, unless the wind that brought it removed half of it again to hurl it elsewhere.

  “Cadfael?” The prior was near-sighted, he had to peer and narrow his eyes even by daylight, but he groped for a hand that came to meet his, and held and knew it. “Thank God you could come! I fear for him… But such a ride… Come within, come within, I have provision made for you, and a meal. You must be both hungry and weary!”

  “First let me see him,” said Cadfael briskly, and set off purposefully up the slope of the court, leaving his broad boot-prints plain in the new-fallen whiteness. Prior Leonard strode beside him, long legs curbed to his friend’s shorter pace, still talking volubly.

  “We have him in a room apart, for quietness, and watched constantly. He breathes, but snoringly, like a man with a broken head. He has not spoken word or opened eye since they brought him. Bruises darken on him everywhere, but those would heal. But a knife was used on him, he has bled too much, though the wound is stanched now. Through here— the inner room is less cold…”