One Corpse Too Many bc-2 Read online

  I did not kill him, after all, though Beringar. His own cunning killed him. And whether he was glad or sorry he was too drained to know. Cadfael would be satisfied, at least; Nicholas Faintree was avenged, he had justice in full. His murderer had been accused publicly, and publicly the charge had been justified by heaven. And his murderer was dead; that failing breath was already spent.

  Beringar reached down and picked up his sword, which rose unresisting out of the convicted hand. He turned slowly, and raised it in salute to the king, and walked, limping now and dropping a few trickles of blood from stiffening cuts in hand and forearm, out of the square of lances, which opened silently to let him go free.

  Two or three paces he took across the sward towards the king’s chair, and Aline flew into his arms, and clasped him with a possessive fervour that shook him fully alive again. Her gold hair streamed about his shoulders and breast, she lifted to him a rapt, exultant and exhausted face, the image of his own, she called him by his name: “Hugh… Hugh…” and fingered with aching tenderness the oozing wounds that showed in his cheek and hand and wrist.

  “Why did you not tell me? Why? Why? Oh, you have made me die so many times! Now we are both alive again …Kiss me!”

  He kissed her, and she remained real, passionate and unquestionably his. She continued to caress, and fret, and fawn.

  “Hush, love,” he said, eased and restored, “or go on scolding, for if you turn tender to me now I’m a lost man. I can’t afford to droop yet, the king’s waiting. Now, if you’re my true lady, lend me your arm to lean on, and come and stand by me and prop me up, like a good wife, or I may fall flat at his feet.”

  “Am I your true lady?” demanded Aline, like all women wanting guarantees before witnesses.

  “Surely! Too late to think better of it now, my heart!”

  She was beside him, clasped firmly in his arm, when he came before the king. “Your Grace,” said Hugh, condescending out of some exalted private place scarcely flawed by weariness and wounds, “I trust I have proven my case against a murderer, and have your Grace’s countenance and approval.”

  “Your opponent,” said Stephen, “proved your case for you, all too well.” He eyed them thoughtfully, disarmed and diverted by this unexpected apparition of entwined lovers. “But what you have proved may also be your gain. You have robbed me, young man, of an able deputy sheriff of this shire, whatever else he may have been, and however foul a fighter. I may well take reprisal by drafting you into the vacancy you’ve created. Without prejudice to your own castles and your rights of garrison on our behalf. What do you say?”

  “With your Grace’s leave,” said Beringar, straight-faced, “I must first take counsel with my bride.”

  “Whatever is pleasing to my lord,” said Aline, equally demurely, “is also pleasing to me.”

  Well, well, though Brother Cadfael, looking on with interest, I doubt if troth was ever plighted more publicly. They had better invite the whole of Shrewsbury to the wedding.

  Brother Cadfael walked across to the guest hall before Compline, and took with him not only a pot of his goose-grass salve for Hugh Beringar’s numerous minor grazes, but also Giles Siward’s dagger, with its topaz finial carefully restored.

  “Brother Oswald is a skilled silversmith, this is his gift and mine to your lady. Give it to her yourself. But ask her — as I know she will — to deal generously by the boy who fished it out of the river. So much you will have to tell her. For the rest, for her brother’s part, yes, silence, now and always. For her he was only one of the many who chose the unlucky side, and died for it.”

  Beringar took the repaired dagger in his hand, and booked at it long and somberly. “Yet this is not justice,” he said slowly. “You and I between us have forced into the light the truth of one man’s sins, and covered up the truth of another’s.” This night, for all his gains, he was very grave and a little sad, and not only because all his wounds were stiffening, and all his misused muscles groaning at every movement. The recoil from triumph had him fixing honest eyes on the countenance of failure, the fate he had escaped. “Is justice due only to the blameless? If he had not been so visited and tempted, he might never have found himself mired to the neck in so much infamy.”

  “We deal with what is,” said Cadfael. “Leave what might have been to eyes that can see it plain. You take what’s lawfully and honourably won, and value and enjoy

  it. You have that right. Here are you, deputy sheriff of Salop, in royal favour, affianced to as fine a girl as heart could wish, and, the one you set your mind on from the moment you saw her. Be sure I noticed! And if you’re stiff and sore’ in every bone tomorrow — and, lad, you will be! — what’s a little disciplinary pain to a young man in your high feather?”

  “I wonder,” said Hugh, brightening, “where the other two are by now.”

  “Within reach of the Welsh coast, waiting for a ship to carry them coastwise round to France. They’ll do well enough.” As between Stephen and Maud, Cadfael felt no allegiance; but these young creatures, though two of them held for Maud and two for Stephen, surely belonged to a future and an England delivered from the wounds of civil war, beyond this present anarchy.

  “As for justice,” said Brother Cadfael thoughtfully, “it is but half the tale.” He would say a prayer at Compline for the repose of Nicholas Faintree, a clean young man of mind and life, surely now assuaged and at rest. But he would also say a prayer for the soul of Adam Courcelle, dead in his guilt; for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many. “No need,” said Cadfael, “for you ever to look over your shoulder, or feel any compunction. You did the work that fell to you, and did it well. God disposes all. From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man’s scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.”

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  Qvadis

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