The Potter's Field Page 3

  Cadfael drew the edges of the rotting cloth carefully back over the skull, from which the dark hair burgeoned in such strange profusion. With the death’s-head face covered she became even more awe-inspiring, and they drew a little back from her, all four, staring down in detached wonder, for in the face of such composed and austere death, pity and horror seemed equally irrelevant. They did not even feel any will to question, or admit to notice, what was strange about her burial, not yet; the time for that would come, but not now, not here. First, without comment or wonder, what was needful must be completed.

  “Well,” said Hugh drily, “what now? Does this fall within my writ, Brothers, or yours?”

  Brother Richard, somewhat greyer in the face than normally, said doubtfully: “We are on abbey land. But this is hardly in accordance with law, and law is your province. I don’t know what the lord abbot will wish, in so strange a case.”

  “He will want her brought back to the abbey,” said Cadfael with certainty. “Whoever she may be, however long buried unblessed, it’s a soul to be salved, and Christian burial is her due. We shall be bringing her from abbey land, and to abbey land he’ll want her returned. When,” said Cadfael with deliberation, “she has received what else is her due, if that can ever be determined.”

  “It can at least be attempted,” said Hugh, and cast a considering glance along the bank of broom bushes and round the gaping pit they had cut through the turf. “I wonder is there anything more to be found here, put in the ground with her. Let’s at least clear a little further and deeper, and see.” He stooped to draw the disintegrating brychan again round the body, and his very touch parted threads and sent motes of dust floating into the air. “We shall need a better shroud if we’re to carry her back with us, and a litter if she’s to be carried whole and at rest, as we see her. Richard, take my horse and ride back to the lord abbot, tell him simply that we have indeed found a body buried here, and send us litter and decent covering to get her home. No need for more, not yet. What more do we know? Leave any further report until we come.”

  “I will so!” agreed Brother Richard, so warmly that his relief was plain. His easy-going nature was not made for such discoveries, his preference was for an orderly life in which all things behaved as they should, and spared him too much exertion of body or mind. He made off with alacrity to where Hugh’s raw-boned grey stood peacefully cropping the greener turf under the headland, heaved a sturdy foot into the stirrup, and mounted. There was nothing the matter with his horsemanship but recent lack of practice. He was a younger son from a knightly family, and had made the choice between service in arms and service in the cloister at only sixteen. Hugh’s horse, intolerant of most riders except his master, condescended to carry this one along the headland and down into the water-meadow without resentment.

  “Though he may spill him at the ford,” Hugh allowed, watching them recede towards the river, “if the mood takes him. Well, let’s see what’s left us to find here.”

  The sergeant was cutting back deeply into the bank, under the rustling broom brushes. Cadfael turned from the dead to descend with kilted habit into her grave, and cautiously began to shovel out the loose loam and deepen the hollow where she had lain.

  “Nothing,” he said at last, on his knees upon a floor now packed hard and changing to a paler colour, the subsoil revealing a layer of clay. “You see this? Lower, by the river, Ruald had two or three spots where he got his clay. Worked out now, they said, at least where they were easy to reach. This has not been disturbed, in longer time than she has lain here. We need go no deeper, there is nothing to find. We’ll sift around the sides a while, but I doubt not this is all.”

  “More than enough,” said Hugh, scouring his soiled hands in the thick, fibrous turf. “And not enough. All too little to give her an age or a name.”

  “Or a kinship or a home, living,” Cadfael agreed sombrely, “or a reason for dying. We can do no more here. I have seen what there is to be seen of how she was laid. What remains to be done can better be done in privacy, with time to spare, and trusted witnesses.”

  It was an hour more before Brother Winfrid and Brother Urien came striding along the headland with their burden of brychans and litter. Carefully they lifted the slender bundle of bones, folded the rugs round them and covered them decently from sight. Hugh’s sergeant was dismissed, back to the garrison at the castle. In silence and on foot the insignificant funeral cortege of the unknown set off for the abbey.

  *

  “It is a woman,” said Cadfael, reporting in due course to Abbot Radulfus in the privacy of the abbot’s parlour. “We have bestowed her in the mortuary chapel. I doubt if there is anything about her that can ever be recognised by any man, even if her death is recent, which I take to be unlikely. The gown is such as any cottage wife might wear, without ornament, without girdle, once the common black, now drab. She wears no shoes, no jewellery, nothing to give her a name.”

  “Her face…?” wondered the abbot, but dubiously, expecting nothing.

  “Father, her face is now the common image. There is nothing left to move a man to say: This is wife, or sister, or any woman ever I knew. Nothing, except, perhaps, that she had a wealth of dark hair. But so have many women. She is of moderate height for a woman. Her age we can but guess, and that very roughly. Surely by her hair she was not old, but I think she was no young girl, either. A woman in her prime, but between five-and-twenty and forty who can tell?”

  “Then there is nothing singular about her at all? Nothing to mark her out?” said Radulfus.

  “There is the manner of her burial,” said Hugh. “Without mourning, without rites, put away unlawfully in unconsecrated ground. And yet—Cadfael will tell you. Or if you so choose, Father, you may see for yourself, for we have left her lying as we found her.”

  “I begin to see,” said Radulfus with deliberation, “that I must indeed view this dead woman for myself. But since so much has been said, you may tell me what it is that outdoes in strangeness the circumstances of her secret burial. And yet…?”

  “And yet, Father, she was laid out straight and seemly, her hair braided, her hands folded on her breast, over a cross banded together from two sticks from a hedgerow or a bush. Whoever put her into the ground did so with some show of reverence.”

  “The worst of men, so doing, might feel some awe,” said Radulfus slowly, frowning over this evidence of a mind torn two ways. “But it was a deed done in the dark, secretly. It implies a worse deed, also done in the dark. If her death was natural, without implication of guilt to any man, why no priest, no rites of burial? You have not so far argued, Cadfael, that this poor creature was killed as unlawfully as she was buried, but I do so argue. What other reason can there be for having her underground in secrecy, and unblessed? And even the cross her grave-digger gave her, it seems, was cut from hedgerow twigs, never to be known as any man’s property, to point a finger at the murderer! For from what you say, everything that might have given her back her identity was removed from her body, to keep a secret a secret still, even now that the plough has brought her back to light and to the possibility of grace.”

  “It does indeed seem so,” Hugh said gravely, “but for the fact that Cadfael finds no mark of injury upon her, no bone broken, nothing to show how she died. After so long in the ground, a stroke from dagger or knife might escape finding, but we’ve seen no sign of such. Her neck is not broken, nor her skull. Cadfael does not think she was strangled. It is as if she had died in her bed—even in her sleep. But no one would then have buried her by stealth and hidden everything that marked her out from all other women.”

  “No, true! No one would so imperil his own soul but for desperate reasons.” The abbot brooded some moments in silence, considering the problem which had fallen into his hands thus strangely. Easy enough to do right to the wronged dead, as due to her immortal soul. Even without a name prayers could be said for her and Mass sung; and the Christian burial once denied her, and the Christian grave, t
hese could be given at last. But the justice of this world also clamoured for recognition. He looked up at Hugh, one office measuring the other. “What do you say, Hugh? Was this a murdered woman?”

  “In the face of what little we know, and of the much more we do not know,” said Hugh carefully, “I dare not assume that she is anything else. She is dead, she was thrust into the ground unshriven. Until I see reason for believing better of the deed, I view this as murder.”

  “It is clear to me, then,” said Radulfus, after a moment’s measuring silence, “that you do not believe she has been long in her grave. This is no infamy from long before our time, or nothing need concern us but the proper amendment of what was done wrong to her soul. The justice of God can reach through centuries, and wait its time for centuries, but ours is helpless outside our own generation. How long do you judge has passed since she died?”

  “I can but hazard, and with humility,” said Cadfael. “It may have been no more than a year, it may have been three or four, even five years, but no more than that. She is no victim from old times. She lived and breathed only a short time ago.”

  “And I cannot escape her,” said Hugh wryly.

  “No. No more than I can.” The abbot flattened his long, sinewy hands abruptly on his desk, and rose. “The more reason I must see her face to face, and acknowledge my duty towards her. Come let’s go and look at our demanding guest. I owe her that, before we again commit her to the earth, with better auguries this time. Who knows, there may be something, some small thing, to call the living woman to mind, for someone who once knew her.”

  It seemed to Cadfael, as he followed his superior out across the great court and in at the southern porch to the cloister and the church, that there was something unnatural in the way they were all avoiding one name. It had not yet been spoken, and he could not choose but wonder who would be the first to utter it, and why he himself had not already precipitated the inevitable. It could not go unspoken for much longer. But in the meantime, as well the abbot should be the first to assay. Death, whether old or new, could not disconcert him.

  In the small, chilly mortuary chapel candles burned at head and foot of the stone bier, on which the nameless woman was laid, with a linen sheet stretched over her. They had disturbed her bones as little as possible in examining the remains for some clue to the means of her death, and composed them again as exactly as they could when that fruitless inspection was over. So far as Cadfael could determine, there was no mark of any injury upon her. The odour of earth clung heavy about her in the enclosed space, but the cold of stone tempered it, and the composure and propriety of her repose overcame the daunting presence of old death, thus summarily exposed again to light, and the intrusion of eyes.

  Abbot Radulfus approached her without hesitation, and drew back the linen that covered her, folding it practically over his arm. He stood for some minutes surveying the remains narrowly, from the dark, luxuriant hair to the slender, naked bones of the feet, which surely the small secret inhabitants of the headland had helped to bare. At the stark white bone of her face he looked longest, but found nothing there to single her out from all the long generations of her dead sisters.

  “Yes. Strange!” he said, half to himself. “Someone surely felt tenderness towards her, and respected her rights, if he felt he dared not provide them. One man to kill, perhaps, and another to bury? A priest, do you suppose? But why cover up her death, if he had no guilt in it? Is it possible the same man both killed and buried her?”

  “Such things have been known,” said Cadfael.

  “A lover, perhaps? Some fatal mischance, never intended? A moment of violence, instantly regretted? But no, there would be no need to conceal, if that were all.”

  “And there is no trace of violence,” said Cadfael.

  “Then how did she die? Not from illness, or she would have been in the churchyard, shriven and hallowed. How else? By poison?”

  “That is possible. Or a stab wound that reached her heart may have left no trace now in her bones, for they are whole and straight, never deformed by blow or fracture.”

  Radulfus replaced the linen cloth, smoothing it tidily over her. “Well, I see there is little here a man could match with a living face or a name. Yet I think even that must be tried. If she has been here, living, within the past five years, then someone has known her well, and will know when last she was seen, and have marked her absence afterwards. Come,” said the abbot, “let us go back and consider carefully all the possibilities that come to mind.”

  It was plain to Cadfael then that the first and most ominous possibility had already come to the abbot’s mind, and brought deep disquiet with it. Once they were all three back in the quiet of the parlour, and the door shut against the world, the name must be spoken.

  “Two questions wait to be answered,” said Hugh, taking the initiative. “Who is she? And if that cannot be answered with certainty, then who may she be? And the second: Has any woman vanished from these parts during these last few years, without word or trace?”

  “Of one such,” said the abbot heavily, “we certainly know. And the place itself is all too apt. Yet no one has ever questioned that she went away, and of her own choice. That was a hard case for me to accept, as the wife never accepted it. Yet Brother Ruald could no more be barred from following his soul’s bent than the sun from rising. Once I was sure of him, I had no choice. To my grief, the woman never was reconciled.”

  So now the man’s name had been spoken. Perhaps no one even recalled the woman’s. Many within the walls could never have set eyes on her, or heard mention of her until her husband had his visitation and came to stand patiently at the gates and demand entry.

  “I must ask your leave,” said Hugh, “to have him view this body. Even if she is indeed his wife, truly he may not be able to say so now with any certainty, yet it must be asked of him that he make the assay. The field was theirs, the croft there was her home after he left it.” He was silent for a long moment, steadily eyeing the abbot’s closed and brooding face. “After Ruald entered here, until the time when she is said to have gone away with another man, was he ever at any time sent back there? There were belongings he gave over to her, there could be agreements to be made, even witnessed. Is he known to have met with her, after they first parted?”

  “Yes,” said Radulfus at once. “Twice in the first days of his novitiate he did visit her, but in company with Brother Paul. As master of the novices Paul was anxious for the man’s peace of mind, no less than for the woman’s, and tried his best to bring her to acknowledge and bless Ruald’s vocation. Vainly! But with Paul he went, and with Paul he returned. I know of no other occasion when he could have seen or spoken with her.”

  “Nor ever went out to field work or any other errand close to that field?”

  “It is more than a year,” said the abbot reasonably. “Even Paul would be hard put to it to say where Ruald served in all that time. Commonly, during his novitiate he would always be in company with at least one other brother, probably more, whenever he was sent out from the enclave to work. But doubtless,” he said, returning Hugh’s look no less fixedly, “you mean to ask the man himself.”

  “With your leave, Father, yes.”

  “And now, at once?”

  “If you permit, yes. It will not yet be common knowledge what we have found. Best he should be taken clean, with no warning, and knowing no need for deception. In his own defence,” said Hugh emphatically, “should he later find himself in need of defence.”

  “I will send for him,” said Radulfus. “Cadfael, will you find him, and perhaps, if the sheriff sees fit, bring him straight to the chapel? As you say, let him come to the proof in innocence, for his own sake. And now I remember,” said the abbot, “a thing he himself said when first this exchange of land was mooted. Earth is innocent, he said. Only the use we make of it mars it.”

  *

  Brother Ruald was the perfect example of obedience, the aspect of the Rule which had alwa
ys given Cadfael the most trouble. He had taken to heart the duty to obey instantly any order given by a superior as if it were a divine command, “without half-heartedness or grumbling”, and certainly without demanding “Why?” which was Cadfael’s first instinct, tamed now but not forgotten. Bidden by Cadfael, his elder and senior in vocation, Ruald followed him unquestioning to the mortuary chapel, knowing no more of what awaited him than that abbot and sheriff together desired his attendance.

  Even on the threshold of the chapel, suddenly confronted by the shape of the bier, the candles, and Hugh and Radulfus conferring quietly on the far side of the stone slab, Ruald did not hesitate, but advanced and stood awaiting what should be required of him, utterly docile and perfectly serene.

  “You sent for me, Father.”

  “You are a man of these parts,” said the abbot, “and until recently well acquainted with all of your neighbours. You may be able to help us. We have here, as you see, a body found by chance, and none of us here can by any sign set a name to the dead. Try if you can do better. Come closer.”

  Ruald obeyed, and stood faithfully staring upon the shrouded shape as Radulfus drew away the linen in one sharp motion, and disclosed the rigidly ordered bones and the fleshless face in its coils of dark hair. Certainly Ruald’s tranquility shook at the unexpected sight, but the waves of pity, alarm and distress that passed over his face were no more than ripples briefly stirring a calm pool, and he did not turn away his eyes, but continued earnestly viewing her from head to foot, and again back to the face, as if by long gazing he could build up afresh in his mind’s eye the flesh which had once clothed the naked bone. When at last he looked up at the abbot it was in mild wonder and resigned sadness.