The Leper of Saint Giles bc-5 Read online

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  Like a flung stone in a placid pool, this violent invasion cast out flurries of ripples in all directions, to beat against gatehouse and guest-hall and cloister. Brother Denis fluttered uncertainly at gaze, unaware even of the identity of this large and very angry youth, and desirous only of restoring peace in the court, but without the least notion of how to set about it. Picard, brought up almost breast to breast with the solid young body and grim face, flamed red to the cheekbones, and then blanched white with answering fury. He could not go forward, he would not go aside, and even if the startled cluster of servants had not been pressing close behind, he would not have given back an inch. Agnes glared outrage, and quickly reached to grip Iveta by the arm, for the girl had started forward with a faint, desolate cry, the subdued stillness of her face broken, and for one moment sparkling with frantic emotion, as shattered ice takes the light and dazzles. Just for that instant she would have forgotten everything but the boy, sprung to his side without conceal, flung her arms round him, if her aunt’s grasp had not plucked her back without gentleness, drawn her close to a rigid, somberly gowned side, and held her there with steely fingers. Whether from long submission or from newly alerted wit, she shrank and was still, and the light, but not the pain, ebbed out of her face. Cadfael saw it, and was inextricably caught. No young thing hardly out of her nurse’s care should so suffer.

  He remembered that look later. At this moment he was held by the impact of Joscelin Lucy’s wildly unwise youth and Godfrid Picard’s subtle, experienced maturity. It was not so unequal a combat as might have been expected. The boy was above himself, and unquestionably a man of his hands, and a son of confident, if minor, privilege.

  “I may not ask you to draw, here,” he said high and clearly. Anger raised his voice, as though to reach a marshal in the lists. “I challenge you to name the place and time where we may draw, to good effect. You have done me an offense, I am cast off by reason of your persuasion, do me right, and stand to what you have urged against me.”

  “Insolent rogue!” Picard spat back at him disdainfully. “I am more likely to set my hounds on you than dignify you by crossing swords with you. If you are dismissed for a profitless, treacherous, meddling, ill-conditioned wretch, you are rightly served, be thankful your lord did not have you whipped from his door. You have got off lightly. Take care you don’t provoke worse usage than you already have. Now stand out of my way, and get you gone homewards, as you were ordered.”

  “Not I!” vowed Joscelin through his teeth. “Not until I have said all that I have to say, here before all these witnesses. Nor will I go for being ordered. Does Huon de Domville own the ground I stand on and the air I breathe? His service he can keep, there are other households at least as honorable as his. But to run with mean tales to him, and blacken my name, was that fair dealing?”

  Picard gave vent to a wordless bellow of impatient rage, and turned to snap imperious fingers at his menservants, half a dozen of whom, solid men-at-arms of an age to be experienced in rough play, came forth blithely enough, three on either side, closing in a half-circle.

  “Take this wastrel out of my sight. The river is handy. Put him to cool in the mud!”

  The women drew back in a flurry of skirts. Agnes and the maid dragging Iveta away by both wrists. The men-at-arms advanced, grinning but wary, and Joscelin was obliged to take some paces back, to avoid being encircled.

  “Stand clear!” he warned, glaring. “Let the coward do his own work, for if you lay hand on me there’ll be blood let.”

  He had so far forgotten himself as to lay hand to hilt, and draw the blade some inches from the scabbard. Cadfael judged that it was high time to intervene, before the young man put himself hopelessly in the wrong, and both he and Brother Denis were starting forward to thrust between the antagonists, when from the cloister surged the tall presence of Prior Robert, monumentally displeased, and from the direction of the abbot’s lodging, swift and silent and thus far unnoticed, the equally tall and far more daunting figure of Abbot Radulfus himself, hawk-faced, shrewd-eyed, and coldly but composedly angry.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Robert spread long, elegant hands between. “You do yourselves and our house great dishonor. Think shame to touch weapon or threaten violence within these walls!”

  The men-at-arms recoiled thankfully into the crowd. Picard stood smouldering but controlled. Joscelin shot his sword very hastily back into the sheath, but stood breathing heavily and cherishing his fury. He was not an easy young men to abash, and harder still to silence. He made a half-turn that brought him eye to eye with the abbot, who had reached the borders of the dispute, and stood lofty, dark and calm, considering all the offenders at leisure. There fell a silence.

  “Within the bounds of this abbey,” said Radulfus at last, without raising his voice, “men do not brawl. I will not say we never hear an angry word. We are also men. Sir Godfrid, keep your men at heel on these premises. And you, young man, so much as touch your hilt again, and you shall lie in a penitent’s cell overnight.”

  Joscelin bent head and knee, though the abbot might well have thought the gesture somewhat perfunctory. “My lord abbot, I ask your pardon! Threatened or no, I was at fault.” But owning his fault, he kept his rage. A close observer might even have wondered if he was not contemplating the possible advantages of offending again, and being cast as promised into a cell within these walls. Locks may be picked, lay brothers suborned or tricked—yes, there were possibilities! He was disadvantaged, however, by a fair-minded disposition not to offend those who had committed no offense against him. “I stand in your mercy,” he said.

  “Good, we understand each other. Now, what is this dispute that troubles the peace here?”

  Both Joscelin and Picard began to talk at once, but Joscelin, for once wise, drew back and left the field to his elder. He stood biting a resolute lip and regarding the abbot’s face, as Picard brushed him contemptuously aside in the terms he had expected.

  “Father, this impertinent squire has been turned off by his lord for a negligent, ill-conditioned fellow, and he credits me with so advising my lord Domville, as indeed I felt it my duty to do. For I have found him presumptuous, pressing his company upon my niece, and in all ways a troubler of the peace. He came here to brawl with me, resenting his well-deserved dismissal. He has no more than his due, but he will not be schooled. And that is all the matter,” he said scornfully.

  Brother Cadfael marvelled how Joscelin kept his mouth shut on the flood of his grievance, and his eyes fixed respectfully upon Radulfus, until he was invited to speak. He must surely have acquired in these few moments a healthy respect for the abbot’s fairness and shrewd sense, so to contain himself. He had confidence that he would not be judged unheard, and it was worth an effort at self-control to manage his defense aright.

  “Well, young sir?” said Radulfus. It could not be asserted that he smiled, his countenance remained judicially remote and calm; but there might have been the suggestion of indulgence in his voice.

  “Father Abbot,” said Joscelin, “all of us of these two houses came here to see a marriage performed. The bride you have seen.” She had been hustled away out of sight, into the guest-hall, long before this. “She is eighteen years old. My lord—he that was my lord!—is nearing sixty. She has been these last eight years orphaned and in her uncle’s care, and she has great lands, long in her uncle’s administration.” Some indication of his unexpected drift had penetrated by then, Picard was boiling and voluble. But Radulfus dipped a frowning brow, and raised a silencing hand, and they gave way perforce.

  “Father Abbot, I pray your help for Iveta de Massard!” Joscelin had gained his moment, and could not hold back. “Father, the honor of which she is lady spans four counties and fifty manors, it is an earl’s portion. They have farmed it between them, uncle and bridegroom, they have parceled it out, she is bought and sold, without her will—Oh, God, she has no will left, she is tamed!—against her will! My offense is that I love her,
and I would have taken her away out of this prison…”

  The latter half of this, though Cadfael had drawn close enough to hear all, was certainly lost to most others under a shrill clamor of refutation, in which Agnes played the loudest part. She had a voice that rode high over opposition, Joscelin could not cry her down. And in the midst of the hubbub, suddenly there were crisp hoofbeats in the gatehouse, and horsemen pacing into the court with the authority of office, and in numbers calculated to draw ear and eye. The thread alike of Joscelin’s appeal and Picard’s refutation was broken abruptly; every eye turned to the gate.

  First came Huon de Domville, the muscles of his face set like a wrestler’s biceps, his small, black, malevolent eyes alertly bright. Close at his elbow rode Gilbert Prestcote, sheriff of Shropshire under King Stephen, a lean, hard, middle-aged knight browed and nosed like a falcon, his black, forked beard veined with gray. He had a sergeant and seven or eight officers at his back, an impressive array. He halted them within the gage, and dismounted as they did.

  “And there he stands!” blared Domville, eyes glittering upon Joscelin, who stood startled and gaping. “The rascal himself! Did I not say he’d be stirring up trouble everywhere possible before he took himself off? Seize him, sheriff! Lay hold on the rogue and make him fast!”

  He had been so intent on his quarry that he had not immediately observed that the abbot himself was among those present. His eye lit on the austere and silent figure belatedly, and he dismounted and doffed in brusque respect. “By your leave, Father Abbot! We have dire business here, and I am all the sorrier that this young rogue should have brought it within your walls.”

  “Such disturbance as he has so far caused us,” said Radulfus coolly, “does not seem of a sort to require the attendance of sheriff and sergeant. I gather that if he has offended, he has also been brought to book for it. To dismiss him your service is your right. To pursue him further seems somewhat excessive. Unless you have further complaint to make against him?” He looked to Prestcote for his answer.

  “There is indeed more,” said the sheriff. “I am instructed by my lord Domville that since this squire was ordered to pack and go, a thing of great value has been missed, and looked for in vain within the household. There is ground for suspicion that this man may have stolen it in despite of his lord, and in revenge for his dismissal. He stands so charged.”

  Joscelin was staring in astonished derision, not yet even angry on this count, and certainly not afraid. “I, steal?” he gasped in huge contempt. “I would not touch the meanest thing that belonged to him, I would not willingly take away on my shoes the dust of his courtyard. Go, he bade me, and so I did, out of his house, and have not even stopped to gather together everything that was mine there. All that I brought away is here on my body or in the saddle-bags there.”

  The abbot raised a restraining hand. “My lord, what is this valuable thing which is lost? How does it bulk? When was it missed?”

  “It is the wedding gift I intended for my bride,” said the baron, “a collar of gold and pearls. It could lie in the palm of a man’s hand, once out of its case. I meant to bring it to the girl today, after Mass, but when I went to take it, and looked within the case, I found it empty. Nigh on an hour ago, I suppose, for we wasted time hunting for it, though the leaving of the empty case should have told us it was not lost, but stolen. And but for this turbulent boy, who was turned off for good reason and took it very defiantly, no one else has left my household. I charge him with the theft, and I will have the remedy of law, to the last particle.”

  “But did this young man know of this collar, and where to lay hand on it?” demanded the abbot.

  “I did, Father,” Joscelin acknowledged readily. “So did all three of us who served him as squires.”

  Still more horsemen had appeared in the gateway, several of Domville’s outridden retinue, and among them Simon and Guy, by the look of their faces by no means eager to be noticed or take any part in this encounter. They looked on from the background, uncertain and unhappy, as well they might.

  “But I have not touched it,” Joscelin went on firmly. “And here am I, just as I left the house, take me away and strip me if you will, you’ll find never a thread that is not mine. And there is my horse and my saddle-bags, turn out whatever you find, and let the lord abbot be witness. But no,” he added vehemently, seeing Domville himself make a move toward the gray horse, “not you, my lord! I will not have my accuser’s hands pawing my belongings. Let an impartial judge do the searching. Father Abbot, I appeal to your justice!”

  “That is but fair,” said the abbot. “Robert, will you do what is needful?”

  Prior Robert received the request with a dignified inclination of the head, and made a solemn procession of his advance upon the duty allotted him. Two of Prestcote’s men-at-arms unbuckled the saddle-bags from their place, and when the horse, nervous at the press of people, sidled unhappily, Simon impulsively slipped down from his mount and ran to take the bridle and soothe the fidgety gray. The saddle-bags lay open on the cobbles of the court. Prior Robert plunged his hands into the first, and began to hand out the simple items of clothing and accouterment their raging owner had stuffed unceremoniously within, barely an hour previously. The sergeant received them solemnly, Prestcote standing close by. Linen shirts, crumpled in a furious fist, chausses, tunics, shoes, a few items of spare harness, gloves …

  Prior Robert ran his long hand about the interior to show that it was empty. He leaned to the second. Joscelin stood braced on long, shapely legs, barely attentive, his bold brown face arrogantly smiling. Though his mother, Cadfael thought, watching, would have something pithy to say about the way he handled the shirts she made for him, when he got home. If he got home …

  And how if he did? What followed then for the girl who had been hustled away and shut up somewhere with the elderly maidservant for gaoler? In all this she was the absent witness. No one asked her what she knew or what she thought. She was not a person, merely a piece of valuable merchandise.

  The second bag yielded a handsome gown for best wear, villainously crumpled, sundry belts and baldrics, a blue capuchon, more shirts, a pair of soft shoes, a best pair of chausses, also blue. The mother who had made all these had had an eye fondly to her offspring’s fair coloring and blue eyes. And marvel, there was a bound book in thin, carved wooden covers, the young man’s prayer book. He had said that he was lettered.

  Lastly, Prior Robert plucked out a small roll of fine linen, and began to unwrap it on his palm. He raised a wondering and approving face.

  “It is a silver scallop-shell medal. Whoever owned it made the pilgrimage to Compostella, to the shrine of Saint James.”

  “It is my father’s,” said Joscelin.

  “And that is all. This bag is also empty.”

  Domville started forward suddenly with a crow of triumph. “Ah, but what’s here? There’s something yet in the linen roll—I caught a glint…” He plucked at the dangling end of the cloth, almost wrenching it from the prior’s hand. The silver medallion fell to the ground, some inches more of its wrapping unrolled, and something flashed and fell after, uncoiling like a little golden snake, to lie in a pool of fine yellow links and creamy pearls between the cobbles at Joscelin’s feet.

  He was so dumbfounded that he could not find a word to say, but stood staring at the small, precious thing that damned him. When at last he raised his eyes, and caught the intent gaze of all those other eyes, Domville gleefully content, the sheriff grimly satisfied, the abbot aloof and sad, and everywhere mute accusation, he shook violently, stirring out of his shocked stillness. He cried out passionately that he had not taken it, that it was not he who had put it there. But he uttered his denial only once, recognizing at once its inevitability and its uselessness. He had some mad thought of putting up a fight for it, but met the abbot’s stern, disillusioned eye, and deliberately put away the thought. Not here! He had pledged himself to forswear offense against this place. So here there was not
hing he could do but submit. Once outside the gates it would be another matter, and the surer they were of his submission, the fewer crippling precautions they were likely to take. He stood mute and unresisting as the sergeant and his men closed in upon him.

  They stripped him of sword and dagger, and kept close hold of him by both arms, but because they were many and he was but one, and seemed utterly subdued, they did not trouble to bind him. Domville stood by, vengefully grinning, and did not deign to stoop to pick up his property, leaving it for Simon to hurry forward, abandoning the gray horse’s bridle, to retrieve the collar and hand it to him. He cast a very doubtful and anxious look at Joscelin as he did so, but said never a word. The Picards looked on with evident and malicious satisfaction. A nuisance out of their way, and if Domville pleased, out of everyone’s way, for ever. Such a theft, with the additional odor of petty treason about it, even if he had already been dismissed his lord’s service, could cost a man his neck.

  “I will have the full penalty of law on him,” said Domville, and fixed a commanding stare upon the sheriff.

  “That will be matter for the court,” said Prestcote shortly, and turned to his sergeant. “Have him away to the castle. I must have some talk with Sir Godfrid Picard and the lord abbot, I’ll follow you.”

  The prisoner went with lamb-like meekness, his fair head drooping, his arms lax and submissive in the grip of two brawny men-at-arms. Brothers and guests and servants fell away to leave him passage, and a horrified silence closed after his passing.

  Brother Cadfael was left gazing as numbly as the rest. It was hard indeed to recognize the belligerent youngster who had galloped into the great court so short a time before, or the audacious lover who had penetrated into the enemy’s territory to plot something desperate with a girl too frightened to reach for what her heart desired. Cadfael could not believe in such sudden translations. On impulse he made off towards the gate in haste, to keep the sorry little procession in sight. Behind him as he went he heard Simon Aguilon’s voice asking: “Shall I take his gray back to our stable, sir? We cannot abandon the poor beast, he’s done no wrong.” It was not quite clear from the tone whether he believed the poor beast’s master had done any, but Cadfael doubted it. He could not be the only one who had reservations about that theft.