A Virgin In The Ice Read online

Brother Elyas was lying mute and still, while a younger brother read to him from the life of Saint Remigius. His bruises and distortions were already subsiding, he seemed free from pain, he had taken food during the day, and at the office bell his lips would move soundlessly on the words of the liturgy. But his open eyes dwelt unrecognizingly upon the boy who entered, and wandered away again languidly into the shadowy corners of the room. Yves crept to the bedside on tiptoe, great-eyed.

  “Brother Elyas, here is Yves come to see you. You remember Yves? The boy you met at Cleobury, and parted from at Foxwood.”

  No, nothing, nothing but the faint tremor of desperate anxiety troubling the patient face. Yves ventured close, and timidly laid his hand over the long, lax hand that lay upon the covers, but it remained chill and unresponsive under his touch.

  “I am sorry you have been hurt. We walked together those few miles. I wish we had kept your company all the way…”

  Brother Elyas stared and quivered, shaking his head helplessly.

  “No, let him be,” said Cadfael, sighing. “If we press him he grows agitated. No matter, he has time. Only let his body revive as it is doing, and memory can wait. It was worth the trying, but he is not ready for us yet. Come, you’re dropping with sleep, let’s get you safely into your bed.”

  *

  They arose at dawn, Cadfael and Hugh and his men, and went out into a world which had again changed its shape in the night, hillocks levelled and hollows filled in, and a spume of fine snow waving like a languid plume from every crest, in the subsiding winds. They took axes with them, and a litter of leather thongs strung between two poles, and a linen cloth to cover her, and they went in dour silence, none of them with anything to say until words were to the point for the grim work in hand. The fall had stopped at the coming of daylight, as it had now ever since that first night when Yves had set off doggedly to trail his errant sister. Iron frost had begun the next night, and that same night some nocturnal beast had ravished and murdered the girl they went out now to seek, for the ice had taken her to itself very shortly after she had been put into an already congealing stream. Of that Cadfael was certain.

  They found her, after some questing and probing in new snow, swept the fresh fall from the ice, and looked down upon her, a girl in a mirror, a girl spun from glass.

  “Good God!” said Hugh in awe. “She’s younger than the boy!” So slight, so childlike, did the shadowy form appear.

  But they were there, perforce, to break her rest and take her away for Christian burial, though it seemed almost a violation to shatter the smoothness of the ice that encase her. They did it with care, well aside from the delicate, imprisoned flesh, and it proved hard work enough. For all the bite of the frost, they were sweating when they hoisted out heavily the girl and her cold coffin, laid her like a piece of statuary in the thongs of the litter, covered her with the linen cloth, and carried her slowly back to Bromfield. Not a drop fell from the ice until they had it stowed privately in the chill, bare mortuary of the priory. Then the glittering edges began to soften and slide, and drip into the channel where the water flowed away from the washing of the dead.

  The girl lay remote and pale within her lucid shroud, and yet grew steadily more human and closer to life, to pain and pity and violence, and all the mortal lot of mankind. Cadfael dared not leave the place for long, because the boy Yves was now up and active, and inquisitive about everything, and no one could guess where he would appear next. He was well brought up, and his manners were charming, but with his inbred conviction of privilege and his very proper thirteen-year-old energy, he might yet prove a hazard.

  It was past ten, and High Mass in progress, when the shell of ice had dwindled so far that the girl began to emerge, the tips of thin, pale fingers and stretched toes, her nose, as yet only a minute pearl, and the first curling strands of hair, a fine lace on either side her forehead. It was those curls that first caught Cadfael’s acute attention. For they were short. He wound a few fine threads on his finger, and they made but a turn and a half. And they were no darker than dark gold, and would be even fairer as they dried. Then he bent to the calm stare of her open eyes, still thinly veiled with ice. Their color seemed to him the soft, dim purple of irises, or the darkest grey of lavender flowers.

  The face emerged as Mass ended. After the air touched her, bruises began to darken on cheek and mouth. The tips of her small breasts broke the glaze over them. And now Cadfael could see clearly the smear that darkened her flesh and her linen there, on the right side, a reddish mark like a graze, faintly mottled from shoulder to breast. He knew the traces of blood. The ice had taken her before the stilling water could wash the stain away. Now it might pale as the remaining ice thawed, but he would know how it had lain, and where to look for the source.

  Well before noon she was freed of her shell, and softening into his hands, slender and young, her small, shapely head covered all over with an aureole of short bronze curls, like an angel in an Annunciation. Cadfael went to fetch Prior Leonard, and they cared for her together, not yet to wash her body, not until Hugh Beringar had viewed it, but to compose her worthily in her everlasting stillness. To the throat they covered her with a linen sheet, and made her ready to be seen.

  Hugh came, and stood by her silently. Eighteen could well be her age, so white and slim and tranquil, gone far beyond them. And beautiful, as reported? Yes, that she was. But was this the dark, headstrong, spoiled daughter of the nobility, who had insisted on her own way in despite of the times, the winter, the war and all?

  “Look!” said Cadfael, and turned back the linen to show the crumpled folds of her shift, just as they had emerged from the ice. The dull, reddish smear speckled her right shoulder, the edge of her shift, and the creases over her right breast.

  “Stabbed?” said Hugh, looking up into Cadfael’s face.

  “There is no wound. See now!” He drew down the linen and showed the flesh beneath. Only a smudge or two showed on her pale skin. He wiped them away, and she shone white without blemish. “Certainly not stabbed. The night frost that took her closed in very quickly, and preserved these marks, faint as they are. But she did not bleed. Or if she did,” he added bleakly, “it was not from knife-wounds, and not there. More likely she fought him—him or them, such wolves hunt happiest in packs!—and drew blood. A clawed face, it might be, or a hand or wrist as she tried to force him off. Bear it in mind, Hugh, as I will also.” He covered her again reverently. The alabaster face looked up from veiled eyes into the vault, supremely unmoved, and her head of clipped curls was beginning to shine like a halo as it dried.

  “She begins to bruise,” said Hugh, and drew a fingertip over her cheekbone and down to the faint discolorations round her lips. “But her throat is unmarked. She was not strangled.”

  “Smothered, surely, in the act of ravishment.”

  They were all three so intent upon the dead girl that they had not heard the footsteps that approached the closed door of the room, and even had they been listening, the footsteps were light enough to be missed, though they came briskly and without conceal. The first they knew of the boy’s coming was the white burst of reflected light from the snow, as the door was opened wide to the wall, and Yves marched over the threshold with the innocent boldness of his kind. No creeping ingratiatingly through a narrow chink for him, nothing he did was done by half-measures. The abruptness with which they all whirled upon him, and their frowning consternation gave him sharp pause and mild offense. Both Hugh and Prior Leonard stepped quickly between him and the trestle on which the body lay.

  “You should not be here, child,” said the prior, flustered.

  “Why should I not, Father? No one has told me I should be at fault. I was looking for Brother Cadfael.”

  “Brother Cadfael will come out to you in a little while. Go back to the guest-hall and wait for him there…”

  It was late to ward him off, he had seen, beyond the sheltering shoulders, enough to tell him what lay behind. The linen sheet, quic
kly drawn up, the unmistakable shape, and one glimpse of short, bright hair where the linen, too hastily drawn, had folded back on itself. His face grew still and wary, his eyes large, and his tongue was silenced.

  The prior laid a hand gently on his shoulder and made to turn him back to the doorway. “Come, you and I will go together. Whatever is to be told, you shall hear later, but leave it now.”

  Yves stood his ground, and went on staring.

  “No,” said Cadfael unexpectedly, “let him come.” He came out from behind the trestle, and took a step or two towards the boy. “Yves, you are a sensible man, no need to pretend to you, after your travels, that violence and danger and cruelty do not exist, and men do not die. We have here a dead body, not known to us. I would have you look at it, if you will, and say if you know this face. You need not fear anything ill to see.”

  The boy drew near steadily and with set face, and eyed the shrouded form with nothing worse than awe. Doubtful if it had ever entered his head, thought Cadfael, that this might be his sister, or indeed a woman. He had seen the dilated eyes fix on the short, curling hair; it was a young man Yves expected. Nevertheless, Cadfael would have approached this somewhat differently if he had not been certain already, in his own mind, that this dead girl, whoever she might be, was not Ermina Hugonin. Beyond that he had only a pitiful suspicion. But Yves would know.

  He drew down the sheet from her face. The boy’s hands, clenched together before him, tightened abruptly. He drew in breath hard, but made no other sound for a long moment. He shook a little, but not much. The wide-eyed stare he raised to Cadfael’s questioning face was one of shocked bewilderment, almost of disbelief.

  “But how is this possible? I thought… I don’t understand! She…” He gave up, shaking his head violently, and hung over her again in fascinated pity and wonder. “I do know her, of course I do, but how can she be here, and dead? This is Sister Hilaria, who came with us from Worcester.”

  Chapter 5

  BETWEEN THEM THEY COAXED and shooed him away across the snowy court. Yves went still in his daze, frowning helplessly over this sudden and inexplicable reappearance in another place of someone he had left safe under a friendly roof some miles away. He was too shaken and puzzled at first to realize fully the meaning of what he had seen, but halfway to the guest-hall it hit him like a blow on the head. He balked, gulped breath in a great sob, and startled himself, if no one else, by bursting into tears. Prior Leonard would have clucked over him like a dismayed hen, but Cadfael clapped him briskly on the shoulder, and said practically:

  “Bear up, my heart, for we’re going to need you. We have a malefactor to trace now, and a wrong to avenge, and who but you can lead us straight to the place where you left her? Where else should we start?”

  The fit passed as abruptly as it had begun. Yves scrubbed at his smudged cheeks hastily with his sleeve, and looked round alertly enough to see what he could read in Hugh Beringar’s face. In Hugh the authority lay. The role of the cloistered was to shelter and counsel and offer prayers, but justice and law were the business of the sheriff. Yves was not a baron’s heir for nothing, he knew all about the hierarchies.

  “That’s true, I can take you straight from Foxwood to John Druel’s holding, it lies higher than Cleeton village.” He caught eagerly at Hugh’s sleeve, wise enough to ask nicely instead of demanding. “May I go with you and show the way?”

  “You may, if you’ll stay close and do all as you’re bidden.” Hugh was already committed, Cadfael had seen to that. But far better for the boy to be out in men’s company, and active, than to sit fretting here alone. “We’ll find you a pony your size. Run, then, get your cloak and come after us to the stables.”

  Yves ran, restored by the prospect of doing something to the purpose. Beringar looked after him thoughtfully. “Go with him, Father Prior, if you will, see that he has some food with him, for it may be a long day, and no matter how large a dinner he’s eaten half an hour ago, he’ll be hungry before night.” And to Cadfael he said, as they turned together towards the stables: “You, I know, will do whatever you fancy doing, and I’m always glad of your company, if your charges, live and dead, can spare you. But you’ve had some hard riding these last days…”

  “For an ageing man,” said Cadfael.

  “As well I did not say so! I doubt you could outlast me, for all your great burden of years. What of Brother Elyas, though?”

  “He needs no more from me, now, than a visit or two each day, to see that nothing’s turned back for him and gone amiss. His body is recovering well. And as for the part of his mind that’s astray, my being here won’t cure it. It will come back of itself one day, or it will cease to be missed. He’s well looked after. As she was not!” he said sadly.

  “How did you know,” asked Hugh, “that it could not be the child’s sister?”

  “The cropped hair, first. A month now since they left Worcester, long enough to provide her that halo we have seen. Why should the other girl clip her locks? And then, the coloring. Ermina, so Herward said, is almost black of hair and eye, darker brown than her brother. So is not this lady. And they did say, as I remember, the nun was also young, no more than five and twenty or so. No, I was sure he was safe from that worst threat. Thus far!” said Cadfael soberly. “Now we have to find her, and make sure he never shall have to uncover another known face and set a name to it. I have the same obligations as you, and I’m coming with you.”

  “Go get yourself booted and ready, then,” said Hugh, without surprise, “and I’ll saddle you one of my own remounts. I came well prepared for any tangles you might get me into. I know you of old.”

  *

  To Foxwood was a fairly easy ride, being a used highway, but from Foxwood they climbed by even higher ways, and on tracks more broken and steep. The vast flank of Titterstone Clee rose here to a bleak plateau, with the highest ground towering over them on the left hand, in cloud that dropped lower as the afternoon passed its peak. Yves rode close at Hugh’s side, intent and important.

  “We can leave the village away on our right, the holding lies above here. Over this ridge there’s a bowl of fields John has, and a sheep-pen up the hill.”

  Hugh reined in suddenly, and sat with head raised, sniffing the air with stretched nostrils. “Are you getting the same waft I have in my nose? What should a husbandman be burning at this end of the year?”

  The faint but ominous stink hung in the air, stirred by a rising wind. One of the men-at-arms at Beringar’s back said with certainty: “Three or four days old, and snowed over, but I smell timber.”

  Hugh spurred forward up the climbing track, between bushes banked with snow, and up to the crest where the ground declined into the hollow. In the sheltered bowl trees grew, providing a wind-break for byre and barn and house, and partly screening the holding from view. They could see the stone walls of the sheep-pen on the rising ground beyond, but not until they had wound their way through the first belt of trees did John Druel’s tenant-farm reveal itself to their appalled sight. Yves uttered a muted howl of dismay, and reached to clutch at Brother Cadfael’s arm.

  The corner-posts of blackened buildings stood stark out of the drifts of snow, the timbers of roof and barn, what remained of them, jutted in charred ruin where they had fallen. A desolation in which nothing moved, nothing lived, even the near-by trees shrivelled and brown. The Druel homestead was emptied of livestock, stores and people, and burned to the ground.

  They threaded the forlorn wreckage in grim silence, Hugh’s eyes intent on every detail. The iron frost had prevented worse stinks than burning, for in the littered yard they found the hacked bodies of two of the household dogs. Though some two or three fresh falls of snow had covered the traces since the holocaust, it seemed that a party of raiders at least ten or twelve strong had committed this outrage, driving off the sheep and the household cow, emptying the bam, and probably the house, too, of anything portable, stringing the fowls together by the legs, for scattered feathers still bl
ew about the ground and clung to the blackened beams.

  Hugh dismounted, and clambered in among the wreckage of the house and barns. His men were quartering all the ground within and without the enclosing wall, probing the drifts.

  “They’ve killed them,” said Yves in a small, hollow voice. “John and his wife, and Peter, and the shepherd—killed them all, or carried them off, as they carried off Sister Hilaria.”

  “Hush!” said Cadfael. “Never jump to meet the worst until you’ve looked about you well. You know what they’re looking for?” The searchers were turning to exchange looks and shrugs, and drawing together again to the yard. “Bodies! And they’ve found none. Only the dogs, poor creatures. They did their proper work, and gave the alarm. Now we’d best hope they gave it in time.”

  Hugh came picking his way back from the barn, beating soiled palms together. “No dead here to find. Either they had warning enough to run for it, or they’ve been dragged off with the raiders. And I doubt if masterless men living wild would bother with captives. Kill they might, but take prisoners, of this simple kind, that I doubt. But I wonder which way they came? As we did, or by tracks of their own, along the hillside here above? If there were no more than ten of them, they’d keep to their measure, and the village might be too strong to tempt them.”

  “There was one sheep slaughtered by the fold,” said his sergeant, back from the hillside. “There’s a traverse comes along the slope there, that might be their path if they wanted to avoid Cleeton and pick off some meat less well defended.”

  “Then Druel may have got his family away towards the village.” Hugh pondered, frowning at the drifts that had covered all traces of coming and going of men and beasts. “If the dogs gave tongue for the sheep, there may have been time. Let’s at least go and ask in the village what they know of it. We may yet find them all alive,” he said, clapping Yves reassuringly on the shoulder, “even if they’ve lost their home and goods.”