One Corpse Too Many bc-2 Read online

  It was mid-afternoon, the time of work for the brothers, play for the boys and the novices, once their limited tasks were done. They came down to the church without meeting any but a few half-grown boys at play, and entered the cool dimness within.

  The mysterious young man from the castle ditch lay austerely shrouded on his bier in the choir end of the nave, his head and face uncovered. Dim but pure light fell upon him; it needed only a few minutes to get accustomed to the soft interior glow in this summer afternoon, and he shone clear to view. Godith stood beside him and gazed in silence. They were alone there, but for him, and they could speak, in low voices. But when Cadfael asked softly: “Do you know him?” he was already sure of the answer.

  A fine thread of a whisper beside him said: “Yes.”

  “Come!” He led her out as softly as they had come. In the sunlight he heard her draw breath very deep and long. She made no other comment until they were secure together in the herbarium, in the drowning summer sweetness, sitting in the shade of the hut.

  “Well, who is he, this young fellow who troubles both you and me?”

  “His name,” she said, very low and wonderingly, “is Nicholas Faintree. I’ve known him, by fits and starts, since I was twelve years old. He is a squire of FitzAlan’s, from one of his northern manors, he’s ridden courier for his lord several times in the last few years. He would not be much known in Shrewsbury, no. If he was waylaid and murdered here, he must have been on his lord’s business. But FitzAlan’s business was almost finished in these parts.” She hugged her head between her hands, and thought passionately. “There are some in Shrewsbury could have named him for you, you know, if they had reason to come looking for men of their own. I know of some who may be able to tell you what he was doing here that day and that night. If you can be sure no ill will come to them?”

  “Never by me,” said Cadfael, “that I promise.”

  “There’s my nurse, the one who brought me here and called me her nephew. Petronilla served my family all her grown life, until she married late, too late for children of her own, and she married a good friend to FitzAlan’s house and ours, Edric Flesher, the chief of the butchers’ guild in town. The two of them were close in all the plans when FitzAlan declared for the empress Maud. If you go to them from me,” she said confidently, “they’ll tell you anything they know. You’ll know the shop, it has the sign of the boar’s head, in the butchers’ row.”

  Cadfael scrubbed thoughtfully at his nose. “If I borrow the abbot’s mule, I can make better speed, and spare my legs, too. There’ll be no keeping the king waiting, but on the way back I can halt at the shop. Give me some token, to show you trust me, and they can do as much without fear.”

  “Petronilla can read, and knows my hand. I’ll write you a line to her, if you’ll lend me a little leaf of vellum, a mere corner will do.” She was alight with ardour, as intent as he. “He was a merry person, Nicholas, he never did harm to anyone, that I know, and he was never out of temper. He laughed a great deal… . But if you tell the king he was of the opposite party, he won’t care to pursue the murderer, will he? He’ll call it a just fate, and bid you leave well alone.”

  “I shall tell the king,” said Cadfael, “that we have a man plainly murdered, and the method and time we know, but not the place or the reason. I will also tell him that we have a name for him — it’s a modest name enough, it can mean nothing to Stephen. As at this moment there’s no more to tell, for I know no more. And even if the king should shrug it off and bid me let things lie, I shall not do it. By my means or God’s means, or the both of us together, Nicholas Faintree shall have justice before I let this matter rest.”

  Having the loan of the abbot’s own mule, Brother Cadfael took with him in this errand the good cloth garments Aline had entrusted to him. It was his way to carry out at once whatever tasks fell him, rather than put them off until the morrow, and there were beggars enough on his way through the town. The hose he gave to an elderly man with eyes whitened over with thick cauls, who sat with stick beside him and palm extended in the shade of the town gate. He looked of a suitable figure, and was in much-patched and threadbare nethers that would certainly fall apart very soon. The good brown cotte went to a frail creature no more than twenty years old who begged at the high cross, a poor feeble-wit with hanging lip and a palsied shake, who had a tiny old woman holding him by the hand and caring for him jealously. Her shrill blessings followed Cadfael down towards the castle gate. The cloak he still had folded before him when he came to the guard-post of the king’s camp, and saw Lame Osbern’s little wooden trolley tucked into the bole of a tree close by, and marked the useless, withered legs, and the hands callused and muscular from dragging all that dead weight about by force. His wooden pattens lay beside him in the grass. Seeing a frocked monk approaching on a good riding mule, Osbern seized them and propelled himself forward into Cadfael’s path. And it was wonderful how fast he could move, over short distances and with intervals for rest, but all the same so immobilised a creature, half his body inert, must suffer cold in even the milder nights, and in the winter terribly.

  “Good brother,” coaxed Osbern, “spare an alms for a poor cripple, and God will reward you!”

  “So I will, friend,” said Cadfael, “and better than a small coin, too. And you may say a prayer for a gentle lady who sends it to you by my hand.” And he unfolded from the saddle before him, and dropped into the startled, malformed hands, Giles Siward’s cloak.

  “You did right to report truly what you found,” said the king consideringly. “Small wonder that my castellan did not make the same discovery, he had his hands full. You say this man was taken from behind by stealth, with a strangler’s cord? It’s a footpad’s way, and foul. And above all, to cast his victim in among my executed enemies to cover the crime — that I will not bear! How dared he make me and my officers his accomplices! That I count an affront to the crown, and for that alone I would wish the felon taken and judged. And the young man’s name — Faintree, you said?”

  “Nicholas Faintree. So I was told by one who came and saw him, where we had laid him in the church. He comes from a family in the north of the county. But that is all I know of him.”

  “It is possible,” reflected the king hopefully, “that he had ridden to Shrewsbury to seek service with us. Several such young men from north of the county have joined us here.”

  “It is possible,” agreed Cadfael gravely; for all things are possible, and men do turn their coats.

  “And to be cut off by some forest thief for what he carried — it happens! I wish I could say our roads are safe, out in this new anarchy, God knows, I dare not claim it. Well, you may pursue such enquiries as can be made into this matter, if that’s your wish, and call upon my sheriff to do justice if the murderer can be found. He knows my will. I do not like being made use of to shield so mean a crime.”

  And that was truth, and the heart of the matter for him, and perhaps it would not have changed his attitude, thought Cadfael, even if he had known that Faintree was FitzAlan’s squire and courier, even if it were proved, as so far it certainly was not, that he was on FitzAlan’s rebellious business when he died. By all the signs, there would be plenty of killing in Stephen’s realm in the near future, and he would not lose his sleep over most of it, but to have a killer-by-stealth creeping for cover into his shadow, that he would take as a deadly insult to himself, and avenge accordingly. Energy and lethargy, generosity and spite, shrewd action and incomprehensible inaction, would always alternate and startle in King Stephen. But somewhere within that tall, comely, simple-minded person there was a gram of nobility hidden.

  “I accept and value your Grace’s support,” said Brother Cadfael truthfully, “and I will do my best to see justice done. A man cannot lay down and abandon the duty God has placed in his hands. Of this young man I know only his name, and the appearance of his person, which is open and innocent, and that he was accused of no crime, and no man has complained of wrong by
him, and he is dead unjustly. I think this as unpleasing to your Grace as ever it can be to me. If I can right it, so I will.”

  At the sign of the boar’s head in the butcher’s row he was received with the common wary civility any citizen would show to a monk of the abbey. Petronilla, rounded and comfortable and grey, bade him in and would have offered all the small attentions that provide a wall between suspicious people, if he had not at once given her the worn and much-used leaf of vellum on which Godith had, somewhat cautiously and laboriously, inscribed her trust in the messenger, and her name. Petronilla peered and flushed with pleasure, and looked up at this elderly, solid, homely brown monk through blissful tears.

  “The lamb, she’s managing well, then, my girl? And you taking good care of her! Here she says it, I know that scrawl, I learned to write with her. I had her almost from birth, the darling, and she the only one, more’s the pity, she should have had brothers and sisters. It was why I wanted to do everything with her, even the letters, to be by her whatever she needed. Sit down, brother, sit down and tell me of her, if she’s well, if she needs anything I can send her by you. Oh, and, brother, how are we to get her safely away? Can she stay with you, if it runs to weeks?”

  When Cadfael could wedge a word or two into the flow he told her how her nurseling was faring, and how he woul4 see to it that she continued to fare. It had not occurred to him until then what a way the girl had of taking hold of hearts, without at all designing it. By the time Edric Flesher came in from a cautious skirmish through the town, to see how the land lay, Cadfael was firmly established in Petronilla’s favour, and vouched for as a friend to be trusted.

  Edric settled his solid bulk into a broad chair, and said with a gusty breath of cautious relief: “Tomorrow I’ll open the shop. We’re fortunate! Ask me, he rues the vengeance he took for those he failed to capture. He’s called off all pillage here, and for once he’s enforcing it. If only his claims were just, and he had more spine in his body, I think I’d be for him. And to look like a hero, and be none, that’s hard on a man.” He gathered his great legs under him, and looked at his wife, and then, longer, at Cadfael. “She says you have the girl’s good word, and that’s enough. Name your need, and if we have it, it’s yours.”

  “For the girl,” said Cadfael briskly, “I will keep her safe as long as need be, and when the right chance offers, I’ll get her away to where she should be. For my need, yes, there you may help me. We have in the abbey church, and we shall bury there tomorrow, a young man you may know, murdered on the night after the castle fell, the night the prisoners were hanged and thrown into the ditch. But he was killed elsewhere, and thrown among the rest to have him away into the ground unquestioned. I can tell you how he died, and when. I cannot tell you where, or why, or who did this thing. But Godith tells me that his name is Nicholas Faintree, and he was a squire of FitzAlan.”

  All this he let fall between them in so many words, and heard and felt their silence. Certainly there were things they knew, and equally certainly this death they had not known, and it struck at them like a mortal blow.

  “One more thing I may tell you,” he said. “I intend to have the truth out into the open concerning this thing, and see him avenged. And more, I have the king’s word to pursue the murderer. He likes the deed no more than I like it.”

  After a long moment Edric asked: “There was only one, dead after this fashion? No second?”

  “Should there have been? Is not one enough?”

  “There were two,” said Edric harshly. “Two who set out together upon the same errand. How did this death come to light? It seems you are the only man who knows.”

  Brother Cadfael sat back and told them all, without haste. If he had missed Vespers, so be it. He valued and respected his duties, but if they clashed, he knew which way he must go. Godith would not stir from her safe solitude without him, not until her evening schooling.

  “Now,” he said, “you had better tell me. I have Godith to protect, and Faintree to avenge, and I mean to do both as best I can.”

  The two of them exchanged glances, and understood each other. It was the man who took up the tale.

  “A week before the castle and the town fell, with FitzAlan’s family already away, and our plans made to place the girl with your abbey in hiding, FitzAlan also took thought for the end, if he died. He never ran until they broke in at the gates, you know that? By the skin of his teeth he got away, swam the river with Adeney at his shoulder, and got clear. God be thanked! But the day before the end he made provision for whether he lived or died. His whole treasury had been left with us here, he wanted it to reach the empress if he were slain. That day we moved it out into Frankwell, to a garden I hold there, so that there need be no bridge to pass if we had to convey it away at short notice. And we fixed a signal. If any of his party came with a certain token — a trifle it was, a drawing, but private to us who knew — they should be shown where the treasury was, provided with horses, all they might need, and put over there to pick up the valuables and make their break by night.”

  “And so it was done?” said Cadfael.

  “On the morning of the fall. It came so early, and in such force, we’d left it all but too late. Two of them came. We sent them over the bridge to wait for night. What could they have done by daylight?”

  “Tell me more. What time did these two come to you that morning, what had they to say, how did they get their orders? How many may have known what was toward? How many would have known the way they would take? When did you last see them both alive?”

  “They came just at dawn. We could hear the din by then, the assault had begun. They had the parchment leaf that was the signal, the head of a saint drawn in ink. They said there had been a council the night before, and FitzAlan had said then he would have them go the following day, whatever happened and whether he lived or no, get the treasury away safe to the empress, for her use in defending her right.”

  “Then all who were at that council would know those two would be on the road the following night, as soon as it was dark enough. Would they also know the road? Did they know where the treasury was hidden?”

  “No, where we had put it, beyond that it was in Frankwell, no one had been told. Only FitzAlan and I knew that. Those two squires had to come to me.”

  “Then any who had ill designs on the treasury, even if they knew the time of its removal, could not go and get it for themselves, they could only waylay it on the road. If all those officers close to FitzAlan knew that it was to be taken westward into Wales from Frankwell, there’d be no doubt about the road. For the first mile and more there is but one, by reason of the coils of the river on either side.”

  “You are thinking that one of those who knew thought to get the gold for himself, by murder?” said Edric. “One of FitzAlan’s own men? I cannot believe it! And surely all, or most, stayed to the end, and died. Two men riding by night could well be waylaid by pure chance, by men living wild in the forest …”

  “Within a mile of the town walls? Don’t forget, whoever killed this lad did so close enough to Shrewsbury castle to have ample time and means to take his body and toss it among all those others in the ditch, long before the night was over. Knowing very well that all those others would be there. Well, so they came, they showed their credentials, they told you the plan had been made the previous evening, come what might. But what came, came earlier and more fiercely than anyone had expected, and all done in haste. Then what? You went with them over to Frankwell?”

  “I did. I have a garden and a barn there, where they and their horses lay in hiding until dark. The valuables were packed into two pairs of saddlebags–-one horse with his rider and that load would have been overdone-in a cavity in a dry well on my land there. I saw them safe under cover, and left them there about nine in the morning.”

  “And at what time would they venture to start?”

  “Not until full dark. And do you truly tell me Faintree was murdered, soon after they set out?”<
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  “Past doubt he was. Had it been done miles away, he would have been disposed of some other way. This was planned, and ingenious. But not ingenious enough. You knew Faintree well — or so Godith gave me to think. Who was the other? Did you also know him?”

  Heavily and slowly, Edric said, “No! It seemed to me that Nicholas knew him well enough, they were familiar together like good comrades, but Nicholas was one open to any new friend. I had never seen this lad before. He was from another of FitzAlan’s northern manors. He gave his name as Torold Blund.”

  They had told him all they knew, and something more than had been said in words. Edric’s brooding frown spoke for him. The young man they knew and trusted was dead, the one they did not know vanished, and with him FitzAlan’s valuables, plate and coin and jewellery, intended for the empress’s coffers. Enough to tempt any man. The murderer clearly knew all he needed to know in order to get possession of that hoard; and who could have known half so well as the second courier himself? Another might certainly waylay the prize on the road. Torold Blund need not even have waited for that. Those two had been in hiding together all that day in Edric’s barn. It was possible that Nicholas Faintree had never left it until he was dead, draped over a horse for the short ride back to the castle ditch, before two horses with one rider set out westward into Wales.

  “There was one more thing happened that day,” said Petronilla, as Cadfael rose to take his leave. “About two of the clock, after the king’s men had manned both bridges and dropped the draw-bridge, he came — Hugh Beringar, he that was betrothed to my girl from years back — making pretence to be all concern for her, and asking where he could find her. Tell him? No, what do you take me for? I told him she’d been taken away a good week before the town fell, and we were not told where, but I thought she was far away by now, and safe out of Stephen’s country. Right well we knew he must have come to us with Stephen’s authority, or he would never have been let through so soon. He’d been to the king’s camp before ever he came hunting for my Godith, and it’s not for love he’s searching for her. She’s worth a fat commission, as bait for her father, if not for FitzAlan himself. Don’t let my lamb get within his sight, for I hear he’s living in the abbey now.”