On the twenty-sixth day of June Fortunata rose early, and with her first waking thought recalled that it was the day of Aldwin’s funeral. It was taken for granted that the entire household would attend, so much was owed to him, for many reasons, years of service, undistinguished but conscientious, years of familiarity with his harmless, disconsolate figure about the place, and the pity and the vague sense of having somehow failed him, now that he had come to so unexpected an end. And the last words she had ever said to him were a reproach! Deserved, perhaps, but now, less reasonably, reproaching her.
Poor Aldwin! He had never made the most of his blessings, always feared their loss, like a miser with his gold. And he had done a terrible thing to Elave in his haunting fear of being discarded. But he had not deserved to be stabbed from behind and cast into the river, and she had him somehow on her conscience in spite of her anxiety and dread for Elave, whom he had injured. On this of all mornings he filled Fortunata’s mind, and drove her on along a road she was reluctant to take. But if justice is to be denied to the inadequate, grudging and sad, to whom then is it due?
Early as she was, it seemed that someone else was earlier. The shop would remain closed all this day, shuttered and dim, so there was no occasion for Jevan to be up so early, but he had risen and gone out before Fortunata came down into the hall.
‘He’s off to his workshop,’ said Margaret, when Fortunata asked after him. ‘He has some fresh skins to put into the river to soak, but he’ll be back in good time for poor Aldwin’s funeral. Were you wanting him?’
‘No, nothing that won’t wait,’ said Fortunata. ‘I missed him, that’s all.’
She was glad that the household was fully occupied with the preparations for one more memorial gathering, so soon after the first, the evening of Uncle William’s wake when this whole cycle of misfortune had begun. Margaret and the maid were busy in the kitchen, Girard, as soon as he had broken his fast, was out in the yard arranging Aldwin’s last dignified transit to the church he had neglected in life. Fortunata went into the shuttered shop, and without more light than filtered through the joints of the shutters, began swiftly and silently to search along the shelves among the array of uncut skins, tools, every corner of a neat, sparsely furnished room. Everything was open to view. She had scarcely expected to find anything alien in here, and did not spend much time on it. She closed the door again upon the shadowy interior, and went back into the empty hall, and up the staircase to Jevan’s bedchamber, over the entry from the street.
Perhaps he had forgotten that she had known from infancy where everything in this house was kept, or overlooked the fact that even those details which had never interested her before might be of grave importance now. She had not yet given him any cause to reflect on such matters, and she was praying inwardly at this moment that she never need give him cause. Whatever she did now, she was going to feel guilt, but that she could bear, since she must. The haunting uncertainty she could not bear.
Never before, Jevan had said, had he troubled to lock up his manuscripts, never until her precious dower box was laid among them. And that might well have been a light, affectionate gesture of praise and thanks to flatter her, but for the fact that he had indeed turned the key on her gift when he was alone in the room at night. She knew it, even before she laid hand to the lid to raise it, and found it locked. Now, if he had kept his keys on his person when he left the house, she could go no further along this fearful road. But he had seen no need for that, for they were there in their usual place, on a hook inside the chest where his clothes were kept, in a corner of the room. Her hand shook as she selected the smallest, and metal grated acidly against metal before she could insert it in the lock of the book-chest.
She raised the lid, and kneeled motionless beside the chest, gripping the carved edge with both hands, so hard that her fingers stiffened and ached with tension. It needed only one glance, not the long, dismayed stare she fixed upon the interior, the serried spines upturned, the vacant space at one end. There was no dark casket there, no great-eyed, round-browed ivory saint returning her wide stare. Whitest of the pale spines, cheek by jowl with its one red-dyed companion, Jevan’s treasured French breviary, bought from some careful thief or trader in stolen goods at Saint Peter’s Fair a couple of years ago, rested in its accustomed place among the others, deprived of its new and sumptuous casket.
The book remained, the box into which it fitted so harmoniously had been removed, and Fortunata could think of only one reason, and only one place where it could have gone.
She closed the lid in a sudden spurt of haste and panic, and turned the key, and a tress of her hair caught in the fretted edge of the lock, and she tugged it loose as she rose, in a fever to escape from this room, and take refuge elsewhere among ordinary events and innocent people, from the knowledge she wished she had let lie, but now could not unknow, and the path on to which she had stepped hoping it would fade from under her feet, and now must follow to its end.
*
Aldwin was carried to his burial at mid-morning, escorted by Girard of Lythwood and all his household, and guided into the next world with all solemnity by Father Elias, satisfied now of his parishioner’s credentials and relieved of all his former doubts. Fortunata stood beside Jevan at the graveside, and felt the counter-currents of pity and horror tearing her mind between them as his sleeve brushed hers. She had watched him make one among those carrying the bier, scatter a handful of earth into the grave, and gaze down into the dark pit with austere and composed face as the clods fell dully and covered the dead. A life lived in discouragement and pessimism might not seem much to lose, but when it is snatched away by murder the offence and the deprivation show as monstrous.
So there went Aldwin out of this world, which had never seen fit to content him, and home went Girard and his family, having done their duty by their unfortunate dependent. They were all quiet at table, but the gap Aldwin had left was narrow at best, and would soon close up like a trivial wound, to leave no scar.
Fortunata cleared away the dishes, and went into the kitchen to help wash the pots after dinner. She could not be sure whether she was delaying what she knew she must do out of care to arouse no special interest in her movements, or out of desperate longing not to do it at all. But in the end she could not leave it unfinished. She might yet be agonising needlessly. There might be a good answer, even now, and if she did not finish what she had begun she might never find it out. Truth is a terrible compulsion.
She crossed the yard and slipped unnoticed into the shuttered shop. The key of the Frankwell workshop was dangling in its proper place, where Jevan had hung it openly and serenely when he returned from his early morning expedition. Fortunata took it down, and hid it in the bodice of her gown.
‘I’m going down to the abbey,’ she said, looking in at the hall door, ‘to see if they’ll let me see Elave again. Or at least to find out if anything has happened yet. The bishop must surely send a message any day now, Coventry is not so far.’
No one objected, no one offered to go with her. No doubt they felt that after the morning’s preoccupation with death it would be the best thing in the world for her to go out into the summer afternoon, and turn her thoughts, however anxious they might be, towards life and youth.
Since only the eyes of the shop, blind and shuttered now, looked out upon the street, the house windows being all in the upright of the L and looking out upon the long strip of yard and garden, no one saw her emerge from the passageway and turn, not left towards the town gate and the abbey, but right, towards the western bridge and the suburb of Frankwell.
*
Brother Cadfael, not usually given to hesitation, had spent the entire morning and an hour of the early afternoon pondering the events of the previous day, and trying to determine how much of what was troubling his mind was knowledge, and how much was wild speculation. Certainly at some stage Fortunata’s box had contained a book, and by the traces left it had been so used for a very considerable time, to leave that faint lavender bloom on the lining, and a frayed, wafer-thin wisp of purple leather trapped in a corner between lining and wood. Gold leaf is applied over glue, and then burnished, and though the sheets are too frail and fine to be handled safely out in the cloister, or in any trace of wind, properly finished gilding is very durable. It would take much use and frequent lifting in and out of a well-fitted container, to fret away even those few infinitesimal grains of gold. The more he thought of it the more he felt sure that somewhere there was a book meant for this casket, and that they had kept company together for a century or more. If they had parted long ago, the book perhaps stolen, raided away into paynim hands, even destroyed, then what had been the nature of the dowry old William had sent to his foster daughter? For he was certain, as Elave was now certain, that it had not been those six felt bags of silver pence.
And supposing it had indeed still been the book, secure in its beautiful coffin, carried across half the world unhandled and unread, for its value to a girl when she had reached marriageable age? Value as something to be sold, and sold shrewdly, to bring in the best profit. Books have another value, to those who have fallen for ever and wholly in love with them. There are those who would cheat for them, steal for them, lie for them, even if then they could never show nor boast of their treasures to any other creature. Kill for them? It was not impossible.
But that was surely looking far beyond the present case, for where was the connection? Who threatened? Who stood in the way? Not a barely literate clerk, who certainly cared not at all about exquisite manuscripts worked long ago by consummate artists.
Abruptly, and somewhat to his own surprise, for he was unaware of the intention forming, Cadfael stopped fretting out small weeds from between his herb beds, put away his hoe, and went to look for Brother Winfrid, weeding by hand in the vegetable garden.
‘Son, I have an errand to do, if Father Abbot allows. I should be back before Vespers, but if I come late, see everything in order and close up my workshop for me before you go.’
Brother Winfrid straightened up to his full brawny country height for a moment to acknowledge his orders, with one large fist full of the greenery he had uprooted, ‘I will. Is there anything within needs a stir?’
‘Nothing. You can take your ease when you are finished here.’ Not that he was likely to take that literally. Brother Winfrid had so much energy in him that it had to find constant outlet, or it would probably split him apart. Cadfael clapped him on the shoulder, left him to his vigorous labours, and went off in search of Abbot Radulfus.
The abbot was in his office, poring over the cellarer’s accounts, but he put them aside when Cadfael asked audience, and gave his full attention to the petitioner.
‘Father,’ said Cadfael, ‘has Brother Anselm told you what we discovered yesterday concerning the box that was brought back from the east for the girl Fortunata? And what, with reservations, we concluded from examining it?’
‘He has,’ said the abbot. ‘I would trust Anselm’s judgement on such matters, but it is still speculation. It does seem likely that there was such a book. A great pity it should be lost.’
‘Father, I am not sure that it is lost. There is reason to believe that what came to England in that box was not the money that is in it now. There was a difference of weight and balance. So says the young man who brought it from the east, and so say I, also, for I handled it on the same day he delivered it to Girard of Lythwood’s house. I think,’ said Cadfael vehemently, ‘that what we have noted should also be reported to the sheriff.’
‘You believe,’ said Radulfus, eyeing him gravely, ‘that it may have some bearing on the only case I know of that Hugh Beringar now has in hand? But that is a case of murder. What can a book, present or absent, have to say regarding that crime?’
‘When the clerk was killed, Father, was it not taken as proven by most men that the young man he had injured had killed him in revenge? Yet we know now it was not so. Elave never harmed him. And who else had cause to move against the man’s life in the matter of that accusation he made? No one. I have come to believe that the cause of his death had nothing to do with his denunciation of Elave. Yet it does still seem that it had something to do with Elave himself, with his coming home to Shrewsbury. Everything that has happened has happened since that return. Is it not possible, Father, that it has to do with what he brought back to that house? A box that changes in weight, and one day handles like a solid carving of wood, and a few days later rings with silver coins. This in itself is strange. And whatever is strange within and around that household, where the dead man lived and worked for years, may have a bearing.’
‘And should be taken into account,’ concluded the abbot, and sat pondering what he had heard for some minutes in silence. ‘Very well, so be it. Yes, Hugh Beringar should know of it. What he may make of it I cannot guess. God knows I can make nothing of it myself, not yet, but if it can shed one gleam of light to show the way a single step towards justice, yes, he must know. Go to him now, if you wish. Take whatever time may be needed, and I pray it may be used to good effect.’
*
Cadfael found Hugh, not at his own house by Saint Mary’s, but at the castle. He was just striding across the outer ward in a preoccupied haste that curiously managed to indicate both buoyancy and irritation as Cadfael came up the ramp from the street, and in through the deep tunnel of the gate-tower. Hugh checked and turned at once to meet him.
‘Cadfael! You come very timely, I’ve news for you.’
‘And so have I for you,’ said Cadfael, ‘if mine can be called news. But for what it may be worth, I think you should have it.’
‘And Radulfus agreed? So there must be substance in it. Come within, and let’s exchange what we have,’ said Hugh, and led the way forthwith towards the guardroom and anteroom in the gate-tower, where they could be private. ‘I was about to go in and see our friend Conan,’ he said with a somewhat wry smile, ‘before I turn him loose. Yes, that’s my news. It’s taken a time to fill in all the comings and goings of his day, but we’ve dredged up at last a cottar at the edge of Frankwell who knows him, and saw him going up the pastures to his flock well before Vespers that afternoon. There’s no way he could have killed Aldwin, the man was alive and well a good hour later.’
Cadfael sat down slowly, with a long, breathy sigh. ‘So he’s out of it, too! Well, well! I never thought him a likely murderer, I confess, but certainty, that’s another matter.’
‘Neither did I think him a likely murderer,’ agreed Hugh ruefully, ‘but I grudge him the days it’s cost us to prise out his witnesses for him, and the fool so sick with fright he could barely remember the very acquaintances he’d passed on his way through Frankwell. And still lying, mark you, when his wits worked at all. But clean he is, and soon he’ll be on his way back to his work, free as a bird. I wish Girard joy of him!’ said Hugh disgustedly. He leaned his elbows on the small table between them, and held Cadfael eye to eye. ‘Will you credit it? He swore he’d seen nothing of Aldwin after the girl’s reproof sent the poor devil off in a passion of guilt to try and retrieve what he’d done – until he knew we’d found out about the hour or so they spent together in the alehouse. Then he admitted that, but swore that was the end of it. No such thing, as it turned out. It was one of the eager hounds baying along the Foregate after Elave who told us the next part of the story. He saw the pair of them cross over the bridge and come along the road towards the abbey with Conan’s arm persuasively about Aldwin’s shoulders, and Conan talking fast and urgently into Aldwin’s ear. Until they both saw and heard the hunt in full cry! Frightened them out of their wits, he says, you’d have thought it was them the hounds were coursing. They went to ground among the trees so fast nothing showed but their scuts. I fancy that was what put an end once and for all to Aldwin’s intention of going to the abbey with his bad conscience. Who knows, after the young priest confessed him he might have got his courage back, if... Only today has Conan admitted that he went after him a second time. They were both a shade drunk, I expect. But finally he did go out to his flock, when he was certain Aldwin was far too frightened to involve himself further.’
‘So you’ve lost your best suspect,’ said Cadfael thoughtfully.
‘The only one I had. And not sorry, so far as the fool himself is concerned, that he should turn out to be blameless. Well, short of murder, at least,’ Hugh corrected himself. ‘But contenders were thin on the ground from the start. And what follows now?’
‘What follows,’ said Cadfael, ‘is that I tell you what I’ve come to tell you, for with even Conan removed from the field it becomes more substantial even than I thought. And then, if you agree, we might drain Conan dry of everything he knows, to the last drop, before you turn him loose. I can’t be sure, even, that anyone has so much as mentioned to you the box that Elave brought home for the girl, by way of a dowry? From the old man, before he died in France?’
‘Yes,’ said Hugh wonderingly, ‘it was mentioned. Jevan told me, by way of accounting for Conan’s wanting to get rid of Elave. He liked the daughter, did Conan, in a cool sort of way, but he began to like her much better when she had a dowry to bring with her. So says Jevan. But that’s all I know of it. Why? How does the box have any bearing on the murder?’
‘I have been baffled from the start,’ said Cadfael, ‘by the absence of motive. Revenge, said everyone, pointing the finger at Elave, but when that was blown clear away by young Father Eadmer, what was left? Conan may have been eager to prevent Aldwin from withdrawing his denunciation, but even that was thin enough, and now you tell me that’s gone, too. Who had anything against Aldwin so grievous as to be worth even a clout in a quarrel, let alone murder? It was hard enough to see the poor devil at all, let alone resent him. He had nothing worth coveting, had done no great harm to anyone until now. No wonder suspects were thin on the ground. Yet he stood in someone’s way, or menaced someone, surely, whether he knew it or not, so since his betrayal of Elave was not the cause of his death, I began to look more closely at all the affairs of the household to which both men were attached, however loosely, every detail, especially anything that was new, this outbreak being so sudden and so dire. All was quiet enough until Elave came home. The only thing but himself he brought into that house was Fortunata’s box. And even at first sight it was no ordinary box. So when Fortunata brought it to the abbey, thinking to use the money in it to procure Elave’s release, I asked if we could examine it more closely. And this, Hugh, this is what we found.’
He told it scrupulously, in every detail of the gold and purple, the change in its weight, the possible and disturbing change in its contents. Hugh listened without comment to the end. Then he said slowly: ‘Such a thing, if indeed it did enter that house, might well be enough to tempt any man.’
‘Any who understood its value,’ said Cadfael. ‘Either in money, or for its own rare sake.’
‘And before all, it would have to be a man who had opened the box, and seen what was there. Before it was made known to them all. Do we know whether it was opened at once, when the boy delivered it? Or how soon after?’
‘That,’ said Cadfael, ‘I do not know. But you have one in hold who may know. One who may even know where it was laid by, who went near it, what was said about it, through those few days, as Elave could not know at all, not being there. Why do we not question Conan once more, before you set him free?’
‘Bearing in mind,’ Hugh warned, ‘that this, too, may blow away in the wind. It may all along have been coins within there, but better packed.’
‘English coin, and in such quantity?’ said Cadfael, catching at a thread he had not considered, but finding it frail. ‘At the end of such a journey, and committed to her from France? But if he sent her money at all, it must needs be English money. He could have been holding it in reserve for such a purpose, once he began to be a sick man. No, there’s nothing certain, everything slips through the fingers.’
Hugh rose decisively. ‘Come, let’s go and see what can be wrung out of Master Conan, before I let him slip through mine.’
*
Conan sat in his stone cell, and eyed them doubtfully and slyly from the moment they entered. He had a slit window on the air, a hard but tolerable bed, ample food and no work, and was just getting used to the fact, at first surprising, that no one was interested in using him roughly, but for all that he was uneasy and anxious whenever Hugh appeared. He had told so many lies in his efforts to distance himself from suspicion of the murder that he had difficulty in remembering now exactly what he had said, and was wary of trapping himself in still more tangled coils.
‘Conan, my lad,’ said Hugh, walking in upon him breezily, ‘there’s still a little matter in which you can be of help to me. You know most of what goes on in Girard of Lythwood’s house. You know the box that was brought for Fortunata from France. Answer me some questions about it, and let’s have no more lies this time. Tell me about the box. Who was there when it first came into the house?’
Uneasy at this or any diversion he could not understand, Conan answered warily: ‘There was Jevan, Dame Margaret, Aldwin and me. And Elave! Fortunata wasn’t there, she came in later.’
‘Was the box opened then?’
‘No, the mistress said it should wait until Master Girard came home.’ Chary of words until he understood the drift, Conan added nothing more.
‘So she put it away, did she? And you saw where, did you not? Tell us!’
He was growing ever more uneasy. ‘She put it away in the press, on a high shelf. We all saw it!’
‘And the key, Conan? The key was with it? And were you not curious about it? Did you not want to see what was in it? Didn’t your fingers begin to itch before nightfall?’
‘I never meddled with it!’ cried Conan, alarmed and defensive. ‘It wasn’t me who pried into it. I never went near it.’
So easy it was! Hugh and Cadfael exchanged a brief glance of astonished gratification. Ask the right question, and the road ahead opens before you. They closed in almost fondly on the sweating Conan.
‘Then who was it?’ Hugh demanded.
‘Aldwin! He pried into everything. He never took things,’ said Conan feverishly, desperate to point the bolts of suspicion away from himself at all costs, ‘but he couldn’t bear not knowing. He was always afraid there was something brewing against him. I never touched it, but he did.’
‘And how do you know this, Conan?’ asked Cadfael.
‘He told me, afterwards. But I heard them, down in the hall.’
‘And when was it you heard them – down in the hall?’
‘That same night.’ Conan drew breath, beginning to be somewhat reassured again, since nothing of all this seemed to be pointing in his direction, after all. ‘I went to bed, and left Aldwin down in the kitchen, but I wasn’t asleep. I never heard him come into the hall, but I did hear Jevan suddenly shout down at him from the top of the stairs, “What are you doing there?” and then Aldwin, down below, all in a hurry, said he’d left his penknife in the press, and he’d be needing it in the morning. And Jevan says take it, then, and get to bed, and give over disturbing other people. And Aldwin came up in haste, with his tail between his legs. And I heard Jevan go on down into the hall and cross to the press, and I think he locked it and took the key away, for it was locked next morning. I asked Aldwin later what he’d been up to, and he said he only wanted to have a look inside, and he had the box open, and then had to shut and lock it again in a hurry, and try to hide what he was about, when Jevan shouted at him.’
‘And did he see what was in it?’ asked Cadfael, already foreseeing the answer, and tasting its bitter irony.
‘Not he! He pretended at first he had, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was, and in the end he had to admit he never got a glimpse. He’d barely raised the lid when he had to close it again in a hurry. It got him nothing!’ said Conan, almost with satisfaction, as if he had scored over his fellow in some way by that wasted curiosity.
It got him his death, thought Cadfael, with awful certainty. And all for nothing! He never had time to see what the box held. Perhaps no one had then seen it. Perhaps it was that prying inquisitiveness that set off another man’s quickening curiosity, fatal to them both.
‘Well, Conan,’ said Hugh, ‘you may take heart and think yourself lucky. There’s a man from the Welsh side of the town can swear to it you were on your way to Girard’s fold well before Vespers, the night Aldwin was killed. You’re clear of blame. You can be off home when you choose, the door’s open.’
*
‘And he did not even see it,’ said Hugh, as they recrossed the outer ward side by side.
‘But there was one who believed he had. And looked for himself,’ said Cadfael, ‘and was lost. Fathoms deep! And in one more day, or two, three at the most, Girard would be home, the box would be opened, what was in it would be known to all, and would be Fortunata’s. Girard is a shrewd merchant, he would get for her the highest sum possible – not that it would approach its worth. But if he did not himself know where best to sell it, he would know where to ask. If it was what I begin to believe, the sum left her in its place would not have bought one leaf.’
‘And only one life stood in the way, to threaten betrayal,’ said Hugh. ‘Or so it seemed! And all for nothing, the poor wretch never did have time to see what should have been there to be seen when the box was opened. Cadfael, my mind misgives me – yesterday, when Anselm examined that box, gold leaf, purple dye and all, Girard and the girl were present? How if one of them proved sharp enough to think as we are thinking? Having gone so far, could a man stop short now, if the same danger threatened his gains all over again?’
It was a new and disturbing thought. Cadfael checked for an instant in midstride, shaken into considering it.
‘I think Girard never gave it much thought. The girl – I would not say! She is deeper than she seems, and she it is who has so much at stake. And she’s young and kind, and sudden undeserved death has never before come so near her. I wonder! Truly I wonder! She did pay close attention, missing nothing, saying little. Hugh, what will you do?’
‘Come!’ said Hugh, making up his mind. ‘You and I will go and visit the Lythwood household. We have pretext enough. They have buried their murdered man this morning, I have released one suspect from their retinue this afternoon, and I am still bent on finding a murderer. No need for one member rather than another to be wary of my probing, as yet, not until I have filled up the score of that day’s movements for him as I took so long to do for Conan. At least we’ll take note here and now of where the girl is, until you or I can talk with her again, and make sure she does nothing to draw danger upon herself.’
*
At about the same time that Hugh and Cadfael set out from the castle, Jevan of Lythwood had occasion to go up to his chamber, to discard and fold away the best cotte he had worn for Aldwin’s funeral, and put on the lighter and easier coat in which he worked. He seldom entered the room without casting a pleased, possessive glance at the chest which held his books, and so he did now. The sunlight, declining from the zenith into the golden, sated hours of late afternoon, came slanting in by the south-facing window, gilded a corner of the lid and just reached the metal plate of the lock. Something gossamer-fine fluttered from the ornate edge, appearing and disappearing as it stirred in an air not quite motionless. Four or five long hairs, dark but bright, showing now and then a brief scintillation of red. But for the light, which just touched them against shadow, they would have been invisible.
Jevan saw them and stood at gaze, his face unchanging. Then he went to take the key from its place, and unlocked the chest and raised the lid. Nothing within was disturbed. Nothing was changed but those few sunlit filaments that stirred like living things, and curled about his fingers when he carefully detached them from the fretted edge in which they were caught.
In thoughtful silence he closed and locked the chest again, and went down into the shuttered shop. The key of his workshop upriver, on the right bank of the Severn well clear of the town, was gone from its hook.
He crossed the yard and looked in at the hall, where Girard was busy over the accounts Aldwin had left in arrears, and Margaret was mending a shirt at the other end of the table.
‘I’m going down to the skins again,’ said Jevan. ‘There’s something I left unfinished.’