The gaoler unlocked the door of Philip’s cell somewhat before noon, and stood back to let the provost enter. Father and son eyed each other hard, and though Geoffrey Corviser continued to look grimly severe, and Philip obdurate and defiant, nevertheless the father was mollified and the son reassured. By and large, they understood each other pretty well.
“You are released to my warranty,” said the provost shortly. “The charge is not withdrawn, not yet, but you’re trusted to appear when called, and until then, let’s hope I may get some sensible work out of you.”
“I may come home with you?” Philip sounded dazed; he knew nothing of what had been going on outside, and was unprepared for this abrupt release. Hurriedly he brushed himself down, all too aware that he presented no very savoury spectacle to walk through the town at the provost’s side. “What made them change their mind? There’s no one been taken for the murder?” That would clear him utterly in Emma’s eyes, no doubts left.
“Which murder?” said his father grimly. “Never mind now, you shall hear, once we have you out of here.”
“Ay, stir yourself, lad,” advised the goodhumoured warder, jingling his keys, “before they change their minds again. The rate things are happening at this year’s fair, you might find the door slammed again before you can get through it.”
Philip followed his father wonderingly out of the castle. The noon light in the outer ward fell warm and dazzling upon him, the sky was a brilliant, deep blue, like Emma’s eyes when she widened them in anxiety or alarm. It was impossible not to feel elated, whatever reproaches might still await him at home; and hope and the resilience of youth blossomed in him as his father recounted brusquely all that had happened while his son fretted in prison without news.
“Then there have been two attacks upon Mistress Vernold’s boat and booth, her goods taken, her men assaulted?” He had quite forgotten his own bedraggled appearance, he was striding towards home with his head up and his visage roused and belligerent, looking, indeed, very much as he had looked when he led his ill-fated expedition across the bridge on the eve of the fair. “And no one seized for it? Nothing done? Why, she herself may be in danger!” Indignation quickened his steps. “For God’s sake, what’s the sheriff about?”
“He has enough to do breaking up unseemly riots by you and your like,” said his father smartly, but could not raise so much as a blush from his incensed offspring. “But since you want to know, Mistress Vernold is in the guest-hall of the abbey, safe enough, in the care of Hugh Beringar and his lady. You’d do better to be thinking about your own troubles, my lad, and mind your own step, for you’re not out of the wood yet.”
“What did I do that was so wrong? I went only one pace beyond what you did yourself the day before.” He did not even sound aggrieved about being judged hard, he made that brief defence only absently, his mind all on the girl. “Even in the guest-hall she may not be out of reach, if this is all some determined plot against her uncle and all his family.” In the death of one more tradesman at the fair he showed less interest, shocking though it was, since it seemed to have little or nothing to do with the vindictive catalogue of offences against Master Thomas and all his possessions. “She spoke so fairly,” he said. “She would not have me accused of worse than I did.”
“True enough! She was a fine, honest witness, no denying it. But no business of yours now, she’s well cared for. It’s your mother you need to be thinking of, she’s been in a fine taking over you all this while, and now they’re looking in other directions for the one who did the killing—with one eye still on you, though, mind!—she’ll likely take some sweetening. One way or another, you’ll get a warm welcome.”
Philip was far beyond minding that, though as soon as he entered the house behind the shoemaker’s shop he did indeed get a warm welcome, not one way or another, but both ways at once. Mistress Corviser, who was large, handsome and voluble, looked round from her fireside hob, uttered a muted shriek, dropped her ladle, and came billowing like a ship in full sail to embrace him, shake him, wrinkle her nose at the prison smell of him, abuse him for the damage to his best cotte and hose, box his ears for laughing at her tirade, exclaim lamentably over the dried scar at his temple, and demand that he sit down at once and let her crop the hair that adhered to the matted blood, and clean up the wound. By far the easiest thing to do was to submit to all, and let her talk herself out.
“The trouble and shame you’ve put us to, the heartaches you’ve cost me, wretch, you don’t deserve that I should feed you, or wash and mend for you. The provost’s son in prison, think of our mortification! Are you not ashamed of yourself?” She was sponging away the encrusted blood, and relieved to find so insignificant a scar remaining; but when he said blithely: “No, mother!” she pulled his hair smartly.
“Then you should be, you good-for-nothing! There, that’s not so bad. Now I hope you’re going to settle down to work, and make up for all the trouble you’ve made for us, instead of traipsing about the town egging on other people’s sons to mischief with your wild ideas...”
“They were the same ideas father and all the guild merchant had, mother, you should have scolded them. And you ask those who’re wearing my shoes whether there’s much amiss with my work.” He was a very good workman, in fact, as she would have asserted valiantly if anyone else had cast aspersions on his diligence and ability. He hugged her impulsively, and kissed her cheek, and she put him off impatiently, with what was more a slap than a caress. “Get along with you, and don’t come moguing me until you’re cleared of the worse charge, and have paid your fine for the riot. Now come and eat your dinner!”
It was an excellent dinner, such as she produced on festivals and saints’ days. After it, instead of shedding the clothes he had worn day and night in his cell, he shaved carefully, made a bundle of his second-best suit, and left the house with it under his arm.
“Now where are you going?” she demanded inevitably.
“To the river, to swim and get clean again.” They had a garden upstream, below the town hall, as many of the burgesses had, for growing their own fruit and vegetables, and there was a small hut there, and a sward where he could dry in the sun. He had learned to swim there, shortly after he learned to walk. He did not tell her where he was going afterwards. It was a pity he would have to present himself in his second-best coat, but in this hot summer weather perhaps he need not put it on at all; in shirt and hose most men look the same, provided the shirt is good linen and well laundered.
The water was not even cold in the sandy shallow by the garden, but after his meal he did not stay in long, or swim out into deep water. But it was good to feel like himself again, cleansed even of the memory of his failure and downfall. There was a still place under the bank where the water hung almost motionless, and showed him a fair image of his face, and the thick bush of red-brown hair which he combed and straightened with his fingers. He dressed as carefully as he had shaved, and set off back to the bridge, and over it to the abbey. The town’s grievance, which he had had on his mind the last time he came this way, was quite forgotten; he had other important business now on the abbey side of Severn.
*
“There’s one here,” said Constance, coming in from the great court with a small, private smile on her lips, “who asks to speak with Mistress Vernold. And not a bad figure of a young fellow, either, though still a thought coltish about the legs. He asked very civilly.”
Emma had looked up quickly at the mention of a young man; now that she had gone some way towards accepting what had happened, and coming to terms with a disaster which, after all, she had not caused, she had been remembering words Ivo had used, almost disregarded then in her shocked daze, but significant and warming now.
“Messire Corbière?”
“No, not this time. This one I don’t know, but he says his name is Philip Corviser.”
“I know him,” said Aline, and smiled over her sewing. “The provost’s son, Emma, the boy you spoke for in the sheriff’s court. Hugh said he would see him set free today. If there’s one soul can say he has done no evil to you or any these last two days, he’s the man. Will you see him? It would be a kindness.”
Emma had almost forgotten him, even his name, but she recalled the plea he had made for her belief in him. So much had happened between. She remembered him now, unkempt, bruised and soiled, pallid-sick after his drunkenness, but still with a despairing dignity. “Yes, I remember him. Of course I’ll see him.”
Philip followed Constance into the room. Fresh from the river, with damp hair curling thickly about his head, shaven and glowing and in fierce earnest, but without the aggression of the manner she had first seen in him, this was a very different person from the humiliated prisoner of the court. The last look he had given her, chin on shoulder, as he was dragged out... yes, she saw the resemblance there. He made his reverence to Aline, and then to Emma.
“Madam, I am released on my father’s bail. I came to say my thanks to Mistress Emma for speaking so fairly for me, when I had no right to expect goodwill from her.”
“I’m glad to see you free, Philip,” said Aline serenely, “and looking none the worse. You will like to speak with Emma alone, I daresay, and company other than mine may be good for her, for here we talk nothing but babies.” She rose, folding her sewing carefully to keep the needle in view as she carried it. “Constance and I will sit on the bench by the hall door, in the sun. The light is better there, and I am no such expert needlewoman as Emma. You can be undisturbed here.”
Out she went, and they saw a ray of sun from the open outer door sparkle in her piled gold hair, before Constance followed, and closed the door between. The two of them were left, gazing gravely at each other.
“The first thing I wanted to do with freedom,” said Philip, “was to see you again, and thank you for what you did for me. As I do, with all my heart. There were some who bore witness there who had known me most of my life, and surely had no grudge against me, and yet testified that I had been the first to strike, and done all manner of things I knew I had not done. But you, who had suffered through my act, though God knows I never willed it, you spoke absolute truth for me. It took a generous heart and a fair mind to do so much for an unknown whom you had no cause to love.” He had not chosen that word, it had come naturally in the commonplace phrase, but when he heard it, it raised a blush like fire in his own face, faintly reflected the next moment in hers.
“All I did was to tell the truth of what I had seen,” she said. “So should we all have done, it’s no virtue, but an obligation. It was shame that they did not. People do not think what it is they are saying, or trouble to be clear about what they have seen. But that’s all by now. I’m very glad they’ve let you go. I was glad when Hugh Beringar said they must, taking into account what has been happening, for which you certainly can bear no blame. But perhaps you have not heard...”
“Yes, I have heard. My father has told me.” Philip sat down beside her in the place Aline had vacated, and leaned towards her earnestly. “There is some very evil purpose against you and yours, surely, how else to account for so many outrages? Emma, I am afraid for you... I fear danger threatening even you. I’m grieved for your loss, and all the distress you’ve suffered. I wish there might be some way in which I could serve you.”
“Oh, but you need not be troubled for me,” she said. “You see I am in the best and kindest hands possible, and tomorrow the fair will all be over, and Hugh Beringar and Aline will help me to find a safe way to go home.”
“Tomorrow?” he said, dismayed.
“It may not be tomorrow. Roger Dod will take the barge down-river tomorrow, but it may be that I must stay a day or two more. We have to find a party going south by Gloucester, for safe-conduct, and with some other women for company. It may take a day or two.”
Even a day or two would be gold; but after that she would be gone, and he might never see her again. And still, confronted by this cause for unhappiness on his own part, he could only think of her. He could not rid himself of the feeling that she was threatened.
“In only two days, see how many ill things have happened, and always close to you, and what may not still happen in a day or two more? I wish you were safe home this moment,” he said passionately, “though God knows I’d rather lose my right hand than the sight of you.” He was not even aware that that same right hand had taken possession of her left one, and was clasping it hard. “At least find me some way of serving you before you go. If nothing more, tell me you know that I never did harm to your uncle...”
“Oh, yes,” she said warmly, “that I can, most willingly. I never did truly believe it. You are no such person, to strike a man dead by stealth. I never thought it. But still we don’t know who did it! Oh, don’t doubt me, I’m sure of you. But I wish it could be shown clear to the world, for your sake.”
It was said very prettily and sincerely, and he took it to his heart gratefully, but it was said out of generous fellow-feeling, and nothing deeper, and he was gallingly sure of it while he hugged at least the kindness to him.
“For mine, too,” she said honestly, “and for the sake of justice. It is not right that a mean murderer should escape his due, and it does aggrieve me that my uncle’s death should go unpaid for.”
Find me some way of serving you, he had said; and perhaps she had. There was nothing he would not have undertaken for her; he would have lain over the threshold of any room in which she was, like a dog on guard, if she had needed it, but she did not, she was cared for by the sheriff’s own deputy and his lady, and they would watch over her until they saw her safely on her way home. But when she spoke of the unknown who had slipped a dagger in her uncle’s back, her great eyes flared with the angry blue of sapphires, and her face grew marble-clear and taut. Her complaint was his commission. He would achieve something for her yet.
“Emma,” he began in a whisper, and drew breath to commit himself deep as the sea.
The door opened, though neither of them had heard the knock; Constance put her head into the room.
“Messire Corbière waits to see you, when you are free,” she said, and withdrew, but left the door ajar. Evidently Messire Corbière ought not to be kept waiting long.
Philip was on his feet. Emma’s eyes had kindled at the name like distant stars, forgetting him. “You may remember him,” she said, still sparing a morsel of her attention for Philip, “the young gentleman who came to help us on the jetty, along with Brother Cadfael. He has been very kind to me.”
Philip did remember, though his bludgeoned senses at the time had seen everything distorted; a slender, elegant, assured lordling who leaped a rolling cask to catch her in his arm at the water’s edge, and further, to be just to him, had appeared in the sheriff’s court and borne out Emma’s honest story—even if he had also produced his falconer to testify to the silly threats Philip had been indulging in, drunk as he was, later that evening. Testimony Philip did not dispute, since he knew he had been incapable of clear thought or positive recollection. He recalled his disgusting self, and smarted at the thought. And the young lord with the bright gold crest and athlete’s prowess had showed so admirable by contrast.
“I’ll take my leave,” said Philip, and allowed her hand to slip out of his, though with reluctance and pain. “For the journey, and always, I wish you well.”
“So do I you,” she said, and with unconscious cruelty added: “Will you ask Messire Corbière to come in?”
Never in his life until then had Philip been required to draw himself to his full stature, body and mind. His departure was made with a dignity he had not dreamed he could achieve, and meeting Corbière face to face in the hall, he did indeed bid him within, at Mistress Emma’s invitation, very civilly and amiably, while he burned with jealousy inwardly. Ivo thanked him pleasantly, and if he looked him over, did so with interest and respect, and with no apparent recollection of ever having seen him in less acceptable circumstances.
No one would have guessed, thought Philip, marching out into the sunshine of the great court, that a working shoemaker and a landed lord rubbed shoulders there. Well, he may have several manors in Cheshire and one in Shropshire, and be distant kin of Earl Ranulf, and welcome at his court; but I have something I can try to do for her, and I have a craft as honourable as his noble blood, and if I succeed, whether she comes my way or no, she’ll never forget me.
*
Brother Cadfael came in at the gatehouse after some hours of fruitless prowling about the fair and the riverside. Among hundreds of men busy about their own concerns, the quest of a gashed sleeve, or one recently and hastily mended, is much the same as hunting one straw in a completed stack. His trouble was that he knew no other way to set about it. Moreover, the hot and settled weather continued unbroken, and most of those about the streets and the stalls were in their shirt-sleeves. There was a point there, he reflected. The glover’s dagger had drawn blood, therefore it had reached the skin, but never a thread of white or unbleached linen had it brought away with the sliver of brown cloth. If the intruder had worn a shirt, he had worn it with sleeves rolled up, and it had emerged unscathed, and could now cover his graze, and if the wound had needed one, his bandage. Cadfael returned to tend the few matters needing him in his workshop, and be ready for Vespers in good time, more because he was at a loss how to proceed than for any other reason. An interlude of quiet and thought might set his wits working again.
In the great court his path towards the garden happened to cross Philip’s from the guest-hall to the gatehouse. Deep in his own purposes, the young man almost passed by unnoticing, but then he checked sharply, and turned to look back.
“Brother Cadfael!” Cadfael swung to face him, startled out of just as deep a preoccupation. “It is you!” said Philip. “It was you who spoke for me, after Emma, in the sheriff’s court. And I knew you then for the one who came to help me to my feet and out of trouble, when the sergeants broke up the fight on the jetty. I never had the chance to thank you, brother, but I do thank you now.”
“I fear the getting you out of trouble didn’t last the night,” said Cadfael ruefully, looking this lanky youngster over with a sharp eye, and approving what he saw. Whether it was time spent in self-examination in the gaol, or time spent more salutarily still in thinking of Emma, Philip had done a great deal of growing up in a very short time. “I’m glad to see you about again among us, and none the worse.”
“I’m not clear of the load yet,” said Philip. “The charge still stands, even the charge of murder has not been withdrawn.”
“Then it stands upon one leg only,” said Cadfael heartily, “and may fall at any moment. Have you not heard there’s been another death?”
“So they told me, and other violence, also. But surely this last bears no connection with the rest? Until this, all was malice against Master Thomas. This man was a stranger, and from Chester.” He laid a hand eagerly on Cadfael’s sleeve. “Brother, spare me some minutes. I was not very clear in my wits that night, now I need to know—all that I did, all that was done to me. I want to trace every minute of an evening I can barely piece together for myself.”
“And no wonder, after that knock on the head. Come and sit in the garden, it’s quiet there.” He took the young man by the arm, and turned him towards the archway through the pleached hedge, and sat him down on the very seat, had Philip known it, where Emma and Ivo had sat together the previous day. “Now, what is it you have in mind? I don’t wonder your memory’s hazy. That’s a good solid skull you have on you, and a blessedly thick thatch of hair, or you’d have been carried away on a board.”
Philip scowled doubtfully into distance between the roses, hesitated how much to say, how much to keep painfully to himself, caught Brother Cadfael’s comfortably patient eye, and blurted: “I was coming now from Emma. I know she is in better care than I could provide her, but I have found one thing, at least, that might still be done for her. She wants and needs to see the man who killed her uncle brought to justice. And I mean to find him.”
“So does the sheriff, so do all his men,” said Cadfael, “but they’ve had little success as yet.” But he did not say it in reproof or discouragement, but very thoughtfully. “So, for that matter, do I, but I’ve done no better. One more mind probing the matter could just as well be the mind that uncovers the truth. Why not? But how will you set about it?”
“Why, if I can prove—prove!—that I did not do it, I may also rub up against something that will lead me to the man who did. At least I can make a start by trying to follow what happened to me that night. Not only for my own defence,” he said earnestly, “but because it seems to me that I gave cover to the deed by what I had begun, and whoever did it may have had me and my quarrel in mind, and been glad of the opening I made for him, knowing that when murder came of the night, the first name that would spring to mind would be mine. So whoever he may be, he must have marked my comings and goings, or I could be no use to him. If I had been with ten friends throughout, I should have been out of the reckoning, and the sheriff would have begun at once to look elsewhere. But I was drunk, and sick, and took myself off alone to the river for a long time, so much I do know. Long enough for it to have been true. And the murderer knew it.”
“That is sound thinking,” agreed Cadfael approvingly. “What, then, do you mean to do?”
“Begin from the riverside, where I got my clout on the head, and follow my own scent until I get clear what’s very unclear now. I do remember what happened there, as far as you hauling me out of the way of the sheriff’s men, and then being hustled away between two others, but my legs were grass and my wits were muddied, and I can’t for my life recall who they were. It’s a place to start, if you knew them.”
“One of them was Edric Flesher’s journeyman,” said Cadfael. “The other I’ve seen, though I don’t know his name, a big, sturdy young fellow twice your width, with tow-coloured hair...”
“John Norreys!” Philip snapped his fingers. “I seem to recall him later in the night. It’s enough, I’ll begin with them, and find out where they left me, and how—or where I shook them off, for so I might have done, I was no fit company for Christians.” He rose, draping his coat over one shoulder. “That whole evening I’ll unravel, if I can.”
“Good lad!” said Cadfael heartily. “I wish you success with all my heart. And if you’re going to be threading your way through a few of the ale-houses of the Foregate, as you seem to have done that night, keep your eyes open on my behalf, will you? If you can find your murderer, you may very well also be finding mine.” Carefully and emphatically he told him what to look for. “An arm raising a flagon, or spread over a table, may show you what I’m seeking. The left sleeve sliced open for a hand’s-length from the cuff of a russet-brown coat, that was sewn with a lighter linen thread. It would be on the underside of the arm. Or where arms are bared, look for the long scratch the knife made when it slit the sleeve, or for the binding that might cover it if it still bleeds. But if you find him, don’t challenge him or say word to him, only bring me, if you can, his name and where to find him again.”
“This was the glover’s slayer?” asked Philip, marking the details with grave nods of his brown head. “You think they may be one and the same?”
“If not the same, well known to each other, and both in the same conspiracy. Find one, and we shall be very close to the other.”
“I’ll keep a good watch, at any rate,” said Philip, and strode away purposefully towards the gatehouse to begin his quest.