Brother Cadfael came out from Prime, next morning, to find Philip hovering anxiously in the great court, fidgeting from one foot to the other as if the ground under him burned, and so intent and grim of face that there was no doubting the urgency of what he had to impart. At sight of Cadfael he came bounding alongside to lay a hand on his sleeve.
“Will you come with me to Hugh Beringar? You know him, he’ll listen if you vouch for me. I didn’t know if he’d be stirring this early, so I waited for you. I think I’ve found the place where Master Thomas was killed.”
It was certainly not what he had been looking for, and came as a total irrelevance for a moment to Brother Cadfael, who checked and blinked at an announcement so unexpected. “You’ve done what!”
“It’s true, I swear it! It was so late last night, I couldn’t pester anyone with it then, and I’ve not been there by daylight—but someone bled there—someone was dragged down to the water—“
“Come!” said Cadfael, recovering. “We’ll go together.” And he set out at a brisk trot for the guest-hall, Philip’s long strides keeping easy pace with him. “If you’re right... He’ll want you to show the place. Can you find it again with certainty?”
“I can, you’ll see why.”
Hugh came out to them yawning, in shirt and hose, but wide awake and shaven all the same. “Speak low!” he said, finger on lip, and softly closed the door of his rooms behind him. “The women are still asleep. Now, what is it? I know better than to turn away anyone who comes with Brother Cadfael’s warranty.”
Philip told only what was needful. For his own personal need there would be time later. What mattered now was the glade in the edge of the woods, beyond the orchards of the Gaye.
“I was following my own scent, last night, and I made too short a cast at the way I took down to the river. I came on a place in the trees there—I can find it again—where some heavy thing had lain, and been dragged down to the water. The grass is flattened where he lay, and combed downhill, where he was dragged, and for all the three days between, it still shows the traces. I think there are also spots of blood.”
“The merchant of Bristol?” asked Hugh, after an instant of startled silence.
“I think so. Daylight may show for certain.”
Hugh turned to drain his morning ale in purposeful haste, and demolish the end of oatcake he had been eating. “You slept at home? In the town?” He was brushing his black crest hastily as he talked, tying the laces of his shirt and reaching for his cotte. “And came to me rather than to the sheriff! Well, no harm, we’re nearer than he, it will save time.” Sword and sword-belt he left lying, and thrust his feet into his shoes. “Cadfael, you’ll be missing breakfast, take these cakes with you, and drink something now, while you may. And you, friend, have you eaten?”
“No escort?” said Cadfael.
“To what end? Your eyes and mine are all we require here, and the fewer great boots stamping about the sward, the better. Come, before Aline wakes, she has a bird’s hearing, and I’d rather have her rest. Now, Philip, lead! You’re on your home turf, take us the quickest way.”
*
Aline and Emma were at breakfast, resigned to Hugh’s sudden and silent departures, when Ivo came asking admittance. Punctilious as always, he asked for Hugh.
“But as that husband of mine has already gone forth somewhere on official business,” said Aline, amused, “and as it’s certainly you he really wants to see, shall we let him in? I felt sure he would not go away without paying his respects to you yet again. He has probably been exercising his wits to find a way of ensuring it shan’t be the last time, either. He was hardly at his best last night, and no wonder, after so many shocks, and grazed and bruised from his fall.”
Emma said nothing, but her colour rose agreeably. She had risen from her bed with a sense of entering a life entirely new, and more her own to determine than ever it had been before. By this hour Master Thomas’s barge must be well down the Severn on its way home. She was relieved of the necessity of avoiding Roger Dod’s grievous attentions, and eased of the sense of guilt she felt in doing him what was probably the great wrong of fearing and distrusting his intentions towards her. Her belongings were neatly packed for travelling, in a pair of saddle-bags bought at the fair, for whatever was to become of her now, she would be leaving the abbey today. If no immediate escort offered for the south, she would go home with Aline, to await whatever arrangements Hugh could make for her, and in default of any other trustworthy provision, he himself had promised her his safe-conduct home to Bristol.
The bustle of departure filled the stable-yard and the great court, and half the rooms in the guest-hall had already been vacated. No doubt Turstan Fowler and the young groom were also assembling their lord’s purchases and effects, and saddling up the bay horse, returned to the abbey by an enterprising errand-boy who had been lavishly rewarded, and their own shaggy ponies. Two of them! The third would be on a leading rein.
Emma felt cold when she remembered what had befallen the rider of the third pony, and the things he had done. So sudden a death filled her with horror. But the man had done murder, and had not scrupled to ride down his own lord when he was unmasked. It was unreasonable to blame Ivo for what had happened, even if his order had not been given in an understandable rage at the misuse of his patronage and the assault upon his own person. Indeed, Emma had been touched, the previous evening, when the very vehemence with which Ivo had defended his action had so clearly betrayed his own doubts and regrets. It had ended in her offering reassurance and comfort. It was a terrible thing in itself, she thought, to have the power of life and death over your fellowmen, whatever crimes they might have committed.
If Ivo had lacked something of his normal balance and confidence last night, he had certainly regained them this morning. His grooming was always immaculate, and his dress, however simple, sat upon his admirable body with a borrowed elegance. It had been hateful to him to be spilled into the dust, and rise limping and defaced before a dozen or more witnesses. This morning he had made sure of his appearance, and wore even the healing grazes on his left cheek like ornaments; but as soon as he entered, Emma saw that he was still limping after his fall.
“I’m sorry to have missed your husband,” he said as he came into the room where they were sitting, “but they tell me he’s already gone forth. I had a scheme to put to him for approval. Dare I put it to you, instead?”
“I’m already curious,” said Aline, smiling.
“Emma has a problem, and I have a solution. I’ve been thinking about it ever since you told me, Emma, two days ago, that you would not be returning to Bristol with the barge, but must find a safe escort south by road. I have no right at all to advance any claim, but if Beringar will consent to trust you to me... You need to get home, I’m sure, as quickly as you can.”
“I must,” said Emma, eyeing him with wondering expectation. “There are so many things I must see to there.”
Ivo addressed himself very earnestly to Aline. “I have a sister at Stanton Cobbold who is determined to take the veil, and the convent of her choice has consented to take her. And by luck it happens that she wished to join a Benedictine house, and the place is the priory at Minchinbarrow, which is some few miles beyond Bristol. She is waiting for me to take her there, and to tell the truth, I’ve been delaying to give her time to change her mind, but the girl’s set on her own way. I’m satisfied she means it. Now if you’ll confide Emma to my care, as I swear you may with every confidence, for it will be my pleasure to serve her, then why should not she and Isabel travel down very comfortably together? I have men enough to provide a safe guard, and naturally I should myself be their escort. That’s the plan I wanted to put to your husband, and I hope he would have felt able to fall in with it and give his approval. It’s a great pity he is not here—”
“It sounds admirable,” said Aline, wide-eyed with pleasure, “and I’m sure Hugh would feel completely happy in trusting Emma to your care. Had we not better ask Emma herself what she has to say?”
Emma’s flushed face and dazzled smile were speaking for her. “I think it would be the best possible answer, for me,” she said slowly, “and I’m most grateful for so kind a thought. But I must really go as soon as possible, and your sister—you said, you wanted her to have time to be sure...”
Ivo laughed, a little ruefully. “I’ve already reached the point of giving up the hope of persuading her to stay in the world. Never fear that you may be forcing Isabel’s hand, ever since she was accepted she has been trying to force mine. And if it’s what she wants, who am I to prevent? She has everything ready, it will give her only pleasure if I come home to say that we can start tomorrow. If you’re willing to trust yourself to me alone for the few miles to Stanton Cobbold, and sleep under our roof tonight, we can be on our way in the morning. We can provide you horse and saddle, if you care to ride, or a litter for the pair of you, as you please.”
“Oh, I can ride,” she said, glowing. “It would be a delight.”
“We would try and make it so. If,” said Ivo, turning his grazed smile almost diffidently upon Aline, “if I may have your approval, and my lord Beringar’s. I would not presume without that. But since this is a journey I must make, sooner or later, and Isabel insists the sooner the better, why not take advantage of it to serve Emma’s need, too?”
“It would certainly solve everything very happily,” agreed Aline. And there could be no doubt, thought Emma, bolstering her own dear wish with the persuasion of virtue, that Aline would be relieved and happy if Hugh could be spared a journey, and she several days deprived of his company. “Emma knows,” said Aline, “that she may choose as she thinks best, for both you and we, it seems, are equally at her service. As for approval, why, of course I approve, and so, I’m sure, would Hugh.”
“I wish he would put in an appearance,” said Ivo, “I should be the happier with his blessing. But if we are to go, I think we should set out at once. I know I said all’s ready with Isabel, but for all that we may need to make the most of this day.”
Emma wavered between her desire and her regret at leaving without making her due and grateful farewell to Hugh. But it was gain for him, great gain, to be rid of the responsibility he had assumed, and so securely as this promised. “Aline, you have been the soul of kindness to me, and I leave you with regret, but it is better to spare an extra journey, in such times, and then, Hugh has been kept so busy on my account already, and you’ve seen so little of him these days... I should like to go with Ivo, if you’ll give me your blessing. Yet I hate to go without thanking him properly...”
“Don’t fret about Hugh, he will surely think you wise to take advantage of so kind and fortunate an offer. I will give him all the pretty messages you’re thinking of. Once I lose sight of him, now, I never know when he’ll return, and I’m afraid Ivo is right, you may yet need every moment of the day, or certainly Isabel may. It’s a great step she’s taking.”
“So I’ve told her,” he said, “but my sister has the boldness of mind to take great steps. You won’t mind, Emma, riding pillion behind me, the few miles we have to go today? At home we’ll find you saddle and horse and all.”
“Really,” said Aline, eyeing the pair of them with a small and private smile, “I begin to be envious!”
*
He sent the young groom to fetch out her saddle-bags. Their light weight was added to the bales of Corbière’s purchases on the spare pony, her cloak, which she certainly would not need on so fine a day, folded and stowed away with the bags. It was like setting out into a new world, sunlit and inviting, but frighteningly wide. True, she had solemn duties waiting for her in Bristol, not least the confession of a failure, but for all that, she felt as if she had almost shed the past, and could be glad of the riddance, and was stepping into this unknown world unburdened and unguarded, truly her own mistress.
Aline kissed her affectionately, and wished them both a happy journey. Emma cast frequent glances towards the gatehouse until the last moment, in case Hugh should appear, but he did not; she had still to leave her messages to Aline for delivery. Ivo mounted first, since the bay, as he said, was in a skittish mood and inclined to play tricks, and then turned to give her a steady, sustaining hand as Turstan Fowler hoisted her easily to the pillion.
“Even with two of us up,” said Ivo over his shoulder, smiling, “this creature can be mettlesome when he’s fresh out. For safety hold me fast about the waist, and close your hands on my belt—so, that’s well!” He saluted Aline very gracefully and courteously. “I’ll see she reaches Bristol safely, I promise!”
He rode out at the gatehouse in shirt-sleeves, just as he had ridden in, his men, now two only, at his heels, and the pack-pony trotting contentedly under his light load. Emma’s arms easily spanned Ivo’s slenderness, and the feel of his spare, strong body was warm and muscular and vital through the fine linen. As they threaded the Foregate, now emptying fast, he laid his own left hand over her clasped ones, pressing them firmly against his flat middle, and though she knew he was simply assuring himself that her hold was secure, she could not help feeling that it was also a caress.
She had laughed and shaken her head over Aline’s romantic fantasies, refusing to believe in any union between landed nobility and trade, except for mutual profit. Now she was not so sure that wisdom was all with the sceptics.
*
The hollow where the big, heavy body had lain still showed at least the approximate bulk of Master Thomas’s person, and round about it the grass was trodden, as though someone, or perhaps more than one, had circled all round him as he lay dead. And so they surely had, for here he must have been stripped and searched, the first of those fruitless searches Brother Cadfael had deduced from the events following. Out of the hollow, down to the raised bank of the river, went the track by which he had been dragged, the grass, growing longer as it emerged from shade, all brushed in one direction.
Nor was there any doubt about the traces of blood, meagre though they were. The sliver of birch bark under the tree showed a thin crust, dried black. Careful search found one or two more spots, and a thin smear drawn downhill, where it seemed the dead man had been turned on his back to be hauled the more easily down to the water.
“It’s deep here,” said Hugh, standing on the green hillock above the river, “and undercuts the bank, it would take him well out into the current. I fancy the clothes went after him at once, we may find the rest yet. One man could have done it. Had they been two, they would have carried him.”
“Would you say,” wondered Cadfael, “that this is a reasonable way he might take to get back to his barge? He’d know his boat lay somewhat down-river from the bridge, I suppose he might try a chance cut through from the Foregate, and overcast by a little way. You see the end of the jetty, where the barge tied up, is only a small way upstream from us. Would you say he was alone, and unsuspecting, when he was struck down?”
Hugh surveyed the ground narrowly. It was not the scene of a struggle, there was the flattened area of the body’s fall, and the trampling of feet all round its stillness. The brushings of the grass this way and that were ordered, not the marks of a fight.
“Yes. There was no resistance. Someone crept behind, and pierced him without word or scruple. He went down and lay. He was on his way back, preferring the byways, and came out a little downstream of where he aimed. Someone had been watching and following him.”
“The same night,” said Philip flatly, “someone had been watching and following me.”
He had their attention at once, both of them eyeing him with sharp interest. “The same someone?” suggested Cadfael mildly.
“I haven’t told you my own part,” said Philip. “It went out of my head when I stumbled on this place, and guessed at what it meant. What I set out to do was to find out just what I did that night, and prove I never did murder. For I’d come to think that whoever intended this killing had his eye on me from the start. I came from that riot on the jetty, with my head bleeding and my mood for murder, I was a gift, if I could but be out of sight and mind when murder was done.” He told them everything he had discovered, word for word. By the end of it they were both regarding him with intent and frowning concentration.
“The man Fowler?” said Hugh. “You’re sure of this?”
“Walter Renold is sure, and I think him a good witness. The man was there to be seen, I pointed him out, and Wat told me what he’d seen of him that night. Fowler looked in, saw and heard the condition I was in, and went away again for it might be as much as half an hour, says Wat. Then he came back, took one measure of ale to drink, and bought a big flask of geneva spirit.”
“And left with it unopened,” Brother Cadfael recalled, “as soon as you took yourself off with your misery into the bushes. No need to blush for it now, we’ve all done as foolishly once or twice in our lives, many of us have bettered it. And the next that’s known of him,” he said, meeting Hugh’s eyes across the glade, “is two hours later, when we discover him lying sodden-drunk under a store of trestles by the Foregate.”
“And Wat of the tavern swears he was sober as a bishop when he quit the inn.”
“And I would swear by Wat’s judgment,” said Philip stoutly. “If any man drank that flagon dry in two hours, he says, it would be the death of him, or go very near. And Fowler was testifying in court next day, and little the worse for wear.”
“Good God!” said Hugh, shaking his head. “I stooped over him, I pulled back the cloak from his shoulders. The fellow reeked. His breath would have felled an ox. Am I losing my wits?”
“Or was it rather the reek you loosed by moving the cloak? I begin to have curious thoughts,” said Cadfael, “for I fancy that juniper liquor was bought for his outside, not his inside.”
“A costly freak,” mused Hugh, “the price such liquors are. Cheap enough, though, if it bought him immunity from all suspicion of a thing that could have cost him a deal higher. What was the first thing I said?—more fool I! By the look of him, I said, he must have been here some hours already. And where did he go from there? Safely into an abbey punishment cell, and lay there overnight. How could he be guilty of anything but being a drunken sot? Children and drunken men are the world’s only innocents! If murder was done that night, who was to look at a man who had put himself out of the reckoning from the time Master Thomas was last seen alive to the time when his body was brought back to Shrewsbury?”
Cadfael’s mind had probed even beyond that point, though nothing beyond was yet clear. “I have a fancy, Hugh, to look again at the place where we picked up that sodden carcase, if it can be found. Surely an honest drunk should have had his bottle lying beside him for all to see. But I remember none. If we missed it, and some stray scavenger found it by night, still half-full or more, well and good. But if by any chance it was hidden—so that no questions need ever be asked about how much had been drunk, and what manner of head could have borne it—would that be the act of a simple sot? He could not walk through the fairground stinking as he did, whether from outside or in. His baptism was there, where we found him tucked away. So should his bottle have been.”
“And if he was neither simple nor a sot that night, Cadfael, how do you read his comings and goings? He looked in at the tavern, took note of this lad’s state, listened to his complaints, and went away—where?”
“As far as Master Thomas’s booth, perhaps, to make sure the merchant was there, busy about his wares, and likely to be busy for a while longer? And so back to the tavern to keep watch on Philip, so handy a scapegoat, and so clearly on the way to ending the evening blind and deaf. And afterwards, when he had followed him far enough into the copse to know he was lost to the world, back to dog Master Thomas’s footsteps as he made his way back to the barge. Made his way, that is, as far as this place.”
“It is all conjecture,” said Hugh reasonably.
“It is. But read it so, and it makes sense.”
“Then back with his flask of spirits ready, to slip unseen into a place withdrawn and private, and become the wretched object we found. How long would it take, would you say, to kill his man, search and strip him down to the river?”
“Counting the time spent following him unseen, and returning unnoticed to the fairground after all was done, more than an hour of those two hours lost between drunk and sober. No,” said Cadfael sombrely, “I do not think he spent any of that time drinking.”
“Was it he, also, who boarded the barge? But no, that he could not, he was at the sheriff’s court. Concerning the merchant of Shotwick, we already know his slayer.”
“We know one of them,” said Cadfael. “Can any of these matters be separated from the rest? I think not. This pursuit is all one.”
“You do grasp,” said Hugh, after a long moment of furious thought, “what it is we are saying? Here are these two men, one proven a murderer, the other suspect. And yesterday the one of them fetched down the other to his death. Coldly, expertly... Before we say more,” said Hugh abruptly, casting a final glance about the glade, “let’s do as you suggested, look again at the place where we found him lying.”