There was a moment of utter silence, while she stood blanched and stiff like a woman turned to ice. Then, as abruptly, she came to life with a piercing scream of rage and grief, and whirling in a storm of flying skirts, turned her back upon sheriff, abbot, niece and all, and clove like a fury through the startled brothers who gave way hastily before her onslaught. Not one glance at Joscelin Lucy now, she bore down on one man, and one man only, raging.
“You... you! Where are you, coward, murderer, come forth and face me! You, you, Simon Aguilon, you killed my lord!”
The ranks scattered before her blazing eyes and levelled arm.
“Stand, damned murderer, face me! Hear me!” The whole Foregate, surely, must be hearing her and crossing themselves in superstitious dread, envisaging a demon come after some prodigious sinner. As for Simon, he stood aghast, too taken aback, it seemed, even to retreat before her. He stared open-mouthed, speechless, as she halted challengingly before him, her black eyes huge and flaring redly in the torchlight. Beside him Guy turned a startled stare helplessly from one to the other, and drew back a furtive pace or two from this new and deadly battlefield.
“You killed him! None but you could have done this. You rode off beside him to this hunt, close to him in the line—I know, I heard how it was drawn up. You, FitzJohn, say, let them all hear! Where did this man ride?”
“He was next to Sir Godfrid,” admitted Guy dazedly. “But...”
“Next to him, yes... and on the way home, in those thick woods, it was easy to take him by surprise. Late and quiet you come back, Simon Aguilon, and you have made sure he will never come back!”
Sheriff and abbot had drawn close to witness this encounter, startled and appalled like everyone else, and made as yet no attempt to interrupt it. She was past reason. Simon said so, when he could speak at all, swallowing hard, and still breathless.
“For God’s sake, what have I done to be so accused? I am altogether innocent of this death, I knew nothing of it... I last saw Sir Godfrid Picard three hours ago, well alive, threading the woods like the rest of us. The poor lady is crazed with grief, she strikes the nearest...”
“I strike at you,” she cried, “and would if there were a thousand in between. For you are the man! You know it as I know it. Pretense will not save you now!”
Simon appealed wildly to the sheriff and abbot, spreading gloved hands. “Why, why should I so much as think of killing a man who was my friend? With whom I had no quarrel in the world? What possible motive could I have for such a deed? You see she has run mad.”
“Ah, but you did have a quarrel with him,” shrieked Agnes vengefully, “as well you know. Why? Why? Do you dare ask me why? Because he suspected—he as good as knew—that you had killed your own lord and uncle!”
Wilder and wilder grew the accusations, and yet this time Simon drew in breath sharply, and for an instant was still and pale. He wrenched himself out of shocked silence with a great heave, to defend himself strongly. “How can that be? Everyone knows that my uncle dismissed me, put off all company and rode out alone. I went to my bed, as I was bidden. I slept late... they came to wake me when they found he had not returned...”
She swept that aside with a contemptuous motion of her hand. “You went to your bed, yes, I make no doubt... and you left it again to steal out in the night and set your trap. Easy enough to leave unseen and return unseen when your wicked work was done. There are more ways in and out of any house than by the hall door, and who was so privileged in going and coming as you? Who else had all the keys he needed? Who stood to gain by the old man’s death but you? And not only in being his heir, oh, no! Deny too these here present, if you dare, that in the evening of the day Huon was brought back dead, you came to my lord, before your uncle was cold you came, to make a bargain with us that you would step into his shoes with my niece, inherit bride, and honor, and all. Deny it, and I’ll prove it! My maid was there!”
Simon looked round the ring of watching faces wildly, and protested: “Why should I not fairly offer for Iveta? My estate would match hers, it is no disparagement. I esteem, I honor her. And Sir Godfrid did not reject me. I was willing to wait, to be patient. He agreed to my suit...”
Iveta’s hand gripped and clung convulsively in Joscelin’s clasp. Her stunned mind went back over those two meetings when Simon had seemed to her the only friend she had in the world, when he had pledged her his help, and Joscelin his loyalty. The first meeting countenanced by a smiling and gracious Agnes, complacently welcoming fortune restored. The second... yes, that had been different indeed, he had professed himself disapproved and banished, and the event had borne him out in his claim. What could have happened between, to change everything?
“So he did,” shrilled Agnes, glittering with hatred, “thinking you the honest man you seemed then. But Huon’s throat was bruised and cut—the monk there said it, and my lord heard it, and so did you—bruised and cut by a ring the murderer wore on his right hand. And once you had heard that said, who saw you again without gloves? In season and out! But my husband was at the coffining of Huon de Domville yesterday, and then you were forced—were you not, wretch?—to doff your gloves for once to take the aspergillum. And it was to him you handed it thereafter! He saw—oh, not the ring, no, that you had taken off hastily as soon as the monk here spoke of it, but the pale band where it was wont to be, and the square whiteness under the stone. And he remembered then that you used to wear a ring, just such a ring. And he was fool enough to speak out what he had seen, and what he believed, when you came visiting. He cut off all ado with a man he had cause to think a murderer.”
Yes, so he had. So that was the reason for the change! But not, thought Iveta, grown by force too suddenly into a woman, not because a murderer would not have been acceptable to him, provided no breath of suspicion ever blew his way. No, rather because while suspicion was even possible, he dared not risk contamination. Give him absolute security on that point, and he would have made up his differences quickly enough. And Joscelin had still been the law’s quarry, and Joscelin might still have been taken, taken and hanged... And she would have been left believing despairingly that she had but one kind friend in the world, and that was Simon Aguilon! He had sworn that the very reason he was banished was because he had declared his faith in Joscelin! And he might—given time enough to dull pain—he might even have prevailed! She pressed close to Joscelin’s side, and trembled.
“I urged him, I begged him,” moaned Agnes, writhing, “to sever all ties with such a man. You knew all too well he might feel it his duty to speak out what he suspected, even without proof. You have made certain he never shall. But you have not reckoned with me!”
“Woman, you are mad!” Simon flung up his hands against her, his voice high almost to breaking. “How could I have set a snare for my uncle, when I did not know where he had gone, or what he intended, much less by what narrow path he must return? I did not know he had a mistress anywhere within this shire, to tempt him to a night’s visit.”
Cadfael had stood silent throughout this duel. He spoke now. “There is one who will say, Simon Aguilon, that you lie, that you did know, none so well. Avice of Thornbury says, and I fancy there will be two other witnesses to bear her out, once they know she is not at risk and asks no silence, that you, and none other, were the trusted escort who conducted her wherever her lord wanted her. You brought her to the hunting-lodge. The way between was well known to you, for you had ridden it. And Huon de Domville admitted but one man at a time to his private amours. For these last three years you have been that man.”
Agnes uttered a long wail of glee and grief together, that drifted eerily on the blown smoke of the torches. She pointed a triumphant hand. “Strip him! You will see! The ring is on him now, he never would leave it off his person, for another to see and understand. Search him, and you’ll find it. And why should he doff it, if it never left mark on a murdered man?”
The men-at-arms had read the sheriff’s signs, and closed in silently, a tight ring of leather and steel about the two antagonists. Simon had been too intent on the threat before him to regard the quiet vigilance behind. He loosed a defiant cry of anger and impatience, and swung on his heel to stride away. “I need not stay to hear such venom!” he spat, too shrilly.
Only then did he see the solid, silent line of armed men, drawn shoulder to shoulder between him and the gate, and balked like a headed deer. He looked round wildly, unable to believe the collapse of his fortunes.
The sheriff drew a measured pace nearer, and spoke.
“Take off your gloves!”
*
It was an unlovely thing to see a human creature break and try to run, see him fight like a wildcat when he was hemmed in, and snarl defiance when he was overcome and pinioned. In deference to the abbot they hauled him out through the gates into the Foregate with as little violence as possible, and dealt with him there. He knotted his hands together to balk the removal of his gloves, and when his hands were naked, the pale circle on the middle finger of his right hand glared like snow on new-ploughed russet soil, the large blot of the stone clear to be seen. He struggled and cursed when they felt about his body, sank his head grimly into his chest so that they had to force his head back to withdraw the cord from round his neck, beneath his shirt, and expose the ring to view.
When they had hustled him away, four of them holding him and hard-pressed at that, to a cell in the castle, there fell a dreadful, exhausted silence over the great court. Joscelin, great-eyed, shaken and bewildered, folded his arms about Iveta, and quivered in uncomprehending relief, too shocked to question as yet the devious use that had been made of him throughout. Agnes stood rigid, staring balefully as long as her enemy remained in view, and then, released, clutched her head between her hands and wept, but hardly, in solitary and forbidding grief. Who would have thought she could have loved her unendearing husband?
The virago was gone. She let fall her hands and paced slowly, like one walking in her sleep, through the agitated onlookers who moved aside to give her passage. She looked round once upon them all, from the steps of the guest-hall, having passed by Iveta’s extended hand as though the girl did not exist, and then she went in, and vanished.
“Later,” said Abbot Radulfus, heavily but calmly, “she will speak freely. Her testimony is essential. As for her lord—he is dead already. Need we question, since he cannot be questioned?”
“Not in any tribunal of mine, at any rate,” agreed Gilbert Prestcote drily, and turned to his remaining men. “You, sergeant, before we set off to bring this dead man home, how comes it that you set so apt a watch about the brook here, while we were beating the forest? We had no intimation that ever reached my ears, that a raid might be attempted on these premises.”
“It was after you were all gone forth, my lord,” said the sergeant, “that Jehan here came to me with the notion that since the squire was set on the lady, he might take the chance when there were but few of us left here, to try to win her away.” He haled forth the clever fellow who had won commendation for an earlier idea, equally justified in the event. The man was not quite so sure of himself, now that things were turned topsy-turvy, and his patron was become the villain in the web, but he stood his ground. “It was he who said that the fellow, if he had the wit, might hide in his lord’s own gardens, you’ll remember, and when we searched, we found he had indeed been there, though he was gone when we came to it. This time it seemed just as good sense, so we kept a vigil in secret.”
“Friend,” said Prestcote, eyeing the man-at-arms somewhat ominously, “your guesses seem to be blessed by heaven, but I fancy hell had more to do with them. When did Aguilon put it into your head to search the bishop’s outhouses for our wanted man? At what hour?”
Jehan had the sense to be open about it, though none too happily. “My lord, it was after my lord Domville’s body was brought back here. When he came back to the bishop’s house, then he suggested it. He said I was welcome to the credit if we found our man, and he would as lief keep out of it.”
Joscelin shook his head despairingly between his hands, slow still to understand the whole of it. “But it was he who helped me—he came to find me, he hid me there himself in goodwill...”
“In very evil will!” said Brother Cadfael. “Son, you had given him not only the opportunity of hastening his inheritance of a great estate, but also of adding to it this lady’s person and lands. For you had provided him a perfect scapegoat, one wronged and angry and bearing a grudge. Yours would be the first and only name that came to mind, when Huon de Domville was waylaid and murdered. But with that in view he had to have you still at liberty, hidden away somewhere safe, until well after the death, and where he could point the hunt to take you when that was done. It was your leaving your sanctuary that balked his plans and saved your neck.”
“Then tonight,” pursued Joscelin, frowning over this chill treachery as if his head ached, “you mean he set this trap for me, in cold blood? I thought him my one friend, I asked his help...”
“How?” asked Cadfael sharply. “How did you get word to him?”
Joscelin told them the whole of it, though not one word yet of Lazarus or Bran, or any of those who had truly helped him. That he might tell some day, surely to Iveta, perhaps even to Brother Cadfael, but not here, not now.
“So he knew only that you were somewhere close, but not where. He could not send his trusty foil here to lay hands on you, he could only wait for you to come to the law, and you had set the scene yourself. All he had to do was pass on your message to the lady, and see that your horse was waiting for you as you had asked—or you would not have crossed into the garden here to be seized, would you?—and then say the quiet word to Jehan here. He would not wish to appear in the matter himself, certainly,” said Cadfael wryly, “since his pose of loyalty to you was his best commendation with the lady. You once safely taken and hanged,” he said, making no bones about it, for the good-natured lad was wrenching hard at belief in such devious treason in one he had trusted, “I doubt if Godfrid Picard would have balked at matching his niece with a murderer—a successful murderer. It was the peril meantime he could not stomach, in case it reached as far as his own credit, if not his own neck.”
“Speak up, Jehan,” ordered the sheriff, grimly smiling. “Did Aguilon again point you the way to commendation and promotion?”
“This morning,” admitted Jehan unwarily, “he put the notion into my head...”
“This morning! Before ever we set forth! And you said no word to me or to your officer until we were out of the way of your intended feat of arms. Promotion is hardly likely to come your way, fellow, for a while. Think yourself lucky to escape a whipping!”
Jehan was indeed thinking himself well out of a perilous corner, to be dismissed so lightly, and made himself scarce without delay.
“We had best be bringing in this dead man,” said the sheriff, turning brusquely back to the task in hand. “Will you guide us, brother? We’ll go mounted, and with a spare horse for Picard’s last ride.”
*
They were away, half a dozen mounted men, Cadfael in no way displeased to be astride a fine, sturdy rouncey again instead of a modest little mule. The abbot watched them out of the gates, and then turned to dismiss, with even voice and calm face, the disturbed and wondering brotherhood.
“Go, compose your minds, wash your hands, and go in to supper. The rule still orders our day. Traffic with the world is laid upon us for chastening, and for the testing of our vocation. The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.”
They went obediently. At a glance from Radulfus, Prior Robert inclined his head and followed the flock. The abbot was left confronting, with a faint, contemplative smile, the two young creatures still clinging hand in hand, eyeing him steadfastly but doubtfully. Too much had happened to them too suddenly, they were like children half-awake, not yet clear what, of their recollections and experiences, was real, and what was dream. But surely the dreams had been terrifying, and the reality must needs be better.
“I think,” said the abbot gently, “you need not be in any anxiety, my son, about that other charge your lord made against you. In all the circumstances, no just man would consider it safe to believe in such a theft, and Gilbert Prestcote is a just man. I cannot choose but wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “whether it was Aguilon also who hid the necklace in your saddle-bag with the medal of Saint James.”
“I doubt it, Father.” Joscelin took thought to be fair, even now, to a comrade who had done him such grievous wrong. “For truly I feel he had not thought of murder until I was cast off and accused, and broke away to freedom as I did. It is as Brother Cadfael said, he was presented with his chance and his scapegoat. My lord Domville most likely did his own meaner work this time. But, Father, it is not my troubles that weigh on me now. It is Iveta.”
He moistened his lips, feeling for the best words, and the abbot stood silent and imperturbable, and gave him no help. Iveta, too, had looked up at him in startled alarm, as though she feared he might too nobly and stupidly let go of her when she thought herself fairly won.
“Father, this lady has been vilely misused by those who were her guardians. Now her uncle is dead, and her aunt, even if she were fit to care for her, would not be allowed to keep the administration of so great an honor. It is my prayer that you, Father, will take her into your own guardianship from this day, for with you I know she will be used with gentleness and honor, and be happy as she deserves. If you put forward such a request to the king, he will not deny you.”
The abbot waited some moments, and his austere lips were very drily smiling. “And that is all? No plea for yourself?”
“None!” said Joscelin, with the fierce humility that looked and sounded what it was, a nobleman’s arrogance.
“But I have a prayer of my own,” said Iveta indignantly, keeping fast hold of a hand that would have renounced its claim on her. “It is that you will look kindly upon Joscelin, and use him as my favored suitor, for I love him, and he loves me, and though I will be obedient to you in everything else, if you will take me, I will not part with Joscelin, or ever love or marry anyone else.”
“Come,” said the abbot, not quite committing himself to a smile, “I think we three had better sit down to supper together in my lodging, and consider how best to dispose of the future. There’s no haste, and much to think about. Thinking is best after prayer, but will be none the worse for a meal and a glass of wine.”
*
The sheriff and his party brought back Godfrid Picard’s body to the abbey before Compline. In the mortuary chapel they laid him straight, and brought candles to examine his injuries. His unblooded dagger, found some yards aside in the grass, where Cadfael had discovered and left it, they slid back into its sheath as they unbuckled his sword-belt, but it cannot be said that much thought had been given to the curious circumstance of its lying thus naked and discarded in the glade.
The man was dead, his murderer, murderer already of one man, and a kinsman at that, was in Shrewsbury castle, safe under lock and key. If there were odd circumstances in this second case, no one but Cadfael noticed them, though for a while they puzzled him as much as they would have puzzled his companions, had they troubled to examine them. A man dies, strangled with a man’s hands, yet himself provided with a dagger, and clearly having had time to draw it. To draw, but not to blood it. And those who kill with their hands do so because they are otherwise unarmed.
The night was still. The candles did not flicker, and the light on the dead man’s suffused face, bitten tongue and exposed throat was sharp enough to show detail. Cadfael looked closely and long at the marks of the strong fingers that had crushed out life, but he said nothing. Nor was he asked anything. All questions had already been answered to the sheriff’s satisfaction.
“We’d best have a mare out tomorrow, to fetch the gray out of the forest,” said Prestcote, drawing up the linen sheet over Picard’s face. “A valuable beast, that. The widow could sell him for a good price in Shrewsbury, if she’s so minded.”
Having completed his duty here, Cadfael excused himself, and went to look for Brother Mark. He found him in the warming-room, rosily restored after a kitchen supper and a change of clothes, and about to take his leave, and walk back to Saint Giles and his duty.
“Wait only a brief while for me,” said Cadfael, “and I’ll bear you company. I have an errand there.”
In the meantime, his errand here was to two young people who had, as he saw when he ran them to earth in the abbot’s parlor, of all places, no great need of his solicitude, since they had enlisted a greater patron, and appeared to be on terms of complete confidence with him, partly due, perhaps, to a good wine after extreme stress and rapturous relief. So Cadfael merely paid his respects, accepted their flushed and generous gratitude, exchanged a somewhat ambiguous glance with Radulfus as he made his reverence, and left them to their deliberations, which were certainly proceeding very satisfactorily, but had certain implications for others, not here represented.
Two warm-hearted children, these, radiant with goodwill towards all who had stood by them at need. Very young, very vulnerable, very eager and impulsive now that they were happy. The abbot would keep them on a close rein for a while, her in some sheltered sisterhood or a well-matroned manor of her own, the boy under discreet watch in whatever service he took up, now that he was clean, honorable and his own best guarantor. But Radulfus would not keep them apart, he was too wise to try to separate what God or his angels had joined.
Meantime, there were others to be thought of, and there was need of the coming night, if what Cadfael had divined proved true.
He turned to the warming-room, where Brother Mark, content and expectant, was waiting for him by the fire. He had not sat so long in the warmth since he was a new novice in the order. It had been well worth getting soused in the Meole brooke.
“Is everything well?” he asked hopefully, as they set out together along the Foregate in the darkness.
“Very well,” said Cadfael, so heartily that Mark drew pleased and grateful breath, and ceased to question.
“The little lady for whom you prayed God’s help, some days ago,” said Cadfael cheerfully, “will do very well now. The lord abbot will see to that. All I want at the hospital is a pleasant word with your wanderer Lazarus, in case he moves on very soon, before I can come again. You know how they snuff the air and grow uneasy, and up anchor suddenly, and sail.”
“I had wondered,” confided Brother Mark, “whether he might be persuaded to stay. He has an affection for Bran. And the mother will not live much longer. She has turned her back on the world. Oh, not on her boy—but she feels he has gone beyond her, and has his own saints,” explained one of those saints diffidently, without self-recognition. “She is certain he is protected by heaven.”
There were those on earth, too, thought Cadfael, who had some interest in the matter. Two grateful, loosened tongues in the abbot’s parlor had poured out all their story without reserve, named names confidingly. Joscelin had a mind quick to learn, and a heart tenacious of affections, and Iveta in the fervor of deliverance wanted to take to her heart and hold fast in her life every soul, high or low, whole or afflicted, who had been good to Joscelin.
*
In the open porch before the hall of the hospice the old man Lazarus sat, mute, motionless, patient, with his erect back braced against the wall, and his legs drawn up beneath him on the bench, crossed after the eastern fashion. Curled up in the circle of the old man’s left arm, Bran lay uneasily asleep, with Joscelin’s wooden horse clasped to his heart. The small lamp above the door of the hall shed a faint yellow light on his spindly limbs and ruffled fair head, and showed a face smudged with tears. He awoke when Cadfael and Mark entered, staring up dazedly out of his nest, and the long arm withdrew from him silently, and let him scramble down from the bench.
“Why, Bran!” said Brother Mark, concerned and chiding. “What are you doing out of your bed at this hour?”
Bran embraced him hard, half-relieved and half-resentful, and accused in muffled tones from within the folds of the new and over-ample habit: “You both went away! You left me alone. I didn’t know where you were... You might not have come back! He hasn’t come back!”
“Ah, but he will, you’ll see.” Brother Mark gathered the boy to him, and took possession of a groping hand. Its fellow was busy retrieving the wooden horse, momentarily discarded but jealously reclaimed. “Come, come to bed, and I’ll tell you all about it. Your friend is well and happy, and need not hide any more. Everything that was wrong has been put right. Come, and you shall hear it once from me, and he will tell it all over again when next you see him. As you will, I promise.”
“He said I should be his squire, and learn to read Latin hand, and reckon numbers, if ever he came to be knight,” Bran sternly reminded both his present and his absent patron, and allowed himself to be led sleepily towards the inner door. Mark looked back at Cadfael as they went, and at his reassuring nod took the child gently towards the dortoir.
Lazarus made no movement and said no word when Cadfael sat down beside him. Long ago he had outlived surprise, fear and desire, at least on his own account. He sat gazing out with his far-sighted blue-gray eyes at a night sky now beginning to flow like running water, a lofty, thin stream of cloud carried tranquilly eastwards on a fair breeze, while here on earth the very leaves were still.
“You’ll have heard,” said Cadfael, leaning back comfortably against the wall, “what Mark told the child. It was true, thanks be to God! Everything that was wrong has been put right. The murderer of Huon de Domville is taken, guilty past doubt. That is over. Pity is out of reach, short of pentinence, and of that there’s none. The man has not only killed his uncle, but vilely betrayed and misused his friend who trusted him, and shamelessly deceived a harried and forsaken girl. That is over. You need trouble no more.”
The man beside him said no word, asked no question, but he listened. Cadfael continued equably: “All will be well with her now. The king will surely approve our abbot as her new guardian. Radulfus is an austere and high-minded man, but also a human and humane one. She has nothing more to fear, not even for a lover none too well endowed with worldly goods. Her wishes, her happiness, will no longer be brushed aside as of no account.”
Within the great cloak Lazarus stirred, and turned his head. The deep voice, forming words with deliberate, halting care, spoke from behind the muffling veil: “You speak only of Domville. What of the second murder?”
“What second murder?” said Cadfael simply.
“I saw the torches among the trees, an hour and more ago, when they came for Godfrid Picard. I know he is dead. Is that, too, laid at this other man’s door?”
“Aguilon will be tried for the murder of his uncle,” said Cadfael, “where there is proof enough. Why look further? If there are some who mistakenly set Picard’s death to his discredit, how is his fate changed? He will not be charged with that. It could not be maintained. Godfrid Picard was not murdered.”
“How do you know?” asked Lazarus, untroubled but willing to be enlightened.
“There was no snare laid for him, he had all his senses and powers when he was killed, but all his senses and powers were not enough. He was not murdered, he was stopped in the way and challenged to single combat. He had a dagger, his opponent had only his hands. No doubt he thought he had an easy conquest, an armed man against one weaponless, a man in his prime against one seventy years old. He had time to draw, but that was all. The dagger was wrenched away and hurled aside, not turned against him. The hands were enough. He had not considered the weight of a just quarrel.”
“It must, then, have been a very grave quarrel between these two,” said Lazarus, after a long silence.
“The oldest and gravest. The shameful mistreatment of a lady. She is avenged and delivered. Heaven made no mistake.”
The silence fell between them again, but lightly and softly as a girl’s veil might float down and settle, or a moth flutter out of the night and alight without a sound. The old man’s eyes returned to the steady, measured flow of wisps of cloud eastward in the zenith. There was diffused light of stars behind the veil, while the earth lay in darkness. Behind the coarse veil of faded blue cloth Cadfael thought there was the faintest and most tranquil of smiles.
“And if you have divined so much from this day’s deed,” said Lazarus at length, “have not others the same knowledge?”
“No other has seen what I have seen,” said Cadfael simply, “and none will now. The marks will fade. No one wonders. No one questions. And only I know. And only I, and the owner of the hands that did the deed, will ever know that of those hands, the left had but two and a half fingers.”
There was a stir of movement within the mound of dark clothes, and a flash of the ice-clear eyes. Out of the folds of the cloak two hands emerged, and were held to the light of the lamp, the right one whole, long and sinewy, the left lacking index and middle finger and the upper joint of the third, the maimed surfaces showing seamed, whitish and dry.
“Having divined so much from so little, brother,” said the slow, calm voice, “take me with you one step beyond, and divine me his name, for I think you know it.”
“So I think, also,” said Brother Cadfael. “His name is Guimar de Massard.”
*
The night hung motionless over the Foregate and the valley of the Meole, and the woods through which the sheriff and his men had hunted in vain, plotting clearly, for those longsighted eyes, the passage of Picard’s bright red cap through the trees, and mapping the way by which, later, he must return. Overhead, in contrast to this terrestrial stillness, the sky flowed steadily away, like one man’s floating, fragile life blown across the constant of life itself, to vanish into the unknown.
“Should I know that name?” asked Lazarus, very still.
“My lord, I, too, was at the storming of Jerusalem. Twenty years old I was when the city fell. I saw you breach the gate. I was at the fight at Ascalon, when the Fatimids of Egypt came up against us—and for my part, after the killing that was done in Jerusalem, of so many who held by the Prophet, I say they deserved better luck against us than they had. But there was never brutality or unknightly act charged against Guimar de Massard. Why, why did you vanish after that fight? Why let us, who revered you, and your wife and son here in England, grieve you for dead? Had any of us deserved that of you?”
“Had my wife, had my son, deserved of me that I should lay upon them the load that had fallen upon me?” asked Lazarus, roused and stumbling for once upon the words that tried his mangled mouth. “Brother, I think you ask what you already know.”
Yes, Cadfael knew. Guimar de Massard, wounded and captive after Ascalon, had learned from the doctors who attended him in captivity that he was already a leper.
“They have excellent physicians,” said Lazarus, again calm and still, “wiser than any here. And who should better know and recognize the first bitter signs? They told me truth. They did what I asked of them, sent word of my death from my wounds. They did more. They helped me to a hermitage where I might live with my enemy, as I had died to my friends, and fight that battle as I had fought the commoner kind. My helm and my sword they sent back to Jerusalem, as I asked.”
“She has them,” said Cadfael. “She treasures them. You have not been forgotten in your death. I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.”
“Chivalrous and courteous I found my captors. At all points they respected and supported me through the years of my penance.”
One nobility is kin to another, thought Cadfael. There are alliances that cross the blood-line of families, the borders of countries, even the impassable divide of religion, And it was well possible that Guimar de Massard should find himself closer in spirit to the Fatimid caliphs than to Bohemond and Baldwin and Tancred, squabbling like malicious children over their conquests.
“How long,” he asked, “have you been on your way home?” For it was a long, long journey across Europe from the midland sea, on broken feet, with a clapper-dish for baggage, and nothing more.
“Eight years. Ever since they brought word to my hermitage, from the reports of an English prisoner, of my son’s death, and told me there was a child, a girl, left orphaned to her dead mother’s kin, wanting any remaining of my blood.”
So he had left his cell, the refuge of years, and set off with his begging-bowl and cloak and veil to make that endless pilgrimage to England, to see for himself, at the prescribed distance, that his grandchild enjoyed her lands and had her due of happiness. He had found, instead, her affairs gone far awry, and with his own maimed hands he had straightened them, and set her free.
“She has her due now,” said Cadfael. “But for all that, I think she might be happy to exchange her title to all that great honor for one living kinsman.”
The silence was long and cold, as if he trod upon forbidden ground. Nevertheless, he persisted doggedly. “You are a quenched fire. You have been now for years, I judge. Do not deny it, I know the signs. What God imposed, no doubt for his own good reasons, for reasons as good he has lifted away. You know it. You are a peril to no man. And whatever name you have used all these years, you are still Guimar de Massard. If she cherishes your sword, how much more would she revere and delight in you? Why deprive her now of her true shield? Or yourself of the joy of seeing her happy? Of giving her with your own hand to a husband I think you approve?”
“Brother,” said Guimar de Massard, shaking his hooded head, “you speak of what you do not understand. I am a dead man. Let my grave and my bones and my legend alone.”
“Yet there was one Lazarus,” said Cadfael, venturing far and in great awe, “who did rise again out of his tomb, to the joy of his kinswomen.”
There was a long hush while the sailing filaments of cloud were the only things that moved in the visible world. Then the old man’s unblemished right hand flashed from within the folds of the cloak, and rose to thrust back the hood. “And was this,” asked Guimar, “the face that made his sisters glad?”
He plucked away the face-cloth, and uncovered the awful visage left to him, almost lipless, one cheek shrunken away, the nostrils eaten into great, discolored holes, a face in which only the live and brilliant eyes recalled the paladin of Jerusalem and Ascalon. And Cadfael was silenced.
Lazarus again covered the ruin from sight behind the veil. The quietness and serenity came back, almost stealthily. “Never seek to roll that stone away,” said the deep, patient voice gently. “I am content beneath it. Let me lie.”
“I must tell you, then,” said Cadfael after a long silence, “that the boy has been sounding your praises to her, and she is begging him to bring her to you, since you cannot go to her, that she may thank you in person for your goodness to her lover. And since he can refuse her nothing, I think in the morning they will be here.”
“They will understand,” said Lazarus calmly, “that there’s no relying on us wandering lepers, the pilgrim kind. We have minds incorrigibly vagus. The fit comes on us, and the wind blows us away like dust. Relics, we make our way where there are relics to console us. Tell them that all is well with me.”
He put down his feet from the bench, carefully and slowly because of their condition, and courteously shook the skirts of his gown down over them, to hide the deformities. “For with the dead,” he said, “all is very well.” He rose, and Cadfael with him.
“Pray for me, brother, if you will.”
He was gone, turning away and withdrawing without another word or look. The heel of the special shoe he wore tapped sharply on the flags of the floor, and changed its note hollowly on the boards within. Brother Cadfael went out from the porch, under the slow-moving clouds that were not drifting, but proceeding with purpose and deliberation on some predestined course of their own, unhurried and unimpeded, like death.
Yes, with the dead, he thought, making his way back to the abbey in the dark, all is surely well. The child will have to find them work for their gratitude, instead. Their dead has accomplished his own burial, now let them turn rather to the living. Who knows? Who knows but the beggar-woman’s scrofulous waif, fed and tended and taught, may indeed end as page and squire to Sir Joscelin Lucy, some day? Stranger things have happened in this strangest, most harrowing and most wonderful of worlds!
*
The next morning, after Mass, Iveta and Joscelin came to Saint Giles, with the abbot’s sanction, and hearts full of goodwill to all those within, but seeking two in particular. The child was easily found. But the old leper called Lazarus had gone forth silently in the night, leaving no word where he was bound, and saying no farewells. They sought for him by all the roads from Shrewsbury, and sent to ask at every place of pilgrimage within three counties, but even on crippled feet he outran pursuit, by what secret ways no one ever discovered. Certain it is he came no more to Shrewsbury.