The Devil's Novice

Chapter Eight

IT WAS NO MORE THAN AN INSTANT’S WITHDRAWAL from the unbearable, recoiling into his enfolding arms, shutting out what nevertheless he could not choose but go on seeing. He had not swooned. Even as Mark flew to him, with no outcry to alarm the busy party dismantling the stack of cordwood, he was already rearing his head and doubling his fists grimly into the soil to raise himself. Mark held him with an arm about his body, for he was trembling still when he got to his feet.

“Did you see? Did you see it?” he asked in a whisper. What remained of the half-burned stack was between them and their charges, no one had turned to look in their direction.

“Yes, I saw. I know! We must get them away,” said Mark. “Leave this pile as it is, touch nothing more, leave the charcoal. We must just load the wood and start them back for home. Are you fit to go? Can you be as always, and keep your face before them?”

“I can,” said Meriet, stiffening, and scrubbed a sleeve over a forehead dewed with a chilly sweat. “I will! But, Mark, if you saw what I saw—we must know …”

“We do know,” said Mark, “you and I both. It’s not for us now, this is the law’s business, and we must let ill alone for them to see. Don’t even look that way again. I saw, perhaps, more than you. I know what is there. What we must do is get our people home without spoiling their day. Now, come and see to loading the cart with me. Can you, yet?”

For answer, Meriet braced his shoulders, heaved in a great breath, and withdrew himself resolutely from the thin arm that still encircled him. “I’m ready!” he said, in a fair attempt at the cheerful, practical voice with which he had summoned them to the hearth, and was off across the level floor to plunge fiercely into the labour of hoisting logs into the cart.

Mark followed him watchfully, and against all temptation contrived to obey his own order, and give no single glance to that which had been uncovered among the ashes. But he did, as they worked, cast a careful eye about the rim of the hearth, where he had also noticed certain circumstances which gave him cause for thought. What he had been about to say to Meriet when the rake fetched down its avalanche was never said.

They loaded their haul, stacking the wood so high that there was no room for the toeless boy to ride on top on the return journey. Meriet carried him on his back, until the arms that clasped him round the neck fell slack with sleepiness, and he shifted his burden to one arm, so that the boy’s tow-coloured head could nod securely on his shoulder. The load on his arm was light enough, and warm against his heart. What else he carried unseen, thought Mark watching him with reticent attention, weighed more heavily and struck cold as ice. But Meriet’s calm continued rock-firm. The one moment of recoil was over, and there would be no more such lapses.

At Saint Giles Meriet carried the boy indoors, and returned to help haul the carts up the slight slope to the barn, where the wood would be stacked under the low eaves, to be sawn and split later as it was needed.

“I am going now into Shrewsbury,” said Mark, having counted all his chicks safely into the coop, tired and elated from their successful foray.

“Yes,” said Meriet, without turning from the neat stack he was building, end-outwards between two confining buttresses of wood. “I know someone must.”

“Stay here with them. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“I know,” said Meriet. “I will. They’re happy enough. It was a good day.”

Brother Mark hesitated when he reached the abbey gatehouse, for his natural instinct was to take everything first to Brother Cadfael. It was plain that his errand now was to the officers of the king’s law in the shire, and urgent, but on the other hand it was Cadfael who had confided Meriet to him, and he was certain in his own mind that the grisly discovery in the charcoal hearth was in some way connected with Meriet. The shock he had felt was genuine, but extreme, his wild recoil too intense to be anything but personal. He had not known, had not dreamed, what he was going to find, but past any doubt he knew it when he found it.

While Mark was hovering irresolute in the arch of the gatehouse Brother Cadfael, who had been sent for before Vespers to an old man in the Foregate who had a bad chest ailment, came behind and clapped him briskly on the shoulder. Turning to find the clemency of heaven apparently presenting him with the answer to his problem, Mark clutched him gratefully by the sleeve, and begged him: “Cadfael, come with me to Hugh Beringar. We’ve found something hideous in the Long Forest, business for him, surely. I was just by way of praying for you. Meriet was with me—this somehow touches Meriet…”

Cadfael fixed him with an acute stare, took him by the arm and turned him promptly towards the town. “Come on then and save your breath to tell the tale but once. I’m earlier back than anyone will expect me, I can stretch my license an hour or two, for you and for Meriet.”

So they were two who arrived at the house near Saint Mary’s, where Hugh had settled his family. By luck he was home before supper, and free of his labours for the day. He haled them in warmly, and had wit enough not to offer Brother Mark respite or refreshment until he had heaved his whole anxiety off his narrow chest. Which he did very consideringly, measuring words. He stepped meticulously from fact to fact, as on sure stepping-stones through a perilous stream.

“I called him round to me because I had seen that on the side of that stack where I was, and where the pile was burned out, the wind had carried fine ash right into the trees, and the near branches of the trees were scorched, the leaves browned and withered. I meant to call his attention to these things, for such a fire was no long time ago. Those were this year’s leaves scorched brown, that was ash not many weeks old still showing grey. And he came readily, but as he came he held on to the rake and tugged it with him, to bring down the top of the stack, where it had not burned out. So he brought down a whole fall of wood and earth and leaves, and this thing rolled down between, at our feet.”

“You saw it plainly,” said Hugh gently, “tell us as plainly.”

“It is a fashionable long-toed riding shoe,” said Mark steadily, “shrunk and dried and twisted by fire, but not consumed. And in it a man’s leg-bone, in the ashes of hose.”

“You are in no doubt,” said Hugh, watching him with sympathy.

“None. I saw projecting from the pile the round knee-joint from which the shin-bone had parted,” said Brother Mark, pale but tranquil. “It so happened I saw it break away. I am sure the man is there. The fire broke through on the other side, a strong wind drove it, and left him, it may be, almost whole for Christian burial. At least we may collect his bones.”

“That shall be done with all reverence,” said Hugh, “if you are right. Go on, you have more to tell. Brother Meriet saw what you had seen. What then?”

“He was utterly stricken and shocked. He had spoken of coming there as a child, and helping the old charcoal-burner. I am certain he knew of nothing worse there than what he remembered. I told him first we must get our people home undisturbed, and he did his part valiantly,” said Brother Mark, “We have left all as we found it—or as we disturbed it unwitting. In the morning light I can show you the place.”

“I think, rather,” said Hugh with deliberation, “Meriet Aspley shall do that. But now you have told us what you had to tell, now you may sit down with me and eat and drink a morsel, while we consider this matter.”

Brother Mark sat down obediently, sighing away the burden of his knowledge. Grateful for the humblest of hospitality, he was equally unawed by the noblest, and having no pride, he did not know how to be servile. When Aline herself brought him meat and drink, and the same for Cadfael, he received it gladly and simply, as saints accept alms, perpetually astonished and pleased, perpetually serene.

“You said,” Hugh pressed him gently over the wine, “that you had cause, in the blown ash and the scorching of the trees, to believe that the fire was of this season, and not from a year ago, and that I accept. Had you other reasons to think so?”

“I had,” said Mark simply, “for though we have brought home, to our gain, a whole cord of good coppice-wood, yet not far aside from ours there were two other flattened and whitened shapes in the grass, greener than the one we have now left, but still clear to be seen, which I think must have been bared when the wood was used for this stack. Meriet told me the logs must be left to season. These would have seasoned more than a year, dried out, it may be, too far for what was purposed. No one was left to watch the burning, and the over-dried wood burned through and burst into a blaze. You will see the shapes where the wood lay. You will judge better than I how long since it was moved.”

“That I doubt,” said Hugh, smiling, “for you seem to have done excellently well. But tomorrow we shall see. There are those can tell to a hair, by the burrowing insects and the spiders, and the tinder fringing the wood. Sit and take your ease awhile, before you must return, for there’s nothing now can be done before morning.”

Brother Mark sat back, relieved, and bit with astonished pleasure into the game pasty Aline had brought him. She thought him underfed, and worried about him because he was so meagre; and indeed he may very well have been underfed, through forgetting to eat while he worried about someone else. There was a great deal of the good woman in Brother Mark, and Aline recognised it.

“Tomorrow morning,” said Hugh, when Mark rose to take his leave and make his way back to his charges, “I shall be at Saint Giles with my men immediately after Prime. You may tell Brother Meriet that I shall require him to come with me and show me the place.”

That, of course, should occasion no anxiety to an innocent man, since he had been the cause of the discovery in the first place, but it might bring on a very uneasy night for one not entirely innocent, at least of more knowledge than was good for him. Mark could not object to the oblique threat, since his own mind had been working in much the same direction. But in departing he made over again his strongest point in Meriet’s defence.

“He led us to the place, for good and sensible reasons, seeing it was fuel we were after. Had he known what he was to find there, he would never have let us near it.”

“That shall be borne in mind,” said Hugh gravely. “Yet I think you found something more than natural in his horror when he uncovered a dead man. You, after all, are much of his age, and have had no more experience of murder and violence than has he. And I make no doubt you were shaken to the soul—yet not as he was. Granted he knew nothing of this unlawful burial, still the discovery meant to him something more, something worse, than it meant to you. Granted he did not know a body had been so disposed of, may he not, nevertheless, have had knowledge of a body in need of secret disposal, and recognised it when he uncovered it?”

“That is possible,” said Mark simply. “It is for you to examine all these things.” And he took his leave, and set off alone on the walk back to Saint Giles.

“There’s no knowing, as yet,” said Cadfael, when Mark was gone, “who or what this dead man may be. He may have nothing to do with Meriet, with Peter Clemence or with the horse straying in the mosses. A live man missing, a dead man found—they need not be one and the same. There’s every reason to doubt it. The horse more than twenty miles north of here, the rider’s last night halt four miles southeast, and this burning hearth another four miles south-west from there. You’ll have hard work linking those into one sequence and making sense of it. He left Aspley travelling north, and one thing’s certain by a number of witnesses, he was man alive then. What should he be doing now, not north, but south of Aspley? And his horse miles north, and on the right route he would be taking, bar a little straying at the end?”

“I don’t know but I’ll be the happier,” owned Hugh, “if this turns out to be some other traveller fallen by thieves somewhere, and nothing to do with Clemence, who may well be down in the peat-pools this moment. But do you know of any other gone missing in these parts? And another thing, Cadfael, would common thieves have left him his riding shoes? Or his hose, for that matter. A naked man has nothing left that could benefit his murderers, and nothing by which he may be easily known, two good reasons for stripping him. And again, since he wore long-toed shoes, he was certainly not going far afoot. No sane man would wear them for walking.”

A rider without a horse, a saddled horse without a rider, what wonder if the mind put the two together?

“No profit in racking brains,” said Cadfael, sighing, “until you’ve viewed the place, and gathered what there is to be gathered there.”

“We, old friend! I want you with me, and I think Abbot Radulfus will give me leave to take you. You’re better skilled than I in dead men, in how long they may have been dead, and how they died. Moreover, he’ll want a watching eye on all that affects Saint Giles, and who better than you? You’re waist-deep in the whole matter already, you must either sink or haul clear.”

“For my sins!” said Cadfael, somewhat hypocritically. “But I’ll gladly come with you. Whatever devil it is that possess young Meriet is plaguing me by contagion, and I want it exorcised at all costs.”

Meriet was waiting for them when they came for him next day, Hugh and Cadfael, a sergeant and two officers, equipped with crows and shovels, and a sieve to sift the ashes for every trace and every bone. In the faint mist of a still morning, Meriet eyed all these preparations with a face stonily calm, braced for everything that might come, and said flatly: “The tools are still there, my lord, in the hut. I fetched the rake from there, Mark will have told you—a corrack, the old man called it.” He looked at Cadfael, with the faintest softening in the set of his lips. “Brother Mark said I should be needed. I’m glad he need not go back himself.” His voice was in as thorough control as his face; whatever confronted him today, it would not take him by surprise.

They had brought a horse for him, time having its value. He mounted nimbly, perhaps with the only impulse of pleasure that would come his way that day, and led the way down the high road. He did not glance aside when he passed the turning to his own home, but turned on the other hand into the broad ride, and within half an hour had brought them to the shallow bowl of the charcoal hearth. Ground mist lay faintly blue over the shattered mound as Hugh and Cadfael walked round the rim and halted where the log that was no log lay tumbled among the ashes.

The tarnished buckle on the perished leather strap was of silver. The shoe had been elaborate and expensive. Slivers of burned cloth fluttered from the almost fleshless bone.

Hugh looked from the foot to the knee, and on above among the exposed wood for the joint from which it had broken free. “There he should be lying, aligned thus. Whoever put him there did not open a deserted stack, but built this new, and built him into the centre. Someone who knew the method, though perhaps not well enough. We had better take this apart carefully. You may rake off the earth covering and the leaves,” he said to his men, “but when you reach the logs we’ll hoist them off one by one where they’re whole. I doubt he’ll be little but bones, but I want all there is of him.”

They went to work, raking away the covering on the unburned side, and Cadfael circled the mound to view the quarter from which the destroying wind must have been blowing. Low to the ground a small, arched hole showed in the roots of the pile. He stooped to look more closely, and ran a hand under the hanging leaves that half-obscured it. The hollow continued inward, swallowing his arm to the elbow. It had been built in as the stack was made. He went back to where Hugh stood watching.

“They knew the method, sure enough. There’s a vent built in on the windward side to let in a draught. The stack was meant to burn out. But they overdid it. They must have had the vent covered until the stack was well alight, and then opened and left it. It blew too fiercely, and left the windward half hardly more than scorched while the rest blazed. These things have to be watched day and night.”

Meriet stood apart, close to where they had tethered the horses, and watched this purposeful activity with an impassive face. He saw Hugh cross to the edge of the arena, where three paler, flattened oblongs in the herbage showed where the wood had been stacked to season. Two of them showed greener than the third, as Mark had said, where new herbage had pierced the layer of dead grass and risen to the light. The third, the one which had supplied such a harvest for the inmates of Saint Giles, lay bleached and flat.

“How long,” asked Hugh, “to make this much new growth, and at this season?”

Cadfael pondered, digging a toe into the soft mat of old growth below. “A matter of eight to ten weeks, perhaps. Difficult to tell. And the blown ash might show as long as that. Mark was right, the heat reached the trees. If this floor had been less bare and hard, the fire might have reached them, too, but there was no thick layer of roots and leaf-mould to carry it along the ground.”

They returned to where the covering of earth and leaves now lay drawn aside, and the ridged surfaces of logs showed, blackened but keeping their shape. The sergeant and his men laid down their tools and went to work with their hands, hoisting the logs off one by one and stacking them aside out of the way. Slow work; and throughout Meriet stood watching, motionless and mute. The dead man emerged from his coffin of timber piecemeal after more than two hours of work. He had lain close to the central chimney on the leeward side, and the fire had been fierce enough to burn away all but a few tindery flakes of his clothing, but had passed by too rapidly to take all the flesh from his bones, or even the hair from his head. Laboriously they brushed away debris of charcoal and ash and half-consumed wood from him, but could not keep him intact. The collapse of part of the stack had started his joints and broken him apart. They had to gather up his bones as best they could, and lay them out on the grass until they had, if not the whole man, all but such small bones of finger and wrist as would have to be sifted from the ashes. The skull still retained, above the blackened ruin of a face, the dome of a naked crown fringed with a few wisps and locks of brown hair, cropped short.

But there were other things to lay beside him. Metal is very durable. The silver buckles on his shoes, blackened as they were, kept the form a good workman had given them. There was the twisted half of a tooled leather belt, with another silver buckle, large and elaborate, and traces of silver ornamenting in the leather. There was a broken length of tarnished silver chain attached to a silver cross studded with what must surely be semi-precious stones, though now they were blackened and encrusted with dirt. And one of the men, running fine ash from close to the body through the sieve, came to lay down for examination a finger-bone and the ring it had loosely retained while the flesh was burned from between. The ring bore a large black stone engraved with a design fouled by clotted ash, but which seemed to be a decorative cross. There was also something which had lain within the shattered rib-cage, burned almost clean by the fire, the head of the arrow that had killed him.

Hugh stood over the remnants of a man and his death for a long while, staring down with a grim face. Then he turned to where Meriet stood, rigid and still at the rim of the decline.

“Come down here, come and see if you cannot help us further. We need a name for this murdered man. Come and see if by chance you know him.”

Meriet came, ivory-faced, drew close as he was ordered, and looked at what lay displayed. Cadfael held off, but at no great distance, and watched and listened. Hugh had not only his work to do, but his own wrung senses to avenge, and if there was some resultant savagery in his handling of Meriet, at least it was not purposeless. For now there was very little doubt of the identity of this dead man they had before them, and the chain that drew Meriet to him was contracting.

“You observe,” said Hugh, quite gently and coldly, “that he wore the tonsure, that his own hair was brown, and his height, by the look of his bones, a tall man’s. What age would you say, Cadfael?”

“He’s straight, and without any of the deformities of ageing. A young man. Thirty he might be, I doubt more.”

“And a priest,” pursued Hugh mercilessly.

“By the ring, the cross and the tonsure, yes, a priest.”

“You perceive our reasoning, Brother Meriet. Have you knowledge of such a man lost hereabouts?”

Meriet continued to stare down at the silent relics that had been a man. His eyes were huge in a face blanched to the palest ivory. He said in a level voice: “I see your reasoning. I do not know the man. How can anyone know him?”

“Not by his visage, certainly. But by his accoutrements, perhaps? The cross, the ring, even the buckles—these could be remembered, if a priest of such years, and so adorned, came into your acquaintance? As a guest, say, in your house?”

Meriet lifted his eyes with a brief and restrained flash of green, and said: “I understand you. There was a priest who came and stayed the night over in my father’s house, some weeks ago, before I came into the cloister. But that one travelled on the next morning, northwards, not this way. How could he be here? And how am I, or how are you, to tell the difference between one priest and another, when they are brought down to this?”

“Not by the cross? The ring? If you can say positively that this is not the man,” said Hugh insinuatingly, “you would be helping me greatly.”

“I was of no such account in my father’s house,” said Meriet with chill bitterness, “to be so close to the honoured guest. I stabled his horse—to that I have testified. To his jewellery I cannot swear.”

“There will be others who can,” said Hugh grimly. “And as to the horse, yes, I have seen in what confortable esteem you held each other. You said truly that you are good with horses. If it became advisable to convey the mount some twenty miles or more away from where the rider met his death, who could manage the business better? Ridden or led, he would not give any trouble to you.”

“I never had him in my hands but one evening and the morning after,” said Meriet, “nor saw him again until you brought him to the abbey, my lord.” And though sudden angry colour had flamed upward to his brow, his voice was ready and firm, and his temper well in hand.

“Well, let us first find a name for our dead man,” said Hugh, and turned to circle the dismembered mound once more, scanning the littered and fouled ground for any further detail that might have some bearing. He pondered what was left of the leather belt, all but the buckle end burned away, the charred remnant extending just far enough to reach a lean man’s left hip. “Whoever he was, he carried sword or dagger, here is the loop of the strap by which it hung—a dagger, too light and elegant for a sword. But no sign of the dagger itself. That should be somewhere here among the rubble.”

They raked through the debris for a further hour, but found no more of metal or clothing. When he was certain there was nothing more to be discovered, Hugh withdrew his party. They wrapped the recovered bones and the ring and cross reverently in a linen cloth and a blanket, and rode back with them to Saint Giles. There Meriet dismounted, but halted in silence to know what was the deputy-sheriff’s will with him.

“You will be remaining here at the hospice?” asked Hugh, eyeing him impartially. “Your abbot has committed you to this service?”

“Yes, my lord. Until or unless I am recalled to the abbey, I shall be here.” It was said with emphasis, not merely stating a fact, but stressing that he felt himself to have taken vows already, and not only his duty of obedience but his own will would keep him here.

“Good! So we know where to find you at need. Very well, continue your work here without hindrance, but subject to your abbot’s authority, hold yourself also at my disposal.”

“So I will, my lord. So I do,” said Meriet, and turned on his heel with a certain drear dignity, and stalked away up the incline to the gate in the wattle fence.

“And now, I suppose,” sighed Hugh, riding on towards the Foregate with Cadfael beside him, “you will be at odds with me for being rough with your fledgling. Though I give you due credit, you held your tongue very generously.”

“No,” said Cadfael honestly, “he’s none the worse for goading. And there’s no blinking it, suspicion drapes itself round him like cobwebs on an autumn bush.”

“It is the man, and he knows that it is. He knew it as soon as he raked out the shoe and the foot within it. That, and not the mere matter of some unknown man’s ugly death, was what shook him almost out of his wits. He knew—quite certainly he knew—that Peter Clemence was dead, but just as certainly he did not know what had been done with the body. Will you go with me so far?”

“So far,” said Cadfael ruefully, “I have already gone. An irony, indeed, that he led them straight to the place, when for once he was thinking of nothing but finding his poor folk fuel for the winter. Which is on the doorstep this very evening, unless my nose for weather fails me.”

The air had certainly grown still and chill, and the sky was closing down upon the world in leaden cloud. Winter had delayed, but was not far away.

“First,” pursued Hugh, harking back to the matter in hand, “we have to affix a name to these bones. That whole household at Aspley saw the man, spent an evening in his company, they must all know these gems of his, soiled as they may be now. It might put a rampaging cat among pigeons if I sent to summon Leoric here to speak as to his guest’s cross and ring. When the birds fly wild, we may pick up a feather or two.”

“But for all that,” said Cadfael earnestly, “I should not do it. Say never a probing word to any, leave them lulled. Let it be known we’ve found a murdered man, but no more. If you let out too much, then the one with guilt to hide will be off and out of reach. Let him think all’s well, and he’ll be off his guard. You’ll not have forgotten, the older boy’s marriage is set for the twenty-first of this month, and two days before that the whole clan of them, neighbours, friends and all, will be gathering in our guest-halls. Bring them in, and you have everyone in your hand. By then we may have the means to divine truth from untruth. And as for proving that this is indeed Peter Clemence—not that I’m in doubt!—did you not tell me that Canon Eluard intends to come back to us on the way south from Lincoln, and let the king go without him to Westminster?”

“True, so he said he would. He’s anxious for news to take back to the bishop at Winchester, but it’s no good news we have for him.”

“If Stephen means to spend his Christmas in London, then Canon Eluard may very well be here before the wedding party arrives. He knew Clemence well, they’ve both been close about Bishop Henry. He should be your best witness.”

“Well, a couple of weeks can hardly hurt Peter Clemence now,” agreed Hugh wryly. “But have you noticed, Cadfael, the strangest thing in all this coil? Nothing was stolen from him, everything burned with him. Yet more than one man, more than two, worked at building that pyre. Would you not say there was a voice in authority there, that would not permit theft though it had been forced to conceal murder? And those who took his orders feared him—or at the least minded him—more than they coveted rings and crosses.”

It was true. Whoever had decreed that disposal of Peter Clemence had put it clean out of consideration that his death could be the work of common footpads and thieves. A mistake, if he hoped to set all suspicion at a distance from himself and his own people. That rigid honesty had mattered more to him, whoever he was, than safety. Murder was within the scope of his understanding, if not of his tolerance; but not theft from the dead.