St Peter's Fair

CHAPTER 1

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 saddlebags 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 thud 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 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 saddlebags. 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 fordelivery. 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 downriver 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, mat 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.”

CHAPTER 2

Philip, who was learning how to listen and be silent, followed at their heels all the way back through the orchards and gardens of the Gaye. Neither of them found fault with his persistence. He had earned his place, and had no intention of being put off. All the larger boats were already gone from the jetty. Soon the labourers would begin dismantling the boards and piers until the following year, and stowing them away in the abbey storehouses. Along the Foregate stalls were being taken down and stacked for removal, while two of the abbey carts worked their way along from the horse-fair towards the gatehouse.

“More than halfway along, I remember,” said Hugh, “and well back from the roadway. There were few lights, most of the stalls here were for the country people who come in by the day. Somewhere in this stretch.”

There had been trestles stacked that night, and canvas awnings leaning against them ready for use. This morning there were also piles of trestles and boards, ready now to be put away for the next fair. They surveyed all the likely area, but to lay a finger on the exact place was impossible. One of the collecting carts had reached this stretch, and two lay servants were hoisting the heaped planks aboard, and stacking the trestles one within another in high piles.

Cadfael watched as the ground was gradually cleared.

“You’ve found some unexpected discards,” he commented, for a corner of the cart carried a small pile of odd objects, a large shoe, a short cotte, bedraggled but by no means old or ragged, a child’s wooden doll with one arm missing, a green capuchon, a drinking-horn.

“There’ll be many more such, brother,” said the carter, grinning, “before the whole ground’s cleared. Some will be claimed. I fancy some child will want to know where she lost her doll. And the cotte is good stuff, some young gentleman took a drop too much, and forgot to collect that when he moved. The shoe’s as good as new, too, and a giant’s size, somebody may sneak in, shamefaced, to ask after that. I hope he had not far to go home with only one. But it wasn’t a rowdy night - not like many a night I’ve seen.” He slid powerful arms under a stack of trestles, and hoisted them bodily. “You’d hardly credit where we found that flagon mere.”

His nod indicated the front of the car, to which Cadfael had hitherto devoted no attention. Slung by a thin leather thong from the shaft hung a flattened glass bottle large enough to hold a quart. “Stuck on top of the canvas over one of the country stalls. An old woman who sells cheeses had the stall, I know her, she comes every year, and seeing she’s not so nimble nowadays, we put up the stall for her the night before the fair opened. The bottle all but brained Daniel here, when we took it down, this morning! Fancy tossing a bottle like that away as if it had no value! He could have got a free drink at Wat’s if he’d taken it back, whoever he was.”

His armful of trestles thumped into the cart, and he turned to heave a stack of boards after it.

“It came from Wat’s tavern then, did it?” asked Cadfael, very thoughtfully gazing.

“It has his mark on the thong. We all know where they belong, these better vessels. But they’re not often left for us.”

“And where was the stall where this one was left?” asked Hugh over Cadfael’s shoulder.

“Not ten yards back from where you’re standing.” They could not resist looking back to measure, and it would do. It would do very well. “The odd thing is, the old woman swore, when she came to put out her wares, that there was a stink of spirits about the place. Said she could smell it in her skirts at night, as if she’d been wading in it. But after the first day she forgot about it. She’s half-Welsh, and has a touch of the strange about her, I daresay she imagined it.”

Cadfael would have said, rather, that she had a keen nose, and some knowledge of the distilling of spirits, and had accurately assessed the cause of her uneasiness. Somewhere in the grass close to her stall, he was now certain, a good part of that quart of liquor had been poured out generously over clothing and ground, no wonder the turf retained it. A taste of it, perhaps, to scent the breath and steady the mind, might have gone down a throat; but no more, for the mind had been steady indeed, when stranger stooped over its fleshly habitation, and sniffed at its flagrant drunkenness. Strangers, all but one! Cadfael began to see what could hardly be called light, for he was looking into a profound darkness.

“It so happens,” he said, “that we have some business with Walter Renold. Will you let us take your bottle back to him? You shall have the credit for it with him.”

“Take it, brother,” agreed the carter cheerfully, unleashing the bottle from the shaft. “Tell him Rychart Nyall sent it. Wat knows me.”

“Nothing in it, I suppose, when you found it?” hazarded Cadfael, hefting the fated thing in one hand.

“Never a drop, brother! Fair-goers may abandon the bottle, but they make sure of what’s inside before they fall senseless!”

The boards were stowed, the stripped ground lay trampled and naked, the cart moved on. It would take no more than a handful of days and the next summer showers, and all the green, fine hair would grow again, and the bald clay coil into ringlets.

“It’s mine, surely,” said Wat, receiving the bottle into a large hand. “The only one of its kind I’m short. Who buys this measure of spirits, even at a fair? Who has the money to afford it? And who chooses it afore decent ale and wine? Not many! I’ve known men desperate to sink their souls fast, at whatever cost, but seldom at a fair. They turn genial at fairs, even the sad fellows get the wind of it, and mellow. I marvelled at that one, even when he asked for it and paid the price, but he was plainly some lord’s servant, he had his orders. He had money, and I sell liquor. But yes, if it’s of worth to you, that same fellow Philip here knows of, that’s the measure he bought.”

A retired corner of Wat’s large taproom was as good a place as any to sit down and think before action, and try to make sense of what they had gathered.

“Wat has just put words to it,” said Cadfael. “We should have been quicker to see. He was plainly some lord’s servant, he had his orders, he had money. One man from a lord’s household suborned to murder by an unknown, one such setting out on his own account to enrich himself by murder and theft, that I could believe in. But two? From the same household? No, I think not! They never strayed from their own manor. They served but one lord.”

“Their own? Corbière?” whispered Philip, the breath knocked out of him by the enormity of the implications. “But he … The way I heard it, the groom tried to ride him down. Struck him into the dust when he tried to stop him. How can you account for that? There’s no sense in it.”

“Wait! Take it from the beginning. Say that on the night Master Thomas died, Fowler was sent out to deal with him, to get possession of whatever it is someone so much desires. His lord has spied out the land, told him of a handy scapegoat who may yet be useful, given him money for the drink that will put him out of the reckoning when the deed is done. The man would demand immunity, he must be seen to be out of the reckoning. His lord keeps in close touch, joins us when we go forth to look for the missing merchant. Recollect, Hugh, it was Corbière, not we, who discovered his truant man. We had passed him by, and that would not have done. He must be found, must be seen to be so drunk as to have been helpless and harmless some hours, and must then be manifestly under lock and key many hours more. Ten murders could have been committed that night, and no one would ever have looked at Turstan Fowler.”

“All for nothing,” pointed out Hugh. “Sooner or later he had to tell his master that murder had been done in vain. Master Thomas did not carry his treasure on him.”

“I doubt if he found that out until morning, when he had his man let out of prison. Therefore he brought Fowler to lay evidence that made sure the finger was pointed at Philip here, and while we were all blamelessly busy at the sheriff’s hearing, sent his second man to search the barge. And again, vainly.

Am I making sense of it thus far?”

“Sound enough,” said Hugh sombrely. “The worst is yet to come. Which man, do you suppose, did the work that day?”

“I doubt if they ever involved the young one. Two were enough to do the business. The groom Ewald, I think. Those two were the hands that did all. But they were not the mind.”

“That same night, then, they broke into the booth, and made their search there, and still without success. The next night came the attack that killed Euan of Shotwick.” Hugh said no word of the violation of Master Thomas’s coffin. “And, as I remember you argued, once more in vain. So far, possible enough. But come to yesterday’s thorny business. For God’s sake, how can sense be made of that affair? I was there watching the man, I saw him change colour, I swear it! Shock and anger and affronted honour, he showed them all. He would not send for the groom, for fear a fellow-servant might warn him, he would fetch him himself. He placed himself between his man and the gate, he risked maiming or worse, trying to halt his flight …”

“All that,” agreed Cadfael heavily, “and yet there is sense in it all, though a more abominable sense even than you or I dreamed of. Ewald was in the stables, there was no escape for him unless he could break out of our walls. Corbière came at the sheriff’s bidding, and was told all. His man was detected past denying, and driven into a corner, he would pour out everything he knew, lay the load on his lord. Consider the order in which everything happened from that moment. Fowler had been at the butts, and had his arbalest with him. Corbière set off to summon Ewald from the stables, Turstan made to follow him, yes, and some words were exchanged that sent him back. But what words? They were too distant to be heard. Nor could we guess what was said in the stable-yard. We waited - you’ll agree? - several minutes before they came. Long enough for Corbière to tell the groom how things stood, bid him keep his head, promise him escape.

Bring the horse, I will ensure that only I stand between you and the gate, pick your moment, mount and away. Lie up in hiding - doubtless at his manor - and you shan’t be the loser. But make it clear that I have no part in this - attack me, make it good for your part, I will make it good for mine. And so he did - the finest player of a part that ever I saw. He set himself between Ewald and the gate, and between them they used the lively horse to edge us all that way. He made a gallant grab at the rein, and took a heavy fall, and the groom was clear.”

They were both gazing at him in mute fascination, wide-eyed.

“Except that his lord had one more trick to play,” said Cadfael. “He had never intended to let him go. Escape was too great a risk, he might yet be taken, and open his mouth. ‘Fetch him down!’ said Corbière, and Turstan Fowler did it.

Without compunction, like master, like man. A dangerous mouth - dangerous to both of them - closed at no cost.”

There was a long moment of appalled silence. Even Beringar, whose breadth of mind could conceive, though with detestation, prodigies of evil and treachery, was shocked out of words. Philip stared aghast, huge of eye, and came slowly to his feet. His experience was narrow, local and decent, it was hard to grasp that men could be monsters.

“You mean it! You believe it! But this man - he visits her, he pays court to her!

And you say there was something he wanted from her uncle, and has missed getting - not on his body, not in his barge, not in his booth - Where is there left, but with Emma? And we delay here!”

“Emma is with my wife,” said Hugh reasonably, “in the abbey guest-hall, what harm can come to her there?”

“What harm?” cried Philip passionately. “When you tell me we are dealing not with men, but with devils?” And he whirled on the heel of a trodden shoe and ran, out of the tavern and arrow-straight along the road towards the Foregate, long legs flashing.

Cadfael and Hugh were left regarding each other mutely across the table, but for no more than a moment. “By God,” said Hugh then, “we learn of the innocents!

Come on, we’d best make haste after. The lad’s shaken me!”

Philip came to the guest-hall out of breath. With chest heaving from his running he asked for Aline, and she came out, smiling but alone.

“Why, Philip, what’s the matter?” Then she thought she knew, and was sorry for a lovesick boy who came too late even to take a dignified farewell, and receive what comfort a few kind words, costing nothing, could provide him. “Oh, Philip, I am sorry you’ve missed her, but they could not linger, it was necessary to leave in good time. She would have wished me to say her goodbye to you, and wish you …” The words faded on her lips. “Philip, what is it? What ails you?”

“Gone?” he said, hard and shrill. “She’s gone? They, you said! Who? Who is gone with her?”

“Why, she left with Messire Corbière, he has offered to escort her to Bristol with his sister, who goes to a convent there. It seemed a lucky chance …

Philip! What have I said? What is wrong?” He had let out a great groan of fury and anguish, and even reached a hand to grip her wrist.

“Where? Where is he taking her? Now, today!”

“To his manor of Stanton Cobbold for tonight - his sister is there …”

But he was gone, the instant she had named the place, running like a purposeful demon, and not towards the gatehouse, but across the court to the stable-yard.

There was no time to ask leave of any man, or respect any man’s property, whatever the consequences. Philip took the best-looking horse he saw ready to hand, which by luck - Philip’s luck, not the owner’s! - stood saddled and waiting for departure, on a tether in the yard. Before Aline, bewildered and frightened, reached the doorway of the hall, Philip was already out of the gate, and a furious groom was haring across the court in voluble and hopeless pursuit.

Since the nearest way to the road leading south towards Stretton and Stanton Cobbold was to turn left at the gate, and left again by the narrow track on the near side of the bridge, Brother Cadfael and Hugh Beringar, hastening along the Foregate, saw nothing of the turmoil that attended Philip’s departure. They came to the gatehouse and the great court without any intimation that things could have gone amiss. There were still guests departing, the normal bustle of the day after the fair, but nothing to give them pause. Hugh made straight for the guest-hall, and Cadfael, following hard on his heels, was suddenly arrested by a large hand on his shoulder, and a familiar, hearty voice hailing him in amiable Welsh.

“The very man I was looking for! I come to make my farewells, brother, and thank you for your companionship. A good fair! I’m off to my boat now, and away home with a handsome profit.”

Rhodri ap Huw beamed merrily from within the covert of his black beard and thorn-bush of black hair.

“Far from a good fair to two, at least, who came looking for a profit,” said Cadfael ruefully.

“Ah, but in cash, or some other currency? Though it all comes down to cash in the end, cash or power. What else do men labour for?”

“For a cause, perhaps, now and then one. You said yourself, I remember, no place like one of the great fairs for meeting someone you’d liefer not be seen meeting. Nowhere so solitary as the middle of a market place!” And he added mildly: “I daresay Owain Gwynedd himself may have had his intelligencers here.

Though they’d need to have good English,” he said guilelessly, “to gather much profit from it.”

“They would so. No use employing me. I daresay you’re right, though. Owain needs to have forward information, as much as any man, if he’s to keep his princedom safe, and add a few more miles to it here and there. Now I wonder which of all these traders I’ve rubbed shoulders with will be making his report in Owain’s ear!”

“And what advice he’ll be giving him,” said Cadfael.

Rhodri stroked his splendid beard, and his dark eyes twinkled. “I think he might take him word that the message Earl Ranulf expected from the south - who knows, maybe even from overseas - will never be delivered, and if he wants to get the best out of the hour, he should be aiming to enlarge his rule away from Chester’s borders, for the earl will be taking no risks, but looking well to his own. Owain would do better to make his bid in Maelienydd and Elfael, and let Ranulf alone.”

“Now I come to think,” mused Cadfael, “it would be excellent cover for Owain’s intelligencers to ask the help of an interpreter in these parts, and be seen to need him. Tongues wag more freely before the deaf man.”

“A good thought,” approved Rhodri. “Someone should suggest it to Owain.” Though there was every indication that the prince of Gwynedd needed no other man’s wits to fortify his own, but had been lavishly endowed by God in the first place.

Cadfael wondered how many other tongues this simple merchant knew. French, almost certainly enough for his purposes. Flemish, possibly a little, he had undoubtedly travelled in Flanders. It would be no surprise if he knew some Latin, too.

“You’ll be coming to Saint Peter’s Fair next year?”

“I may, brother, I may, who knows! Will you come forth again and speak for me, if I do?”

“Gladly. I’m a Gwynedd man myself. Take my greetings back with you to the mountains. And good speed on the way!”

“God keep you!” said Rhodri, still beaming, and clapped him buoyantly on the shoulder, and set off towards the riverside.

Hugh had no sooner set foot in the hall when Aline flew into his arms, with a cry of relief and desperation mingled, and began to pour into his ears all her bewilderment and anxiety.

“Oh, Hugh, I think I must have done something terrible! Either that, or Philip Corviser has gone mad. He was here asking after Emma, and when I told him she was gone he rushed away like a madman, and there’s a merchant from Worcester in the stables accusing him of stealing his horse and making off with it, and what it all means I daren’t guess, but I’m afraid …”

Hugh held her tenderly, dismayed and solicitous. “Emma’s gone? But she was coming home with us. What happened to change it?”

“You know he’s been paying attentions to her … He came this morning asking for you - he said he has a sister who is entering the nunnery at Minchinbarrow, and since he must escort her there, and it’s barely five miles from Bristol, he could as well take Emma home in his sister’s company. He said they’d sleep overnight at his manor, and set off tomorrow. Emma said yes, and I thought no wrong, why should I? But the very name has sent Philip off like a man demented ...”

“Corbière?” demanded Hugh, holding her off by the shoulders to peer anxiously into her face.

“Yes! Yes, Ivo, of course - but what’s so wrong in that? He takes her to his sister at Stanton Cobbold - I thought it ideal, so did she, and you were not here to say yes or no. Besides, she is her own mistress …”

True, the girl had a will of her own, and liked the man who had made the offer, and was flattered at being singled out for his favours. Even for the sake of her own independence she would have chosen to go, and Hugh, had he been present, j would not then have known or suspected enough to prevent. He tightened his arms comfortingly round his trembling wife, his cheek pressed against her hair. “My love, my heart, you could not have done anything but what you did, and I should have done the same. But I must go after. No questions now, you shall know everything later. We’ll bring her back - there’ll be no harm done …”

“It’s true, then!” whispered Aline, her breath fluttering against his throat.

“There’s reason to fear harm? I’ve let her go into danger?”

“You could not stop her. She chose to go. Think no more of your part, you played none - how could you know? Where’s Constance? Love, I hate to leave you like this …”

He was thinking, of course, like all men, she thought, that any grievous upset to his wife in this condition was a potential upset to his son. That roused her.

She was not the girl to keep a man dancing anxious attention on her, even if she had a wife’s claim on him, when he was needed more urgently elsewhere. She drew herself resolutely out of his arms.

“Of course you must leave me. I’ve taken no harm, and shall take none. Go, quickly! They have a good three hours start of you, and besides, if you delay, Philip may run his head into trouble alone. Send quickly for what men you can muster, and I’ll go see what I can do to placate the merchant whose horse has been borrowed …” He was loath, all the same, to let go of her. She took his head between her hands, kissed him hard, and turned him about just as Cadfael came in at the hall door.

“She’s gone with Corbière,” said Hugh, conveying news in the fewest words possible. “Bound for his one Shropshire manor. The boy’s off after them, and so must I. I’ll send word to Prestcote to have a guard follow as fast as may be.

You’ll be here to take care of Aline …”

Aline doubted that, seeing the spark flare up in Brother Cadfael’s bright and militant eye. Hastily she said: “I need no one to nurse me. Only go - both of you!”

“I have licence,” said Cadfael, clutching at virtue to cover his ardour. “Abbot Radulfus gave me the charge of seeing that his guest came to no harm under his roof, and I’ll stretch that to extend beyond his roof, and make it good, too.

You have a horse to spare, Hugh, besides that raw-boned dapple of yours. Come on! It’s a year since you and I rode together.”

CHAPTER 3

The manor of Stanton Cobbold lay a good seventeen miles from Shrewsbury, in the south of the shire, and cheek by jowl with the large property of the bishops of Hereford in those parts, which covered some nine or ten manors. The road lay through the more open and sunlit stretches of the Long Forest, and at its southernmost fringe plunged in among the hump-backed hills at the western side of a long, bare ridge that ran for some miles. Here and there a wooded valley backed into its bare flank, and into one of these Corbière turned, along a firm cart-track. It was the height of the early afternoon then, the sun at its highest, but even so the crowding trees cast sudden chill and shadow. The bay horse had worked off his high spirits, and went placidly under his double burden. Once in the forest they had halted briefly, and Ivo had produced wine and oatcakes as refreshment on the journey, and paid Emma every possible delicate attention. The day was fair, the countryside strange to her and beautiful, and she was embarked on an agreeable adventure. She approached Stanton Cobbold with only the happiest anticipation, flattered by Ivo’s deference, and eager to meet his sister.

A rivulet ran alongside the track, coming down from the ridge. The path narrowed, and the trees closed in.

“We are all but home,” said Ivo over his shoulder; and in a few minutes more the rising ground opened before them into a narrow, level plot enclosed before with a wooden stockade. Within, the manor house backed solidly into the hillside, trees at the back, trees shutting it in darkly at either end. A boy came running to open the gate for them, and they rode into the enclosure. Barns and byres lined the stockade within. The manor itself showed a long undercroft of stone, buttressed, and pierced with two doors wide enough for carts, and a living floor above, also of stone for most of its length, where the great hall and the kitchens and pantries lay, but at the right, stone gave place to timber, and stone mullions to wooden window-frames and stout shutters; and this wooden living apartment was taller than the stone portion, and seemed to have an additional floor above the solar. A tall stone stair led up to the hall door.

“Modest enough,” said Ivo, turning his head to smile at her, “but it has room and a welcome for you.”

He was well served. Grooms came running before the horse had halted, a maid appeared in the hall doorway, and began to flutter down to meet them.

Ivo kicked his feet free of the stirrups, swung a leg nimbly over the horse’s bowing head, and leaped down, waving Turstan Fowler aside, to stretch up his arms to Emma and lift her down herself. Her slight weight gave him no trouble, he held her aloft for a long moment to prove it, laughing, before he set her down.

“Come, I’ll take you up to the solar.” He put off the maid with a flick of his hand, and she stood aside and followed them demurely up the steps, but let them go on without her when they reached the hall. The thick stone walls struck inward with a palpable chill. The hall was large and lofty, the high ceiling smoke-stained, but now, in the summer, the huge fireplace was empty and cold.

The mullioned windows let in air far more genial than that within, and a comforting light, but they were narrow, and could do little to temper the oppression of the room. “Not my most amiable home,” said Ivo with a grimace, “but in these Welsh borders we built for defence, not for comfort. Come up to the solar. The timber end was built on later, but even there this is a chill, dark house. Even on summer evenings we need some firing.”

A short staircase at the end of the hall led up to a broad gallery and a pair of doors. “The chapel,” he said, indicating that on the left. “There are two small bedchambers above, dark, since they look into the hillside and the trees at close quarters. And in here, if you’ll forgive me while I attend to your baggage and mine, and see the horses stabled, I’ll rejoin you shortly.”

The solar into which he led her contained a massive table, a carved bench, cushioned chairs, tapestries draping the walls, and rugs on the floor, and was a place of some comfort and elegance, if also somewhat dim and cold, chiefly by reason of the looming hillside and the shrouding trees, and the narrow windows that let in so little of the day, and so filtered through heavy branches. Here there was no fireplace, the only chimney serving the hall and the kitchens; but the centre of the floor was set with large paving stones to make a hearth proof against cinders, and on this square a brazier burned, even on this summer day.

Charcoal and wood glowed, discreetly massed, to give a central spark of comfort without smoke. Summer sunlight failed to warm through the arm’s-length thickness of the stone walls below, and here the sun, though confronted only with friendly timber, hardly ever reached.

Emma went forward into the room and stood looking about her curiously. She heard Ivo close the door between them, but it was only a very small sound in a large silence.

She had expected his sister to appear immediately on his return, and felt a pang of disappointment, though she knew it was unreasonable. He had sent no word ahead, how could the girl have known? She might, with good reason, be out walking on the open hill in the full summer warmth, or she might have duties elsewhere. When she did come, it would be to the pleasure of having her brother home, and with a visitor of her own sex and approximate age, into the bargain, and to hear that she was to have her will without further delay. Yet her absence was a disappointment, and his failure to remark on it or apologise for it was a check to her eagerness.

She began to explore the room, interested in everything. Her own city home was cushioned and comfortable by comparison, though no less dark and shut in, if not among trees, among the buildings the trees provided. She was aware that she had been born to comparative wealth, but wealth concentrated into one commodious and well-furbished dwelling, whereas this border manor represented only perhaps a tenth of what Ivo possessed, without regard to the land attached to all those manors. He had said himself that this was not the most genial of his homes, yet it held sway over she could not guess how many miles of land, and how many free tenants and unfree villeins. It was another world. She had looked at it from a distance, and been dazzled, but never to blindness.

She felt a conviction suddenly that it was not for her, though whether she was glad or sorry remained a mystery.

All the same, there was knowledge and taste here beyond her experience. The brazier was a beautiful thing, a credit to the smith who made it; on three braced legs like saplings, the fire-basket a trellis of vine-leaves. If it had a fault, it was that it was raised rather too high, she thought, to be completely stable. The cushions of the chairs were of fine embroidery of hunting scenes, though dulled by use and friction and the touch of slightly greasy fingers. On a shelf built under the table there were books, a psalter, a vellum folder of music, and a faded treatise with strange diagrams. The carving of chairs and table and bench-ends was like live plants growing. The tapestries that covered all the walls between windows and door were surely old, rich, wonderfully worked, and once had had glorious colours that showed still, here and there, in the protected folds; but they were smoke-blackened almost beyond recognition, rotted here and there into tinder. She parted a fold, and the hound, plunging with snarling jaws and stretched paws between her fingers, disintegrated into powdery dust, and floated on the air in slow dissolution. She let fall the threads she held, and retreated in dismay. The very dust on her palms felt like ash.

She waited, but nobody came. Probably the time she waited was not as long as she supposed, by no means as long as it felt to her, but it seemed an age, a year of her life.

In the end, she thought she might not be offending by wandering along the gallery into the chapel. She might at least hear if there was any activity below. Ivo had bought Flemish tapestries for his new Cheshire manor, he might well be unbaling them and delighting in their fresh colours. She could forgive a degree of neglect in such circumstances.

She set her hand to the latch of the door, and trustingly lifted it. The door did not give. She tried it again, more strongly, but the barrier remained immovable. No doubt of it, the door was locked.

What she felt first was sheer incredulity, even amusement, as if some foolish accident had dropped a latch and shut her in by mistake. Then came the instinctive wish of every creature locked in, to get out; and only after that the flare of alarm and the startled and furious reappraisal, in search of understanding. No mistake, no! Ivo’s own hand had turned the key on her.

She was not the girl to fall into a frenzy and batter on the door. What good would that do? She stood quite still with the latch in her hand, while her wits ran after truth as fiercely as the hound in the tapestry after the hart. She was here in an upstairs room, with no other door, and windows not only narrow for even her slender body to pass through, but high above ground, by reason of the slope. There was no way out until someone unlocked the door.

She had come with him guilelessly, in good faith, and he turned into her gaoler.

What did he want of her? She knew she had beauty, but suddenly was certain he would not go to such trouble on that account. Not her person, then, and there was only one thing in her possession for which someone had been willing to go to extremes. Deaths had followed it wherever it passed. One of those deaths a servant of his had helped to bring about, and he had dealt out summary justice.

A sordid attack for gain, a theft that accidentally ended in murder, and the stolen property found to prove it! She had accepted that as everyone had accepted it. To doubt it was to see beyond into a pit too black to be credited, but she was peering into that darkness now. It was Ivo, and no other, who had caged her.

If she could not pass through the windows, the letter she carried could, though that would be to risk others finding it. Its weight was light, it would not carry far. All the same, she crossed to the windows and peered out through the slits at the slope of grass and the fringe of trees below; and there, sprawled at ease against the bole of a beech with his arbalest beside him, was Turstan Fowler, looking up idly at these very windows. When he caught sight of her face between the timbers of the frame, he grinned broadly. No help there.

She withdrew from the window, trembling. Quickly she drew up, from its resting-place between her breasts, the small, tightly-rolled vellum bag she had carried ever since Master Thomas had hung it about her neck, before they reached Shrewsbury. It measured almost the length of her hand, but was thin as two fingers of that same hand, and the thread on which it hung was of silk, cobweb-fine. It did not need a very large hiding-place. She coiled the silk thread about it, and rolled it carefully into the great swathe of blue-black tresses coiled within her coif of silken net, until its shape was utterly shrouded and lost. When she had adjusted the net to hold it secure, and every strand of hair lay to all appearances undisturbed, she stood with hands clasped tightly to steady them, and drew in long breaths until the racing of her heart was calmed. Then she put the brazier between herself and the door, and looking up across the room, felt the heart she had just steeled to composure leap frantically in her breast.

Once again she had failed to hear the key turn in the lock. He kept his defences well oiled and silent. He was there in the doorway, smiling with easy confidence, closing the door behind him without taking his eyes from her. She knew by the motion of his arm and shoulder that he had transferred the key to the inner side, and again turned it. Even in his own manor, with his household about him, he took no risks. Even with no more formidable opponent than Emma Vernold! It was, in its way, a compliment, but one she could have done without.

Since he could not know whether she had or had not tried the door, she chose to behave as if nothing had happened to disturb her. She acknowledged his entrance with an expectant smile, and opened her lips to force out some harmless enquiry, but he was before her.

“Where is it? Give it to me freely, and come to no harm. I would advise it.”

He was in no hurry, and he was still smiling. She saw now that his smile was a deliberate gloss, as cold, smooth and decorative as a coat of gilt. She gazed at him wide-eyed, the blank, bewildered stare of one suddenly addressed in an unknown tongue. “I don’t understand you! What is it I’m to give you?”

“Dear girl, you know only too well. I want the letter your uncle was carrying to Earl Ranulf of Chester, the same he should have delivered at the fair, by prior agreement, to Euan of Shotwick, my noble kinsman’s eyes and ears.” He was willing to go softly with her, since time was now no object, he even found the prospect amusing, and was prepared to admire her playing of the game, provided he got his own way in the end. “Never tell me, sweet, mat you have not even heard of any such letter. I doubt if you make as good a liar as I do.”

“Truly,” she said, shaking her head helplessly, “I understand you not at all.

There is nothing else I could say to you, for I know nothing of a letter. If my uncle carried one, as you claim, he never confided in me. Do you suppose a man of business takes his womenfolk into his confidence over important matters?

You’re mistaken in him if you believe that.”

Corbière came forward an idle pace or two into the room, and she saw that no trace of his limp remained. The brazier had burned into a steady, scarlet glow, the light from it reflected like the burnish of sunset along the waving gold of his hair. “So I thought,” he agreed, and laughed at the memory. “It took me a long time, too long, to arrive at you, my lady. I would not have trusted a woman, no … But Master Thomas, it seems, had other ideas. And I grant you, he had an unusual young woman to deal with. For what it’s worth, I admire you.

But I shall not let that stand in my way, believe me. What you hold is too precious to leave me any scruples, even if I were given to such weaknesses.”

“But I don’t hold it! I can’t give you what I have not in my possession. How can I convince you?” she demanded, with the first spurt of impatience and indignation, though she knew in advance that she was wasting all pretences. He knew.

He shook his head at her, smiling. “It is not in your baggage. We’ve taken apart even the seams of your saddlebags. Therefore it is here, on your person. There is no other possibility. It was not on your uncle, it was neither in his barge nor in his booth. Who was left but you? You, and Euan of Shotwick, if I had somehow let a messenger slip through my guard. You, I knew, would keep, and come tamed to my hand - but for a sudden qualm I had, that you might have sent it back in Thomas’s coffin for safe-keeping, but that was to overrate you, my dear, clever as you are. And Euan never received it. Who was then left, but you? Not his crew - all of them far too simple, even if he had not had orders to keep strict secrecy, as I know he had. I doubt if he told even you what was in the letter.”

It was true, she had no idea of its contents. She had simply been given it to wear and guard, as the obvious innocent who would never come under suspicion of being anyone’s courier, but its importance had been impressed upon her most powerfully. Lives, her uncle had said, hung upon its safe delivery, or, failing that, its safe return to the sender. Or, in the last resort, its total destruction.

“I am tired of telling you,” she said forcefully, “that you are wrong in supposing that I know anything about it, or believe it ever existed but in your imagination. You brought me here, my lord, on the pretext of providing me the companionship of your sister, and conducting us both to Bristol. Do you intend to do as you promised?”

He threw his head back and laughed aloud, the red glow dancing on his fine cheekbones. “You would not have come with me if there had not been a woman in the story. If you behave sensibly now you may yet meet, some day, the only sister I have. She’s married to one of Ranulf’s knights, and keeps me informed of what goes on in Ranulf’s court. But devil a nun she’d ever have made, even if she were not already a wife. But send you safe home to Bristol - yes, that I’ll do, when you’ve given me what I want from you. And what I will have!” he added with a snap, and his shapely, smiling lips thinned and tightened into a sword-blade.

There was a moment, then, when she almost considered obeying him, and giving up what she had kept so obstinately through so many shocks. Fear was a reality by this time, but so was anger, all the more fierce because she was so resolutely suppressing it. He came a step towards her, his smile as narrow as a cat’s bearing down on a bird, and she moved just as steadily to keep the brazier between them; that also amused him, but he had ample patience.

“I don’t understand,” she said, frowning as if she had begun to feel genuine curiosity, “why you should set such store on a letter. If I had it, do you think I should refuse it to you, when I’m in your power? But why does it matter to you so much? What can there be in a mere letter?”

“Fool girl, there can be life and death in a letter,” he said condescending to her simplicity, “wealth, power, even land to be won or lost. Do you know what that single packet could be worth? To King Stephen, his kingdom entire! To me, maybe an earldom. And to a number of others, their necks! For I think you must know, for all your innocence, that Robert of Gloucester has his plans made to bring the Empress Maud to England, and make a fight of it for her claim to the throne, and has been touting through his agents here to get Earl Ranulf’s support for her cause when they do land. My noble kinsman has a hard heart, and has demanded proof of the strength of that cause before he lifts a hand or stirs a foot to commit himself. Names, numbers, every detail, if I know my Ranulf, they’ve been forced to set down in writing for him. All the tale of the king’s enemies, the names of all those who pay him lip service now but are preparing to betray him. There could be as many as fifty names on the list, and it will serve, believe me, for Ranulf’s ruin no less, since if his name is not there, he had reached the point of considering adding it. What will not King Stephen give, to have that delivered into his hand? All committed to writing, it may be even the date they plan to sail, and the port where they hope to land. All his enemies cut off before they can forgather, a prison prepared for Maud before ever she gets foot ashore. That, my child, is what I propose to offer to the king, and never doubt but I shall get my price for it.”

She stood staring at him with drawn brows and shocked eyes across the brazier, and felt her blood chill in her veins and all her body grow cold. And he was not even a partisan! He had killed, or procured others to kill for him, three times already, not for a cause, but coldly and methodically for his own gain and advancement. He cared nothing at all for which of them wore the crown, Stephen or Maud. If he could have got his hands rather on information of value to Maud, and felt that she was likely to prevail and reward him well, he would have betrayed Stephen and all his supporters just as blithely.

For the first time she was terrified, the weight of all those imperilled lives lay upon her heart like a great stone. She had no doubt that this estimate of what would be in the letter must be very close to the truth, close enough to destroy a great many men who adhered to the same side her uncle had served with devotion. He had been a passionate partisan, and it had cost him his life. Now, unless she could bring about a miracle, the message he had carried would cost many more lives, bloodshed, bereavement, ruin. And all for the enrichment and advancement of Ivo Corbière! She had followed and supported Master Thomas as a matter of family loyalty. Now that meant nothing any longer, and all she felt was a desperate desire to avoid more killing, not to betray any man on either side of the quarrel to his enemies on the other. To help every fugitive, to hide every hunted man, to keep the wives unwidowed and the children still fathered, was better by far than to fight and kill either for Stephen or for Maud.

And she would not let him have them! Whatever the cost, he should not tread his way unscathed to his earldom over other men’s faces.

“I have nothing against you,” Corbière was saying, confident and at ease. “Give me the letter, and you shall reach Bristol in safety, and not be the loser. But don’t think I’ll scruple to pay you in full, either, if you thwart me.”

She stood fixed and still, her hands cupping her face, as though pressing hard to contain fear. The tips of her fingers worked unseen under the edge of her tissue net into the coils of her hair, feeling for the little cylinder of vellum, but face to face with her he saw no movement at all.

“Come, you are not so attractive to me that you need fear rape,” he said, disdainfully smiling, “provided you are sensible, but for all that, it would be no hardship to me to strip you with my own hands, if you are obstinate. It might even give me pleasure, if the act proves stimulating. Give, or have it taken from you by force. You should know by now that I let no man stand in my way, much less a little shopkeeper’s girl of no account.”

Of no account! No, she had never been of any account to him, never for a moment, only of use in his ruthless pursuit of his own ambitious interests. Still she stood as if frozen, except that when he advanced upon her at leisure, his smile now wolfish and hungry, she circled inch by inch to keep the brazier between them. Its heart was a red glow. She stood close, as if only that core of warmth gave her some comfort and protection; and suddenly she tore down the coil of her hair and clawed out the letter, tearing off her silken net with it in her haste.

She dared not simply cast it into the fire, it might roll clear or be too easily retrieved. She made a desperate lunge, and thrusting it deep into the heart of the glow, held it there for an agonised moment, snatching back burned fingers with a faint cry that sounded half of pain and half of triumph.

He uttered a bellow of rage, and lunged as quickly to snatch it out again, but the net had flared at a touch, tiny worms of fire climbed to lick his hand, and all he touched of the precious letter, before he recoiled, was the wax of the seal, which had melted at once, and clung searingly to his fingers as he wrung them and whined with pain. She heard herself laughing, and could not believe she was the source of the sound. She heard him frantically cursing her, but he was too intent on recovering his prize to turn upon her then. He tore off his cotte, wrapped a corner of the skirt about his hand, and leaned to grasp again at the glowing cylinder thrust upright in the fire-basket. And he would get it, defaced and incomplete, perhaps, but enough for his purpose. The outer covering was not yet burned through everywhere. He should not have it, she would not bear it! She stooped as he snatched at it, clutched with her good hand at the leg of the brazier, and overturned it over his ankles and feet.

He screamed aloud and leaped back. Glowing coals flew, cascading over the floor, starting a brown furrow, a flurry of smoke and a stink of burning wood across the nearest rug, and reached the tinder-dry skirts of the tapestries on the wall between the two windows. There was a strange sound like a great indrawn breath, and an instant serpent of flame climbed the wall, and after it a tree of fire grew, thickened, put out lightning branches on all sides, enveloped all the space between the windows, and coursed both ways like hounds at fault, to reach the dusty hangings on the neighbouring walls. A brittle shell of fire encased the room before Emma could even stir from her horrified stillness. She saw the huntsmen and huntresses in the tapestries blaze for an instant into quivering life, the hounds leap, the forest trees shimmer in fierce light, before they disintegrated into glittering dust. Smoke rose from a dozen burning fragments over half the floor, and vision dimmed rapidly.

Somewhere in that abrupt hell beyond the hearth, Ivo Corbière, shirt and hair aflame, a length of blazing tapestry fallen upon him, rolled and shrieked in agony, the sounds he made tearing her senses. Behind her one wall of the room was still clean, but the circling flames were licking round both ways towards it.

There was a rug untouched at her back, she dragged it up and tried to reach the burning man with it, but smoke thickened quickly, stinging and blinding her eyes, and flashing tongues of fire jetted out of the smoke and drove her back.

She flung the rug, in case he could still clutch at it and roll himself in its smothering folds, but she knew then that it was too late for anyone to help him.

The room was already thick with smoke, she clutched her wide sleeve over mouth and nostrils, and drew back from the awful screaming that shrilled in her ears.

And he had the key of the room on him! No hope of reaching him now, no hope of recovering the key. The room was ablaze, timber at window and wall and floor began to cry out in loud cracks and splitting groans, spurting strange jets of flame.

Emma drew back, shielding her face, and hammered at the door, shrieking for help against the furious sounds of the fire. She thought she heard cries somewhere below, but distantly. She knotted her hands in the tapestries on either side the door, where the flames had not yet reached, tore the rotting fabric down, rolled it up tightly to resist sparks, and hurled it into the furnace on the other side of the room. Let the door at least remain passable. All the hangings that were not yet burning she dragged down. Her seared hand she had forgotten, she used it as freely as the other. All those other lives, surely, were safe enough, no one was ever going to read the letter that had failed to reach Ranulf of Chester.

Even that fearful life shut in this room with her must be all but over, the sounds were almost lost in the voice of the fire. A busy, preoccupied voice, not unlike the obsessed hum of the fairground. She had a life to lose, too. She was young, angry, resolute, she would not lose it tamely. She hammered at the door, and called again. No one came. She heard no voices, no hasty footsteps on the stairs to the gallery, nothing but the singing of the fire, mounting steadily from a hum to a roar, like a rioting crowd, but better harmonised, the triumphant utterance of a single will.

Emma stooped to the keyhole, and called through it as long as breath and strength lasted. She could neither see nor think by then, all about her was gathering blackness, and a throttling hand upon her throat. From stooping she sank to her knees, and from her knees sagged forward along the base of the door, and lay there with mouth and nose pressed against the gap that let in a thread of clean air. After a while she was not aware of anything, even of breathing.

CHAPTER 4

Philip lost himself briefly in the tangle of small valley tacks that threaded the hills, after leaving the Long Forest, and was forced to hunt out a local man from the first assart he came to, to put him on the road for Stanton Cobbold.

The region he knew vaguely, but not the manor. The cottar gave him precise instructions, and turning to follow his own pointing, saw the first thin column of smoke going up into a still sky, and rapidly thickening and darkening as he stared at it.

“That could be the very place, or near it. The woods are dry enough for trouble.

God send they can keep it from the house, if some fool’s set a spark going ...”

“How far is it?” demanded Philip, wildly staring.

“A mile and over. You’d best …” But Philip was gone, heels driving into his stolen horse’s sides, off at a headlong gallop. He kept his eyes upon that growing, billowing column of smoke more often than upon the road, and took risks on those little-used and eccentric paths that might have fetched him down a dozen times if luck had not favoured him. With every minute, the spectacle grew more alarming, the red of flames belching upward spasmodically against the black of smoke. Long before he reached the manor, and came bursting out of the trees towards the stockade, he could hear the bursting of beams, splitting apart in the heat with louder reports than any axe-blow. It was the house, not the forest.

The gate stood open, and within, frantic servants ran confusedly, dragging out from hall and kitchen whatever belongings they could, salvaging from the stables and byres, dangerously near to the wooden part of the house, terrified and shrieking horses, and bellowing cattle. Philip stared aghast at the tower of smoke and flames that engulfed one end of the house. The long stone building of hall and undercroft would stand, though as a gutted shell, but the timbered part was already a furnace. Confused men and screaming maids ran about distractedly and paid him no heed. The disaster had overtaken them so suddenly that they were half out of their wits.

Philip kicked his feet out of the stirrups which were short for him, but which he had never paused to lengthen, and vaulted from the horse, leaving it to wander at will. One of the cowmen blundered across his path, and Philip seized him by the arm and wrenched him round to face him.

“Where’s your lord? Where’s the girl he brought here today?” The man was dazed and slow to answer; he shook him furiously. “The girl - what has he done with her?”

Gaping helplessly, the man pointed into the pillar of smoke. “They’re in the solar - my lord as well … It’s there the fire began.”

Philip dropped him without a word, and began to run towards the stair to the hall door. The man howled after him: “Fool, it’s the hob of hell in there, nothing could live in it! And the door’s locked - he had the key with him …

You’ll go to your death!”

Nothing of this made any impression upon Philip, until mention of the locked door checked him sharply. If there was no other way in, by a locked door he would have to enter. He cast about him at all the piles of hangings and furnishings and utensils they had dragged out into the courtyard, for something he could use to break through such a barrier. The kitchen had been emptied, there were meat-choppers and knives, but, better still, there was a pile of arms from the hall. One of Corbière’s ancestors, it seemed, had favoured the battle-axe. And these craven creatures of the household had made no attempt to use so handy a weapon! Their lord could roast before they would risk a burned hand for him.

Philip went up the stone steps three at a time, and into the black and stifling cavern of the hall. The heat, after all, was not so intense here, the stone walls were thick, and the floor, too, was laid with stones over the great beams of the undercroft. The worst enemy was the smoke that bit acrid and poisonous into his throat at the first breath. He spared the few moments it took to tear off his shirt and bind it round his face to cover nose and mouth, and then began to grope his way at reckless speed along the wall towards the other end of the hall, whence the heat and the fumes came. He did not think at all, he did what he had to do. Emma was somewhere in that inferno, and nothing mattered but to get her out of it.

He found the foot of the staircase to the gallery by stumbling blindly over the first step, and went up the flight stooped low, because it seemed that the bulk of the smoke was rolling along the roof. The shape of the solar door he found by the framework of smoke pouring in a thin, steady stream all round it. The wood itself was not yet burning. He hammered and strained at the door, and called, but there was no sound from within but the crackling of the fire. No way but to go through.

He swung the axe like a berserker Norseman, aiming at the lock. The door was stout, the wood old and seasoned, but less formidable axes had felled the trees that made it. His eyes smarted, streaming tears that helped by damping the cloth that covered his mouth. The blows started the beams of the door, but the lock held. Philip went on swinging. He had started a deep crack just above the lock, so deep that he had trouble withdrawing the axe. Time after time he struck at the same place, aware of splinters flying, and suddenly the lock burst clear with a harsh, metallic cry, and the edge of the door gave, only to stick again when he had thrust it open no more than a hand’s breadth. The upper part, when he groped round it, offered no resistance. He felt along the floor within, and closed his hand upon a coil of silky hair. She was there, lying along the doorway, and though the heat that gushed out at him was terrifying, yet only the smoke, not the flames, had reached her.

The opening of the door had provided a way through for the wind that fed the flames, such a brightness burned up beyond the black that he knew he had only minutes before the blaze swept over them both. Frantically he leaned to get a grasp of her arm and drag her aside, so that he could open the door for the briefest possible moment, just wide enough to lift her through, and again draw it to against the demon within.

There was a great explosion of scarlet and flame, that sent a tongue out through the opening to singe his hair, and then he had her, the soft, limp weight hoisted on his shoulder, the door dragged to again behind them, and he was half-falling, half-running down the staircase with her in his arms, and the devil of fire had done no worse than snap at their heels. He did not even realise, until he took off his shoes much later, that the very treads of the stairs had been burning under his feet.

He reached the hall doorway with head lolling and chest labouring for breath, and had to sit down with his burden on the stone steps, for fear of falling with her. Greedily he dragged the clean outside air into him, and pulled down the smoke-fouled shirt from about his face. Vision and hearing were blurred and distant, he did not even know that Hugh Beringar and his guard had come galloping into the courtyard, until Brother Cadfael scurried up the steps to take Emma gently from him.

“Good lad! I have her. Come away down after us - lean on me as we go, so! Let’s find you a safe corner, and we’ll see what we can do for you both.”

Philip, suddenly shivering, and so feeble he dared not trust his legs to stand, asked in urgent, aching terror “Is she … ?”

“She’s breathing,” said Brother Cadfael reassuringly. “Come and help me care for her, and with God’s blessing, she’ll do.”

Emma opened her eyes upon a clean, pale sky and two absorbed and anxious faces.

Brother Cadfael’s she knew at once, for it bore its usual shrewdly amiable aspect, though how he had come to be there, or where, indeed, she was, she could not yet divine. The other face was so close to her own that she saw it out of focus, and it was wild and strange enough, grimed from brow to chin, the blackness seamed with dried rivulets of sweat, the brown hair along one temple curled and brown from burning! but it had two fine, clear brown eyes as honest as the daylight above, and fixed upon her with such devotion that the face, marred as it was, and never remarkable for beauty, seemed to her the most pleasing and comforting she had ever seen. The face on which her eyes had last looked, before it became a frightful lantern of flame, had been the face of ambition, greed and murder, in a plausible shell of beauty. This face was the other side of the human coin.

Only when she stirred slightly, and he moved his position to accommodate her more comfortably, did she realise that she was lying in his arms. Feeling and awareness came back gradually, even pain took its time. Her head was cradled in the hollow of his shoulder, her cheek rested against the breast of his cotte. A craftsman’s working clothes, homespun. Of course, he was a shoemaker. A shopkeeper’s boy, of no account! There was much to be said for it. The stink of smoke and burning still hung about them both, in spite of Cadfael’s attentions with a pannikin of water from the well. The shopkeeper’s boy of no account had come into the manor after her, and brought her out alive. She had mattered as much as that to him. A little shopkeeper’s girl …

“Her eyes are open,” said Philip in an eager whisper. “She’s smiling.”

Cadfael stooped to her. “How is it with you now, daughter?”

“I am alive,” she said, almost inaudibly, but with great joy.

“So you are, God be thanked, and Philip here next after God. But lie still, we’ll find you a cloak to wrap you in, for you’ll be feeling the cold that comes after danger. There’ll be pain, too, my poor child.” She already knew about the pain. “You’ve a badly burned hand, and I’ve no salves here, I can do no more than cover it from the air, until we get back to town. Leave your hand lie quiet, if you can, the stiller the better. How did it come that you escaped clean, but for the one hand so badly burned?”

“I put it into the brazier,” said Emma, remembering. She saw with what startled eyes Philip received this, and realised what she had said; and suddenly the most important thing of all seemed to her that Philip should not know everything, that his candid clarity should not be made to explore the use of lies, deceptions and subterfuges, no matter how right the cause they served. Some day she might tell someone, but it would not be Philip. “I was afraid of him,” she said, carefully amending, “and I tipped over the brazier. I never meant to start such a fire …”

Somewhere curiously distant from the corner of peace where she lay, Hugh Beringar and the sergeant and officers who had followed him from Shrewsbury were mustering the distracted servants in salvage, and damping down all the outhouses that were still in danger from flying sparks and debris, so that the beasts could be housed, and a roof, at least, provided for the men and maids. The fire had burned so fiercely that it was already dying down, but not for some days would the heat have subsided enough for them to sift through the embers for Ivo Corbière’s body.

“Lift me,” entreated Emma. “Let me see!”

Philip raised her to sit beside him in the clean, green grass. They were in a corner of the court, their backs against the stockade. Round the perimeter the barns and byres steamed in the early evening sun from the buckets of water which had been thrown over them. Close to the solar end, men were still at work carrying buckets in a chain from the well. There would be roofs enough left to shelter horses, cattle and people, until better could be done for them. They had the equipment of the kitchen, the stores in the undercroft might be damaged, but would not all be spoiled. In this summer weather they would do well enough, and someone must make shift to have the manor restored before the winter. All that terror, in the end, had taken but one life.

“He is dead,” she said, staring at the ruin from which she, though not he, had emerged alive.

“No other possibility,” said Cadfael simply.

He surmised, but she knew. “And the other one?”

“Turstan Fowler? He’s prisoner. The sergeant has him in charge. It was he, I believe,” said Cadfael gently, “who killed your uncle.”

She had expected that at the approach of Beringar and the law he would have helped himself to a horse and taken to his heels, but after all, he had known of no reason why he should. No one had been accusing him when he left Shrewsbury.

Everyone at the abbey ought to have taken it for granted that Emma had been duly conducted home to Bristol. Why should they question it? Why had they questioned it? She had much to learn, as well as much to tell. There would be time, later.

Now there was no time for anything but living, and exulting in living, and being glad and grateful, and perhaps, gradually and with unpractised pleasure, loving.

“What will become of him?” she asked.

“He’ll surely tell all he knows, and lay the worst blame where it belongs, on his lord.” Cadfael doubted, all the same, whether Turstan could hope to evade the gallows, and doubted whether he should, but he did not say so to her. She was deeply preoccupied at this moment with life and death, and willed mercy even to the lowest and worst in the largeness of the mercy shown to her. And that was good, God forbid he should say any word to deface it.

“Are you cold?” asked Philip tenderly, feeling her shiver in his arm.

“No,” she said at once, and turned her head a little in the hollow of his shoulder, resting her forehead against his grimy cheek. He felt the soft curving of her lips in the hollow of his throat as she smiled, and was filled with so secure a sense of possession that no one would ever be able to take her away from him.

Hugh Beringar came to them across the trampled grass of the court, even his neatness smoked and odorous.

“What can be done’s done,” he said, wiping his face. “We had better get her back to Shrewsbury, there’s no provision here. I’m leaving my sergeant and most of the men here for the time being, but the place for you,” he said, smiling somewhat wearily at Emma, “is in a comfortable bed, with your hurt properly dressed, and no need for you to think or stir until you’re restored. Bristol will have to wait for you. We’ll take you to Aline at the abbey, you’ll be easy there.”

“No,” said Philip, with large assurance. “I am taking Emma to my mother in Shrewsbury.”

“Very well, so you shall,” agreed Hugh, “it’s hardly a step further. But give Cadfael time at the abbey to hunt out the salves and potions he wants from his workshop, and let Aline see for herself that we’ve not let Emma come to any great harm. And don’t forget, friend, you owe Aline something for entertaining the fellow you robbed of his horse, and guarding your back for you until you can restore him.”

Beneath his coating of soot Philip could still blush. “True enough, I’m likely to end in gaol again for theft, but not until I’ve seen Emma safe lodged in my mother’s care.”

Hugh laughed, and clapped him amiably on the shoulder. “Nor then nor ever, while I’m in office - not unless you choose to kick the law in the teeth on some other occasion. We’ll satisfy the merchant, Aline will have sweetened him into complacency, you’ll find. And his horse has been rubbed down and watered and rested, while you’ve been otherwise occupied, and we’ll take him back with us unloaded, none the worse for his adventures. There are horses enough here, I’ll find you the pick of them, a steady ride fit to bear two.” He had had one eye on Emma while he had been mustering water-carriers and husbanding household effects, he knew better than to try to wrest her out of Philip’s arms, or send for a horse-litter to carry her back. There were two here so joined together that only a fool would attempt to part them even for a few hours; and Hugh was no fool.

They wrapped her gently in a brychan borrowed from the salvaged bedding, rather for comfortable padding than for warmth, for the evening was still serene and mild, though she might yet suffer the cold that comes after effort is all over.

She accepted everything with serenity, like one in a dream, though the pain of her hand must, they reasoned, be acute. She seemed to feel nothing but a supreme inner peace that made everything else of no account. They mounted Philip on a great, broad-backed, steady-paced gelding, and then lifted Emma up to him in her swathing blanket, and she settled into the cradle of his lap and arms and braced shoulder as though God had made her to fit there.

“And perhaps so he did,” said Brother Cadfael, riding behind with Hugh Beringar close beside him.

“So he did what?” wondered Hugh, starting out of very different considerations, for two officers brought a bound Turstan Fowler behind them.

“Direct all,” said Cadfael. “It is, after all, a way he has.”

Halfway back towards Shrewsbury she fell asleep in his arms, nestled on his breast. For the fall of her black, smoke-scented hair he could see only the lower part of her face, but the mouth was soft and moist and smiling, and all her weight melted and moulded into the cradle of his loving body as into a marriage-bed. In her dream she had gone somewhere beyond the pain of her burned hand. It was as if she had thrust her hand into the future, and found it worth the price. The left hand, the unmarked one, lay clasped warmly round him, inside his coat, holding him close to her in her dream.

CHAPTER 5

The summer darkness of fine nights, which is never quite dark, showed a horse-fair deserted, no trace of the past three days but the trampled patches and the marks of trestles in the grass. All over for another year. The abbey stewards had gathered in the profits of rent and toll and tax, delivered their accounts, and gone to their beds. So had the monks of the abbey, the lay servants, the novices and the pupils. A sleepy porter opened the gate for them; and mysteriously, at the sounds of their arrival, though circumspect and subdued, the great court awoke to life. Aline came running from the guest-hall with the aggrieved merchant, now remarkably complacent, at her back, Brother Mark from the dortoir, and Abbot Radulfus’s own clerk from the abbot’s lodging, with a bidding to Brother Cadfael to attend there as soon as he arrived, however late the hour.

“I sent him word what was toward,” said Hugh, “as we left. It was right he should know. He’ll be anxious to hear how it ended.”

While Aline took Emma and Philip, half awake and dazedly docile, to rest and refresh themselves in the guest-hall, and Brother Mark ran to the herbarium to collect the paste of mulberry leaves and the unguent of Our Lady’s mantle, known specifics for burns, and the men-at-arms went on to the castle with their prisoner, Brother Cadfael duly attended Radulfus in his study. Whether at midday or midnight, the abbot was equally wide-awake. By the single candle burning he surveyed Cadfael and asked simply: “Well?”

“It is well, Father. We are returned with Mistress Vernold safe and little the worse, and the murderer of her uncle is in the sheriff’s hands. One murderer - the man Turstan Fowler.”

“There is another?” asked Radulfus.

“There was another. He is dead. Not by any man’s hand, Father, none of us has killed or done violence. He is dead by fire.”

“Tell me,” said the abbot.

Cadfael told him the whole story, so far as he knew it, and briefly. How much more Emma knew was a matter for conjecture.

“And what,” the abbot wished to know, “can this communication have been, to cause any man to commit such crimes in pursuit of it?”

“That we do not know, and no man now will know, for it is burned with him. But where there are two warring factions in a land,” said Cadfael, “men without scruples can turn controversy to gain, sell men for profit, take revenge on their rivals, hope to be awarded the lands of those they betray. Whatever evil was intended, now will never come to fruit.”

“A better ending than I began to fear,” said Radulfus, and drew a thankful sigh.

“Then all danger is now over, and the guests of our house are come to no harm.”

He pondered for a moment. “This young man who did so well for us and for the girl - you say he is son to the provost?”

“He is, Father. I am going with them now, with your permission, to see them safely home and dress their burns. They are not too grave, but they should be cleansed and tended at once.”

“Go with God’s blessing!” said the abbot. “It is convenient, for I have a message to the provost, which you may deliver for me, if you will. Ask Master Corviser, with my compliments, if he will be kind enough to attend here tomorrow morning, about the end of chapter. I have some business to transact with him.”

Mistress Corviser had undoubtedly been fulminating for hours about her errant son, a good-for-nothing who was no sooner bailed out of prison than he was off in mischief somewhere else until midnight and past. Probably she had said at least a dozen times that she washed her hands of him, that he was past praying for, and she no longer cared, let him go to the devil his own way. But for all that, her husband could not get her to go to bed, and at every least sound that might be a footstep at the door or in the street, steady or staggering, she flew to look out, with her mouth full of abuse but her heart full of hope.

And then, when he did come, it was with a great-eyed girl in his arm, a thick handful of his curls singed off at one temple, the smell of smoke in his coat, his shirt in tatters, a monk of Saint Peter’s at his heels, and a look of roused authority and maturity about him that quite overcame his draggled and soiled state. And instead of either scolding or embracing him, she took both him and the girl by the hand and drew them inside together, and went about seating, feeding, tending them, with only few words, and those practical and concerned.

Tomorrow Philip might be brought to tell the whole story. Tonight it was Cadfael who told the merest skeleton of it, as he cleansed and dressed Emma’s hand, and the superficial burns on Philip’s brow and arm. Better not make too much of what the boy had done. Emma would take care of that, later; his mother would value it most of all from her.

Emma herself said almost nothing, islanded in her exhaustion and bliss, but her eyes seldom left Philip, and when they did, it was to take in with deep content the solid, dark furnishings and warm panelling of this burgess house, so familiar to her that being accepted here was like coming home. Her rapt, secret smile was eloquent; mothers are quick to notice such looks. Emma had already conquered, even before she was led gently away to the bed prepared for her, and settled there by Mistress Corviser with all the clucking solicitude of a hen with one chick, with a posset laced with Brother Cadfael’s poppy syrup to make sure that she slept, and forgot her pain.

“As pretty a thing as ever I saw,” said Mistress Corviser, coming back softly into the room, and closing the door between. She cast a fond look at her son, and found him asleep in his chair. “And to think that’s what he was about, while I was thinking all manner of bad things about him, who should have known him better!”

“He knows himself a deal better than he did a few days ago,” said Cadfael, repacking his scrip. “I’ll leave you these pastes and ointments, you know how to use them. But I’ll come and take a look at her later tomorrow. Now I’ll take my leave, I confess I’m more than ready for my own bed. I doubt if I shall hear the bell for Prime tomorrow.”

In the yard Geoffrey Corviser was himself stabling the horse from Stanton Cobbold with his own. Cadfael gave him the abbot’s message. The provost raised sceptical eyebrows. “Now what can the lord abbot want with me? The last time I came cap in hand to chapter, I got a dusty answer.”

“All the same,” advised Cadfael, scrubbing thoughtfully at his blunt brown nose, “in your shoes I think I’d be curious enough to come and see. Who knows but the dust may have settled elsewhere by this time!”

It was no wonder if Brother Cadfael, though he did manage to rise for Prime, took advantage of his carefully chosen place behind a pillar to doze his way through chapter. He was so sound asleep, indeed, that for once he was in danger of snoring, and at the first melodious horn-call Brother Mark took fright, and nudged him awake.

The provost had obeyed the abbot’s invitation to the latter, and arrived only at the very end of chapter. The steward of the grange court had just announced that he was in attendance when Cadfael opened his eyes.

“What can the provost be here for?” whispered Mark.

“He was asked to come. Do I know why? Hush!” Geoffrey Corviser came in in his best, and made his reverence respectfully but coolly. He had no solid cohort at his back this time, and to tell the truth, though he may have felt some curiosity, he was attaching very little importance to this encounter. His mind was on other things. True, the problems of the town remained, and at any other time would have taken foremost place in his concern, but today he was proof against public cares by reason of private elation in a son vindicated and praised, a son to be proud of.

“You sent for me, Father Abbot. I am here.”

“I thank you for your courtesy in attending,” said the abbot mildly. “Some days ago, Master Provost, before the fair, you came with a request to me which I could not meet.”

The provost said not a word; there was none due, and he felt no need to speak at a loss.

“The fair is now over,” said the abbot equably. “All the rents, tolls and taxes have been collected, and all have been delivered into the abbey treasury, as is due by charter. Do you endorse that?”

“It is the law,” said Corviser, “to the letter.”

“Good! We are agreed. Right has therefore been done, and the privilege of this house is maintained. That I could not infringe by any prior concession. Abbots who follow me would have blamed me, and with good reason. Their rights are sacrosanct. But now they have been met in full. And as abbot of this house, it is for me to determine what use shall be made of the monies in our hold. What I could not grant away in imperilment of charter,” said Radulfus with deliberation, “I can give freely as a gift from this house. Of the fruits of this year’s fair, I give a tenth to the town of Shrewsbury, for the repair of me walls and repaving of the streets.”

The provost, enlarged in his family content, flushed into startled and delighted acknowledgement, a generous man accepting generosity. “My lord, I take your tenth with pleasure and gratitude, and I will see that it is used worthily. And I make public here and now that no part of the abbey’s right is thereby changed.

Saint Peter’s Fair is your fair. Whether and when your neighbour town should also benefit, when it is in dire need, that rests with your judgment.”

“Our steward will convey you the money,” said Radulfus, and rose to conclude a satisfactory encounter. “This chapter is concluded,” he said.

CHAPTER 6

August continued blessedly fine, and all hands turned gladly to making sure of the harvest. Hugh Beringar and Aline set off with their hopes and purchases for Maesbury, as did the merchant of Worcester for his home town, a day late, but well compensated with a fee for the hire of his horse in an emergency, on the sheriff’s business, and a fine story which he would retail on suitable occasions for the rest of his life. The provost and council of Shrewsbury drafted a dignified acknowledgement to the abbey for its gift, warm enough to give proper expression to their appreciation of the gesture, canny enough not to compromise any of their own just claims for the future. The sheriff put on record the closure of a criminal affair, as related to him by the young woman who had been lured away on false pretences, with the apparent design of stealing from her a letter left in her possession, but of the contents of which she was ignorant.

There was some suspicion of a conspiracy involved, but as Mistress Vernold had never seen nor been told the significance of what she held, and as in any case it was now irrevocably lost by fire, no further action was necessary or possible. The malefactor was dead, his servant, self-confessed a murderer at his master’s orders, awaited trial, and would plead that he had been forced to obey, being villein-born and at his lord’s mercy. The dead man’s overlord had been informed. Someone else, at the discretion of the earl of Chester, would take seisin of the manor of Stanton Cobbold.

Everyone drew breath, dusted his hands, and went back to work.

Brother Cadfael went up into the town on the second day, to tend Emma’s hand.

The provost and his son were at work together, in strong content with each other and the world. Mistress Corviser returned to her kitchen, and left leech and patient together.

“I have wanted to talk to you,” said Emma, looking up earnestly into his face as he renewed the dressing. “There must be one person who hears the truth from me, and I would rather it should be you.”

“I don’t believe,” said Cadfael equably, “that you told the sheriff a single thing that was false.”

“No, but I did not tell him all the truth. I said that I had no knowledge of what was in the letter, or even for whom it was intended, or by whom it was sent. That was true, I had no such knowledge of my own, though I did know who brought it to my uncle, and that it was to be handed to the glover for delivery.

But when Ivo demanded the letter of me, and I span out the time asking what could be so important about a letter, he told me what he believed to be in it.

King Stephen’s kingdom stood at stake, he said, and the gain to the man who provided him the means to wipe out his enemies would stretch as wide as an earldom. He said the empress’s friends were pressing the earl of Chester to join them, and he would not move unless he had word of all the other powers her cause could muster, and this was the promised despatch, to convince him his interest lay with them. As many as fifty names there might be, he said, of those secretly bound to the empress, perhaps even the date when Robert of Gloucester hopes to bring her to England, even the port where they plan to land. All these sold in advance to the king’s vengeance, life and limb and lands, he said, and the earl of Chester with them, who had gone so far as to permit this approach! All these offered up bound and condemned, and he would get his own price for them. This is what he told me. This is what I do not know of my own knowledge, and yet in my heart and soul I do know it, for I am sure what he said was true.” She moistened her lips, and said carefully: “I do not know King Stephen well enough to know what he would do, but I remember what he did here, last summer. I saw all those men, as honest in their allegiance as those who hold with the king, thrown into prison, their lives forfeit, their families stripped of land and living, some forced into exile … I saw deaths and revenges and still more bitterness if the tide should turn again. So I did what I did.”

“I know what you did,” said Brother Cadfael gently. He was bandaging the healing proof of it.

“But still, you see,” she persisted gravely, “I am not sure if I did right, and for right reasons. King Stephen at least keeps a kind of peace where his writ runs. My uncle was absolute for the empress, but if she comes, if all these who hold with her rise and join her, there will be no peace anywhere. Whichever way I look I see deaths. But all I could think of, then, was preventing him from gaining by his treachery and murders. And there was only one way, by destroying the letter. Since then I have wondered … But I think now that I must stand by what I did. If there must be fighting, if there must be deaths, let it happen as God wills, not as ambitious and evil men contrive. Those lives we cannot save, at least let us not help to destroy. Do you think I was right? I have wanted someone’s word, I should like it to be yours.”

“Since you ask what I think,” said Cadfael, “I think my child, that if you carry scars on the fingers of this hand lifelong, you should wear them like jewels.”

Her lips parted in a startled smile. She shook her head over the persistent tremor of doubt. “But you must never tell Philip,” she said with sudden urgency, holding him by the sleeve with her good hand. “As I never shall. Let him believe me as innocent as he is himself …” She frowned over the word, which did not seem to her quite what she had wanted, but she could not find one fitter for her purpose. If it was not innocence she meant - for of what was she guilty? - was it simplicity, clarity, purity? None of them would do. Perhaps Brother Cadfael would understand, none the less. “I felt somehow mired,” she said. “He should never set foot in intrigue, it is not for him.”

Brother Cadfael gave her his promise, and walked back through the town in a muse, reflecting on the complexity of women. She was perfectly right. Philip, for all his two years advantage, his intelligence, and his new and masterful maturity, would always be the younger, and the simpler, and - yes, she had the just word, after all! - the more innocent. In Cadfael’s experience, it made for very good marriage prospects, where the woman was fully aware of her responsibilities.

On the thirtieth of September, just two months after Saint Peter’s Fair, the Empress Maud and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed near Arundel and entered into the castle there. But Earl Ranulf of Chester sat cannily in his own palatine, minded his own business, and stirred neither hand nor foot in her cause.