The Holy Thief

Chapter Eleven

“I HAVE NOT SO FAR HAD THE OPPORTUNITY,” said Robert Bossu, “of cultivating your acquaintance. But I must tell you, if you do not already know it, for I think you miss very little, and can see as far through a forest by moonlight as the next man, that the name of Hugh Beringar has not gone unnoted by men of sense. How could it, when the exchequer is in chaos most of the time, and the chancery clerks out of touch with much of the land? How many shires, how many sheriffs, do you suppose, pay their annual farms regularly and on time? Yours is known never to be in default, and your county enjoys at least a kind of peace, a man can hope to travel to the Abbey fair here safely, and your courts manage to keep the roads relatively free of what we modestly call evil customs. Moreover, you contrive to be on amicable terms with Owain Gwynedd, as I know, even if Powys boils over now and again.”

“I study and practise to keep my place,” said Hugh with a grin.

“You study and practise to keep your shire functioning as quietly as may be,” said the earl. “So do all men of sense, but against the odds.”

They were sitting in the earl’s apartment in the guest-hall, facing each other across a small table, with wine passing amiably between them, and a curtained door closed and shrouded against the world. Robert Bossu was well served. His squires were prompt to his call, and soft-footed and neat-handed with flask and glass, and seemed to go in no awe of him, but rather to take pride in matching his poise and serenity; but for all that, he dismissed them before he opened his confidence to one almost a stranger, and Hugh had no doubt that they kept his rules and betook themselves well out of earshot of his conversation, though close enough to jump to respond if he called.

“I like order,” said Hugh, “and I have a preference for keeping my people alive and whole where possible, though you have seen it cannot always be done. I hate waste. Waste of lives, waste of time that could be profitable, waste of the earth that could be fruitful. There’s been more than enough of all three. If I try to keep it out of my bailiwick, at least, is that matter for wonder?”

“Your opinion,” said the earl with deliberation, “I should value. What you say here, I have said before you. Now, do you see any ending? How many more years of this to-ing and fro-ing that always fetches up in stalemate? You are Stephen’s man. So am I. Men every bit as honourable follow the empress. We entangle ourselves like this with little thought, but I tell you, Hugh, the time is coming when men will be forced to think, upon both sides, before waste has wasted all, and no man can lift a lance any more.”

“And you and I are conserving what we can for that day?” Hugh enquired, with raised brows and a rueful mouth.

“Oh, not for a few years yet, but it will come. It must. There was some vestige of sense in it when we began, when Stephen had Normandy as well as England, and victory was in view. But four years and more ago that was all changed, when Geoffrey of Anjou wormed and bludgeoned his way into Normandy and made it his past doubt, even if it was in his wife’s right and his son’s name.”

“Yes,” agreed Hugh flatly, “the year the Count of Meulan left us, to protect his right in Normandy by coming to terms with Geoffrey as overlord in Stephen’s place.”

“What else,” asked Robert, undisturbed and unindignant, even wryly smiling, “could my brother do? His right and title rest there. He is Waleran, Count of Meulan; however dear his titles in England may be, his line and identity is there. Not even Normandy, though the greater part of his inheritance is in Normandy. But the name, the name is in France itself, he owes homage to the king of France for that, and now for the larger heritage to Geoffrey of Anjou. Whatever else he jettisons, the root and blood of his name he cannot live without. I am the luckier of the two, Hugh. I came into my father’s English lands and titles, I can dig my heels in here, and sit it out. True, my wife brought me Breteuil, but that is the lesser part of my heart, as my brother’s title of Worcester is the lesser part of his. So he is there, and written off as a turncoat in Maud’s favour as I am here, and credited as a loyal man to Stephen. And what difference, Hugh, do you see between us two? Twin brothers, the closest blood-kin there can be?”

“None,” said Hugh, and was silent a moment, weighing and discarding the cautious selection of words. “I understand very well,” he said then, “that with Normandy gone, this followed. For others, besides the Beaumont brothers. There’s not a man among us would not make some concessions to protect his rooted right and his sons’ inheritance. We may reckon your brother as Anjou’s man now, yet he will do Stephen as little harm as he can, and give Geoffrey as little active support. And you, left here still Stephen’s man, you will keep your loyalty, but keep it as quietly as may be, avoiding action against the brood of Anjou as Waleran avoids action against Stephen. And there he will gloze over your continued allegiance and protect your lands and interests, as you are doing here for him. The division between you is no division at all. It is a drawing together that will draw together the interests of many others like you. Not in Stephen’s cause, not in the cause of the empress and her son.”

“In the cause of sanity,” said the earl flatly, and studied Hugh with alert and critical interest, and smiled. “You have felt it, too. This has become a war which cannot be won or lost. Victory and defeat have become alike impossible. Unfortunately it may take several years yet before most men begin to understand. We who are trying to ride two horses know it already.”

“If there is no winning and no losing,” said Hugh, “there has to be another way. No land can continue for ever in a chaotic stalemate between two exhausted forces, without governance, while two groups of bewildered old men squat on their meagre gains and stare helplessly at each other, unable to lift a hand for the coup de grace.”

Robert Bossu contemplated that summing up and his own fine finger-ends with a considering gravity, and then looked up sharply, his eyes, which had sparks of burning purple in their blackness, meeting Hugh’s unmoving stare with appreciative attention. “I like your diagnosis. It has gone on too long, and it will go on some years yet, make no mistake. But there is no ending that way, except by the death of all the old men, and not from wounds, from stagnation and old age and disgust. I would rather not wait to make one of them.”

“Nor I!” said Hugh heartily. “And therefore,” he asked, with an eyebrow cocked expectantly to meet the bright imperial stare, “what does a sane man do while he’s enduring such waiting as he can endure?”

“Tills his own ground, shepherds his own flock, mends his own fences, and sharpens his own sword,” said Robert Bossu.

“Collects his own revenues?” suggested Hugh. “And pays his own dues?”

“Both. To the last penny. And keeps, Hugh... keeps his own counsel. Even while terms like traitor and turncoat are being bandied about like arrows finding random marks. You will know better. I loved Stephen. I still do. But I do not love this ruinous nothing he and his cousin have made between them.”

The afternoon was drawing on towards the first hint of dusk. Soon it would be time for the Vesper bell. Hugh drained his cup and set it down on the board. “Well, I had better be about shepherding my own flock, if I can count the abbot’s two prisoners as any charge of mine. This is still a murder we have on our hands. And you, my lord? I take it you will be away now to your own country? These are no times to turn one’s back for longer than a few days.”

“I’m loth to go without knowing the ending,” the earl admitted, warming into slightly self-deprecating laughter. “I know murder is no jest, but these two prisoners of yours... Can you believe either of them capable of killing? Oh, I know there’s no reading in the face what the mind can conceive, you handle them as you best can. As for me, yes, in a day or so I must make ready and take my leave. I am glad,” he said, rising as Hugh rose, “that I have got to know you. Oh, and I have made other gains, for Rémy and his servants will be coming with me. There’s room in my household for so good a poet and maker of songs. My luck, that I happened on him before he made off to the north, to Chester. His luck, too, for he’d have wasted his eloquence there. Ranulf has things on his mind graver than music, even if he has a note of music in him, which I doubt.”

Hugh took his leave, and was not pressed to remain, though the earl came a few formal steps towards the hall door with him. He had said what no doubt he was choosing to say to all such men holding authority, however limited, once he had measured them and liked and respected what he found. He had seed to sow, and was selecting the ground where it might root and flourish. When Hugh had reached the top of the steps the voice behind him said with mild but impressive emphasis: “Hugh! Bear it in mind!”

Hugh and Cadfael came together from Tutilo’s cell, and refuged in the herb-garden in the twilight after Vespers, to consider what little they had got from him; and it was little enough, but sturdily consistent with what he had affirmed from the beginning. The boy was puffy-eyed and drunken with sleep, and if he felt any great anxiety about his fate he was too dulled still to be capable of appreciating the many pitfalls that lay in wait for him every way. Not a word of Daalny; for her he was fiercely on guard. He sat on his narrow pallet languidly composed, close to resignation, answered questions without any suspect pauses, and listened with dropped jaw and startled eyes when Cadfael told him how the Gospels had decisively restored Saint Winifred to Shrewsbury, and how Brother Jerome had babbled out his astonishing confession rather than wait to be accused by heaven.

“Me?” blurted Tutilo, incredulous. “He meant it for me? And for one instant he laughed aloud at the absurdity of the idea of Jerome as assassin, and himself as victim, and then in revulsion was stricken aghast at himself, and clapped both hands to his face as if to crush out the very lines of laughter. “And the poor soul helpless, and someone... Oh, God, how could any man...” And then, suddenly comprehending what was inferred, and instantly springing to refute it: “Oh, no, not that! Not Jerome, that’s impossible.” Quite certain, quite firmly stating his certainty, he who had found the wreckage of a man. “No, of course you can’t and don’t believe that.” Not protesting, not exclaiming, but stating another certainty. He was fully awake and alive by then, his golden eyes wide and confident upon his questioners, both monastic and secular. As sound, sensible men both, they could not possibly credit that Jerome, narrow, meagre, malicious little soul though he might be, could have battered a senseless man’s head to pulp with a heavy stone.

“Since you were not at Longner,” said Hugh, “where did you take yourself off that night, to be coming back by that same path?”

“Anywhere to be out of sight and mind,” said Tutilo fervently. “I lay up in the loft above the Horse Fair stable until I heard the bell for Compline, and then went up almost to the ferry, to be seen to come back by the Longner path if anyone noticed me.”

“Alone?” said Hugh.

“Of course alone.” He lied cheerfully and firmly. No use lying at all unless you can do it with conviction.

And that was all that was to be got out of him. No, he had met no one, going or returning, who would be able to vouch for his movements. He had told all the worst of what he had done, and did not seem greatly concerned about the rest. They locked the door upon him again, restored the key to its place in the gatehouse, and withdrew to the privacy of the herbarium to blow the brazier into a comfortable glow, and shut out the encroaching darkness of the night.

“And now,” said Cadfael, “I think I shall be forgiven if I tell you the rest of what he did that night, the part he was not willing to tell.”

Hugh leaned back against the timber wall and said equably: “I might have known you would have right of entry where no one else was let in. What is it he has not told me?”

“He has not told me, either. It was from someone else I got it, and with no licence to pass it on, even to you, but I think she’ll hold me justified. The girl Daalny, you’ll have seen her about, but she keeps discreetly apart within these walls...”

“Rémy’s singing girl,” said Hugh, “the little thing from Provence.”

“From Ireland, properly speaking. But yes, that’s the one. Her mother was put up for sale in Bristol, a prize from oversea. This one was born into servitude. The trade still goes on, and Bishop Wulstan’s sermons haven’t made it illegal, only frowned upon. I fancy our holy thief is between enthusiasms just now, unsure whether he wants to be a saint or a knight errant. He has dreams now of delivering the only slave he’s likely to encounter in these parts, though I doubt if he’s fully realized yet that she’s a girl, and a fine one, and has already taken his measure.”

“Are you telling me,” demanded Hugh, beginning to sparkle with amusement, “that he was with her that night?”

“He was, and won’t say so because her master sets a high value on her voice, and goes in fear that she may slip through his fingers somehow. What happened was that the manservant who travels with them overheard somewhere about Aldhelm being on his way here to identify the brother who cozened him, and told Daalny, knowing very well that she had an eye to the lad herself. She warned him, he made up the tale that he was summoned to Longner, and got his permission from Herluin, who knew nothing about Aldhelm being expected here. Tutilo went out by the gate, like an honest fellow, and took the path from the Foregate towards the ferry, but turned aside to the Horse Fair and hid in the loft over our stable, just as he says. And she slid out by the broad gate from the cemetery, and joined him there. They waited there until they heard the bell for Compline, and then parted to return by the same ways they had come. So she says, and so he won’t say, in case it rebounds on her.”

“So all that evening they were cosily employed in the hayloft, like many a lad and lass before them,” said Hugh, and laughed.

“So they were, in a manner of speaking, but not like every such pair. Not quite. For she says they talked. Nothing more. And those two had much to talk about, and little chance until then. The first time they ever were together outside these walls. Even then I doubt if they got to the real meat of what they should have been saying. For believe me, Hugh, she has already set her mark on him, and he, though he may not know it yet, is in thrall to her fathoms deep. They said the evening prayers together, she says, when they heard the Compline bell.”

“And you believe her?”

“Why say it, else?” said Cadfael simply. “She had nothing to prove to me. She told me of her own will, and had no need to add one word.”

“Well, if true,” said Hugh seriously, “it speaks for him. It fits with the time he came to us at the castle, and puts him an hour behind Aldhelm on that path. But you realize as well as I that the word of the girl will hardly be taken more gravely for proof than his own, if things are thus between them. However innocent that assignation may have been.”

“Have you considered,” Cadfael asked sombrely, “that Herluin will surely want to set out for home now he’s lost his bid? And he is Tutilo’s superior, and will certainly want to take him back with him. And so far as I can see, as the case stands at this moment he has every right to do so. If you had kept him in the castle on suspicion things would have been different, possession is still the better part of the law. But he’s here in the Church’s prison, and you know how hard the Church holds on to its own. Between a secular charge of murder and a clerical one of theft and deception, on the face of it the lad might well prefer the latter. But as between your custody and Herluin’s, frankly, I’d wish him in your charge. But Herluin will never willingly let go of him. The fool child raised his prior’s hopes of gaining a miracle-working saint, and then failed to make a success of it, and brought the whole down to a reproach and a humiliation. He’ll be made to pay for that tenfold, once Herluin gets him home. I don’t know but I’d rather see him charged on a count of which he’s innocent, and hoisted away into your hold, than dragged off to do endless penance for the count on which he himself owns he’s guilty.”

Hugh was smiling, a shade wryly, and eyeing Cadfael along his shoulder with rueful affection. “Better get to work in the day or so remaining, and find me the man who really did murder, since you’re certain this boy did not. They will surely all leave together, for Rémy and his party are joining Robert Bossu’s household, and Herluin’s way home takes the same road as far as Leicester, it’s why the wagon fell victim there in the first place, and started all this to-do, so he’d be mad not to avail himself of a safe escort and ask to travel with the earl, if indeed the earl does not invite him before he can ask. I may contrive to delay Robert a couple of days, but no longer.”

He rose and stretched. It had been an eventful day, with many mysteries propounded and none of them solved. He had earned an hour or two of Aline’s company, and an amiable tumble with the five-year-old tyrant Giles, before the boy was swept away to bed by Constance, his devoted slave. Let lesser considerations, and for that matter greater ones, too, hang in abeyance until tomorrow.

“And what particular responsibilities did he want to talk over with you in private this afternoon?” asked Cadfael as his friend turned towards the door.

“The need,” said Hugh, looking back and weighing words with care, “for all thinking men in this deadlocked contention to set about finding a means of doing away with factions, since neither faction has any hope of winning. The thing is becoming very simple: how to clamber out of a morass before the muck reaches our chins. You can be giving your mind to that, Cadfael, while you say a word in God’s ear at Compline.”

Cadfael could never be quite sure what it was that prompted him to borrow the key yet again after Compline, and go in to pay a late visit to Tutilo. It might have been the sound of the light, pure voice from within the cell, heard eerily across the court when he came from the last Office of the evening. A faint gleam of light showed through the high, barred window; the prisoner had not yet put out his little lamp. The singing was very soft, not meant to reach anyone outside, but the tone was so piercingly true, in the centre of the note like an arrow in the gold of a target, that it carried on the twilit stillness to the most remote corners of the court, and caused Cadfael to freeze in midstride, stricken to the heart with its beauty. The boy’s timing was a little out: he was still singing the close of the Office. Nothing so wonderful had been heard in the choir of the church. Anselm was an excellent precentor, and long ago in his youth might have sounded like this: but Anselm with all his skills was old, and this was an ageless voice that might have belonged to a child or an angel. Blessed be the human condition, thought Cadfael, which allows us marred and fallible creatures who are neither angels nor children to make sounds like these, that belong in another world. Unlooked for mercies, undeserved grace!

Well, that could be meant as a sign. Or again, what sent him to the gatehouse for the key might have been simply a feeling that he must make one more effort to get something useful out of the boy before sleeping, something that might point the way forward, perhaps something Tutilo did not even realize that he knew. Or, Cadfael thought afterwards, it might have been a sharp nudge in the ribs from Saint Winifred, stretching out the grace of a thought all the way from her grave in Gwytherin, having forgiven the graceless youth who had had the excellent taste to covet her, as she had forgiven the graceless old man who had presumed to suppose he was interpreting her will, just as impudently, all those years ago. Whatever it was, to the gatehouse he went, the entrancing and agonizing beauty of Tutilo’s singing following him all the way. Brother Porter let him take the key without question; in his solitude Tutilo had shown every sign of resignation and content, as if he welcomed the peace and quiet to consider his present state and his future prospects. Whatever complex motives had combined to drive Tutilo into the cloister, there was nothing spurious about his faith; if he had done no evil, he was assured no evil would come to him. Or else, of course, being the lad he was, he was lulling everyone into believing in his docility, until they ceased to pay him any careful attention, and let him slide out of the trap like an eel. With Tutilo you would never be quite sure. Daalny was right. You would have to know him very well, to know when he was lying and when he was telling the truth.

Tutilo was still on his knees in front of the plain, small cross on the cell wall, and did not immediately look round when the key grated in the lock, and the door opened at his back. He had stopped singing, and was gazing musingly before him, eyes wide open, and face placid and absent. He turned, rising when the door swung heavily to again, and beholding Cadfael, smiled rather wanly, and sat down on his cot. He looked mildly surprised, but said nothing, waiting submissively to hear what was now required of him, and in no apprehension about it, because it was Cadfael who came.

“No, nothing,” said Cadfael with a sigh, answering the look. “Just a gnawing hope that talking to us earlier might have started a hare, after all. Some small thing recalled that might be useful.”

Tutilo shook his head slowly, willing but blank. “No, I can think of nothing I haven’t told you. And everything I have told you is truth.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you,” said Cadfael resignedly. “Still, bear it in mind. The merest detail, something you think negligible, might be the very grain that makes the weight. Never mind, leave your wits fallow and something may come back to you.” He looked round the narrow, bare white cell. “Are you warm enough here?”

“Once in the brychans, snug enough,” said Tutilo. “I’ve slept harder and colder many a time.”

“And there’s nothing wanting? Any small thing I can do for you?”

“According to the Rule, you should not so much as offer,” said Tutilo, with a sudden sparkling grin. “But yes, maybe there is one lawful thing I could ask, even to my credit. I have kept the hours, alone here, but there are bits I forget sometimes. And besides, I miss reading in it to pass the time. Even Father Herluin would approve. Could you bring me a breviary?”

“What happened to your own?” Cadfael asked, surprised. “I know you had one, a little narrow one.” The vellum had been folded many times to make its cramped pages. “Good eyes you’d need for that minuscule, but then, your eyes are young enough to be sharp.”

“I’ve lost it,” said Tutilo. “I had it at Mass, the day before I was locked in here, but where I’ve left it or dropped it I don’t know. I miss it, but I can’t think what I’ve done with it.”

“You had it the day Aldhelm was to come here? The day, the night, rather, you found him?”

“That was the last I can be clear about, and I may have shaken it out of my scrip or dropped it somewhere among the trees in the dark, that’s what I’m afraid of. I was hardly noticing much that night,” he said ruefully, “after I found him. What with bolting down the track and across the river into the town, I could have shed it anywhere. It may be down the Severn by now. I like to have it,” he said earnestly, “and I rise for Matins and Lauds in the night. I do!”

“I’ll leave you mine,” said Cadfael. “Well, best get your sleep, if you’re going to rise with the rest of us at midnight. Keep your lamp burning till then, if you like, there’s enough oil here.” He had checked it in the little pottery vessel with a fingertip. “Goodnight, son!”

“Don’t forget to lock the door,” said Tutilo after him, and laughed without a trace of bitterness.

She was standing in the darkest of the dark, slender and still and erect, pressed against the stones of the cell wall when Cadfael rounded the corner. The faint gleam of Tutilo’s lamp through the grill high out of her reach fell from above over her face as no more than a glowworm’s eerie spark, conjuring out of deep darkness a spectral mask of a face, oval, elusive, with austere carven features, but the remaining light from the west window of the church, hardly less dim, found the large, smouldering lustre of her eyes, and a few jewelled points of brightness that were embroidered silver threads along the side hems of her bliaut. She was in her finery, she had been singing for Robert Bossu. A lean, motionless, intent presence in the stillness of the night. Daalny, Partholan’s queen, a demi-goddess from the western paradise.

“I heard your voices,” she said, her own voice pitched just above a whisper; whispers carry more audibly than soft utterances above the breath. “I could not call to him, someone might have heard. Cadfael, what is to happen to him?”

“I hope,” said Cadfael, “no great harm.”

“In long captivity,” she said, “he will stop singing. And then he will die. And the day after tomorrow we ride with the earl for Leicester. I have my orders from Rémy, tomorrow I must begin packing the instruments for safe carriage, and the next morning we ride. Bénezet will be seeing to all the horses, and exercising Rémy’s to make sure his injury’s healed well. And we go. And he remains. At whose mercy?”

“God’s,” said Cadfael firmly, “and with the intercession of the saints. One saint, at any rate, for she has just nudged me with the seed of an idea. So go to your bed, and keep your heart up, for nothing is ended yet.”

“And what gain is there for me?” she said. “We might prove ten times over that he did no murder, but still he will be dragged back to Ramsey, and they will have their revenge on him, not so much for being a thief as for making a botch of his thievery. In the earl’s party half the way, and far too strong an escort for him to break loose.” She lowered her burning eyes to the broad brown hand in which Cadfael held the key, and suddenly she smiled. “I know the right key now,” she said.

“It might be changed over to the wrong nail,” said Cadfael mildly.

“I should know it, even so. There are but two alike in size and design, and I remember well the pattern of the wards on the wrong one. I shall not make that mistake again.”

He was about to urge her to let well alone and trust heaven to do justice, but then he had a sudden vision of heaven’s justice as the Church sometimes applied it, in good but dreadful faith, with all the virtuous narrowness and pitilessness of minds blind and deaf to the infinite variety of humankind, its failings, and aspirations, and needs, and forgetful of all the Gospel reminders concerning publicans and sinners. And he thought of songbirds caged, drooping without air to play on the cords of their throats, without heart to sing, and knew that they might very well die. Half humanity was here in this lean dark girl beside him, and that half of humanity had its right to reason, determine and meddle, no less than the male half. After all, they were equally responsible for humankind continuing. There was not an archbishop or an abbot in the world who had not had a flesh and blood mother, and come of a passionate coupling.

She would do as she thought fit, and so would he. He was not charged with the keeping of the keys, once he had restored this one to its place.

“Well, well!” said Cadfael with a sigh. “Let him be for tonight. Let all things be. Who knows how much clearer the skies will be by tomorrow?”

He left her then, and went on up the court to the gatehouse, to return the key to Brother Porter. Behind him Daalny said softly: “Goodnight!” Her tone was level, courteous, and withdrawn, promising nothing, confiding nothing, a neutral salute out of the dark.

And what had he to show for that last instinctive return to question the boy yet again, to hope for some sudden blinding recollection that would unveil truth like flinging open the shutters on a summer morning? One small thing only: Tutilo had lost his breviary, somewhere, at some time, on the death-day. With half a mile of woodland and two or three hundred yards of Foregate back-alleys, and the hasty rush into the town and back again, to parcel out in search of it, if it was valued enough. A breviary can be recopied. And yet, if that was all, why was it that he felt Saint Winifred shaking him impatiently by the shoulder and urging in his ear that he knew very well where to begin looking, and that he had better be about it in the morning, for time was running out?