The Potter's Field

Chapter Twelve

IN THE ABBOT’S parlour the four of them were gathered after Vespers, with the window shuttered and the door fast closed against the world. They had had to wait for Hugh. He had a garrison to review, levies newly dismissed from feudal service to pay and discharge home to their families, a few wounded to see properly tended, before he could even dismount stiffly in his own courtyard, embrace wife and son, shed his soiled travelling clothes and draw breath at his own table. The further examination of a doubtful witness, however low his credit stood now, could wait another hour or two without disadvantage.

But after Vespers he came, eased and refreshed but weary. He shed his cloak at the door, and made his reverence to the abbot. Radulfus closed the door, and there was a silence, brief but deep. Sulien sat still and mute on the bench built against the panelled wall. Cadfael had drawn aside into the corner by the shuttered window.

‘I must thank you, Father,’ said Hugh, ‘for providing us this meeting place. I should have been sorry to impose upon the family at Longner, and by all counts you have also an interest in this matter, as valid as mine.’

‘We have all an interest in truth and justice, I trust,’ said the abbot. ‘Nor can I discard all responsibility for a son because he has gone forth into the world. As Sulien knows. Proceed as you choose, Hugh.’

He had made room for Hugh beside him behind his desk, cleared now of its parchments and the business of the day. Hugh accepted the place and sat down with a great sigh. He was still cramped from the saddle and had stiffening grazes newly healed, but he had brought back his company intact from the Fens, and that was achievement enough. What else he had brought back with him he was about to sift, and these three in company with him here were about to learn.

‘Sulien, I need not remind you, or these who were witnesses, of the testimony you gave concerning Ruald’s wife’s ring, and how you came by it at the shop of John Hinde, in Priestgate, in Peterborough. Name and place I asked, and you told me. From Cambridge, when we were discharged from service, I went to Peterborough. Priestgate I found. The shop I found. John Hinde I found. I have talked to him, Sulien, and I report his testimony as I heard it from him. Yes,’ said Hugh with deliberation, his eyes on Sulien’s blanched but composed face, ‘Hinde remembers you well. You did come to him with the name of Abbot Walter to commend you, and he took you in for a single night, and set you on your way home next day. That is truth. That he confirms.’

Recalling how readily Sulien had supplied the jeweller’s name and the place where his shop was to be found, Cadfael had had little doubt of the truth of that part of the story. It had not seemed likely, then, that the rest of it would ever be tested. But Sulien’s face continued as marble-blank as resolution could make it, and his eyes never left Hugh’s face.

‘But when I asked him of the ring, he asked, what ring was that? And when I pictured it to him, he was absolute that he had never seen such a ring, never bought that or anything else from such a woman as I described. So recent a transaction he could not possibly forget, even if he did not keep good records, as he does. He never gave you the ring, for he never had the ring. What you told us was a fabric of lies.’

The new silence fell like a stone, and seemed to be arrested in Sulien’s braced stillness. He neither spoke nor lowered his eyes. Only the small, spasmodic movement of Radulfus’s muscular hand upon the desk broke the tension within the room. What Cadfael had foreseen from the moment he had conveyed the abbot’s summons, and observed the set of Sulien’s face as he received it, came as a shock to Radulfus. There was not much of human behaviour he had not encountered in his life. Liars he had known and dealt with, without surprise, but this one he had not expected.

‘Yet you produced the ring,’ Hugh continued steadily, ‘and Ruald recognised and verified the ring. Since you did not get it from the silversmith, how did you come by it? One story you told is shown to be false. Now you have your chance to tell another and a truer. Not all liars have that grace. Now say what you have to say.’

Sulien opened his lips with a creaking effort, like one turning a key in a lock unwilling to respond.

‘I already had the ring,’ he said. ‘Generys gave it to me. I have told the lord abbot, I tell you now, all my life long I held her in affection, deeper than I knew. Even as I grew a man, I never understood how that affection was changing, until Ruald deserted her. Her rage and grief made me to know. What moved her I hardly know. It may be she was avenging herself upon all men, even me. She did receive and make use of me. And she gave me the ring. It did not last long,’ he said, without bitterness. ‘I could not satisfy, green as I was. I was not Ruald, nor of sufficient weight to pierce Ruald to the heart.’

There was something strange, Cadfael thought, in his choice of words, as though at times the blood of passion did run in them, and at others they came with detached care, measured and contrived. Perhaps Radulfus had felt the same unease, for this time he did speak, impatient for plainer telling.

‘Are you saying, my son, that you were this woman’s lover?’

‘No,’ said Sulien. ‘I am saying that I loved her, and she admitted me some small way into her grief, when she was in mortal need. If my torment was any ease to hers, that time was not wasted. If you mean, did she admit me even into her bed, no, that she never did, nor I never asked nor hoped for it. My significance, my usefulness, never came so high.’

‘And when she vanished,’ Hugh pursued with relentless patience, ‘what did you know of that?’

‘Nothing, no more than any other man.’

‘What did you suppose had become of her?’

‘My time,’ said Sulien, ‘was over by then, she had done with me. I believed what the world believed, that she had taken up her roots and fled the place that had become abhorrent to her.’

‘With another lover?’ Hugh asked evenly. ‘The world believed so.’

‘With a lover or alone. How could I know?’

‘Truly! You knew no more than any other man. Yet when you came back here, and heard that we had found a woman’s body buried in the Potter’s Field, you knew that it must be she.’

‘I knew,’ said Sulien with aching care,’that it was the common belief that it must be. I did not know that it was.’

‘True, again! You had no secret knowledge, so equally you could not know that it was not Generys. Yet you felt it necessary at once to make up your lying story, and produce the ring she had given you, as you now say, in order to prove that she was well alive and far enough away to make confirmation hard, and to lift the shadow of suspicion from Ruald. Without respect to his guilt or innocence, for according to the account you give of yourself now, you did not know whether she was alive or dead, nor whether he had or had not killed her.’

‘No!’ said Sulien, with a sudden flush of energy and indignation that jerked his braced body forward from the panelled wall, ‘That I did know, because I know him. It is inconceivable that he could ever have harmed her. It is not in the man to do murder.’

‘Happy the man whose friends can be so sure of him!’ said Hugh drily. ‘Very well, pass on to what followed. We had no cause to doubt your word then; you had proved, had you not, that Generys was alive? Therefore we looked about us for other possibilities, and found another woman who had frequented there, and not been seen of late. And behold, your hand is seen again moulding matters. From the moment you heard of the pedlar’s arrest you began a hunt for some manor where the woman might have found a shelter through the winter, where someone might be able to testify to her being alive well after she parted from Britric. I doubt if you expected to find her still settled there, but I am sure you were glad of it. It meant you need not appear, she could come forward of her own accord, having heard there was a man charged with her murder. Twice, Sulien? Twice are we to accept your hand for the hand of God, with no more pressing motive than pure love of justice? Since you had so infallibly proved the dead woman could not be Generys, why should you be so sure she was not Gunnild? Two such rescues were one too many to be believed in. Gunnild’s survival was proven, she came, she spoke, she was flesh and blood beyond doubt. But for the life of Generys we have only your word. And your word is shown to be false. I think we need look no further for a name for the woman we found. By denying her a name, you have named her.’

Sulien had shut his lips and clenched his teeth, as though he would never speak another word. It was too late to deploy any more lies.

‘l think,’ said Hugh,’that when you heard what the abbey plough had turned up out of the soil, you were never in a moment’s doubt as to her name. I think you knew very well that she was there. And you were quite certain that Ruald was not her murderer. Oh, that I believe! A certainty, Sulien, to which only God can be entitled, who knows all things with certainty. Only God, and you, who knew all too well who the murderer was.’

‘Child,’ said Radulfus into the prolonged silence, ‘if you have an answer to this, speak out now. If there is guilt on your soul, do not continue obdurate, but confess it. If not, then tell us what your answer is, for you have brought this suspicion upon yourself. To your credit, it seems that you would not have another man, be he friend or stranger, bear the burden of a crime not his to answer. That I should expect of you. But the lies are not worthy, not even in such a cause. Better by far to deliver all others, and say outright: I am the man, look no further.’

Silence fell again, and this time lasted even longer, so that Cadfael felt the extreme stillness in the room as a weight upon his flesh and a constriction upon his breath. Outside the window dusk had gathered in thin, low, featureless cloud, a leaden grey sucking out all colour from the world. Sulien sat motionless, shoulders braced back to feel the solid wall supporting him, eyelids half lowered over the dimmed blue of his eyes. After a long tune he stirred, and raised both hands to press and flex with stiff fingers at his cheeks, as though the desperation in which he found himself had cramped even his flesh, and he must work the paralysing chill out of it before he could speak. But when he did speak, it was in a voice low, reasonable and persuasive, and he lifted his head and confronted Hugh with the composure of one who has reached a decision and a stance from which he will not easily be shifted.

‘Very well! I have lied, and lied again, and I love lies no more than you do, my lord. But if I make a bargain with you, I swear to you I shall keep it faithfully. I have not confessed to anything, yet. But I will give you my confession to murder, upon conditions!’

‘Conditions?’ said Hugh, with black brows obliquely raised in wry amusement.

‘They need not limit in any degree what can be done to me,’ said Sulien, as gently as if he argued a sensible case to which all sane men must consent once they heard it. ‘All I want is that my mother and my family shall suffer no dishonour and no disgrace by me. Why should not a bargain be struck even over matters of life and death, if it can spare all those who are not to blame, and destroy only the guilty?’

‘You are offering me a confession,’ said Hugh, ‘in exchange for blanketing this whole matter in silence?’

The abbot had risen to his feet, a hand raised in indignant protest. ‘There can be no bargaining over murder. You must withdraw, my son, you are adding insult to your offence.’

‘No,’ said Hugh, ‘let him speak. Every man deserves a hearing. Go on, Sulien, what is it you are offering and asking?’

‘Something which could very simply be done. I have been summoned here, where I chose to abandon my calling,’ Sulien began in the same measured and persuasive voice. ‘Would it be so strange if I should change yet again, and return to my vocation here as a penitent? Father Abbot here, I’m sure, could win me if he tried.’ Radulfus was frowning at this moment in controlled disapproval, not of the misuse being made of his influence and office, but of the note of despairing levity which had crept into the young man’s voice. ‘My mother is in her death illness,’ said Sulien, ‘and my brother has an honoured name, like our father before us, a wife, and a child to come next year, and has done no wrong to any man, and knows of none. For God’s sake leave them in peace, let them keep their name and reputation as clean as ever it was. Let them be told that I have repented of my recantation, and returned to the Order, and am sent away from here to seek out Abbot Walter, wherever he may be, submit myself to his discipline and earn my return to the Order. He would not refuse me, they will be able to believe it. The Rule allows the stray to return and be accepted even to the third time. Do this for me, and I will give you my confession to murder.’

‘So in return for your confession,’ said Hugh, begging silence of the abbot with a warning gesture of his hand, ‘I am to let you go free, but back into the cloister?’

‘I did not say that. I said let them believe that. No, do this for me,’ said Sulien in heavy earnest, and paler than his shirt, ‘and I will take my death however you may require it, and you may shovel me into the ground and forget me.’

‘Without benefit of a trial?’

‘What should I want with a trial? I want them to be left in peace, to know nothing. A life is fair pay for a life, what difference can a form of words make?’

It was outrageous, and only a very desperate shiner would have dared advance it to a man like Hugh, whose grip on his office was as firm and scrupulous as it was sometimes unorthodox. But still Hugh sat quiet, fending off the abbot with a sidelong flash of his black eyes, and tapping the fingertips of one long hand upon the desk, as if seriously considering. Cadfael had an inkling of what he was about, but could not guess how he would set about it. The one thing certain was that no such abominable bargain could ever be accepted. To wipe a man out, murderer or no, in cold blood and in secret was unthinkable. Only an inexperienced boy, driven to the end of his tether, could ever have proposed it, or cherished the least hope that it could be taken seriously. This was what he had meant by saying that he had made provision. These children, Cadfael thought in a sudden blaze of enlightened indignation, how dare they, with such misguided devotion, do their progenitors such insult and offence? And themselves such grievous injury!

‘You interest me, Sulien,’ said Hugh at length, holding him eye to eye across the desk. ‘But I need to know somewhat more about this death before I can answer you. There are details that may temper the evil. You may as well have the benefit of them, for your own peace of mind and mine, whatever happens after.’

‘I cannot see the need,’ said Sulien wearily but resignedly.

‘Much depends on how this thing happened,’ Hugh persisted. ‘Was it a quarrel? When she rejected and shamed you? Even a mere unhappy chance, a struggle and a fall? For we do know by the manner of her burial, there under the bushes by Ruald’s garden

” He broke off there, for Sulien had stiffened sharply and turned his head to stare. ‘What is it?’

‘You are confused, or trying to confuse me,’ said Sulien, again withdrawing into the apathy of exhaustion. ‘It was not there, you must know it. It was under the clump of broom bushes in the headland.’

‘Yes, true, I had forgotten. Much has happened since then, and I was not present when the ploughing began. We do know, I was about to say, that you laid her in the ground with some evidence of respect, regret, even remorse. You buried a cross with her. Plain silver,’ said Hugh, ‘we could not trace it back to you or anyone, but it was there.’

Sulien eyed him steadily and made no demur.

‘It leads me to ask,’ Hugh pursued delicately, ‘whether this was not simply mischance, a disaster never meant to happen. For it may take no more than a struggle, perhaps flight, an angry blow, a fall, to break a woman’s skull as hers was broken. She had no other broken bones, only that. So tell us, Sulien, how this whole thing befell, for it may go some way to excuse you.’

Sulien had blanched into a marble pallor, fending him off with a bleak and wary face. He said between his teeth: ‘I have told you all you need to know. I will not say a word more.’

‘Well,’ said Hugh, rising abruptly, as though he had lost patience, ‘I daresay it may be enough. Father, I have two archers with horses outside. I propose to keep the prisoner under guard in the castle for the present, until I have more time to proceed. May my men come in and take him? They have left their arms at the gate.’

The abbot had sat silent all this time, but paying very close attention to all that was said, and by the narrowed intelligence of his eyes in the austere face he had missed none of the implications. Now he said: ‘Yes, call them in.” And to Sulien, as Hugh crossed to the door and went out: ‘My son, however lies may be enforced upon us, or so we may think, there is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.”

Sulien turned his head, and the candle caught and illuminated the dulled blue of his eyes and the exhausted pallor of his face. He unlocked his lips with an effort. ‘Father, will you keep my mother and my brother in your prayers?’

‘Constantly,’ said Radulfus.

‘And my father’s soul?’

‘And your own.’

Hugh was at the parlour door again. The two archers of the garrison came in on his heels, and Sulien, unbidden, rose with the alacrity of relief from the bench, and went out between them without a word or a glance behind. And Hugh closed the door.

‘You heard him,’ said Hugh. ‘What he knew he answered readily. When I took him astray he knew he could not sustain it, and would not answer at all. He was there, yes, he saw her buried. But he neither killed nor buried her.’

‘I understood,’ said the abbot,’ that you put to him points that would have betrayed him‘

‘That did betray him,’ said Hugh.

‘But since I do not know all the details, I cannot follow precisely what you got out of him. Certainly there is the matter of exactly where she was found. That I grasped. He set you right. That was something he knew, and it bore out his story. Yes, he was a witness.’

‘But not a sharer, nor even a close witness,’ said Cadfael. ‘Not close enough to see the cross that was laid on her breast, for it was not silver, but made hastily out of two sticks from the bushes. No, he did not bury her, and he did not kill her, because if he had done so, with his bent for bearing the guilt, he would have set us right about her injuries—or want of them. You know, as I know, that her skull was not broken. She had no detectable injuries. If he had known how she died, he would have told us. But he did not know, and he was too shrewd to risk guessing. He may even have realised that Hugh was setting traps for him. He chose silence. What you do not say cannot betray you. But with eyes like those in his head, even silence cannot shield him. The lad is crystal.’

‘I am sure it was truth,’ said Hugh,’that he was sick with love for the woman. He had loved her unquestioning, unthinking, like a sister or a nurse, from childhood. The very pity and anger he felt on her account when she was abandoned must have loosed all the strings of a man’s passion in him. It must be true, I think, that she did lean on him then, and gave him cause to believe himself elect, while she still thought of him as a mere boy, a child of whom she was fond, offering her a child’s comfort.’

‘True, also,’ the abbot wondered,’that she gave him the ring?’

It was Cadfael who said at once: ‘No.’

‘I was still in some doubt,’ said Radulfus mildly, ‘but you say no?’

‘One thing has always troubled me,” said Cadfael, ‘and that is the manner in which he produced the ring. You’ll recall, he came to ask you, Father, for leave to visit his home. He stayed there overnight, as you permitted, and on his return he gave us to understand that only from his brother, during that visit, had he learned of the finding of the woman’s body, and the understandable suspicion it cast upon Ruald. And then he brought forth the ring, and told his story, which we had then no cause to doubt. But I believe that already, before he came to you to ask leave of absence, he had been told of the case. That was the very reason his visit to Longner became necessary. He had to go home because the ring was there, and he must get it before he could speak out in defence of Ruald. With lies, yes, because truth was impossible. We can be sure, now, that he knew, poor lad, who had buried Generys, and where she was laid. Why else should he take flight into the cloister, and so far distant, from a place where he could no longer endure to be?’

‘There is no help for it,’ said Radulfus reflectively, ‘he is protecting someone else. Someone close and dear to him. His whole concern is for his kin and the honour of his house. Can it be his brother?’

Hugh said: ‘No. Eudo seems to be the one person who has escaped. Whatever happened in the Potter’s Field, not a shadow of it has ever fallen upon Eudo. He is happy, apart from his mother’s sickness he has no cares, he is married to a pleasant wife, and looking forward hopefully to having a son. Better still, he is wholly occupied with his manor, with the work of his hands and the fruits of his soil, and seldom looks below, for the dark things that gnaw on less simple men. No, we can forget Eudo.’

‘There were two,’ said Cadfael slowly, ‘who fled from Longner after Generys vanished. One into the cloister, one into the battlefield.’

‘His father!’ said Radulfus, and pondered in silence for a moment. ‘A man of excellent repute, a hero who fought in the king’s rearguard at Wilton, and died there. Yes, I can believe that Sulien would sacrifice his own life rather than see that record soiled and blemished. For his mother’s sake, and his brother’s, and the future of his brother’s sons, no less than for his father’s memory. But of course,’ he said simply, ‘we cannot let it lie. And now what are we to do?’

Cadfael had been wondering the same thing, ever since Hugh’s springes had caused even obstinate silences to speak with such eloquence, and confirmed with certainty what had always been persistent in a corner of Cadfael’s mind. Sulien had knowledge that oppressed him like guilt, but he carried no guilt of his own. He knew only what he had seen. But how much had he seen? Not the death, or he would have seized on every confirming detail, and offered it as evidence against himself. Only the burial. A boy in the throes of his first impossible love, embraced and welcomed into an all-consuming grief and rage, then put aside, perhaps for no worse reason than that Generys had cared for him deeply, and willed him not to be scorched and maimed by her fire more incurably than he already was, or else because another had taken his place, drawn irresistibly into the same furnace, one deprivation fused inextricably with another. For Donata was already, for several years, all too well acquainted with her interminable death, and Eudo Blount in his passionate and spirited prime as many years forced to be celibate as ever was priest or monk. Two starving creatures were fed. And one tormented boy spied upon them, perhaps only once, perhaps several times, but in any event once too often, feeding his own anguish with his jealousy of a rival he could not even hate, because he worshipped him.

It was conceivable. It was probable. Then how successful had father and son been in dissembling their mutual and mutually destructive obsession? And how much had any other in that house divined of the danger?

Yes, it could be so. For she had been, as everyone said, a very beautiful woman.

‘I think,’ Cadfael,’that with your leave, Father, I must go back to Longner.’

‘No need,’ said Hugh abstractedly. ‘We could not leave the lady waiting all night without word, certainly, but I have sent a man from the garrison.’

‘To tell her no more than that he stays here overnight? Hugh, the great error has been, throughout, telling her no more than some innocuous half-truth to keep her content and incurious. Or, worse, telling her nothing at all. Such follies are committed in the name of compassion! We must not let her get word of this! We must keep this trouble from her! Starving her courage and strength and will into a feeble shadow, as disease has eaten away her body. When if they had known and respected her as they should she could have lifted half the load from them. If she is not afraid of the monster thing with which she shares her life, there is nothing of which she can be afraid. It is natural enough,’ he said ruefully, ‘for the manchild to feel he must be his mother’s shield and defence, but he does her no service. I said so to him as we came. She would far rather have scope to fulfil her own will and purpose and be shield and defence to him, whether he understand it or not. Better, indeed, if he never understands it.’

‘You think,’ said Radulfus, eyeing him sombrely,’that she should be told?’

‘I think she should have been told long ago everything there was to tell about this matter. I think she should be told, even now. But I cannot do it, or let it be done if I can prevent. Too easily, as we came, I promised him that if the truth could still be kept from her, I would see it done. Well, if you have put off the hour for tonight, so be it. True, it is too late now to trouble them. But, Father, if you permit, I will ride back there early in the morning.’

‘If you think it necessary,’ said the abbot, ‘by all means go. If it is possible now to restore her her son with the least damage, and salve her husband’s memory for her without publishing any dishonour, so much the better.’

‘One night,’ said Hugh mildly, rising as Cadfael rose, ‘cannot alter things, surely. If she has been left in happy ignorance all this time, and goes to bed this night supposing Sulien to have been detained here by the lord abbot without a shade of ill, you may leave her to her rest. There will be time to consider how much she must know when we have reasoned the truth out of Sulien. It need not be mortal. What sense would it make now to darken a dead man’s name?’

Which was good sense enough, yet Cadfael shook his head doubtfully even over these few hours of delay. ‘Still, go I must. I have a promise to keep. And I have realised, somewhat late, that I have left someone there who has made no promises.’