The Potter's Field

Chapter Three

IN THE ABBOT’S parlour, some twenty minutes later, he had regained his calm, the calm of resignation even to his own shortcomings and failures, but he did not cease to accuse himself. ‘In my own need I was armed against hers. What manner of man can sever an affection half a lifetime long, and within the year feel nothing? I am ashamed that I could stand by that bier and look upon the relics of a woman, and be forced to say: I cannot tell. It may be Generys, for all I know. I cannot see why it should, or how it could so happen, but nor can I say: It is not so. Nothing moved in me from the heart. And for the eyes and the mind, what is there now in those bones to speak to any man?’

‘Except,’ said the abbot austerely, ‘inasmuch as it speaks to all men. She was buried in unconsecrated ground, without rites, secretly. It is but a short step to the conclusion that she came by her death in a way equally secret and unblessed, at the hands of man. She requires of me due in belated provision for her soul, and from the world justice for her death. You have testified, and I believe it, that you cannot say who she is. But since she was found on land once in your possession, by the croft from which your wife departed, and to which she has never returned, it is natural that the sheriff should have questions to ask you. As he may well have questions to ask of many others, before this matter is resolved.’

‘That I do acknowledge,’ said Ruald meekly, ‘and I will answer whatever may be put to me. Willingly and truthfully.’

And so he did, even with sorrowful eagerness, as if he wished to flagellate himself for his newly realised failings towards his wife, in rejoicing in his own fulfilment while she tasted only the poison of bitterness and deprivation.

‘It was right that I should go where I was summoned, and do what it was laid on me to do. But that I should embrace my joy and wholly forget her wretchedness, that was ill done. Now the day is come when I cannot even recall her face, or the way she moved, only the disquiet she has left with me, too long unregarded, now come home in full. Wherever she may be, she has her requital. These six months past,’ he said grievously, ‘I have not even prayed for her peace. She has been clean gone out of mind, because I was happy.’

‘You visited her twice, I understand,’ said Hugh, ‘after you were received here as a postulant.’

‘I did, with Brother Paul, as he will tell you. I had goods which Father Abbot allowed me to give over to her, for her living. It was done lawfully. That was the first occasion.’

‘And when was that?’

‘The twenty-eighth day of May, of last year. And again we went there to the croft in the first days of June, after I had made up the sum I had from selling my wheel and tools and what was left of use about the croft. I had hoped that she might have become reconciled, and would give me her forgiveness and goodwill, but it was not so. She had contended with me all those weeks to keep me at her side as before. But that day she turned upon me with hatred and anger, scorned to touch any part of what was mine, and cried out at me that I might go, for she had a lover worth the loving, and every tenderness ever she had had for me was turned to gall.’

‘She told you that?’ said Hugh sharply. ‘That she had another lover? I know that was the gossip, when she left the cottage and went away secretly. But you had it from her own lips?’

‘Yes, she said so. She was bitter that after she had failed to keep me at her side, neither could she now be rid of me and free in the world’s eyes, for still I was her husband, a millstone about her neck, and she could not slough me off. But that should not prevent, she said, but she would take her freedom by force, for she had a lover, a hundred times my worth, and she would go with him, if he beckoned, to the ends of the earth. Brother Paul was witness to all,’ said Ruald simply. ‘He will tell you.’

‘And that was the last time you saw her?’

‘That was the last time. By the end of that month of June she was gone.’

‘And since that time, have you ever been back to that field?’

‘No. I have worked on abbey land, in the Gaye for the most part, but that field has only now become abbey land. Early in October, a year ago now, it was given to Haughmond. Eudo Blount of Longner, who was my overlord, made the gift to them. I never thought to see or hear of the place again.’

‘Or of Generys?’ Cadfael interjected mildly, and watched the lines of Ruald’s thin face tighten in a brief spasm of pain and shame. And even these he would endure faithfully, mitigated and rendered bearable by the assurance of joy that now never deserted him. ‘I have a question to ask,’ said Cadfael, ‘if Father Abbot permits. In all the years you spent with her, had you ever cause to complain of your wife’s loyalty and fidelity, or the love she bore to you?’

Without hesitation Ruald said: ‘No! She was always true and fond. Almost too fond! I doubt I ever could match her devotion. I brought her out of her own land,’ said Ruald, setting truth before his own eyes and scarcely regarding those who overheard, ‘into a country strange to her, where her tongue was alien and her ways little understood. Only now do I see how much more she gave me than I ever had it in me to repay.’

It was early evening, almost time for Vespers, when Hugh reclaimed the horse Brother Richard had considerately stabled, and rode out from the gatehouse into the Foregate, and for a moment hesitated whether to turn left, and make for his own house in the town, or right, and continue the pursuit of truth well into the dusk. A faint blue vapour was already rising over the river, and the sky was heavily veiled, but there was an hour or more of light left, time enough to ride to Longner and back and have a word with young Eudo Blount. Doubtful if he had paid any attention to the Potter’s Field since it was deeded away to Haughmond, but at least his manor lay close to it, over the crest and in among the woodlands of his demesne, and someone among his people might almost daily have to pass that way. It was worth an enquiry.

He made for the ford, leaving the highway by the hospital of Saint Giles, and took the field path along the waterside, leaving the partially ploughed slope high on his left-hand side. Beyond the headland that bordered the new ploughland a gentle slope of woodland began above the water meadows, and in a cleared space within this belt of trees the manor of Longner stood, well clear of any flooding. The low undercroft was cut back into the slope, and stone steps led steeply up to the hall door of the living floor above. A groom was crossing the yard from the stable as Hugh rode in at the open gateway, and came blithely to take his bridle and ask his business with the master.

Eudo Blount had heard the voices below, and came out to his hall door to see who his visitor might be. He was already well acquainted with the sheriff of the shire, and greeted him warmly, for he was a young man cheerful and open by nature, a year established now in his lordship, and comfortable in his relationship with his own people and the ordered world around him. The burial of his father, seven months past now, and the heroic manner of his death, though a grief, had also served to ground and fortify the mutual trust and respect the new young lord enjoyed with his tenants and servants. The simplest villein holding a patch of Blount land felt a share in the pride due to Martel’s chosen few who had covered the king’s retreat from Wilton, and died in the battle. Young Eudo was barely twenty-three years old, and inexperienced, untravelled, as firmly bound to this soil as any villein in his holding, a big, homely, fair-skinned fellow with a shock of thick brown hair. The right management of a potentially prosperous manor, somewhat depleted in his grandfather’s time, would be an absorbing joy to him, and he would make a good job of it, and leave it to his eventual heir richer than he had inherited it from his father. At this stage, Hugh recalled, this young man was only three months married, and the gloss of fulfilment was new and shiny upon him.

‘I’m on an errand that can hardly be good news to you,’ said Hugh without preamble,’though no reason it should cause you any trouble, either. The abbey put in its plough team this morning in the Potter’s Field.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Eudo serenely. ‘My man Robin saw them come. I’ll be glad to see it productive, though it’s no business of mine now.’

‘We’re none of us overjoyed at the first crop it’s produced,’ said Hugh bluntly. “The plough has turned up a body from under the headland. We have a dead woman in the mortuary chapel at the abbey—or her bones, at least.’

The young man had halted in the act of pouring wine for his visitor, so abruptly that the pitcher shook and spilled red over his hand. He turned upon Hugh round, blue, astonished eyes, and stared open-mouthed.

‘A dead woman? What, buried there? Bones, you say—how long dead then? And who can it be?’

‘Who’s to know that? Bones is all we have, but a woman it is. Or was once. Dead perhaps as long as five years, so I’m advised, but no longer, and perhaps much less. Have you ever seen strangers there, or anything happening to make a man take notice? I know you had no need to keep a watch on the place, it has been Haughmond’s business for the past year, but since it’s so close, some of your men may have noted if there were intruders about. You’ve no inkling of anything untoward?’

Eudo shook his head vehemently. ‘I haven’t been up there since my father, God rest him, gave the field to the priory. They tell me there have been vagabonds lying up there in the cottage now and then, during the fair or overnight last winter if they were travelling, but who or what I don’t know. There was no harm ever reported or threatened, that I know of. This comes very strangely to me.’

‘To all of us,’ Hugh agreed ruefully, and took the offered cup. It was growing dim in the hall, and there was a fire already laid. Outside the open door the light showed faintly blue with mist, shot through with the faded gold of sunset. ‘You never heard of any woman going astray from her home in these parts, these last few years?’

‘No, none. My people live all around, they would have known, and it would have come to my ears soon enough. Or to my father’s, in his time. He had a good hold on everything that went on here, they brought everything to him, knowing he would not willingly let any man of his miscarry.’

‘I know that for truth,’ said Hugh heartily. ‘But you’ll not have forgotten, there was one woman who walked out of her house and went away without a word. And from that very croft.’

Eudo was staring at him again in open disbelief, great-eyed, even breaking into a broad grim at the very idea.

‘Ruald’s woman? You can’t mean it! Everyone knew about her going, that was no secret. And do you truly mean it could be so recent? But even if it could, and this poor wench bones already, that’s folly! Generys took herself off with another man, and small blame to her, when she found that if he was free to follow his bent, she was still bound. We would have seen to it that she would not want, but that was not enough for her. Widows can wed again, but she was no widow. You can’t surely believe, in good earnest, that this is Generys you have in the mortuary?’

‘I am at a total loss,’ Hugh admitted. ‘But the place and the time and the way they tore themselves apart must make a man wonder. As yet there are but the few of us know of this, but in a little while it must out, and then you’ll hear what every tongue will be whispering. Better if you should make enquiry among your own men for me, see if any of them has noted furtive things going on about that field, or doubtful fellows lurking in the cottage. Especially if any had women with them. If we can find some way of putting a name to the woman we shall be a long stride on the way.’

It seemed that Eudo had come to terms with the reality of death by this time, and was taking it seriously, though not as a factor which could or should be allowed to disturb the tenor of his own ordered existence. He sat thoughtfully gazing at Hugh over the wine cups, and considering the widening implications. ‘You think this woman was done to death secretly? Could Ruald be in any real danger of such a suspicion? I cannot believe ill of him. Certainly I will ask among my fellows, and send you word if I find out anything of note. But had there been anything, surely it would have found its way to me before.’

‘Nevertheless, do that service. A trifle that a man might let slip out of his mind lightly, in the ordinary way, could come to have a weighty meaning once there’s a death in the matter. I’ll be putting together all I can about Ruald’s end of it, and asking questions of many a one besides. He has seen what we found,’ said Hugh sombrely, ‘and could not say yes or no to her, and no blame to him, for it would be hard indeed for any man, if he lived with her many years, to recognise her face now.’

‘He cannot have harmed his wife,’ Eudo avowed sturdily. ‘He was already in the cloister, had been for three or four weeks, maybe more, while she was still there in the croft, before she went away. This is some other poor soul who fell foul of footpads, or some such scum, and was knifed or stabbed to death for the clothes she wore.’

‘Hardly that,’ said Hugh wryly. ‘She was clothed decently, laid out straight, and her hands folded on her breast over a little rough cross, cut from a hedge. As for the manner of her death, there’s no mark on her, no bone broken. There may have been a knife. Who’s to tell, now? But she was buried with some care and respect. That’s the strangeness of it.’

Eudo shook his head, frowning, over this growing wonder. ‘As a priest might?’ he hazarded doubtfully. ‘If he found her dead? But then he would have cried it aloud, and had her taken to church, surely.’

‘There are some,’ said Hugh, ‘will soon be saying, “As a husband might,” if they were in bitter contention, and she drove him to violence first, and remorse afterwards. No, no need to fret yet for Ruald, he has been in the company of a host of brothers since before his wife was last seen whole and well. We’ll be patching together from their witness all his comings and goings since he entered his novitiate. And going back over the past few years in search of other women gone astray.’ He rose, eyeing the gathering dusk outside the door. ‘I’d best be getting back. I’ve taken too much of your time.’

Eudo rose with him, willing and earnest. ‘No, you did right to look this way first. And I’ll ask among my men, be sure. I still feel sometimes as though that field is my ground. You don’t let go of land, even to the Church, without feeling you’ve left stray roots in it. I think I’ve stayed away from it to avoid despite, that it was left waste. I was glad to hear of the exchange, I knew the abbey would make better use of it. To tell the truth, I was surprised when my father made up his mind to give it to Haughmond, seeing the trouble they’d have turning it to account.’ He had followed Hugh towards the outer door, to see his guest out and mounted, when he halted suddenly, and looked back at the curtained doorway in a corner of the great hall.

‘Would you look in for a moment, and say a neighbourly word to my mother, Hugh, while you’re here? She can’t get out at all now, and has very few visitors. She hasn’t been out of the door since my father’s burial. If you’d look in for a moment, it would please her.’

‘I will surely,’ said Hugh, turning at once.

‘But don’t tell her anything about this dead woman, it would only upset her, land that was ours so lately, and Ruald being our tenant. God knows she has enough to endure, we try to keep the world’s ill news away from her, all the more when it comes so near home.’

‘Not a word!’ agreed Hugh. ‘How is it with her since I saw her last?’

The young man shook his head. ‘Nothing changes. Only day by day she grows a little thinner and paler, but she makes no complaint. You’ll see. Go in to her!’ His hand was at the curtain, his voice lowered, to be heard only by Hugh. Plainly he was reluctant to go in with the guest, his vigorous youth was uneasy and helpless in the presence of illness, he could be excused for turning his eyes away. As soon as he opened the door of the solar and spoke to the woman within, his voice became unnaturally gentle and constrained, as to a stranger difficult, to approach, but to whom he owed affection. ‘Mother, here’s Hugh Beringar paying us a visit.’

Hugh passed by him, and entered a small room, warmed by a little charcoal brazier set on a flat slab of stone, and lit by a torch in a sconce on the wall. Close under the light the dowager lady of Longner sat on a bench against the wall, propped erect with rugs and cushions, and in her stillness and composure dominating the room. She was past forty-five and long, debilitating illness had aged her into a greyness and emaciation beyond her years. She had a distaff set up before her, and was twisting the wool with a hand that looked frail as a withered leaf, but was patient and competent as it teased out and twirled the strands. She looked up, at Hugh’s entrance, with a startled smile, and let down the spindle to rest against the foot of the bench.

‘Why, my lord, how good of you! It’s a long time since I saw you last.’ That had been at her husband’s funeral, seven months past now. She gave him her hand, light as a windflower in his, and as cold when he kissed it. Her eyes, which were huge and dusky blue, and sunk deeply into her head, looked him over with measured and shrewd intelligence. ‘Your office becomes you,’ she said. ‘You look well on responsibility. I am not so vain as to think you made the journey here to see me, when you have such weighty burdens on your time. Had you business with Eudo? Whatever brought you, a glimpse of you is very welcome.’

“They keep me busy,’ he said, with considered reserve. ‘Yes, I had business of a sort with Eudo. Nothing that need trouble you. And I must not stay to tire you too long, and with you I won’t talk business. How are you? And is there anything you need, or any way I can serve you?’

‘All my needs are met before I can even ask,’ said Donata. ‘Eudo is a good soul, and I’m lucky in the daughter he’s brought me. I have no complaints. Did you know the girl is already pregnant? And sturdy and wholesome as good bread, sure to get sons. Eudo has done well for himself. Perhaps I do miss the outside world now and then. My son is wholly taken up with making his manor worth a little more every harvest, especially now he looks forward to a son of his own. When my lord was alive, he looked beyond his own lands. I got to hear of every move up or down in the king’s fortunes. The wind blew from wherever Stephen was. Now I labour behind the times. What is going on in the world outside?’

She did not sound to Hugh in need of any protection from the incursions of the outside world, near or far, but he stepped cautiously in consideration of her son’s anxieties. ‘In our part of it, very little. The Earl of Gloucester is busy turning the south-west into a fortress for the Empress. Both factions are conserving what they have, and for the moment neither side is for fighting. We sit out of the struggle here. Lucky for us!’

‘That sounds,’ she said, attentive and alert, ‘as if you have very different news from elsewhere. Oh, come, Hugh, now you are here you won’t deny me a little fresh breeze from beyond the pales of Eudo’s fences? He shrouds me in pillows, but you need not.’ And indeed it seemed to Hugh that even his unexpected company had brought a little wan colour to her fallen face, and a spark to her sunken eyes.

He admitted wryly: ‘There’s news enough from elsewhere, a little too much for the king’s comfort. At St Albans there’s been the devil to pay. Half the lords at court, it seems, accused the Earl of Essex of having traitorous dealings with the Empress yet again, and plotting the king’s overthrow, and he’s been forced to surrender his constableship of the Tower, and his castle and lands in Essex. That or the gallows, and he’s by no means ready to die yet.’

‘And he has surrendered them? That would go down very bitterly with such a man as Geoffrey de Mandeville,’ she said, marvelling. ‘My lord never trusted him. An arrogant, overbearing man, he said. He has turned his coat often enough before, it may very well be true he had plans to turn it yet again. It’s well that he was brought to bay in time.’

‘So it might have been, but once he was stripped of his lands they turned him loose, and he’s made off into his own country and gathered the scum of the region about him. He’s sacked Cambridge. Looted everything worth looting, churches and all, before setting light to the city.’

‘Cambridge?’ said the lady, shocked and incredulous. ‘Dare he attack a city like Cambridge? The king must surely move against him. He cannot be left to pillage and burn as he pleases.’

‘It will not be easy,’ said Hugh ruefully. The man knows the Fen country like the lines of his hand, it’s no simple matter to bring him to a pitched battle in such country.’

She leaned to retrieve the spindle as a movement of her foot set it rolling. The hand with which she recoiled the yarn was languid and translucent, and the eyelids half-lowered over her hollow eyes were marble-white, and veined like the petals of a snowdrop. If she felt pain, she betrayed none, but she moved with infinite care and effort. Her lips had the strong set of reticence and durability.

‘My son is there among the fens,’ she said quietly. ‘My younger son. You’ll remember, he chose to take the cowl, in September of last year, and entered Ramsey Abbey.’

‘Yes, I remember. When he brought back your lord’s body for burial, in March, I did wonder if he might have thought better of it by then. I wouldn’t have said your Sulien was meant for a monk, from all I’d seen of him he had a good, sound appetite for living in the world. I thought six months of it might have changed his mind for him. But no, he went back, once that duty was done.’

She looked up at him for a moment in silence, the arched lids rolling back from still lustrous eyes. The faintest of smiles touched her lips and again faded. ‘I hoped he might stay, once he was home again. But no, he went back. It seems there’s no arguing with a vocation.’

It sounded like a muted echo of Ruald’s inexorable departure from world and wife and marriage, and it was still ringing in Hugh’s ears as he took his leave of Eudo in the darkening courtyard, and mounted and rode thoughtfully home. From Cambridge to Ramsey is barely twenty miles, he was reckoning as he went. Twenty miles, to the north-west, a little further removed from London and the head of Stephen’s strength. A little deeper into the almost impenetrable world of the Fens, and with winter approaching. Let a mad wolf like de Mandeville once establish a base, islanded somewhere in those watery wastes, and it will take all Stephen’s forces ever to flush him out again.

Brother Cadfael went up to the Potter’s Field several times while the ploughing continued, but there were no more such unexpected finds to be made. The ploughman and his ox-herd had proceeded with caution at every turn under the bank, wary of further shocks, but the furrows opened one after another smooth and dark and innocent. The word kept coming to mind. Earth, Ruald had said, is innocent. Only the use we make of it can mar it. Yes, earth and many other things, knowledge, skill, strength, all innocent until use mars them. Cadfael considered in absence, in the cool, autumnal beauty of this great field, sweeping gently down from its ridge of bush and bramble and tree, hemmed on either side by its virgin headlands, the man who had once laboured here many years, and had uttered that vindication of the soil on which he laboured, and from which he dug his clay. Utterly open, decent and of gentle habit, a good workman and an honest citizen, so everyone who knew him would have said. But how well can man ever know his fellow-man? There were already plenty of very different opinions being expressed concerning Ruald, sometime potter, now a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury. It had not taken long to change their tune.

For the story of the woman found buried in the Potter’s Field had soon become common knowledge, and the talk of the district, and where should gossip look first but to the woman who had lived there fifteen years, and vanished without a word to anyone at the end of it? And where for the guilty man but to her husband, who had forsaken her for a cowl?

The woman herself, whoever she might be, was already reburied, by the abbot’s grace, in a modest corner of the graveyard, with all the rites due to her but the gift of a name. Parochially, the situation of the whole demesne of Longner was peculiar, for it had belonged earlier to the bishops of Chester, who had bestowed all their local properties, if close enough, as outer and isolated dependencies of the parish of Saint Chad in Shrewsbury. But since no one knew whether this woman was a parishioner or a passing stranger, Radulfus had found it simpler and more hospitable to give her a place in abbey ground, and be done with one problem, at least, of the many she had brought with her.

But if she was finally at rest, no one else was.

‘You’ve made no move to take him in charge,’ said Cadfael to Hugh, in the privacy of his workshop in the herb garden, at the close of a long day. ‘Nor even to question him hard.’

‘No need yet,’ said Hugh. ‘He’s safe enough where he is, if ever I should need him. He’ll not move. You’ve seen for yourself, he accepts all as, at worst, a just punishment laid on him by God—oh, not necessarily for murder, simply for all the faults he finds newly in himself—or at best as a test of his faith and patience. If we all turned on him as guilty he would bear it meekly and with gratitude. Nothing would induce him to avoid. No, rather I’ll go on piecing together all his comings and goings since he entered here. If ever it reaches the case where I have cause to suspect him in good earnest, I know where to find him.’

‘And as yet you’ve found no such cause?’

‘No more than I had the first day, and no less. And no other woman gone from where she should be. The place, the possible time, the contention between them, the anger, all speak against Ruald, and urge that this was Generys. But Generys was well alive after he was here within the enclave, and I have found no occasion when he could have met with her again, except with Brother Paul, as both have told us. Yet is it impossible that he should, just once, have been on some errand alone, and gone to her, against all orders, for I’m sure Radulfus wanted an end to the bitterness. The frame,’ said Hugh, irritated and weary, ‘is all too full of Ruald and Generys, and I can find no other to fit into it.’

‘But you do not believe it,’ Cadfael deduced, and smiled.

‘I neither believe nor disbelieve. I go on looking. Ruald will keep. If tongues are wagging busily against him, he’s safe within from anything worse. And if they wag unjustly, he may take it as Christian chastisement, and wait patiently for his deliverance.’