Virgin in the Ice

Chapter Four

There was nothing to be done here at this hour, alone as he was, and if he lingered, the boy might come to see what kept him so long. He rose from his knees in haste, and went back to where the horse stamped and fidgeted, eager to get back to his stable. The boy was looking round for him curiously, rather than anxiously.

“What was it? Is there something wrong?”

“Nothing to fret you.” Not yet, he thought with a pang, not until you must know. At least let’s feed you, and warm you, and reassure you your own life is safe enough, before you need hear word of this. “I thought I saw a sheep caught in the ice, but I was mistaken.” He mounted, and reached round the boy to take the reins. “We’d best make haste. We’ll have full darkness on us before we reach Bromfield.”

Where the track forked they bore right as they had been instructed, a straight traverse along the slope, easy to follow. The boy’s sturdy body grew heavier and softer in Cadfael’s arm, the brown head hung sleepy on his shoulder. You at least, thought Cadfael, mute in his anger and grief, we’ll put out of harm’s way, if we could not save your sister.

“You have not told me your name,” said Yves, yawning. “I don’t know what to call you.”

“My name is Cadfael, a Welshman from Trefriw, but now of Shrewsbury abbey. Where, I think, you were bound.”

“Yes, so we were. But Ermina - my sister’s name is Ermina - she must always have her own way. I have far more sense than she has! If she’d listened to me we would never have got separated, and we should all have been safe in Shrewsbury by now. I wanted to come to Bromfield with Brother Elyas - you do know about Brother Elyas? - and so did Sister Hilaria, but not Ermina, she had other plans. This is all her fault!”

And small doubt, by now, that that was true, Brother Cadfael reflected wretchedly, clasping the innocent judge who lay warm and confiding in his arm. But surely our little faults do not deserve so crushing a penalty. Without time to reconsider, to repent, to make reparation. Youth destroyed for a folly, when youth should be allowed its follies on the way to maturity and sense.

They were coming down on to the good, trodden road between Ludlow and Bromfield. “Praise God!” said Cadfael, sighting the torches at the gatehouse, yellow terrestrial stars glowing through a fragile but thickening curtain of snow. “We are here!”

They rode in at the gate, to be confronted by a scene of unexpected activity in the great court. The snow within was stamped into intricate patterns of hooves, and about the stables two or three grooms, certainly not of the household, were busy rubbing down horses and leading them to their stalls. Beside the door of the guest-hall Prior Leonard stood in earnest conversation with a lithe young man of middle height, still cloaked and hooded, and his back turned, but it was a back Cadfael knew very well by now. Hugh Beringar had come in person to probe into the first news of the lost Hugonins, and brought, by the look of it, two or three more officers with him.

His ear was as sharp as ever, he turned towards the arrivals and came striding before ever the horse halted. The prior followed, eager and hopeful at sight of two returning where only one went forth.

Cadfael was down by the time they approached, and Yves, dazzled and excited, had recovered from his sleepiness and braced himself to encounter with a nobleman’s assurance whoever bore down on him. He set both plump paws to the pommel of the saddle, and vaulted down into the snow. A long way down for his short stature, but he lit like an acrobat, and stretched erect before Beringar’s amused and approving eye.

“Make your bow, Yves, to Hugh Beringar, the deputy sheriff of this shire,” said Cadfael. “And to Prior Leonard of Bromfield, your host here.” And to Hugh, aside, he said fervently, while the boy made his solemn reverences: “Ask him nothing, yet, get him within!”

Between them they made a reasonable job of it, quick in response to each other from old habit. Yves was soon led away contentedly with Leonard’s bony but benevolent hand on his shoulder, to be warmed and fed and made much of before bed. He was young, he would sleep this night. He was cloister-educated, he would stir in response to the bells for office, and find nothing but reassurance, and sleep again heartily.

“For God’s sake,” said Cadfael, heaving a great sigh as soon as the boy was safely out of sight, “come within, somewhere quiet, where we can talk. I never expected you here in person, seeing the ties you have at home …” Beringar had taken him companionably by the arm, and was hurrying him into the doorway of the prior’s lodging, and eyeing him intently along his shoulder as they shook the snow from boots and cloaks on the threshold. “We had but a first breath of news of our quarry, I never thought it could tear you away, though thanks be, it did!”

“I’ve left all in very good order behind me,” said Hugh. He had come to meet his friend expecting a glow of good news, and found himself confronted with a gravity that promised little but trouble. “If you have burdens on your mind here, Cadfael, at least you may be easy about affairs in Shrewsbury. The very day you left us, our son was born, a fine, lusty lad as yellow-haired as his mother, and the pair of them flourishing. And for good measure, the Worcester girl has given her man a son, too, only one day after. The house is full of exultant women, and no one is going to miss me for these few days.”

“Oh, Hugh, the best of news! I’m happy for you both.” It was right and fitting, Cadfael thought, a life emerging in defiance of a death. “And all went well for her? She had not too hard a time of it?”

“Oh, Aline has the gift! She’s too innocent to understand that there can be pain in a thing so joyful as birth, so she felt none. Faith, even if I hadn’t had this errand to occupy me, I was as near being elbowed out of my own house as makes no matter. Your prior’s message came very aptly. I have three men here with me, and twenty-two more I have quartered on Josce de Dinan in Ludlow castle, to be at hand if I need them, and to give him a salutary jolt if he really is in two minds about changing sides. He cannot be in any doubt now that I have my eye on him. And now,” said Hugh, drawing up a chair to the fire in the prior’s parlor, “you owe me a story, I fancy, and for my life I can’t tell what to expect of it. Here you come riding in with the boy we’ve been hunting on your saddle-bow, and yet a face on you as bleak as the sky, when you should be beaming. And not a word to be got out of you until he was safe out of earshot. Where did you find him?”

Cadfael sat back with a small groan of weariness and stiffness after his chill ride. There was no longer any urgent need for action. In the night they would never find the place, especially now that the wind was high and the fresh snow altering the landscape on all sides, blowing hillsides naked, filling in hollows, burying what yesterday had uncovered. He could afford to sit still and feel the warmth of the fire on his legs, and tell what he had to tell at his own pace, since there was nothing to be done about it until daylight.

“In an assart in Clee Forest, in shelter with a decent cottar and his wife, who would not let him take his chance alone through the woods until some trustworthy traveller came by to bear him company. Me they considered fit for the task, and he came with me willingly enough.”

“But he was there alone? A pity,” said Hugh with a wry grimace, “that you did not find his sister, too, while you were about it.”

“I am only too afraid,” said Cadfael, the warmth of the fire heavy on his eyelids, “that I have indeed found her.”

The silence lasted a shorter time than it seemed. The significance of that last utterance there was no mistaking.

“Dead?” asked Hugh bluntly.

“And cold.” Cold as ice, encased in ice. The first bitter frost had provided her a glassy coffin, preserving her flesh immaculate and unchanged to accuse her destroyer.

“Tell me,” said Hugh, intent and still.

Cadfael told him. The whole story would have to be told again when Prior Leonard came, for he, too, must help to stand between the boy and too early and too sudden knowledge of his loss. But in the meantime it was a relief to heave the burden from his heart, and know that this was now Hugh’s responsibility as much as his own.

“Can you find the place again?”

“By daylight, yes, I’ll find it. In darkness, no use trying. It will be a fearful thing … We shall have to take axes to hew her out of the ice, unless the thaw comes.” It was a forlorn hope, there was no possible sign of a thaw.

“That we’ll face when we come to it,” said Hugh somberly. “Tonight we’d best get the boy’s story out of him, and see if we can gather from it how she ever came where you happened on her. And where, in heaven’s name, is the nun who fled with her?”

“According to Yves, he left her in Cleeton, safe enough. And the girl - poor fool! - he says went off with a lover. But I took him no further into matters, it was towards the end of the day, and the most urgent thing was to get one, at least, into safety.”

“True enough, and you did well. We’ll wait for the prior, and until the boy’s fed and warmed and easy. Then between us we’ll hope to get out of him all he knows, and more, perhaps, than he realizes he knows, without betraying that he’s lost a sister. Though he’ll have to learn it soon or late,” said Hugh unhappily. “Who else knows the poor girl’s face?”

“But not tonight, let him sleep soundly tonight. Time enough,” said Cadfael heavily, “when we’ve brought her in and made her as comely as may be, before he need see her.”

Supper and security had done much for Yves, and his own natural resilience had done even more. He sat in the prior’s parlor before Compline, face to face with Hugh Beringar, and with Prior Leonard and Brother Cadfael in watchful attendance, and told his story with bluntness and brevity.

“She is very brave,” he said judicially, giving his sister her due, “but very obstinate and self-willed. All the way from Worcester I did feel she had something up her sleeve, and was taking advantage of having to run away. We had to go roundabout at first, and slowly, because there were bands of soldiers roaming even miles from the town, so it took us a long time to get safely to Cleobury, and there we stayed one night, and that was the night Brother Elyas was there, too, and he came with us as far as Foxwood, and wanted us to come with him into Bromfield for safety, and I wanted that, too, and so did Sister Hilaria. From here we could have got an escort into Shrewsbury, and it would not have been a much longer way. But Ermina would not have it! She must always have her own way, and she would go on over the hills to Godstoke. No use my arguing, she never listens, she claims that being the elder makes her the wiser. And if we others had gone with Brother Elyas she would still have gone on over the hills alone, so what could we do but go with her?” He blew out his lips in a disgusted breath.

“Certainly you could not leave her,” agreed Beringar reasonably. “So you went on, to spend the next night at Cleeton?”

“It’s close by Cleeton, a solitary holding. Ermina had a nurse once who married a tenant of that manor, so we knew we could get a bed there. The man’s name is John Druel. We got there in the afternoon, and I remembered afterwards that Ermina was talking apart with the son of the house, and then he went away, and we didn’t see him again until evening. I never thought of it then, but now I’m sure she sent him with a message. That was what she intended all along. For a man came late in the evening, with horses, and took her away. I heard the stir, and I got up and looked out … Two horses there were, and he was just helping her up into the saddle …”

“He?” said Hugh. “You knew him?”

“Not his name, but I do remember him. When my father was alive he used to visit sometimes, if there was hunting, or for Christmas or Easter. Many guests used to come, we always had company. He must be son or nephew to one of my father’s friends. I never paid him much attention, nor he never noticed me, I was too young. But I do remember his face, and I think … I think he has been visiting Ermina now and then in Worcester.”

If he had, they must have been very decorous visits, with a sponsoring sister always in attendance.

“You think she sent him word to come and fetch her?” asked Hugh. “This was no abduction? She went willingly?”

“She went gaily!” Yves asserted indignantly. “I heard her laughing. Yes, she sent for him, and he came. And that was why she would go that way, for he must have a manor close by, and she knew she could whistle him to her. She will have a great dower,” said the baron’s heir solemnly, his round, childish cheeks flushing red with outrage. “And my sister would never endure to have her marriage made for her in the becoming way, if it went against her choice. I never knew a rule she would not break, shamelessly …”

His chin shook, a weakness instantly and ruthlessly suppressed. All the arrogant pride of all the feudal houses of Anjou and England in this small package, and he loved as much as he hated her, or more, and never, never must he see her mute and violated and stripped to her shift.

Hugh took up the questioning with considerate calm. “And what did you do?” The jolt back into facts was salutary.

“No one else had heard,” said Yves, rallying, “unless it was the boy who carried her message, and he had surely been told not to hear anything. I was still dressed, there being only one bed, which the women had, so I rushed out to try and stop them. Older she may be, but I am my father’s heir! I am the head of our family now.”

“But afoot,” said Hugh, pricking him back to the real and sorry situation, “you could hardly keep their pace. And they were away before you could hale them back to answer to you.”

“No, I couldn’t keep up, but I could follow. It had begun to snow, they left tracks, and I knew they could not be going very far. Far enough to lose me!” he owned, and bit a lip that did not quite know whether to curl up or down. “I followed as long as I could by their tracks, and it was uphill, and the wind rose, and there was so much snow the tracks were soon covered. I couldn’t find the way forward or back. I tried to keep what I thought was the direction they’d taken, but I don’t know how much I may have wandered, or where I went. I was quite lost. All night I was in the forest, and the second night Thurstan found me and took me home with him. Brother Cadfael knows. Thurstan said there were outlaws abroad, and I should stay with him until some safe traveller came by. And so I did. And now I don’t know,” he said, visibly sinking into his proper years, “where Ermina went with her lover, or what has become of Sister Hilaria. She would wake to find the two of us gone, and I don’t know what she would do. But she was with John and his wife, they surely wouldn’t let her come to harm.”

“This man who took your sister away,” pressed Beringar. “You don’t know his name, but you do remember he was acceptable in your father’s house. If he has a manor in the hills, within easy reach of Cleeton, no doubt we can trace him. I take it he might, had your father lived, have been a possible suitor for your sister, even in a more approved fashion?”

“Oh, yes,” said the boy seriously, “I think he well might. There were any number of young men used to come, and Ermina, even when she was only fourteen or fifteen, would ride and hunt with the best of them. They were all men of substance, or heirs to good estates. I never noticed which of them she favored.” He would have been playing with toy warriors and falling off his first pony then, uninterested in sisters and their admirers. “This one is very handsome,” he said generously. “Much fairer than me. And taller than you, sir.” That would not make him a rarity, Beringar’s modest length of steel and sinew had been under-estimated by many a man to his cost. “I think he must be about twenty-five or six. But his name I don’t know. There were so many came visiting to us.”

“Now there is one more thing,” said Cadfael, “in which Yves may be able to help us, if I may keep him from his bed a few minutes more. You know, Yves, you spoke of Brother Elyas, who left you at Foxwood?”

Yves nodded, attentive and wondering.

“Brother Elyas is here in the infirmary. After leaving for home, his errand done, he was attacked by footpads in the night and badly hurt, and the countrymen who found him brought him here to be cared for. I am sure he is on the mend now, but he has not been able to tell us anything about what happened to him. He has no memory of these recent days, only in his sleep he seems to struggle with some half-recalled distress. Waking, his mind is blank, but in sleep he has mentioned you, though not by name. The boy would have gone with me, he said. Now if he claps eyes on you, safe and well, it might be the sight will jog his memory. Will you try it with me?”

Yves rose willingly, if somewhat apprehensively, looking to Beringar for confirmation that he had done all that was required of him here. “I am sorry he has come to harm. He was kind … Yes, whatever I can do for him …”

On the way to the sickroom, with no other witness by, he slipped his hand thankfully, like an awed child, into Brother Cadfael’s comfortable clasp, and clung tightly.

“You mustn’t mind that he is bruised and disfigured. All that will pass, I promise you.”

Brother Elyas was lying mute and still, while a younger brother read to him from the life of Saint Remigius. His bruises and distortions were already subsiding, he seemed free from pain, he had taken food during the day, and at the office bell his lips would move soundlessly on the words of the liturgy. But his open eyes dwelt unrecognizingly upon the boy who entered, and wandered away again languidly into the shadowy corners of the room. Yves crept to the bedside on tiptoe, great-eyed.

“Brother Elyas, here is Yves come to see you. You remember Yves? The boy you met at Cleobury, and parted from at Foxwood.”

No, nothing, nothing but the faint tremor of desperate anxiety troubling the patient face. Yves ventured close, and timidly laid his hand over the long, lax hand that lay upon the covers, but it remained chill and unresponsive under his touch.

“I am sorry you have been hurt. We walked together those few miles. I wish we had kept your company all the way …”

Brother Elyas stared and quivered, shaking his head helplessly.

“No, let him be,” said Cadfael, sighing. “If we press him he grows agitated. No matter, he has time. Only let his body revive as it is doing, and memory can wait. It was worth the trying, but he is not ready for us yet. Come, you’re dropping with sleep, let’s get you safely into your bed.”

They arose at dawn, Cadfael and Hugh and his men, and went out into a world which had again changed its shape in the night, hillocks levelled and hollows filled in, and a spume of fine snow waving like a languid plume from every crest, in the subsiding winds. They took axes with them, and a litter of leather thongs strung between two poles, and a linen cloth to cover her, and they went in dour silence, none of them with anything to say until words were to the point for the grim work in hand. The fall had stopped at the coming of daylight, as it had now ever since that first night when Yves had set off doggedly to trail his errant sister. Iron frost had begun the next night, and that same night some nocturnal beast had ravished and murdered the girl they went out now to seek, for the ice had taken her to itself very shortly after she had been put into an already congealing stream. Of that Cadfael was certain.

They found her, after some questing and probing in new snow, swept the fresh fall from the ice, and looked down upon her, a girl in a mirror, a girl spun from glass.

“Good God!” said Hugh in awe. “She’s younger than the boy!” So slight, so childlike, did the shadowy form appear.

But they were there, perforce, to break her rest and take her away for Christian burial, though it seemed almost a violation to shatter the smoothness of the ice that encase her. They did it with care, well aside from the delicate, imprisoned flesh, and it proved hard work enough. For all the bite of the frost, they were sweating when they hoisted out heavily the girl and her cold coffin, laid her like a piece of statuary in the thongs of the litter, covered her with the linen cloth, and carried her slowly back to Bromfield. Not a drop fell from the ice until they had it stowed privately in the chill, bare mortuary of the priory. Then the glittering edges began to soften and slide, and drip into the channel where the water flowed away from the washing of the dead.

The girl lay remote and pale within her lucid shroud, and yet grew steadily more human and closer to life, to pain and pity and violence, and all the mortal lot of mankind. Cadfael dared not leave the place for long, because the boy Yves was now up and active, and inquisitive about everything, and no one could guess where he would appear next. He was well brought up, and his manners were charming, but with his inbred conviction of privilege and his very proper thirteen-year-old energy, he might yet prove a hazard.

It was past ten, and High Mass in progress, when the shell of ice had dwindled so far that the girl began to emerge, the tips of thin, pale fingers and stretched toes, her nose, as yet only a minute pearl, and the first curling strands of hair, a fine lace on either side her forehead. It was those curls that first caught Cadfael’s acute attention. For they were short. He wound a few fine threads on his finger, and they made but a turn and a half. And they were no darker than dark gold, and would be even fairer as they dried. Then he bent to the calm stare of her open eyes, still thinly veiled with ice. Their color seemed to him the soft, dim purple of irises, or the darkest grey of lavender flowers.

The face emerged as Mass ended. After the air touched her, bruises began to darken on cheek and mouth. The tips of her small breasts broke the glaze over them. And now Cadfael could see clearly the smear that darkened her flesh and her linen there, on the right side, a reddish mark like a graze, faintly mottled from shoulder to breast. He knew the traces of blood. The ice had taken her before the stilling water could wash the stain away. Now it might pale as the remaining ice thawed, but he would know how it had lain, and where to look for the source.

Well before noon she was freed of her shell, and softening into his hands, slender and young, her small, shapely head covered all over with an aureole of short bronze curls, like an angel in an Annunciation. Cadfael went to fetch Prior Leonard, and they cared for her together, not yet to wash her body, not until Hugh Beringar had viewed it, but to compose her worthily in her everlasting stillness. To the throat they covered her with a linen sheet, and made her ready to be seen.

Hugh came, and stood by her silently. Eighteen could well be her age, so white and slim and tranquil, gone far beyond them. And beautiful, as reported? Yes, that she was. But was this the dark, headstrong, spoiled daughter of the nobility, who had insisted on her own way in despite of the times, the winter, the war and all?

“Look!” said Cadfael, and turned back the linen to show the crumpled folds of her shift, just as they had emerged from the ice. The dull, reddish smear speckled her right shoulder, the edge of her shift, and the creases over her right breast.

“Stabbed?” said Hugh, looking up into Cadfael’s face.

“There is no wound. See now!” He drew down the linen and showed the flesh beneath. Only a smudge or two showed on her pale skin. He wiped them away, and she shone white without blemish. “Certainly not stabbed. The night frost that took her closed in very quickly, and preserved these marks, faint as they are. But she did not bleed. Or if she did,” he added bleakly, “it was not from knife-wounds, and not there. More likely she fought him - him or them, such wolves hunt happiest in packs! - and drew blood. A clawed face, it might be, or a hand or wrist as she tried to force him off. Bear it in mind, Hugh, as I will also.” He covered her again reverently. The alabaster face looked up from veiled eyes into the vault, supremely unmoved, and her head of clipped curls was beginning to shine like a halo as it dried.

“She begins to bruise,” said Hugh, and drew a fingertip over her cheekbone and down to the faint discolorations round her lips. “But her throat is unmarked. She was not strangled.”

“Smothered, surely, in the act of ravishment.”

They were all three so intent upon the dead girl that they had not heard the footsteps that approached the closed door of the room, and even had they been listening, the footsteps were light enough to be missed, though they came briskly and without conceal. The first they knew of the boy’s coming was the white burst of reflected light from the snow, as the door was opened wide to the wall, and Yves marched over the threshold with the innocent boldness of his kind. No creeping ingratiatingly through a narrow chink for him, nothing he did was done by half-measures. The abruptness with which they all whirled upon him, and their frowning consternation gave him sharp pause and mild offense. Both Hugh and Prior Leonard stepped quickly between him and the trestle on which the body lay.

“You should not be here, child,” said the prior, flustered.

“Why should I not, Father? No one has told me I should be at fault. I was looking for Brother Cadfael.”

“Brother Cadfael will come out to you in a little while. Go back to the guest-hall and wait for him there …”

It was late to ward him off, he had seen, beyond the sheltering shoulders, enough to tell him what lay behind. The linen sheet, quickly drawn up, the unmistakable shape, and one glimpse of short, bright hair where the linen, too hastily drawn, had folded back on itself. His face grew still and wary, his eyes large, and his tongue was silenced.

The prior laid a hand gently on his shoulder and made to turn him back to the doorway. “Come, you and I will go together. Whatever is to be told, you shall hear later, but leave it now.”

Yves stood his ground, and went on staring.

“No,” said Cadfael unexpectedly, “let him come.” He came out from behind the trestle, and took a step or two towards the boy. “Yves, you are a sensible man, no need to pretend to you, after your travels, that violence and danger and cruelty do not exist, and men do not die. We have here a dead body, not known to us. I would have you look at it, if you will, and say if you know this face. You need not fear anything ill to see.”

The boy drew near steadily and with set face, and eyed the shrouded form with nothing worse than awe. Doubtful if it had ever entered his head, thought Cadfael, that this might be his sister, or indeed a woman. He had seen the dilated eyes fix on the short, curling hair; it was a young man Yves expected. Nevertheless, Cadfael would have approached this somewhat differently if he had not been certain already, in his own mind, that this dead girl, whoever she might be, was not Ermina Hugonin. Beyond that he had only a pitiful suspicion. But Yves would know.

He drew down the sheet from her face. The boy’s hands, clenched together before him, tightened abruptly. He drew in breath hard, but made no other sound for a long moment. He shook a little, but not much. The wide-eyed stare he raised to Cadfael’s questioning face was one of shocked bewilderment, almost of disbelief.

“But how is this possible? I thought … I don’t understand! She …” He gave up, shaking his head violently, and hung over her again in fascinated pity and wonder. “I do know her, of course I do, but how can she be here, and dead? This is Sister Hilaria, who came with us from Worcester.”