An Excellent Mystery (27 page)

Hugh
was on his feet, aghast. “Madog’s boat? That must be the hiring Cadfael told me
of… Drowned? Are they sure of their tale? Madog never lost man nor cargo till
now.”

“My
lord, who can argue with lightning? The tree crashed full on them. Someone in
Frankwell saw the bolt fall. The lord abbot may not even know of it yet, but
they’re all in the same story in the town.”

“I’ll
come!” said Hugh, and swung hurriedly on Nicholas. “God knows I’m sorry, Nick,
if this is true. Brother Humilis — your Godfrid — had a longing to see his
birthplace at Salton again, and set out with Madog this morning, or so he
intended — he and Fidelis. Come with me! We’d best go find out the truth of it.
Pray God they’ve made much of little, as usual, and they’ve come by nothing
worse than a ducking… Madog can outswim most fish. But let’s go and make sure.”

Nicholas
had risen with him, startled and slow to take it in. “My lord? And he so sick?
Oh, God, he could not live through such a shock. Yes, I’ll come… I must know!”

And
they were away, abandoning their prisoner. The door closed briskly between, and
the key turned in the lock. No one had given another look or thought to Adam
Heriet, who sank back slowly on his hard bed, and bowed himself into his cupped
hands, a demoralised hulk of a man, worn out and emptied at heart. Gradually
slow tears began to seep between his braced fingers and fall upon his pillow,
but there was no one there to see and wonder, and no one to interpret.

They
took horse in haste through the town, through streets astonishingly drying out
already in the gentle warmth after the deluge. It was still broad day and late
sunlight, and the roofs and walls and roads steamed, so that the horses waded a
shallow, frail sea of vapour. They passed by Hugh’s house without halting. As
well, for they would have found no Aline there to greet them.

People
were emerging into the streets again wherever they passed, gathering in twos
and threes, heads together and chins earnestly wagging. The word of tragedy had
gone round rapidly, once it was whispered. Nor was it any false alarm this
time. Out through the eastern gate and crossing the bridge towards the abbey,
Hugh and Nicholas drew rein at sight of a small, melancholy procession crossing
ahead of them. Four men carried an improvised litter, an outhouse door taken
from its hinges in some Frankwell householder’s yard, and draped decently with
rugs to carry the corpse of one victim, at least, of the storm. One only, for
it was a narrow door, and the four bearers handled it as if the weight was
light, though the swathed body lay long and large-boned on its bier.

They
fell in reverently behind, as many of the townsfolk afoot were also doing,
swelling the solemn progress like a funeral cortege. Nicholas stared and
strained ahead, measuring the mute and motionless body. So long and yet so
light, fallen away into age before age was due, this could be no other but
Godfrid Marescot, the maimed and dwindling flesh at last shed by its immaculate
spirit. He stared through a mist, trying impatiently to clear his eyes.

“That
is this Madog, that man who leads them?”

Hugh
nodded silently, yes. No doubt but Madog had recruited friends from the suburb,
part Welsh, as he was wholly Welsh, to help him bring the dead man home. He
commanded his helpers decorously, dolorously, with great dignity.

“The
other one — Fidelis?” wondered Nicholas, recalling the retiring anonymous figure
forever shrinking into shadow, yet instant in service. He felt a pang of
self-reproach that he grieved so much for Godfrid, and so little for the young
man who had made himself a willing slave to Godfrid’s nobility.

Hugh
shook his head. There was but one here.

They
were across the bridge and moving along the approach to the Foregate, between
the Gaye on the left hand and the mill and mill-pool on the right, and so to
the gatehouse of the abbey. There the bearers turned in to the right with their
burden, under the arch, into the great court, where a silent, solemn assembly
had massed to wait for them, and there they set down their charge, and stood in
silent attendance.

The
news had reached the abbey as the brothers came from Vespers. They gathered in
a stunned circle, abbot, prior, obedientiaries, monks and novices, brought thus
abruptly to the contemplation of mortality. The townspeople who had followed
the procession to its destination hovered within the gate, somewhat apart, and
gazed in awed silence.

Madog
approached the abbot with the Welshman’s unservile readiness to accept all men
as equals, and told his story simply. Radulfus acknowledged the will of God and
the helplessness of man with an absolving motion of his hand, and stood looking
down at the swathed body a long moment, before he stooped and drew back the
covering from the face.

Humilis
in dying had shed all but his proper years. Death could not restore the lost
and fallen flesh, but it had relaxed the sharp, gaunt lines, and smoothed away
the engraved hollows of pain. Hugh and Nicholas, standing aloof at the corner
of the cloister, caught a brief glimpse of Humilis translated, removed into
superhuman serenity and repose, before Radulfus lowered the cloth again,
blessed the bier and the bearers, and motioned to his obedientiaries to take up
the body and carry it into the mortuary chapel.

Only
then, when Brother Edmund, reminded of old reticences those two lost brothers
had shared, and manifestly deprived of Fidelis, looked round for the one other
man who was in the intimate secrets of Humilis’s broken body, and failed to
find him — only then did Hugh realise that Brother Cadfael was the one man
missing from this gathering. He, who of all men should have been ready and
dutiful in whatever concerned Humilis, to be elsewhere at this moment! The
dereliction stuck fast in Hugh’s mind, until he made sense of it later. It was,
after all, possible that a dead man should have urgent unfinished business
elsewhere, even more dear to him than the last devotions paid to his body.

They
extended their respects and condolences to Abbot Radulfus, with the promise
that search should be made downstream for the body of Brother Fidelis, as long
as any hope remained of finding him, and then they rode back at a walking pace
into the town, host and guest together. The dusk was closing gently in, the sky
clear, bland, innocent of evil, the air suddenly cool and kind. Aline was
waiting with the evening meal ready to be served, and welcomed two men
returning as graciously as one. And if there was still a horse missing from the
stables, Hugh did not linger to discover it, but left the horses to the grooms,
and devoted his own attention to Nicholas.

“You
must stay with us,” he said over supper, “until his burial. I’ll send word to
Cruce, he’ll want to pay the last honours to one who once meant to become his
brother by law, and he has a right to know how things stand now with Heriet.”

That
caused Aline to prick up her ears. “And how do things stand now with Heriet? So
much has happened today, I seem to have missed at least the half of it.
Nicholas did say he brought grim news, but even the downpour couldn’t delay him
long enough to say more. What has happened?”

They
told her, between them, all that had passed, from the dogged search in
Winchester to the point where news of Madog’s disaster had interrupted the
questioning of Adam Heriet, and sent them out in consternation to find out the
truth of the report. Aline listened with a slight, anxious frown.

“He
burst in crying that two brothers from the abbey were dead, drowned in the
river? Named names, did he? There in the cell, in front of your prisoner?”

“I
think it was I who named names,” said Hugh. “It came at the right moment for
Heriet, I fancy he was nearing the end of his tether. Now he can draw breath
for the next bout, though I doubt if it will save him.”

Aline
said no more on that score until Nicholas, short of sleep after his long ride
and the shocks of this day, took himself off to his bed. When he was gone, she
laid by the embroidery on which she had been working, and went and sat down
beside Hugh on the cushioned bench beside the empty hearth, and wound a
persuasive arm about his neck.

“Hugh,
love — there’s something you must hear — and Nicholas must not hear, not yet,
not until all’s over and safe and calm. It might be best if he never does hear
it, though perhaps he’ll divine at least half of it for himself in the end. But
you we need now.”

“We?”
said Hugh, not too greatly surprised, and turned to wind an arm comfortably
about her waist and draw her closer to his side.

“Cadfael
and I. Who else?”

“So
I supposed,” said Hugh, sighing and smiling. “I did wonder at his abandoning
the disastrous end of a venture he himself helped to launch.”

“But
he did not abandon it, he’s about resolving it this moment. And if you should
hear someone about the stables, a little later, no need for alarm, it will only
be Cadfael bringing back your horse, and you know he can be trusted to see to
his horse’s comfort before he gives a thought to his own.”

“I
foresee a long story,” said Hugh. “It had better be interesting.” Her fair hair
was soft and sweet against his cheek. He turned to touch his lips to hers, very
softly and briefly.

“It
is. As any matter of life and death must be. You’ll see! And since it was
blurted out in front of poor Adam Heriet that two brothers have drowned, you
ought to pay him a visit as soon as you can, tomorrow, and tell him he need not
fret, that things are not always what they.seem.”

“Then
tell me,” said Hugh, “what they really are.”

She
settled herself warmly into the circle of his arm, and very gravely told him.

The
search for the body of Brother Fidelis was pursued diligently from both banks
of the river, at every spot where floating debris commonly came ashore, for
more than two days, but all that came to light was one of his sandals, torn
from his foot by the river and cast up in the sandy shoals near Atcham. Most
bodies that went into the Severn were also put ashore by the Severn, sooner or
later. This one never would be. Shrewsbury and the world had seen the last of
Brother Fidelis.

Chapter Fourteen

THE
BURIAL OF BROTHER HUMILIS BROUGHT TOGETHER in the abbey guest-hall
representatives of all the small nobility of the shire, and most of the
Benedictine foundations within the region. Sheriff and town provost would
certainly attend and so would many of the elders and merchants of Shrewsbury,
more by reason of the dramatic and tragic nature of the dead man’s departure
than for any real knowledge they had had of him in his short sojourn in the town.
Most had never seen him, but knew his reputation before he took the cowl, and
felt that his birth and death here in their midst gave them some title in him.
It would be a great occasion, befitting an entombment within the church itself,
a rare honour.

Reginald
Cruce came down from Lai a day in advance of the ceremony, malevolently
gratified at all that Nicholas had to report, and taking vengeful pleasure in
having the miscreant who had dared do violence to a member of the Cruce family
securely in prison and tacitly acknowledged as guilty, even if trial had to
await the legal formalities. Hugh did nothing to cast doubts on his
satisfaction.

Reginald
held the enamelled ring in a broad palm, and studied the intricate decoration
with interest. “Yes, I remember it. Strange it should be this small thing that
condemns him. She had another ring, I recall, that she valued, perhaps all the
more because it was given to her as a child, when her fingers were far too
small to retain it. Marescot sent it to her when the contract of betrothal was
concluded, it was old, one that had been handed down bride to bride in his
family. She used to wear it on a chain round her neck because it was too big
for her fingers. I’m sure she would not leave that behind.”

“This
was the only ring listed in the valuables she took with her,” said Nicholas,
taking back the little jewel. “I’m pledged to return it to the silversmith’s
wife in Winchester.”

“The
list was of the things intended for her dowry. The ring Marescot sent her she
probably meant to keep. It was gold, a snake with red eyes making two coils
about the finger. Very old, the scales were worn smooth. I wonder,” said
Reginald, “where it is now. There are no more Marescots left, not of that
branch, to give it to their brides.”

No
more Marescots, thought Nicholas, and no more Julians. A double, grievous loss,
for which revenge, now that he seemed to have it securely in his hands, was no
compensation at all. “Should you be mistaken, and she is still living,” the
silversmith’s wife had said, “and wants her ring, then give it back to her, and
pay me for it whatever you think fair.” If I had more gold than king and
empress put together, thought Nicholas, nursing the ache he carried within him,
it would not be enough to pay for so inexpressible a blessing.

Brother
Cadfael had behaved himself extremely modestly and circumspectly these last
days, strict to every scruple of the horarium, prompt in every service, trying,
he admitted to himself ruefully, to deserve success, and disarm whatever disapproval
the heavens might be harbouring against him. The end in view, he was certain,
was not only good but vitally necessary, for the sake of the abbey and the
church, and the peace of mind of all those whose fate it was to live on now
that Humilis was delivered out of the body, and safe for ever. But the means —
he was less certain that the means were above reproach. But what can a man do,
or a woman either, but use what comes to hand?