The Leper of Saint Giles (11 page)

“She should lie at rest for some hours, after she comes round. It was a bad swoon.” He marvelled how little there was of her, and was convinced her finery weighed more than she did; yet this fragile creature had roused herself to heroic defiance for the sake of Joscelin, she who was so tamed and resigned for herself. Even the charge of theft and a cell in the castle had seemed comfort and joy to her when they served to ward off the infinitely worse charge of murder. Now, when she got her wits back, and remembered, she would be torn in two between terror for his life, since this killing was indeed a hanging matter, and hope for his escape, since thus far he was still at liberty. Hope offered itself and snatched itself away again from Iveta de Massard.

“Madam, if you will show the way…”

Agnes gathered her splendid skirts and swept before him into the guest-hall, to her own apartments. It could not be said, Cadfael reflected, that she felt no concern for her niece, since her niece was the greater part of her fortune, and for that she felt a strong defensive care. But her prevailing emotion towards the girl Iveta herself was impatience and displeasure. By this hour she should have been safely married off, a commodity profitably disposed of. However, she was still eminently salable, she still had all her father’s great honor in lands and titles, down to the sword and helmet of the paladin Guimar de Massard, chivalrously restored by the Fatimids of Egypt: the one item of her inheritance, possibly, which Picard did not covet.

“You may lay her here.” By the narrow way she eyed him, Agnes had not forgotten that he was the brother of whose ready prevarications she had complained to the abbot; but that hardly mattered now, since Joscelin Lucy was quarry for a hunt to the death, and no threat to her peace of mind any longer. “Is there anything needs to be done for her?”

Iveta lay on her covered bed, sighed and was still. All that gold, as though she had been minted.

“If you would be kind enough to find me a small cup, to take a draught of this decoction of herbs when she is with us again. It’s a good, bitter restorative, and wards off further fainting. And I think there should be some warmth in the room. A small charcoal brazier would serve.”

These recommendations she took seriously, perforce. He had given her enough to do to remove her from the room, though for perhaps five minutes at best. Her maids had waited in the hall. She swept out to set them to work.

Iveta opened her eyes. The same brother! She had known his voice, and stolen that one glance to make certain. But when she tried to speak, tears rose to hamper her utterance. But he was listening close; he heard.

“They never told me! They said the thief could be pressed to his death…”

“I know,” said Cadfael, and waited.

“They said—unless I did all perfectly, spoke the right words, made all above suspicion… Huon would have his life…”

“Yes… Hush now, softly! Yes, I know!”

“But if I did all well, he should go free…”

Yes, she had been ready to sell herself, body and will and hopes and all, to see Joscelin delivered. She had her own bravery.

“Help him!” she said, huge eyes like purple flowers overblown, and closed her small hand, fine-boned like a little bird, but with a little bird’s strong and compelling grip, on Cadfael’s hand. “He has not stolen or killed… I know!”

“If I can!” breathed Cadfael, and stooped to conceal her from Agnes in the doorway. She was very quick, she lay back in mute acceptance, eyes veiled; the hand was empty and limp as before. Not for several more minutes did she raise her lids again and look up, answer faintly and wonderingly when Agnes asked her, with genuine anxiety but little kindness, how she did, and drink the bitter, aromatic draught Cadfael presented to her lips.

“She should be left alone in quietness,” he advised when he took his leave, minded to procure for her, if he could, the solitude she needed, deliverance from the company of people whose very presence was oppression. “She will sleep. Such seizures are as exhausting as great exertion. If Father Abbot permits, I will look in on her before Vespers, and bring her a syrup that will ensure her a peaceful night.”

That, at least, they might allow her. They had her securely in their power, she could not escape, but at present no more could be done with her or to her. Domville was dead, there would have to be reconsideration now, the field was open to other bidders. It was not deliverance, but it was a respite. Time to give some thought to the circumstances of this violent death, and the fate of the unfortunate young man at whose door it was being laid. There were a great many questions not yet asked, let alone answered.

It was towards noon that one of the men-at-arms combing the copses and gardens behind the houses of the Foregate on the north side came to his sergeant and said brightly: “There’s but one garden left unexamined in all this array, and now I mind me there could be good sense in looking there, too. Bishop de Clinton’s house itself!” And when he was cried down with mention of the folly of hiding in the very lion’s mouth, he defended his notion earnestly.

“Not such folly, neither! Suppose this fellow’s listening to the pack of you now, making mock of the very idea! He’d have the laugh if he’s lying low within there, and you refusing to believe it possible. The one place you put out of the question is the one place he might have wit enough to be. And don’t forget his horse is within there, and with all this running hither and thither, who’s to care whether the stable’s left open?”

The sergeant thought the argument worth considering, and authorized the search of the bishop’s garden, byres and stables, his orchard, all the ground within his walls. In due course they arrived at the hay-store by the rear wall. They did not find Joscelin Lucy, but they did find plain evidence that someone had lain there in the hay, and left behind him the heel of a loaf and the core of an apple, besides the impress in the fodder of a long young body, clear to be seen. Joscelin Lucy knew this place, and the wicket in the wall was unbarred. No one had any doubt as to who the vanished guest had been.

So the man-at-arms who had insisted on entry here, though he failed of getting the credit for a capture, did well enough out of his suggestion to be commended by his officer, and was not ill-content with the enterprise.

Chapter Six

HUON DE DOMVILLE LAY NAKED BENEATH A LINEN CERECLOTH in the mortuary chapel, and round about him stood the abbot and prior, the sheriff of the county, the dead man’s nephew and squire, Sir Godfrid Picard, who should by this time have been his uncle by marriage, and Brother Cadfael.

Simon Aguilon was still cloaked and gloved from his strenuous part in the morning’s search, and looked haggard and worried, as well he might, at the responsibility that had fallen on him as the dead man’s nearest kin here. Picard was gnawing the black, clipped fringe of his beard, and brooding on his losses and the openings now left to him. Radulfus was quietly and scrupulously intent on what Cadfael was expounding.

The abbot was a man of the world and of the church, of wide experience, but not so wide as to include those manifestations of violence which were an open book to Brother Cadfael, who had been soldier and sailor besides. Rare among men of wide experience, Radulfus knew precisely the gaps that were left, and was willing to be instructed. The honour and integrity of his house was his prime concern, and in that criterion pure justice was implied. As for Prior Robert, his Norman loyalties were outraged, since a Norman lord had been removed by murder. In his own way he required a vengeance just as surely as did Picard.

“The head injuries,” said Brother Cadfael, his palm under the newly laved and combed head, “would have been no danger, had they been all. But the blow stunned him and laid him open to assault. Now, see…” He drew down the linen cloth below the great barrel of a breast and the massive upper arms. “He fell asprawl on his back, head against the tree, arms and legs spread. My lord Prestcote here saw him so, and so did Brother Edmund and certain novices of our house. I could not then see what I have seen now, by reason of his clothing. Look here at the inner side of his upper arms, those round black bruisings in the muscle. See those arms spread, and consider what fell upon him, senseless as he was. His enemy kneeled here upon these arms, reached here to his throat.”

“And that would not rouse him?” asked the abbot gravely, following Cadfael’s blunt brown finger as he traced the prints of murder.

“There was some effort made.” Cadfael recalled the deep pits Domville’s boot-heels had scored in the turf. “But by the body only, as men jerk from wounds when they have no more power to resist them. His senses were out of him, he could not fight his assailant. And these were strong hands, and resolute. See here, where both thumbs, one over the other, were driven in. The apple of his neck is ruptured.”

He had not had the opportunity until now to look more closely at that savage injury. Under the short beard the slash made by the rope drew a dark-red line, from which the beads of blood had been washed away. The black bruises left by the strangler’s hands showed up clearly.

“Here is every sign of a madly vindictive attacker,” said Prestcote grimly.

“Or a very frightened one,” Cadfael said mildly. “Desperate at his own act, an act unlike him, suddenly undertaken and monstrously overdone.”

“You could be speaking of the same man,” said Radulfus reasonably. “Is there anything more this body can tell us about him?”

It seemed that there was. On the left side of Domville’s neck, about where the middle fingers of the right hand must have gripped, and had left their shadowy shape, the bruise was crossed by a short, indented wound, as though a jagged stone had been pressed into the flesh there. Cadfael pondered this small, insignificant thing in silence for a while, and concluded that it might be by no means insignificant.

“A small, sharp cut,” he mused, peering close, “and this hollow wound beside it. The man who did this wore a ring, on the middle or third finger of his right hand. A ring with a large stone in it, to thrust so into the flesh. And it must hang rather loose on his finger, for it turned partially within as he gripped. On the middle finger, surely… if it had hung loose on the third he would have shifted it to the middle one. I can think of no other way such an injury can have been made.” He looked up into the circle of attentive faces. “Did young Lucy wear such a ring?”

Picard shrugged off all knowledge of such matters. After some thought Simon said: “I cannot recall ever noticing a ring. But neither can I say certainly that he never wore one. I might ask Guy if he knows.”

“It shall be enquired into,” said the sheriff. “Is there more to be noticed?”

“I can think of nothing. Unless it is worth wondering where this man had been, and on what errand, to find him on that path at such an hour.”

“We do not know the hour,” said Prestcote.

“No, true. It is not possible to say how long a man has been dead, not within a matter of hours. Yet the turf under him was moist. But there is another point. All the signs show—very well, let us be wary of reading too confidently, they seem to show!—that he was riding back towards his house when he was waylaid. And the trap set for him was laid and waiting before he came. Therefore whoever set it, and thereafter killed him, knew where he had gone, and by what road he must return.”

“Or must have followed him in the night, and made his plans accordingly,” said the sheriff. “We are sure now that Lucy made his way to the hay-store in the bishop’s garden and hid there, but after dark he came forth, and may well have lurked to keep watch on his lord’s movements, with this fell intent in mind. He knew Domville would be supping here at the abbey, for all the household knew it. It would not be difficult to wait in hiding for his return, and to see him riding on alone and dismissing his squire provided the very chance revenge needed. Small doubt but Lucy is our man.”

There was no more then to be said. The sheriff returned to his hunt, convinced of his rightness; and on the face of it, Cadfael allowed, no blame at all to him for the case was black. Huon de Domville was left to the care of Brother Edmund and his helpers, and his coffin bespoken from Martin Bellecote, the master carpenter in the town, for whether he was to find his burial here or elsewhere, he must be decently coffined for his journey to the grave, and with suitable grandeur. His body had no more now to tell.

Or so Brother Cadfael thought, until he consented to recount the circumstances of death and enquiry to Brother Oswin in the workshop, over the sorting of beans for the next year’s seed. Oswin listened intently to all. At the end he said with apparent inconsequence: “I wonder that he should ride in a late October night without a capuchon. And he bald, too!”

Cadfael stood at gaze, contemplating him with wonder across a handful of seed. “What was that you said?”

“Why, for an old man to go bare-headed in the night…”

He had put his finger firmly on the one thing Cadfael had missed. Domville had not ridden away bareheaded from the abbey gatehouse, that was certain. Cadfael himself had seen him depart, the fine crimson capuchon twisted up into an elaborate hat, gold fringe swinging, and yet he had not thought to look for it where the body lay fallen, or question its absence.

“Child,” said Cadfael heartily, “I am always underestimating you. Remind me of it when next I breathe down your neck over your work, for I shall deserve it. He did indeed have a capuchon, and I had better be about finding it.”

He asked no permission, preferring to consider that the morning’s leave to join in the search might reasonably be extended to cover a further stage in the same quest. There was still time before Vespers if he hurried, and the place was marked with their improvised cross.

The turf under the oak still retained the vague shape of Domville’s body, but already the grasses were rising again. Cadfael prowled the pathway with his eyes on the ground, penetrated into the trees on both sides, and found nothing. It was a sudden shaft of sunlight through the branches, filtering through thick underbrush, that finally located for him what he sought, by picking out the glitter of the gold fringe that bordered the cape of the capuchon. It had been flung from its wearer’s head when he was thrown, and buried itself in a clump of bushes three yards from the path, its fashionable twisted arrangement making it all too easy to dislodge in such a shock. Cadfael hauled it out. The turban-like folds had been well wound, it was still a compact cap, with one draped edge left to swing gracefully to a shoulder. And in the dark crimson folds a cluster of bright blue shone. Somewhere in his nocturnal ride Huon de Domville had added to his adornments a little bunch of frail, straight stems bearing long, fine green leaves and starry flowers of a heavenly blue, even now, when they had lain all day neglected. Cadfael drew the posy out of the folds, and marveled at it, for though it had commoner cousins, this plant was a rarity.

He knew it well, though it was seldom to be found even in the shady places in Wales where he had occasionally seen it. He knew of no place here in England where it had ever, to his knowledge, been discovered. When he wanted seed to make powders or infusions against colic or stone, he had to be content with the poor relatives of this rarity. Now what, he wondered, viewing its very late and now somewhat jaded flowers, is a bunch of the blue creeping gromwell doing in these parts? Certainly Domville had not had it when he left the abbey.

It was a pity there was no time to go further, since he must be back to attend Iveta and go to Vespers. He was beginning to be very curious indeed about Domville’s nightly ramblings. Had not Picard mentioned by the way that the baron had a hunting-lodge near the Long Forest? From the Foregate this path might well be the most direct way to that lodge. True, the place might lie anywhere along some miles of the forest borders, but it would be well worth following the road the dead man had taken. But not today, that was out of the question.

Cadfael tucked the little bunch of blue and the capuchon in the breast of his habit, and made his way back. No doubt it was his duty to hand over both, with due explanations, to the sheriff, but he was not at all sure that he was going to do so. The capuchon, certainly, that added nothing to what was already known. But this small knot of fading beauty was eloquent indeed. Where that grew, Domville had been, and there surely could not be more than one such place in all this shire. He knew of only three in Gwynedd, where it had its home, here he was astonished to find even one. And Prestcote was an honest and just man, but arbitrary in his decisions, and already convinced of Joscelin’s guilt. Who else had a grudge against the baron? Cadfael was not convinced. Loose talk about killing did not delude him. There are people who are capable of murder by stealth, and people who are not, and nothing would persuade him to the contrary. Every man may be driven to kill, but not every man can be driven to kill by cunning, the knife in the back, the rope across the path.

He went back dutifully to the abbey, delivered the capuchon to the sergeant Prestcote had left at the gatehouse, and went to fetch the poppy syrup for Iveta from his workshop.

This time they did not leave him alone with her for a moment. The maid Madlen, plainly Agnes’s creature to the hilt, stood over them sharp-eyed and prick-eared, all he could give the girl was the reassurance of his continued partisanship by his very presence, and the ministrations he offered. At least they could exchange looks, and interpret what they saw. And he could ensure that she should sleep, and sleep long, while he pondered how best to help her. Also to help Joscelin Lucy? She would not be grateful for a partisanship that did not extend to her lover, for whose life she had been willing to barter all her own future happiness.

Cadfael went to Vespers with the little fading cluster of blue still in his habit.

Brother Mark had been vaguely but persistently troubled, all that day, by the feeling that his grasp on the whole body of his flock at the hospice had somehow been disrupted. It had begun at Prime, when all the household, except the one or two young children, came together in the church. It was not that he ever counted them. If any were sicker or more out of mood than normally, they could remain at rest, no one drove them, so the number need never be the same. Moreover, during even this brief office there were some who for good reason must ease their discomfort by movement, and therefore the whole mass shifted and changed a little. It was rather that he was haunted by a sense of unexpected bulk, a limitation of the light within the church, which at all times was dim and cramped. There were six or seven big men among his charges, but he knew the manner and gait of them all, the little halts and stoops that identified even the veiled ones among them.

Once or twice during Prime he had thought he detected one lofty, shrouded head and covered face that had an alien look, but always he lost it again. Not until the end did it dawn on him that he was losing it because all his afflicted household was so disposing its people as to swallow up the intruder.

Intruder seemed a hard word where the doors were open to all, yet had the newcomer been truly a leper, here arrived at one more halt in a lifetime’s pilgrimage, he would have announced himself, and there would have been no need for this mysterious shifting and dissembling. Yet what whole man in his right mind would choose to hide here? He would have to be desperate.

Mark had almost persuaded himself that he was dreaming. But when he doled out the bread and oatmeal and small ale at breakfast, though again he did not count—for who counts what is given to the unfortunate?—by the end of it he knew that his supplies were depleted beyond what he had expected. Someone among his children had drawn food for another mouth.

He knew, of course, that the sheriffs men were beating the wood and gardens between Saint Giles and the town, and before noon the news of Huon de Domville’s death had reached him. The isolation of the outcasts here never kept out the news. Whatever happened in town or abbey was known at once in the hospice, down to the very manner of the baron’s death, and the outcry raised against the escaped squire as his murderer. But Brother Mark had work to do, and had not thought much about the rumors. There were all his morning medical duties first, and not until the last dressing was renewed and the last sore anointed did he give much consideration to the discrepancy that was troubling him. Even then there were other matters to be attended to, recording gifts made to the hospital, arranging for a party of the able-bodied to go gleaning for the winter wood-pile in the manor of Sutton, a right granted them by the late lord and continued by his son, helping to prepare the midday meal, checking the superior’s accounts, and a dozen other things. Only in the afternoon was he at leisure to pursue some of the duties he had appropriated to himself of his own will, such as reading the office privately to one old man who was too ill to leave his bed, and giving a lesson to the boy Bran. Very easy lessons they usually turned out to be, more than half play, but for all that, the child was thirsty for letters, and drew in learning like mother’s milk, as naturally as breathing.