The Leper of Saint Giles (21 page)

“Speak up, Jehan,” ordered the sheriff, grimly smiling. “Did Aguilon again point you the way to commendation and promotion?”

“This morning,” admitted Jehan unwarily, “he put the notion into my head…”

“This morning! Before ever we set forth! And you said no word to me or to your officer until we were out of the way of your intended feat of arms. Promotion is hardly likely to come your way, fellow, for a while. Think yourself lucky to escape a whipping!”

Jehan was indeed thinking himself well out of a perilous corner, to be dismissed so lightly, and made himself scarce without delay.

“We had best be bringing in this dead man,” said the sheriff, turning brusquely back to the task in hand. “Will you guide us, brother? We’ll go mounted, and with a spare horse for Picard’s last ride.”

They were away, half a dozen mounted men, Cadfael in no way displeased to be astride a fine, sturdy rouncey again instead of a modest little mule. The abbot watched them out of the gates, and then turned to dismiss, with even voice and calm face, the disturbed and wondering brotherhood.

“Go, compose your minds, wash your hands, and go in to supper. The rule still orders our day. Traffic with the world is laid upon us for chastening, and for the testing of our vocation. The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.”

They went obediently. At a glance from Radulfus, Prior Robert inclined his head and followed the flock. The abbot was left confronting, with a faint, contemplative smile, the two young creatures still clinging hand in hand, eyeing him steadfastly but doubtfully. Too much had happened to them too suddenly, they were like children half-awake, not yet clear what, of their recollections and experiences, was real, and what was dream. But surely the dreams had been terrifying, and the reality must needs be better.

“I think,” said the abbot gently, “you need not be in any anxiety, my son, about that other charge your lord made against you. In all the circumstances, no just man would consider it safe to believe in such a theft, and Gilbert Prestcote is a just man. I cannot choose but wonder,” he said thoughtfully, “whether it was Aguilon also who hid the necklace in your saddle-bag with the medal of Saint James.”

“I doubt it, Father.” Joscelin took thought to be fair, even now, to a comrade who had done him such grievous wrong. “For truly I feel he had not thought of murder until I was cast off and accused, and broke away to freedom as I did. It is as Brother Cadfael said, he was presented with his chance and his scapegoat. My lord Domville most likely did his own meaner work this time. But, Father, it is not my troubles that weigh on me now. It is Iveta.”

He moistened his lips, feeling for the best words, and the abbot stood silent and imperturbable, and gave him no help. Iveta, too, had looked up at him in startled alarm, as though she feared he might too nobly and stupidly let go of her when she thought herself fairly won.

“Father, this lady has been vilely misused by those who were her guardians. Now her uncle is dead, and her aunt, even if she were fit to care for her, would not be allowed to keep the administration of so great an honor. It is my prayer that you, Father, will take her into your own guardianship from this day, for with you I know she will be used with gentleness and honor, and be happy as she deserves. If you put forward such a request to the king, he will not deny you.”

The abbot waited some moments, and his austere lips were very drily smiling. “And that is all? No plea for yourself?”

“None!” said Joscelin, with the fierce humility that looked and sounded what it was, a nobleman’s arrogance.

“But I have a prayer of my own,” said Iveta indignantly, keeping fast hold of a hand that would have renounced its claim on her. “It is that you will look kindly upon Joscelin, and use him as my favored suitor, for I love him, and he loves me, and though I will be obedient to you in everything else, if you will take me, I will not part with Joscelin, or ever love or marry anyone else.”

“Come,” said the abbot, not quite committing himself to a smile, “I think we three had better sit down to supper together in my lodging, and consider how best to dispose of the future. There’s no haste, and much to think about. Thinking is best after prayer, but will be none the worse for a meal and a glass of wine.”

The sheriff and his party brought back Godfrid Picard’s body to the abbey before Compline. In the mortuary chapel they laid him straight, and brought candles to examine his injuries. His unblooded dagger, found some yards aside in the grass, where Cadfael had discovered and left it, they slid back into its sheath as they unbuckled his sword-belt, but it cannot be said that much thought had been given to the curious circumstance of its lying thus naked and discarded in the glade.

The man was dead, his murderer, murderer already of one man, and a kinsman at that, was in Shrewsbury castle, safe under lock and key. If there were odd circumstances in this second case, no one but Cadfael noticed them, though for a while they puzzled him as much as they would have puzzled his companions, had they troubled to examine them. A man dies, strangled with a man’s hands, yet himself provided with a dagger, and clearly having had time to draw it. To draw, but not to blood it. And those who kill with their hands do so because they are otherwise unarmed.

The night was still. The candles did not flicker, and the light on the dead man’s suffused face, bitten tongue and exposed throat was sharp enough to show detail. Cadfael looked closely and long at the marks of the strong fingers that had crushed out life, but he said nothing. Nor was he asked anything. All questions had already been answered to the sheriff’s satisfaction.

“We’d best have a mare out tomorrow, to fetch the gray out of the forest,” said Prestcote, drawing up the linen sheet over Picard’s face. “A valuable beast, that. The widow could sell him for a good price in Shrewsbury, if she’s so minded.”

Having completed his duty here, Cadfael excused himself, and went to look for Brother Mark. He found him in the warming-room, rosily restored after a kitchen supper and a change of clothes, and about to take his leave, and walk back to Saint Giles and his duty.

“Wait only a brief while for me,” said Cadfael, “and I’ll bear you company. I have an errand there.”

In the meantime, his errand here was to two young people who had, as he saw when he ran them to earth in the abbot’s parlor, of all places, no great need of his solicitude, since they had enlisted a greater patron, and appeared to be on terms of complete confidence with him, partly due, perhaps, to a good wine after extreme stress and rapturous relief. So Cadfael merely paid his respects, accepted their flushed and generous gratitude, exchanged a somewhat ambiguous glance with Radulfus as he made his reverence, and left them to their deliberations, which were certainly proceeding very satisfactorily, but had certain implications for others, not here represented.

Two warm-hearted children, these, radiant with goodwill towards all who had stood by them at need. Very young, very vulnerable, very eager and impulsive now that they were happy. The abbot would keep them on a close rein for a while, her in some sheltered sisterhood or a well-matroned manor of her own, the boy under discreet watch in whatever service he took up, now that he was clean, honorable and his own best guarantor. But Radulfus would not keep them apart, he was too wise to try to separate what God or his angels had joined.

Meantime, there were others to be thought of, and there was need of the coming night, if what Cadfael had divined proved true.

He turned to the warming-room, where Brother Mark, content and expectant, was waiting for him by the fire. He had not sat so long in the warmth since he was a new novice in the order. It had been well worth getting soused in the Meole brooke.

“Is everything well?” he asked hopefully, as they set out together along the Foregate in the darkness.

“Very well,” said Cadfael, so heartily that Mark drew pleased and grateful breath, and ceased to question.

“The little lady for whom you prayed God’s help, some days ago,” said Cadfael cheerfully, “will do very well now. The lord abbot will see to that. All I want at the hospital is a pleasant word with your wanderer Lazarus, in case he moves on very soon, before I can come again. You know how they snuff the air and grow uneasy, and up anchor suddenly, and sail.”

“I had wondered,” confided Brother Mark, “whether he might be persuaded to stay. He has an affection for Bran. And the mother will not live much longer. She has turned her back on the world. Oh, not on her boy—but she feels he has gone beyond her, and has his own saints,” explained one of those saints diffidently, without self-recognition. “She is certain he is protected by heaven.”

There were those on earth, too, thought Cadfael, who had some interest in the matter. Two grateful, loosened tongues in the abbot’s parlor had poured out all their story without reserve, named names confidingly. Joscelin had a mind quick to learn, and a heart tenacious of affections, and Iveta in the fervor of deliverance wanted to take to her heart and hold fast in her life every soul, high or low, whole or afflicted, who had been good to Joscelin.

In the open porch before the hall of the hospice the old man Lazarus sat, mute, motionless, patient, with his erect back braced against the wall, and his legs drawn up beneath him on the bench, crossed after the eastern fashion. Curled up in the circle of the old man’s left arm, Bran lay uneasily asleep, with Joscelin’s wooden horse clasped to his heart. The small lamp above the door of the hall shed a faint yellow light on his spindly limbs and ruffled fair head, and showed a face smudged with tears. He awoke when Cadfael and Mark entered, staring up dazedly out of his nest, and the long arm withdrew from him silently, and let him scramble down from the bench.

“Why, Bran!” said Brother Mark, concerned and chiding. “What are you doing out of your bed at this hour?”

Bran embraced him hard, half-relieved and half-resentful, and accused in muffled tones from within the folds of the new and over-ample habit: “You both went away! You left me alone. I didn’t know where you were… You might not have come back! He hasn’t come back!”

“Ah, but he will, you’ll see.” Brother Mark gathered the boy to him, and took possession of a groping hand. Its fellow was busy retrieving the wooden horse, momentarily discarded but jealously reclaimed. “Come, come to bed, and I’ll tell you all about it. Your friend is well and happy, and need not hide any more. Everything that was wrong has been put right. Come, and you shall hear it once from me, and he will tell it all over again when next you see him. As you will, I promise.”

“He said I should be his squire, and learn to read Latin hand, and reckon numbers, if ever he came to be knight,” Bran sternly reminded both his present and his absent patron, and allowed himself to be led sleepily towards the inner door. Mark looked back at Cadfael as they went, and at his reassuring nod took the child gently towards the dortoir.

Lazarus made no movement and said no word when Cadfael sat down beside him. Long ago he had outlived surprise, fear and desire, at least on his own account. He sat gazing out with his far-sighted blue-gray eyes at a night sky now beginning to flow like running water, a lofty, thin stream of cloud carried tranquilly eastwards on a fair breeze, while here on earth the very leaves were still.

“You’ll have heard,” said Cadfael, leaning back comfortably against the wall, “what Mark told the child. It was true, thanks be to God! Everything that was wrong has been put right. The murderer of Huon de Domville is taken, guilty past doubt. That is over. Pity is out of reach, short of pentinence, and of that there’s none. The man has not only killed his uncle, but vilely betrayed and misused his friend who trusted him, and shamelessly deceived a harried and forsaken girl. That is over. You need trouble no more.”

The man beside him said no word, asked no question, but he listened. Cadfael continued equably: “All will be well with her now. The king will surely approve our abbot as her new guardian. Radulfus is an austere and high-minded man, but also a human and humane one. She has nothing more to fear, not even for a lover none too well endowed with worldly goods. Her wishes, her happiness, will no longer be brushed aside as of no account.”

Within the great cloak Lazarus stirred, and turned his head. The deep voice, forming words with deliberate, halting care, spoke from behind the muffling veil: “You speak only of Domville. What of the second murder?”

“What second murder?” said Cadfael simply.

“I saw the torches among the trees, an hour and more ago, when they came for Godfrid Picard. I know he is dead. Is that, too, laid at this other man’s door?”

“Aguilon will be tried for the murder of his uncle,” said Cadfael, “where there is proof enough. Why look further? If there are some who mistakenly set Picard’s death to his discredit, how is his fate changed? He will not be charged with that. It could not be maintained. Godfrid Picard was not murdered.”

“How do you know?” asked Lazarus, untroubled but willing to be enlightened.

“There was no snare laid for him, he had all his senses and powers when he was killed, but all his senses and powers were not enough. He was not murdered, he was stopped in the way and challenged to single combat. He had a dagger, his opponent had only his hands. No doubt he thought he had an easy conquest, an armed man against one weaponless, a man in his prime against one seventy years old. He had time to draw, but that was all. The dagger was wrenched away and hurled aside, not turned against him. The hands were enough. He had not considered the weight of a just quarrel.”

“It must, then, have been a very grave quarrel between these two,” said Lazarus, after a long silence.

“The oldest and gravest. The shameful mistreatment of a lady. She is avenged and delivered. Heaven made no mistake.”

The silence fell between them again, but lightly and softly as a girl’s veil might float down and settle, or a moth flutter out of the night and alight without a sound. The old man’s eyes returned to the steady, measured flow of wisps of cloud eastward in the zenith. There was diffused light of stars behind the veil, while the earth lay in darkness. Behind the coarse veil of faded blue cloth Cadfael thought there was the faintest and most tranquil of smiles.