The Potter's Field (17 page)

The way was by open fields as far as the village of Upton, climbing very gently. Beyond, there was a well-used track the further two miles or more to Withington, through flat land, rich and green. Two brooks threaded their gentle way between the houses of the village, to merge on the southern edge and flow on to empty into the River Tern. The small church that sat in the centre of the green was a property of the abbey, like its neighbour at Upton, Bishop de Clinton's gift to the Benedictines some years back. On the far side of the village, drawn back a little from the brook, the manor lay within a low stockade, ringed round with its barns and byres and stables. The undercroft was of timber beams, one end of the living floor of stone, and a short, steep flight of steps led up to the hall door, which was standing open at this early working hour of the day, when baker and dairymaid were likely to be running busily in and out.

Cadfael dismounted at the gate and led the mule at leisure into the yard, taking time to look about him. A woman-servant was crossing with a huge crock of milk from the byre to the dairy and halted at the sight of him, but went on about her business when a groom emerged from the stable and came briskly to take the mule's bridle.

“You're early abroad, Brother. How can we serve you? My master's ridden out towards Rodington already. Shall we send after him, if your errand's to him? Or if you have leisure to wait his return, you're welcome within. His door's always open to the cloth.”

“I'll not disrupt the order of a busy man's day,” said Cadfael heartily. I'm on a simple errand of thanks to your young mistress for her kindness and help in a certain vexed business, and if I can pay my compliments to the lady, I'll soon be on my way back to Shrewsbury. I don't know her name, for I hear your lord has a flock of children. The lady I want may well be the eldest, I fancy. The one who has a maid called Gunnild.”

By the practical way the groom received the name, Gunnild's place in this household was established and accepted, and if ever there had been whispers and grudges among the other maids over the transformation of a draggle-tailed tumbler into a favoured tirewoman, they were already past and forgotten, which was shrewd testimony to Gunnild's own good sense.

“Oh, ay, that's Mistress Pernel,” said the groom, and turned to call up a passing boy to take the mule from him and see him cared for. “She's within, though my lady's gone with my lord, at least a piece of the way; she has business with the miller's wife at Rodington. Come within, and I'll call Gunnild for you.”

The to and fro of voices across the yard gave place, as they climbed the steps to the hall door, to shriller voices and a great deal of children's laughter, and two boys of about twelve and eight came darting out from the open doorway and down the steps in two or three leaps, almost bowling Cadfael over, and recovering with breathless yells to continue their flight towards the fields. They were followed in bounding haste by a small girl of five or six years, holding up her skirts in both plump hands and shrieking at her brothers to wait for her. The groom caught her up deftly and set her safely on her feet at the foot of the steps, and she was off after the boys at the fastest speed her short legs could muster. Cadfael turned for a moment on the steps to follow her flight. When he looked round again to continue mounting, an older girl stood framed in the doorway, looking down at him in smiling and wondering surprise.

Not Gunnild, certainly, but Gunnild's mistress. Eighteen, just turned, Hugh had said. Eighteen, and not yet married or, it seemed, betrothed, perhaps because of the modesty of her dowry and of her father's connections, but perhaps also because she was the eldest of this brood of lively chicks, and very valuable to the household. The succession was secured, with two healthy sons, and two daughters to provide for might be something of a tax on Giles Otmere's resources, so that there was no haste. With her gracious looks and evident warmth of nature she might need very little by way of dowry if the right lad came along.

She was not tall, but softly rounded and somehow contrived to radiate a physical brightness, as if her whole body, from soft brown hair to small feet, smiled as her eyes and lips smiled. Her face was round, the eyes wide-set and wide-open in shining candour, her mouth at once generously full and passionate, and resolutely firm, though parted at this moment in a startled smile. She had her little sister's discarded wooden doll in her hand, just retrieved from the floor where it had been thrown.

“Here is Mistress Pernel,” said the groom cheerfully, and drew back a step towards the yard. “Lady, the good brother would like a word with you.”

“With me?” she said, opening her eyes wider still. “Come up, sir, and welcome. Is it really me you want? Not my mother?”

Her voice matched the brightness she radiated, pitched high and gaily, like a child's, but very melodious in its singing cadences.

“Well, at least,” she said, laughing, “we can hear each other speak, now the children are away. Come into the window-bench, and rest.”

The alcove where they sat down together had the weather shutter partially closed, but the lee one left open. There was almost no wind that morning, and though the sky was clouded over, the light was good. Sitting opposite to this girl was like facing a glowing lamp. For the moment they had the hall to themselves, though Cadfael could hear several voices in busy, braided harmony from passage and kitchen, and from the yard without.

“You are come from Shrewsbury?” she said.

“With my abbot's leave,” said Cadfael, “to give you thanks for so promptly sending your maid Gunnild to the lord sheriff, to deliver the man held in prison on suspicion of causing her death. Both my abbot and the sheriff are in your debt. Their intent is justice. You have helped them to avoid injustice.”

“Why we could do no other,” she said simply, “once we knew of the need. No one, surely, would leave a poor man in prison a day longer than was needful, when he had done no wrong.”

“And how did you learn of the need?” asked Cadfael. It was the question he had come to ask, and she answered it cheerfully and frankly, with no suspicion of its real significance.

“I was told. Indeed, if there is credit in the matter it is not ours so much as the young man's who told me of the case, for he had been enquiring everywhere for Gunnild by name, whether she had spent the winter of last year with some household in this part of the shire. He had not expected to find her still here, and settled, but it was great relief to him. All I did was send Gunnild with a groom to Shrewsbury. He had been riding here and there asking for her, to know if she was alive and well, and beg her to come forward and prove as much, for she was thought to be dead.”

“It was much to his credit,” said Cadfael, “so to concern himself with justice.”

“It was!” she agreed warmly. “We were not the first he had visited, he had ridden as far afield as Cressage before he came to us.”

“You know him by name?”

“I did not, until then. He told me he was Sulien Blount, of Longner.”

“Did he expressly ask for you?” asked Cadfael.

“Oh, no!” She was surprised and amused, and he could not be sure, by this time, that she was not acutely aware of the curious insistence of his questioning, but she saw no reason to hesitate in answering. “He asked for my father, but Father was away in the fields, and I was in the yard when he rode in. It was only by chance that he spoke to me.”

At least a pleasant chance, thought Cadfael, to afford some unexpected comfort to a troubled man.

“And when he knew he had found the woman he sought, did he ask to speak with her? Or leave the telling to you?”

“Yes, he spoke with her. In my presence he told her how the pedlar was in prison, and how she must come forward and prove he had never done her harm. And so she did, willingly.”

She was grave now rather than smiling, but still open, direct and bright. It was evident from the intelligent clarity of her eyes that she had recognised some deeper purpose behind his interrogation, and was much concerned with its implications, but also that even in that recognition she saw no cause to withhold or prevaricate, since truth could not in her faith be a means of harm. So he asked the final question without hesitation: “Did he ever have opportunity to speak with her alone?”

“Yes,” said Pernel. Her eyes, very wide and steady upon Cadfael's face, were a golden, sunlit brown, lighter than her hair. “She thanked him and went out with him to the yard when he mounted and left. I was within with the children, they had just come in, it was near time for supper. But he would not stay.”

But she had asked him. She had liked him, was busy liking him now, and wondering, though without misgivings, what this monk of Shrewsbury might want concerning the movements and generosities and preoccupations of Sulien Blount of Longner.

“What they said to each other, said Pernel, “I do not know. I am sure it was no harm.”

“That,” said Cadfael, “I think I may guess at. I think the young man may have asked her, when she came to the sheriff at the castle, not to mention that it was he who had come seeking her, but to say that she had heard of Britric's plight and her own supposed death from the general gossip. News travels. She would have heard it in the end, but not, I fear, so quickly.”

“Yes,” said Pernel, flushing and glowing, “that I can believe of him, that he wanted no credit for his own goodness of heart. Why? Did she do as he wished?”

“She did. No blame to her for that, he had the right to ask it of her.”

Perhaps not only the right, but the need! Cadfael made to rise, to thank her for the time she had devoted to him, and to take his leave, but she put out a hand to detain him.

“You must not go without taking some refreshment in our house, Brother. If you will not stay and eat with us at midday, at least let me call Gunnild to bring us wine. Father bought some French wine at the summer fair.” And she was on her feet and across the width of the hall to the screen door, and calling, before he could either accept or withdraw. It was fair, he reflected. He had had what he wanted from her, ungrudging and unafraid; now she wanted something from him. “We need say nothing to Gunnild,” she said softly, returning. “It was a harsh life she used to live, let her put it by, and all reminders of it. She has been a good friend and servant to me, and she loves the children.”

The woman who came in from the kitchen and pantry with flask and glasses was tall, and would have been called lean rather than slender, but the flow of her movements was elegant and sinuous still within the plain dark gown. The oval face framed by her white wimple was olive-skinned and suave, the dark eyes that took in Cadfael with serene but guarded curiosity and dwelt with almost possessive affection upon Pernel, were still cleanly set and beautiful. She served them handily, and withdrew from them discreetly. Gunnild had come into a haven from which she did not intend to sail again, certainly not at the invitation of a vagabond like Britric. Even when her lady married, there would be the little sister to care for, and perhaps, some day, marriage for Gunnild herself, the comfortable, practical marriage of two decent, ageing retainers who had served long enough together to know they can run along cosily for the rest of their days.

“You see,” said Pernel, “how well worth it was to take her in, and how content she is here. And now,” she said, pursuing without conceal what most interested her, “tell me about this Sulien Blount. For I think you must know him.”

Cadfael drew breath and told her all that it seemed desirable to him she should know about the sometime Benedictine novice, his home and his family, and his final choice of the secular world. It did not include any more about the history of the Potter's Field than the mere fact that it had passed by stages from the Blounts to the abbey's keeping, and had given up, when ploughed, the body of a dead woman for whose identity the law was now searching. That seemed reason enough for a son of the family taking a personal interest in the case, and exerting himself to extricate the innocent from suspicion, and accounted satisfactorily for the concern shown by the abbot and his envoy, this elderly monk who now sat in a window embrasure with Pernel, recounting briefly the whole disturbing history.

“And his mother is so ill?” said Pernel, listening with wide, sympathetic eyes and absorbed attention. “At least how glad she must be that he has chosen, after all, to come home.”

“The elder son married in the summer,” said Cadfael, “so there is a young woman in the household to give her comfort and care. But yes, certainly she will be glad to have Sulien home again.”

“It is not so far,” Pernel mused, half to herself. “We are almost neighbours. Do you think the lady Donata is ever well enough to want to receive visitors? If she cannot go out, she must sometimes be lonely.”

Cadfael took his leave with that delicate suggestion still in his ears, in the girl's warm, purposeful, buoyant voice, and with her bright and confident face before his eyes, the antithesis of illness, loneliness and pain. Well, why not? Even if she went rather in search of the young man who had touched her generous fancy than for such benefit as her vigour and charm could confer upon a withered gentlewoman, her presence might still do wonders.

He rode back through the autumnal fields without haste, and instead of turning in at the abbey gatehouse, went on over the bridge and into the town, to look for Hugh at the castle.

*

It was plain, as soon as he began to climb the ramp to the castle gatehouse, that something had happened to cause a tremendous stir within. Two empty carts were creaking briskly up the slope and in under the deep archway in the tower, and within, there was such bustle between hall, stables, armoury and stores, that Cadfael sat his mule unnoticed for many minutes in the midst of the to-ings and fro-ings, weighing up what he saw, and considering its inevitable meaning. There was nothing confused or distracted about it, everything was purposeful and exact, the ordered climax of calculated and well-planned preparations. He dismounted, and Will Warden, Hugh's oldest and most seasoned sergeant, halted for an instant in directing the carters through to the inner yard, and came to enlighten him.