An Excellent Mystery (18 page)

“We’ve
tired you out,” said Hugh. “We’ll leave you now to rest.”

“No,
wait!” There was a fine dew of sweat breaking on his high forehead. Fidelis
leaned and wiped it away, and a preoccupied smile flashed up at him for a
moment, and lingered to darken into a frown.

“Son,
go out from here, take the sun and the air, you spend too much time caring for
me, and you see I am in need of nothing now. It is not right that you should
make me your only work here. In a little while I shall sleep.” It was not
clear, from the serenity of his voice, weak though it was, whether he spoke of
a mere restful slumber on a hot afternoon, or the last sleep of the body at the
awakening of the soul. He laid his hand for a moment on the young man’s hand,
in the most delicate touch possible, austerely short of a caress. “Yes, go, I
wish it. Finish my work for me, your touch is steadier than mine, and the
detail — too fine for me now.”

Fidelis
looked down at him with a composed face, looked up briefly at the two who
watched, and again lowered submissively those clear grey eyes that rang so
striking a contrast with the curling bronze ring of his tonsure, he went as he
was bidden, perhaps gladly, certainly with a free and rapid step.

“Nicholas
never stopped to tell me,” said Humilis, when silence had closed over the last
light footstep, “what these valuables were, that my affianced wife took with
her. Were they so distinctive as to be recognisable, should they ever be
traced?”

“I
doubt if there were any two such,” said Hugh. “Gold and silversmiths generally
make to their own designs, even when they aim at pairs I wonder if they ever
match exactly. These were singular enough. Once known, known for all time.”

“May
I know what they were? She had coined money, I understand — that is at the
service of whoever takes it. But the rest?”

Hugh,
whose memory for words was exact as a mirror, willingly described them: “A pair
of candlesticks of silver, made in the form of tall sconces entwined with the
vine, with snuffers attached by silver chains, also ornamented with
grapeleaves. A standing cross a man’s hand-length in height, on a silver
pedestal of three steps, and studded with semi-precious stones of yellow
pebble, amethyst and agate, together with a similar cross of the same metal and
stones, a little finger’s length, on a thin silver neck-chain for a priest’s
wear. Also some pieces of jewellery, a necklet of polished stones from the
hills above Pontesbury, a bracelet of silver engraved with tendrils of vetch,
and a curious ring of silver set with enamels all round, in the form of yellow
and blue flowers. That’s the tally. They must surely all have left this shire.
They’ll be found, if ever found at all, somewhere in the south, where they and
she vanished.”

Humilis
lay quiet, his eyelids closed, his lips moving soundlessly on the details of
these chattels. “A very small fortune,” he said in a whisper. “But not small to
some poor wretched souls. Do you truly believe she may have died for these few
things?”

“Men,
and women too,” said Hugh starkly, “have died for very much less.”

“Yes,
true! A small cross,” said Humilis, lips moving again upon the recollected
phrases,”the length of a little finger, set with yellow stones, and green agate
and amethyst… Fellow to an altar cross of the same, but made for wearing. Yes,
a man would know that again.”

The
faint dew of weakness was budding again on his forehead, a great drop ran down
into the folds of a closed eyelid. Cadfael wiped the corroding drops away, and
frowned Hugh before him out at the door.

“I
shall sleep…” said Humilis, and faintly and fleetingly smiled.

In
the large room across the stone passage, where a dozen beds lay spaced in two
rows, either side an open corridor, Brother Edmund and another brother, his
back turned and his strong, erect figure unidentifiable from behind, were
lifting a cot and the lay brother in it, to move them a short way along the
wall, and make room for a new pallet and a new patient. The helper set down his
end of the bed as Cadfael and Hugh passed by the open doorway. He straightened
and turned, brushing his hands together to rub out the dents left by the
weight, and showed them the dark, level brows and burning eyes of Brother
Urien. In unaccustomed content with himself and the walls and persons about
him, he wore a slight, taut smile that curled his lips but never damped the
smouldering of his eyes. He watched them pass as if a shadow had passed, and
crossed their tracks as soon as they were by, to stack an armful of washed
linen in the press that stood in the passage.

In
the infirmary, by custom, all doors stood open, so that a call for help might
safely reach attentive ears, and help come hurrying. Voices, the chant of the
office, even bird song, circulated freely. Only in times of storm or heavy rain
or winter cold were doors closed and shutters secured, never as now, in the
heat of summer.

“The
man is lying,” said Hugh, pacing beside Cadfael in the great court, and
worrying at the texture of truth and deceit. “But also half the time he is
telling the truth, and which half holds the lies? Tell me that!”

“If
I could,” said Cadfael mildly, “I should be more than mortal.”

“He
had her trust, he knew what she was worth, he rode alone with her the last few
miles, and no trace of her since,” said Hugh, gnawing the evidence savagely.
“And yet, on the road there, he asked me time and again if I knew whether she
lived or was dead, and I would have sworn he was honest in asking. But now see
him! Halfway through that business, he stands there unmoved as a rock, and
never makes protest against being held, nor shows any further trouble over her
fate. What’s to be made of him?”

“Or
of any of this,” agreed Cadfael ruefully. “I’m of your mind, he is certainly
lying. He knows what he has not declared. Yet if he has possessed himself of
all she had, what has he done with it? It may not be great riches, but it would
be worth more to a man than the low pay and danger and sweat of a simple
soldier, yet here is he manifestly a simple soldier still, and nothing more.”

“Soldier
he may be,” said Hugh wryly, “but simple he is not. His twists and turns have
me baffled. Winchester he knows well — yes, maybe, but wherever he has served
the greater part of these three years, since this winter all forces have closed
in on Winchester. How could he not know it? And yet I’d have sworn, at first,
that he truly did not know, and longed to know, what had become of the girl.
Either that, or he’s the cunningest mime that ever twisted his face to
deceive.”

“He
did not seem to me greatly uneasy,” said Cadfael thoughtfully, “when you
brought him in. Wary, yes, and picking his words with care — and that gives
them all the more meaning,” he added, brightening. “I’ll be thinking on that.
But fearful or anxious, no, I would not say so.”

They
had reached the gatehouse, where the groom waited with Hugh’s horse. Hugh
gathered the reins and set toe in stirrup, and paused there to look over his
shoulder at his friend.

“I
tell you what, Cadfael, the only sure way out of this tangle is for that girl
to turn up somewhere, alive and well. Then we can all be easy. But there,
you’ve had more than your fair share of miracles already this year, not even
you dare ask for more.”

“And
yet,” said Cadfael, fretting at the disorderly confusion of shards that would
not fit together, “there’s something winks at me in the corner of my mind’s
eye, and is gone when I look towards it. A mere will-o’-wisp — not even a
spark…”

“Let
it alone,” said Hugh, wheeling his horse towards the gate. “Never blow on it
for fear it may go out altogether. If you breathe the other way, who knows? It
may grow into a candle-flame, and bring the moths in to singe their wings.”

Brother
Urien lingered long over stacking the laundered linen in its press in the
infirmary. He had let Fidelis pass without a sign, his mind still intent upon
the three who were left within the sickroom, and the stone walls brought hollow
echoes ringing across the passage, through the open doors. Brother Urien’s
senses were all honed into acute sensitivity by his inward anguish, to the
point where his skin crawled and his short hairs stood on end at the torture of
sounds which might seem soft and gentle to another ear. He moved with precision
and obedience to fulfil whatever Edmund required of him: a bed to be moved,
without disturbing its occupant, who was half-paralysed and very old, a new cot
to be installed ready for another sufferer.

He
turned to watch the departure of sheriff and herbalist brother without conceal,
his mind still revolving words sharply remembered. All those artifacts of
precious metal and semi-precious stones, vanished with a vanished woman. An
altar cross — no, that was of no importance here. But a cross made to match, on
a silver neck-chain… Benedictine brothers may not retain the trappings of the
person, the fruit of the world, however slight, without special permission,
seldom granted. Yet there are brothers who wear chains about the neck — one, at
least. He had touched, once, to bitter humiliation, and he knew.

The
time, too, spoke aloud, the time and the place. Those who have killed for a
desperate venture, for gain, and find themselves hard pressed, may seek refuge
wherever it offers. Gains may be hidden until flight is again possible and
safe. But why, then, follow that broken crusader here into Shrewsbury? Flight
would have been easy after Hyde burned, in that inferno who could count heads?

Yet
no one knew better than he how love, or whatever the name for this torment
truly is, may be generated, nursed, take tyrannical possession of a man’s soul,
with far greater fury and intensity here in the cloister than out in the world.
If he could be made to suffer it thus, driven blind and mad, why should not
another? And how could two such victims not have something to bind them
together, if nothing else, their inescapable guilt and pain? And Humilis was a
sick man, and could not live long. There would be room for another when he
vacated his place, when the void left after him began to ache intolerably.
Urien’s heart melted in him like wax, thinking on what Fidelis might be
enduring in his impenetrable silence.

He
finished the work to which he had been called in the infirmary, closed the
press, glanced once round the open ward, and went out to the court. He had been
a body-servant and groom in the world, and was without craft skills, and barely
literate until entering the Order. He lent his sinews and strength where they
were needed, indoors or out, to any labour. He did not grudge the effort such
labour cost him, nor feel his unskilled aid to be menial, for the fuel that
fired him within demanded a means of expending itself without, or there could
be no sleep for him in his bed, nor ease when he awoke. But whatever he did he
could not rid himself of the too well remembered face of the woman who had
spurned and left him in his insatiable hunger and thirst. He had seen again her
smooth young face, the image of innocence, and her great, lucid grey eyes in
the boy Rhun, until those eyes turned on him full and seared him to the bone by
their sweetness and pity. But her rich, burning russet hair, not red but brown
in its brightness, he had found only in Brother Fidelis, crowning and
corroborating those same wide grey eyes, the pure crystals of memory. The
woman’s voice had been clear, high and bold. This mirror image was voiceless,
and therefore could never be harsh or malicious, never condemn, never scarify.
And it was male, blessedly not of the woman’s cruel and treacherous clan. Once
Fidelis might have recoiled from him, startled and affrighted. But he had said
and believed then that it would not always be so.

He
had achieved the measured monastic pace, but not the tranquillity of mind that
should have gone with it. By lowering his eyes and folding his hands before him
in his sheltering sleeves he could go anywhere within these walls, and pass for
one among many. He went where he knew Fidelis had been sent, and where he would
surely go, valuing the bench where he sat by the true tenant who should have
been sitting there, and the vellum leaf on the desk before him, and the little
pots of colour deployed there, by the work Humilis had begun, and bade him
finish.

At
the far end of the scriptorium range in the cloister, under the south wall of
the church, Brother Anselm the precentor was trying out a chant on his small
hand-organ, a sequence of a half-dozen notes repeated over and over, like an
inspired bird-call, sweet and sad. One of the boy pupils was there with him,
lifting his childish voice unconcernedly, as gifted children will, wondering
why the elders make so much fuss about what comes by nature and costs no pain.
Urien knew little of music, but felt it acutely, as he felt everything, like
arrows piercing his flesh. The boy rang purer and truer than any instrument,
and did not know he could wring the heart. He would rather have been playing
with his fellow-pupils, out in the Gaye.

The
carrels of the scriptorium were deep, and the stone partitions cut off sound.
Fidelis had moved his desk so that he could sit half in shade, while the full
sunlight lit his leaf. His left side was turned to the sun, so that his hand
cast no shadow as he worked, though the coiled tendril which was his model for
the decoration of the capital letter M was wilting in the heat. He worked with
a steady hand and a very fine brush, twining the delicate curls of the stem and
starring them with pale, bright flowers frail as gossamer. When the singing
boy, released from his schooling, passed by at a skipping run, Fidelis never
raised his head. When Urien cast a long shadow and did not pass by, the hand
that held the brush halted for a moment, then resumed its smooth, long strokes,
but still Fidelis did not look up. By which token Brother Urien was aware that
he was known. For any other this mute painter would have looked up briefly, for
many among the brothers he would have smiled. And without looking, how could he
know? By a silence as heavy as his own, or by some quickening that flushed his
flesh and caused the hairs of his neck to rise when this one man of all men
came near?