Sanctuary Sparrow (8 page)

Twice she had raised her creamy eyelids during this complaint, once ruefully at her husband, and once, with a miraculously fleeting effect which should have eluded Margery, but did not, at Daniel, eyes blindingly bright in the one flash that shot from them, but instantly veiled and serene.

“Now, now, sweet,” said the wool-merchant indulgently, “you know how I shall hurry back to you.”

“And how long it will take,” she retorted, pouting. “Three or four nights solitary. And you’d better bring me something nice to sweeten me for it when you return.”

As she knew he would. He never came back from any journey but he brought her a gift to keep her sweet. He had bought her, but there was enough of cold sense in him, below his doting, to know that he had to buy her over and over again if he wanted to keep her. The day he acknowledged it, and examined the implications, she might well go in fear for her slender throat, for he was an arrogant and possessive man.

“You say very truly, madam!” said Margery, stiff-lipped. “I do know, indeed, how fortunate I am.”

Only too well! But every man’s fortune, and every woman’s too, can be changed given a little thought, perseverance and cunning.

Liliwin had spent his day in so unexpected and pleasant a fashion that for an hour and more at a time he had forgotten the threat hanging over him. As soon as High Mass was over, the precentor had hustled him briskly away to the corner of the cloister where he had already begun to pick apart, with a surgeon’s delicacy and ruthlessness, the fractured shards of the rebec. Slow, devoted work that demanded every particle of the pupil’s attention, if he was to assist at a resurrection. And excellent therapy against the very idea of death.

“We shall put together what is here broken,” said Brother Anselm, intent and happy, “for an avowal on our pan. No matter if the product, when achieved, turns out to be flawed, yet it shall speak again. If it speaks with a stammering voice, then we shall make another, as one generation follows its progenitor and takes up the former music. There is no absolute loss. Hand me here that sheet of vellum, son, and mark in what order I lay these fragments down.” Mere splinters, a few of them, but he set them carefully in the shape they should take when restored. “Do you believe you will play again upon this instrument?”

“Yes,” said Liliwin, fascinated, “I do believe.”

“That’s well, for faith is necessary. Without faith nothing is accomplished.” He mentioned this rare tool as he would have mentioned any other among those laid out to his hand. He set aside the fretted bridge. “Good workmanship, and old. This rebec had more than one master before it came to you. It will not take kindly to silence.”

Neither did he. His brisk, gentle voice flowed like a placid stream while he worked, and its music lulled like the purling of water. And when he had picked apart and set out in order all the fragments of the rebec, and placed the vellum that held them in a safe corner, covered with a linen cloth, to await full light next day, he confronted Liliwin at once with his own small portative organ, and demanded he should try his hand with that. He had no need to demonstrate its use, Liliwin had seen one played, but never yet had the chance to test it out for himself.

He essayed the fingering nimbly enough at his first attempt, but concentrated so totally on the tune he was playing that he forgot to work the little bellows with his left hand, and the air ran out with a sigh into silence. He caught himself up with a startled laugh, and tried again, too vigorously, his playing hand slow on the keys. At the third try he had it. He played with it, entranced, picked out air after air, getting the feel of it, balancing hand against hand, growing ambitious, attempting embellishments. Five fingers can do only so much.

Brother Anselm presented to him a curious, figured array of signs upon vellum, matched by written symbols which he knew to be words. He could not read them, since he could not read in any tongue. To him this meant nothing more than a pleasing pattern, such as a woman might draw for her embroidery.

“You never learned this mystery? Yet I think you would pick it up readily. This is music, set down so that the eye, no less than the ear, may master it. See here, this line of neums here! Give me the organ.”

He took it and played a long line of melody. “That—what you have heard—that is written down here. Listen again!” And again he plucked it jubilantly forth. “There, now sing me that!”

Liliwin flung up his head and paid him back the phrase.

“Now, follow me still… answer as I go.”

It was an intoxication, line after line of music to copy and toss back. Within minutes Liliwin had begun to embellish, to vary, to return a higher echo that chorded with the original.

“I could make of you a singer,” said Brother Anselm, sitting back in high content.

“I am a singer,” said Liliwin. He had never before understood fully how proud he was of being able to say so.

“I do believe it. Your music and mine go different ways, but both of them are made up of these same small signs here, and the sounds they stand for. If you stay a little, I shall teach you how to read them,” promised Anselm, pleased with his pupil. “Now, take this, practise some song of your own with it, and then sing it to me.”

Liliwin reviewed his songs, and was somewhat abashed to discover how many of them must be suppressed here as lewd and offensive. But not all were so. He had a favourite, concerned with the first revelation of young love, and recalling it now, he recalled Rannilt, as poor as himself, as unconsidered, in her smoky kitchen and coarse gown, with her cloud of black hair and pale, oval face lit by radiant eyes. He fingered out the tune, feeling his way, his left hand now deft and certain on the bellows. He played and sang it, and grew so intent upon the singing that he scarcely noticed how busily Brother Anselm was penning signs upon his parchment.

“Will you believe,” said Anselm, delightedly proffering the leaf, “that what you have just sung to me is written down here? Ah, not the words, but the air. This I will explain to you hereafter, you shall learn both how to inscribe and how to decypher. That’s a very pleasant tune you have there. It could be used for the ground of a Mass. Well, now, that’s enough for now, I must go and prepare for Vespers. Let be until tomorrow.”

Liliwin set the organetto tenderly back on its shelf, and went out, dazed, into the early evening. A limpid, pale-blue day was drifting away into a deeper blue twilight. He felt drained and gentle and fulfilled, like the day itself, silently and hopefully alive. He thought of his battered wooden juggling rings and balls, tucked away under his folded brychans in the church porch. They represented another of his skills, which, if not practised, would rust and be damaged. He was so far buoyed up by his day that he went to fetch them, and carried them away hopefully into the garden, which opened out level below level to the pease-fields that ran down to the Meole brook. There was no one there at this hour, work was over for the day. He untied the cloth, took out the six wooden balls and the rings after them, and began to spin them from hand to hand, testing his wrists and the quickness of his eye.

He was still stiff from bruises and fumbled at first, but after a while the old ease began to return to him, and his pleasure in accomplishment. This might be a very humble skill, but it was still an achievement, and his, and he cherished it. Encouraged, he put the balls and rings away, and began to try out the suppleness of his thin, wiry body, twisting himself into grotesque knots. That cost him some pain from muscles trampled and beaten, but he persisted, determined not to give up. Finally he turned cartwheels all along the headland across the top of the pease-fields, coiled himself into a ring and rolled down the slope to the banks of the brook, and made his way up again, the slope being gentle enough, in a series of somersaults.

Arrived again at the level where the vegetable gardens and the enclosed herbarium began, he uncurled himself, flushed and pleased, to find himself gazing up at a couple of yards distance into the scandalised countenance of a sour-faced brother almost as meagre as himself. He stared, abashed, into eyes rounded and ferocious with outrage.

“Is this how you reverence this holy enclave?” demanded Brother Jerome, genuinely incensed. “Is such foolery and lightmindedness fit for our abbey? And have you, fellow, so little gratitude for the shelter afforded you here? You do not deserve sanctuary, if you value it so lightly. How dared you so affront God’s enclosure?”

Liliwin shrank and stammered, out of breath and abased to the ground. “I meant no offence. I am grateful, I do hold the abbey in reverence. I only wanted to see if I could still master my craft. It is my living, I must practise it! Pardon if I’ve done wrong!” He was easily intimidated, here where he was in debt, and in doubt how to comport himself in a strange world. All his brief gaiety, all the pleasure of the music, ebbed out of him. He got to his feet almost clumsily, who had been so lissome only moments ago, and stood trembling, shoulders bowed and eyes lowered.

Brother Jerome, who seldom had business in the gardens, being the prior’s clerk and having no taste for manual labour, had heard from the great court the small sound, strange in these precincts, of wooden balls clicking together in mid-air, and had come to investigate in relative innocence. But once in view of the performance, and himself screened by bushes fringing Brother Cadfael’s herb-garden, he had not called a halt at once and warned the offender of his offence, but remained in hiding, storing up a cumulative fund of indignation until the culprit uncoiled at his feet. It may be that a degree of guilt on his own part rendered more extreme the reproaches he loosed upon the tumbler.

“Your living,” he said mercilessly, “ought to engage you rather in prayers and self-searchings than in these follies. A man who has such charges hanging over him as you have must concern himself first with his soul’s welfare, for whether he has a living to make hereafter or none, he has a soul to save when his debt in this world is paid. Think on that, and go put your trumpery away, as long as you are sheltered here. It is not fitting! It is blasphemy! Have you not enough already unpaid on your account?”

Liliwin felt the terror of the outer world close in on him: it could not be long evaded. As some within here wore hovering haloes, so he wore a noose, invisible but ever-present.

“I meant no harm,” he whispered hopelessly and turned, half-blind with misery, to grope for his poor bundle of toys and blunder hastily away.

“Tumbling and juggling, there in our gardens,” Jerome reported, still burning with offence, “like a vagabond player at a fair. How can it be excused? Sanctuary is lawful for those who come in proper deference, but this… I reproved him, of course. I told him he should be thinking rather of his eternal part, having so mortal a charge against him. “My living,” he says! And he with a life owing!”

Prior Robert looked down his patrician nose, and maintained the fastidious and grieved calm of his noble countenance. “Father Abbot is right to observe the sanctity of sanctuary, it may not be discarded. We are not to blame, and need not be concerned, for the guilt or innocence of those who lay claim to it. But we are, indeed, concerned for the good order and good name of our house, and I grant you this present guest is little honour to us. I should be happier if he took himself off and submitted himself to the law, that is true. But unless he does so, we must bear with him. To reprove where he offends is not only our due, but our duty. To use any effort to influence or eject him is far beyond either. Unless he leaves of his own will,” said Prior Robert, “both you and I, Brother Jerome, must succour, shelter and pray for him.”

How sincerely, how resolutely. But how reluctantly!

Chapter Five

Monday: from dawn to Compline

SUNDAY PASSED, CLEAR AND FINE, and Monday came up no less sunnily, a splendid washing day, with a warm air and a light breeze, and bushes and turf dry and springy. The Aurifaber household was always up and active early on washing days, which were saved up two or three weeks at a time, to make but one upheaval of the heating of so much water, and such labour of scrubbing and knuckling with ash and lye. Rannilt was up first, to kindle the fire under the brick and clay boiler and hump the water from the well. She was stronger than she looked and used to the weight. What burdened her far more, and to that she was not used, was the terror she felt for Liliwin.

It was with her every moment. If she slept, she dreamed of him, and awoke sweating with fear that he might be hunted out already and taken and she none the wiser. And while she was awake and working, his image was ever in her mind, and a great stone of anxiety hot and heavy in her breast. Fear for yourself crushes and compresses you from without, but fear for another is a monster, a ravenous rat gnawing within, eating out your heart.

What they said of him was false, could not under any circumstances be true. And it was his life at stake! She could not help hearing all that was said of him among them, how they all united to accuse him, and promised themselves he should hang for what he had done. What she was certain in her heart and soul he had not done! It was not in him to strike down any man, or rob any man’s coffers.

The locksmith, up early for him, heard her drawing up the bucket from the well, and came out from his back door to stroll down into the garden in the sunlight and pass the time of day. Rannilt did not think he would have troubled if he had known it was only the maidservant. He made a point of being attentive to his landlord’s family, and never missed the common neighbourly courtesies, but his notice seldom extended to Rannilt. Nor did he linger on this fine morning, but took a short turn about the yard and returned to his own door. There he looked back, eyeing for a moment the obvious preparations at the goldsmith’s house, the great mound of washing in hand, and the normal bustle just beginning.

Susanna came down with her arms full of linen, and went to work with her usual brisk, silent competence. Daniel ate his breakfast and went to his workshop, leaving Margery solitary and irresolute in the hall. Too much had happened on her wedding night, she had had no time to grow used to house and household, or consider her own place in it. Wherever she turned to make herself useful, Susanna had been before her. Walter lay late, nursing his sore head, and Dame Juliana kept her own chamber, but Margery was too late to carry food and drink to either, it was already done. There was no need yet to think of cooking, and in any case all the household keys were on Susanna’s girdle. Margery turned her attention to the one place where she felt herself and her own wishes to be dominant, and set to work to rearrange Daniel’s bachelor chamber to her own taste, and clear out the chest and press which must now make room for her own clothes and stores of linen. In the process she discovered much evidence of Dame Juliana’s noted parsimony. There were garments which must have belonged to Daniel as a growing boy, and could certainly never again be worn by him. Neatly mended again and again, they had all been made to last as long as possible, and even when finally outgrown, had still been folded away and kept. Well, she was now Daniel’s wife, she would have this chamber as she wanted it, and be rid of these useless and miserly reminders of the past. Today the household might still be running on its customary wheels, as though she had no part to play, but it would not always be so. She was in no haste, she had a great deal of thinking to do before she took action.

On her knees in the yard, Rannilt scrubbed and pummelled, her hands sore from the lye. By mid-morning the last of the washing was wrung and folded and piled into a great wicker basket. Susanna hoisted it on her hip and bore it away down the slope of the garden, and through the deep arch in the town wall, to spread it out on the bushes and the smooth plane of grass that faced almost due south to the sun. Rannilt cleared away the tub and mopped the floor, and went in to tend the fire and set the salt beef simmering for dinner.

Here quiet and alone, she was suddenly so full of her pain on Liliwin’s account that her eyes spilled abrupt tears into the pot, and once the flow began she could not dam it. She groped blindly about the kitchen, working by touch, and shedding helpless tears for the first man who had caught her fancy, and the first who had ever fancied her.

Absorbed into her misery, she did not hear Susanna come quietly into the doorway behind her, and halt there at gaze, watching the fumbling hands feeling their way, and the half-blind eyes still streaming.

“In God’s name, girl, what is it with you now?”

Rannilt started and turned guiltily, stammering that it was nothing, that she was sorry, that she was getting on with her work, but Susanna cut her off sharply:

“It is not nothing! I’m sick of seeing you thus moping and useless. You’ve been limp as a sick kitten this two days past, and I know why. You have that miserable little thief on your mind—I know! I know he wound about you with his soft voice and his creeping ways, I’ve watched you. Must you be fool enough to fret over a guilty wretch the like of that?”

She was not angry; she was never angry. She sounded impatient, even exasperated, but still contemptuously kind, and her voice was level and controlled as ever. Rannilt swallowed the choking residue of tears, shook the mist from her eyes, and began to be very busy with her pots and pans, looking hurriedly about her for a distraction which would turn attention from herself at any cost. “It came over me just for a minute: I’m past it now. Why, you’ve got your feet and the hem of your gown wet,” she exclaimed, seizing gratefully on the first thing that offered. “You should change your shoes.”

Susanna shrugged the diversion scornfully aside. “Never mind my wet feet. The river’s up a little, I was not noticing until I went too near the edge, leaning to hang a shirt on the bushes. What of your wet eyes? That’s more to the point. Oh, fool girl, you’re wasting your fancy! This is a common rogue of the roads, with many a smaller deed of the kind behind him, and he’ll get nothing but his due in the noose that’s waiting for him. Get sense, and put him out of your mind.”

“He is not a rogue,” said Rannilt, despairingly brave. “He did not do it, I know it, I know him, he could not. It isn’t in him to do violence. And I do fret for him, I can’t help it.”

“So I see,” said Susanna resignedly. “So I’ve seen ever since they ran him to ground. I tire of him and of you. I want you in your wits again. God’s truth, must I carry this household on my back without even your small help?” She gnawed a thoughtful lip, and demanded abruptly: “Will it cure you if I let you go see for yourself that the tumbler is alive and whole, and out of our reach for a while, more’s the pity? Yes, and likely to worm his way out of even this tangle in the end!”

She had spoken magical words. Rannilt was staring up at her dry-eyed, bright as a candle-flame. “See? See him? You mean I could go there?”

“You have legs,” said Susanna tartly. “It’s no distance. They don’t close their gates against anyone. You may even come back in your right senses, when you see how little store he sets by you, while you’re breaking your fool heart for him. You may get to know him for what he is, and the better for you. Yes, go. Go, and be done with it! This once I’ll manage without you. Let Daniel’s wife start making herself useful. Good practice for her.”

“You mean it?” whispered Rannilt, stricken by such generosity. “I may go? But who will see to the broth here, and the meat?”

“I will. I have often enough, God knows! I tell you, go, go quickly, before I change my mind, stay away all day long, if that will send you back cured. I can very well do without you this once. But wash your face, girl, and comb your hair, and do yourself and us credit. You can take some of those oat-cakes in a basket, if you wish, and whatever scraps were left from yesterday. If he felled my father,” said Susanna roughly, turning away to pick up the ladle and stir the pot simmering on the hob, “there’s worse waiting for him in the end, no need to grudge him a mouthful while he is man alive.” She looked back over a straight shoulder at Rannilt, who still hovered in a daze. “Go and visit your minstrel, I mean it, you have leave. I doubt if he even remembers your face! Go and learn sense.”

Lost in wonder, and only half believing in such mercies, Rannilt washed her face and tidied her tangle of dark hair with trembling hands, seized a basket and filled it with whatever morsels were brusquely shoved her way, and went out through the hall like a child walking in its sleep. It was wholly by chance that Margery was coming down the stairs, with a pile of discarded garments on her arm. She marked the small, furtive figure flitting past below, and in surprised goodwill, since this waif was alien and lonely here as she was, asked: “Where are you sent off to in such a hurry, child?”

Rannilt halted submissively, and looked up into Margery’s rounded, fresh countenance. “Mistress Susanna gave me leave. I’m going to the abbey, to take this provision to Liliwin.” The name, so profoundly significant to her, meant nothing to Margery. “The minstrel. The one they say struck down Master Walter. But I’m sure he did not! She said I may go, see for myself how he’s faring—because I was crying…”

“I remember him,” said Margery. “A little man, very young. They’re sure he’s the guilty one, and you are sure he is not?” Her blue eyes were demure. She hunted through the pile of garments on her arm, and very faintly and fleetingly she smiled. “He was not too well clothed, I recall. There is a cotte here that was my husband’s some years ago, and a capuchon. The little man could wear them, I think. Take them with you. It would be a pity to waste them. And charity is approved of in Heaven, even to sinners.”

She sorted them out gravely, a good dark-blue coat outgrown while it was still barely patched, and a much-mended caped hood in russet brown. “Take them! They’re of no use here.” None, except for the satisfaction it gave her to despatch them to the insignificant soul condemned by every member of her new family. It was her gesture of independence.

Rannilt, every moment more dazed, took the offerings and tucked them into her basket, made a mute reverence, and fled before this unprecedented and hardly credible vein of good will should run out, and food, clothing, holiday and all fall to ruin round her.

Susanna cooked, served, scoured and went about her circumscribed realm with a somewhat grim smile on her lips. The provisioning of the house under her governance was discreetly more generous than ever it had been under Dame Juliana, and on this day there was enough and to spare, even after she had carried his usual portion to Iestyn in the workshop, and sat with him for company while he ate, to bring back the dish to the kitchen afterwards. What remained was not worth keeping to use up another day, but there was enough for one. She shredded the remains of the boiled salt beef into it, and took it across to the locksmith’s shop, as she had sometimes done before when there was plenty.

John Boneth was at work at his bench, and looked up as she entered, bowl in hand. She looked about her, and saw everything in placid order, but no sign of Baldwin Peche, or the boy Griffin, probably out on some errand.

“We have a surfeit, and I know your master’s no great cook. I brought him his dinner, if he hasn’t eaten already.”

John had come civilly to his feet, with a deferential smile for her. They had known each other five years, but always at this same discreet distance. The landlord’s daughter, the rich master-craftsman’s girl, was no meat for a mere journeyman.

“That’s kind, mistress, but the master’s not here. I’ve not seen him since the middle of the morning, he’s left me two or three keys to cut. I fancy he’s off for the day. He said something about the fish rising.”

There was nothing strange in that. Baldwin Peche relied on his man to take charge of the business every bit as competently as he could have done himself, and was prone to taking holidays whenever it suited his pleasure. He might be merely making the round of the ale-houses to barter his own news for whatever fresh scandal was being whispered, or he might be at the butts by the riverside, betting on a good marksman, or out in his boat, which he kept in a yard near the Watergate, only a few minutes down-river. The young salmon must be coming up the Severn by this time. A fisherman might well be tempted out to try his luck.

“And you don’t know if he’ll be back?” Susanna read his face, shrugged and smiled. “I know! Well, if he’s not here to eat it… I daresay you have still room to put this away, John?” He brought with him, usually, a hunk of bread and a strip of salt bacon or a piece of cheese, meat was festival fare in his mother’s house. Susanna set down her bowl before him on the bench, and sat down on the customer’s stool opposite, spreading her elbows comfortably along the boards. “It’s his loss. In an ale-house he’ll pay more for poorer fare. I’ll sit with you, John, and take back the bowl.”

Rannilt came down the Wyle to the open gate of the town, and passed through its shadowed arch to the glitter of sunlight on the bridge. She had fled in haste from the house, for fear of being called back, but she had lingered on the way through the town for fear of what lay before her. For the course was fearful, to one unschooled, half-wild, rejected by Wales and never welcomed in England but as a pair of labouring hands. She knew nothing of monks or monasteries, and none too much even of Christianity. But there inside the abbey was Liliwin, and thither she would go. The gates, Susanna had said, were never closed against any.

On the far side of the bridge she passed close by the copse where Liliwin had curled up to sleep, and been hunted out at midnight. On the other side of the Foregate lay the mill pool, and the houses in the abbey’s grant, and beyond, the wall of the enclave began, and the roofs of infirmary and school and guest-hall within, and the tall bulk of the gatehouse. The great west door of the church, outside the gates, confronted her in majesty. But once timidly entering the great court, she found reassurance. Even at this hour, perhaps the quietest of the day, there was a considerable bustle of coming and going within there, guests arriving and departing, servants ambling about on casual errands, petitioners begging, packmen taking a midday rest, a whole small world of people, some of them as humble as herself. She could walk in there among them, and never be noticed. But still she had to find Liliwin, and she cast about her for the most sympathetic source of information.