moved far enough to be out of earshot of the village.
“My lord …” She looked up at him with sharp blue eyes, and spoke in a purposeful undertone. “One more thing I can tell you about the dark man, that no one else saw. I said no word, for fear they would close up against him if they knew. He was a very well-looking man, I trusted him, even if he was not what he seemed …”
“In what particular?” asked Hugh, just as quietly.
“He kept his cloak close about him, my lord, and in the cold that was no marvel. But when he went away I followed a little, and I saw how the folds hung at his left side. Country lad or no, he wore a sword.”
“So they went from here together,” said Yves, as they rode down towards the highroad, where they must haste if they were to use the remainder of the daylight. He had been very silent, struggling with revelations that seemed only to make the pattern of events more complex and entangled. “He came back to look for us all, and found only Sister Hilaria. It was evening already, they would be caught in the darkness and the snow. And these same robbers and murderers who have ruined poor John must have attacked them, and left them both for dead.”
“So it would seem,” said Hugh somberly. “We have a plague among us that needs burning out before it spreads. But what are we to make of this simple countryman who wore a sword under his cloak?”
“And asking after us!” Yves recalled, marvelling. “But I know no one like that.”
“What like was the young lord who took away your sister?”
“Not black, nor like a hawk, rather fair-skinned, and fair in the hair, too. And besides, even if he came seeking the two of us she’d left behind, he would not come up from the highroad, not according to the way we set off when I followed them. And he would not come dressed as a peasant, either. Nor alone.”
All of which was shrewd sense. There were, of course, other possibilities. The men of Gloucester, elated by their gains, might well be sending agents in disguise into these regions, probing for any weak spots, and such envoys, thought Cadfael, might have been told to pursue, at the same time, the search for Laurence d’Angers’ nephew and nice, strayed in the Worcester panic.
“Let it lie by a while,” said Beringar, half-grim and half-appreciative, as if he looked forward to interesting encounters. “We shall certainly hear more of Cleeton’s dark stranger, if we just bide quiet and bear his image in mind.”
They were within two miles of Ludlow before the expected snow began with the dusk. They drew close cloak and capuchon, and rode sturdily with heads down, but so close to home that they were in no danger of losing the road. Hugh parted from them under the walls of Ludlow, to ride in to his company there, leaving two of his men to escort Cadfael and the boy the short way on to Bromfield. Even Yves had lost his tongue by then, a little drunk with fresh air and exercise, and already growing hungry, for all he had eaten his hunk of bread and strip of hard bacon long before. He sat braced and stolid in the saddle, hunched under his hood, but emerged from it with a face like a rosy apple as soon as they lighted down in the great court at the priory. Vespers was long over. Prior Leonard was hovering, watchful and uneasy, for the return of his fledgling, and ventured out into the thick haze of snow to reclaim him and bring him in to supper.
It was after Compline when Beringar rode in, let his tired mount be led away to the stables, and came to find Cadfael, who was sitting by the bed where Brother Elyas already slept his secret, remote and troubled sleep. At sight of Hugh’s face, full of hard tidings, Cadfael laid a finger to his lip, and rose to steal away from the bedside into the anteroom, where they could talk without disturbing the sleeper.
“Our friend above Cleeton,” said Hugh, sitting back with a great sigh against the panelled wall, “is not the only one who had fallen victim, Cadfael. We have the devil among us, no question. Ludlow’s in a hum tonight. It seems one of Dinan’s archers has an old father at a hamlet south of Henley, a free tenant holding from Mortimer, and today the lad went off to visit, to see how the old man was making out in this hard weather. A holding not two miles from Ludlow, though solitary. He found the place as we found Druel’s homestead. Not burned, though?smoke or flames would have been seen, and brought Dinan out with all his force like a swarm of bees disturbed. But swept clear of life, goods, gear and all. And there the folk did not escape. Butchered, every one, except for one poor idiot wretch the archer found wandering from house to house, foraging for any crumbs left to live on.”
Brother Cadfael gaped at him in appalled wonder. “That they should dare, so near a strong town!”
“Trying out their claws, in despite of a well-found garrison. And the one man left alive, who hid in the woods until the raiders left, may be uncertain in his wits, but he saw it all, and has given an account that makes excellent sense, and for my part, I think him a good witness. And he says there were about twenty men, and they had daggers, axes and swords among them. Three, he says, were mounted. They came about midnight, and in a few hours had driven off all the stock and departed into the night. And he has small notion of how many days he has been solitary and starving there, but such things as the changes of weather he understands very well, and he says, and will not be shifted, that this took place on the night of the first hard frost, when all the brooks stopped flowing.”
“I take your meaning,” said Cadfael, and gnawed his knuckles in fierce thought. “The same two-legged wolves? The same night, surely. The first hard frost! About midnight this slaughter and pillage by Henley … As if they set out deliberately to blacken Dinan’s face!”
“Or mine,” said Hugh grimly.
“Or King Stephen’s! Well, so they moved off with their spoils maybe two hours after midnight. They would not move fast, driving cattle and carrying food and grain. Not long before dawn they ransacked and burned John Druel’s holding, high on Clee. And in between?would you not say, Hugh??in between they happened on Brother Elyas and Sister Hilaria, and after their fashion let loose in a little exuberant sport, leaving both dead or dying. Could there be two such bands out on their grisly business on the same night? A wild night, a blizzard night, that might well keep even thieves and vagabonds close to home. There are here men who know these parts like their own palms, Hugh, and neither snow nor frost can cage them.”
“Two such bands?” said Hugh, darkly pondering. “No, that’s out of the reckoning. And consider the line they took that night. The night’s ventures began here under our noses?that’s the furthest range of their foray. They returned eastward, crossing the highway?for somewhere there your Brother Elyas was found?and before dawn they were rounding the high shoulder of Titterstone Clee, where they burned out Druel’s holding. It may not even have been in their plan, simply a frolic by men drunk with success. But it was on their way home, for they’d want to be snug and unseen by dawn. Agreed?”
“Agreed. And are you thinking, Hugh, what I am thinking? Yves rushes out to recall his sister from her folly, and strikes off from that holding uphill, perhaps not on the same level, but surely in the same direction your outlaws took on their way home, two nights later. Somewhere in those uplands lies the manor to which his sister fled with her lover. Does it not look as though he may have taken her to a house far too close neighbor to the devil to be a safe place either for him or for her?”
