startling contortions to prove it. He had not lost his skills. His fingers itched for the coloured rings and balls he used for his juggling, safely tucked away in their knotted cloth under his bed, but he feared they would be frowned on here. The ruin of his rebec also reposed in the corner of the porch next the cloister. He returned there after his breakfast to find Brother Anselm turning the wreck thoughtfully in his hands, and running a questing finger along the worst of the cracks.
The precentor was past fifty, a vague, slender, shortsighted person who peered beneath an untidy brown tonsure and bristling brows to match, and smiled amiably and encouragingly at the owner of this disastrous relic.
‘This is yours? Brother Cadfael told me how it had suffered. This has been a fine instrument. You did not make it?’
‘No. I had it from an old man who taught me. He gave it to me before he died. I don’t know,’ said Liliwin, ‘how to make them.’
It was the first time Brother Anselm had heard him speak since the shrill terror of the first invasion. He looked up alertly, tilting his head to listen. ‘You have the upper voice, very true and clear. I could use you, if you sing? But you must sing! You have not thought of taking the cowl, here among us?’ He recalled with a sigh why that was hardly likely under present circumstances. ‘Well, this poor thing has been villainously used, but it is not beyond help. We may try. And the bow is lost, you say.’ Liliwin had said no such thing, he was mute with wonder. Evidently Brother Cadfael had given precise information to a retentive enthusiast. ‘The bow, I must say, is almost harder to perfect than the fiddle, but I have had my successes. Have you skills on other instruments?’
‘I can get a tune out of most things,’ said Liliwin, charmed into eagerness.
‘Come,’ said Brother Anselm, taking him firmly by the arm, ‘I will show you my workshop and you and I between us, after High Mass, will try what can best be done for this rebec of yours. I shall need a helper to tend my resins and gums. But this will be slow and careful work, mind, and matter for prayer, not to be hastened for any cause. Music is study for a lifetime, son?a lifetime however long.’
He blew so like a warm gale that Liliwin went with him in a dream, forgetting how short a lifetime could also be.
Walter Aurifaber woke up that morning with a lingering headache, but also with a protesting stiffness in his limbs and restless animation in his mind that made him want to get up and stretch, and stamp, and move about briskly until the dullness went out of him. He growled at his patient, silent daughter, enquired after his journeyman, who had had the sense to make sure of his Sunday rest by vanishing from both shop and town for the day, and sat down to eat a substantial breakfast and stare his losses in the face.
Things were coming back to him, however foggily, including one incident he would just as soon his mother should not hear about. Money was money, of course, the old woman had the right of it there, but it’s not every day a man marries off his heir, and marries him, moreover, to a most respectable further amount of money. A little flourish towards a miserable menial might surely be forgiven a man, in the circumstances. But would she think so? He regretted it bitterly himself, now, reflecting on the disastrous result of his rare impulse of generosity. No, she must not hear of it!
Walter nursed his thick head and vain regrets, and took some small comfort in seeing his son and his new daughter-in-law off to church at Saint Mary’s, in their best clothes and properly linked, Margery’s hand primly on Daniel’s arm. The money Margery had brought with her, and would eventually bring, mattered now more than anything else until the lost contents of his strong-box could be recovered. His head ached again fiercely when he thought of it. Whoever had done that to the house of Aurifaber should and must hang, if there was any justice in this world.
When Hugh Beringar came, with a sergeant in attendance, to hear for himself what the aggrieved victim had to tell, Walter was ready and voluble. But he was none too pleased when Dame Juliana, awaiting Brother Cadfael’s visit, and foreseeing more strictures as to her behaviour if she wanted to live long, took it into her head to forestall the lecture by being downstairs when her mentor came and stumped her way down, cane in hand, prodding every tread before her and scolding Susanna away from attempting to check her. She was firmly settled on her bench in the corner, propped with cushions, when Cadfael came, and challenged him with a bold, provocative stare. Cadfael chose not to gratify her with homilies, but delivered the ointment he had brought for her, and reassured himself of the evenness of her breathing and heart, before turning to a Walter grown unaccountably short of words.
‘I’m glad to see you so far restored. The tales they told of you were twenty years too soon. But I’m sorry for your loss. I hope it may yet be recovered.’
‘Faith, so do I,’ said Walter sourly. ‘You tell me that rogue you have in sanctuary has no part of it on him, and while you hold him fast within there he can hardly unearth and make off with it. For it must be somewhere, and I trust the sheriff’s men here to find it.’
‘You’re very certain of your man, then?’ Hugh had got him to the point where he had taken his valuables and gone to stow them away in the shop, and there he had suddenly grown less communicative. ‘But he had already been expelled some time earlier, as I understand it, and no one has yet testified to seeing him lurking around your house after that.’
Walter cast a glance at his mother, whose ancient ears were pricked and her faded but sharp eyes alert. ‘Ah, but he could well have stayed in hiding, all the same. What was there to prevent it in the dark of the night?’
‘So he could,’ agreed Hugh unhelpfully, ‘but there’s no man so far claims he did. Unless you’ve recalled something no one else knows? Did you see anything of him after he was thrown out?’
Walter shifted uneasily, looked ready to blurt out a whole indictment, and thought better of it in Juliana’s hearing. Brother Cadfael took pity on him.
‘It might be well,’ he said guilelessly, ‘to take a look at the place where this assault was made. Master Walter will show us his workshop, I am sure.’
Walter rose to it thankfully, and ushered them away with alacrity, along the passage and in again at the door of his shop. The street door was fast, the day being Sunday, and he closed the other door carefully behind them, and drew breath in relief.
‘Not that I’ve anything to conceal from you, my lord, but I’d as lief my mother should not have more to worry her than she has already.’ Plausible cover, at any rate, for the awe of her in which he still went. ‘For this is where the thing happened, and you see from this door how the coffer lies in the opposite corner. And there was I, with the key in the lock and the lid laid back against the wall, wide open, and my candle here on the shelf close by. The light shining straight down into the coffer?you see??and what was within in plain view. And suddenly I hear a sound behind me, and there’s this minstrel, this Liliwin, creeping in at the door.’
‘Threateningly?’ asked Hugh, straight-faced. If he did not wink at Cadfael, his eyebrow was eloquent. ‘Armed
