when I complained, she threw me a penny, and told them to put me out!’
So she would, thought Cadfael ruefully, seeing her life-blood spilled if a prized possession was broken, she who hoarded every groat that was not spent on her perverse tenderness for her soul, which brought alms flowing to the abbey altars, and rendered Prior Robert her cautious friend.
‘And they did it?’ It would not have been a gentle ejection, they would all have been inflamed and boisterous by them. ‘How late was that? An hour before midnight?’
‘More. None of them had left, then. They tossed me out of door, and wouldn’t let me in again.’ He had long experience of his own helplessness in similar circumstances, his voice sagged despondently. ‘I couldn’t even pick up my juggling balls, I’ve lost them all.’
‘And you were left chill in the night, thrown out of the burgage. Then how came this hunt after you?’ Cadfael smoothed a turn of his linen roll round the thin arm that jerked in his hands with frustrated rage. ‘Hold still, child, that’s right! I want this slit well closed, it will knit clean if you take ease. What did you do?’
‘Crept away,’ said Liliwin bitterly. ‘What else could I do? The watch let me out of the wicket in the town gate, and I crossed the bridge and slipped into the bushes this side, meaning to make off from this town in the morning, and make for Lichfield. There’s a decent grove above the path down to the river, the other side the highroad from the abbey here, I went in there and found me a good place in the grass to sleep the night out.’ But with his grievance boiling and festering in him, and his helplessness over and above, if what he told was truth. And long acquaintance with injustice and despite does not reconcile the heart.
‘Then how comes it the whole pack of them should be hunting you an hour or so later, and crying murder and theft on you?’
‘As God sees me,’ blurted the youth, quaking, ‘I know no more than you! I was near to sleeping when I heard them come howling across the bridge. I’d no call to suppose it was ought to do with me, not until they were streaming down into the Foregate, but it was a noise to make any man afraid, whether he’d anything on his conscience or no. And then I could hear them yelling murder and vengeance, and crying it was the mumper who did it, and baying for my blood. They spread out and began to beat the bushes, and I ran for my life, being sure they’d find me. And all the pack of them came roaring after. They were all but plucking at my hair when I stumbled in here at the door. But God strike me blind if I know what I’m held to have done?and dead if I’m lying to you now!’
Cadfael completed his bandage, and drew the tattered sleeve down over it. ‘According to young Daniel, it seems his father’s been struck down and his strong-box emptied. A poor way of rounding off a wedding night! Do you tell me all this can have happened after you were put out without your pay? On the face of it, that might turn their minds to you and your grievance, if they were casting about for a likely felon.’
‘I swear to you,’ insisted the young man vehemently, ‘the goldsmith was hale and well the last time I set eyes on him. There was no quarrelling, no violence but what they used on me, they were laughing and drinking and singing still. What’s happened since I know no more than you. I left the place?what use was there in staying? Brother, for God’s sake believe me! I’ve touched neither the man nor his money.’
‘Then so it will be found,’ said Cadfael sturdily. ‘Here you’re safe enough in the meantime, and you must needs put your trust in justice and Abbot Radulfus, and tell your tale as you’ve told it to me when they question you. We have time, and given time, truth will out. You heard Father Abbot?stay here within the church tonight, but if they come to a decent agreement tomorrow you may have the run of the household.’ Liliwin was very cold to the touch, with fear and shock, and still trembling. ‘Oswin,’ said Cadfael briskly, ‘go and fetch me a couple of brychans from the store, and then warm me up another good measure of wine on the brazier, and spice it well. Let’s get some warmth into him.’
Oswin, who had held his tongue admirably while his eyes devoured the stranger, departed in a flurry of zeal to do his errands. Liliwin watched him go, and then turned to watch Cadfael no less warily. Small wonder if he felt little trust in anyone just now.
‘You won’t leave me? They’ll be peering in at the door again before the night’s out.’
‘I won’t leave you. Be easy!’
Advice difficult to follow, he admitted wryly, in Liliwin’s situation. But with enough mulled wine in him he might sleep. Oswin came again glowing with haste and the flush of bending over the brazier, and brought two thick, rough blankets, in which Liliwin thankfully wound himself. The spiced draught went down gratefully. A little colour came back to the gaunt, bruised face.
‘You go to your bed, lad,’ said Cadfael, leading Oswin towards the night stairs. ‘You can, now, he’ll do till morning. Then we shall see.’
Brother Oswin looked back in some wonder at the swaddled body almost swallowed up in Prior Robert’s capacious stall, and asked in a whisper: ‘Do you think he can really be a murderer, though?’
‘Child,’ said Cadfael, sighing, ‘until we get some sensible account of what’s happened in Walter Aurifaber’s burgage tonight, I doubt if there’s been murder done at all. With enough drink in them, the fists may well have started flying, and a few noses been bloodied, and some fool may very well have started a panic, with other fools ready enough to take up the cry. You go to your bed, and wait and see.’
And so must I wait and see, he thought, watching Oswin obediently climb the stair. It was all very well distrusting the alarms of the moment, but for all that, not all those voluble accusers had been drunk. And something unforeseen had certainly happened in the goldsmith’s house, to put a violent end to the celebrations of young Daniel’s marriage. How if Walter Aurifaber had really been struck dead? And his treasury robbed? By that woebegone scrap of humanity huddled in his brychans, half-drunk with the wine they had poured into him, half asleep but held alert by terror? Would he dare, even with a bitter grievance? Could he have managed the affair, even if he had dared? One thing was certain, if he had robbed he must have disposed of his gains in short order in the dark, in a town surely none too well known to him. In those scanty garments of his, that threadbare motley, there was barely room to conceal the single penny the old dame had thrown at him, much less the contents of a goldsmith’s coffer.
When he approached the stall, however quietly, the bruised eyelids rolled wide from the dark blue eyes, and they fixed on him in instant dread.
‘Never shrink, it’s I. No one else will trouble you this night. And my name, if you need it, is Cadfael. And yours is Liliwin.’ A name strangely right for a vagabond player, very young and solitary and poor, and yet proud of his proficiency in his craft, tumbler, contortionist, singer, juggler, dancer, purveying merriment for others while he found little cause to be merry himself. ‘How old are you, Liliwin?’
Half asleep and afraid to give way and sleep in earnest, he looked ever younger, dwindling into a swaddled child, reassuringly flushed now as the chill ebbed out of him. But he himself did not know the answer. He could only knit his fair brows and hazard doubtfully: ‘I think I may be turned twenty. It could be more. The mummers may have
