Brother Cadfael was watching Emma’s face just as intently as was her hopeless admirer, and it seemed to him that in the pleasure of knowing that her old servant had survived unharmed, she was proof against all other blows. The loss of the strongbox she received with unshaken serenity. In these surroundings, safe from any too pressing manifestation of his passion, she was even moved to comfort Roger. A kind-hearted girl, who did not like to see any of her own people out of sorts with his competence and his self-respect.
“You must not feel it so sharply,” she said warmly. “How could you have prevented? There is no fault attaches to you.”
“I took most of the money back to the barge with me last night,” pleaded Roger earnestly. “It’s safe locked away, there’s been no more tampering there. But Master Thomas’s account books, and some parchments of value, and charters …”
“Then there will be copies,” said Emma firmly. “And what is more, if they took the box, supposing it to be full of money, they’ll keep what money was left there, and most likely discard the box and the parchments, for what use can they make of those? We may get most of it back, you will see.”
Not merely a kind girl, but a girl of sense and fortitude, who bore up nobly under her losses. Cadfael looked at Hugh, and found Hugh looking at him, just as woodenly, but with one lively eyebrow signalling slightly sceptical admiration.
“Nothing is lost,” said Emma firmly, “of any value to compare with a life. Since Warin is safe, I cannot be sad.”
“Nevertheless,” said Hugh with deliberation, “it might be well if one abbey sergeant stood guard on your booth until the fair is over. For it does seem that all the misfortunes that should be rights be shared among all the abbey’s clients are falling solely upon you. Shall I ask Prior Robert to see to it?”
She looked down, wary and thoughtful, for a moment, and then lifted deep blue eyes wide and clear as the sky, and a degree more innocent than if they had but newly opened on the world. “It’s kind of you,” she said, “but surely everything has now been done to us. I don’t think it will be necessary to set a guard upon us now.”
Hugh came to Cadfael’s workshop after the midday meal, leaving Emma in Aline’s charge, helped himself to a horn of wine from Cadfael’s private store, and settled down on the bench under the eaves, on the shady side. The fragrance of the herbs lay like a sleepy load on the air within the pleached hedges, and set him yawning against his will and his mood, which was for serious discussion.
They were well away from the outer world here, the busy hum of the marketplace drifted to them only distantly and pleasantly, like the working music of Brother Bernard’s bees. And Brother Mark, weeding the herb-beds with delicate, loving hands, habit kilted to his knees, was no hindrance at all to their solitude.
“A separate creature,” said Brother Cadfael, eyeing him with detached affection “My priest, my proxy. I had to find some way of evading the fate that closed on me. There goes my sacrificial lamb, the best of the flock.”
“Some day he will take your confession,” said Hugh, watching Mark pluck out weeds as gently as though he pitied them, “and you’ll be a lost man, for he’ll know every evasion.” He sipped wine, drew it about his mouth thoughtfully, swallowed it and sat savouring the after-taste for a moment. “This fellow Warin had little to add,” he said then. “What do you say now? This cannot be chance.”
“No,” agreed Cadfael, propping the door of his workshop wide to let in the air, and coming to sit beside his friend, “it cannot be chance. The man is killed, stripped, his barge searched, his booth searched. Not a soul besides, at this fair where there are several as wealthy, has suffered any attack or any loss.
No, there is nothing done at hazard here.”
“What, then? Expound! The girl claimed there were things stolen from the barge.
Now something positive, a strongbox, the single portable thing in the booth that might confidently be supposed to hold valuables, is demonstrably stolen from this last assault. If these are not simple thefts, what are they? Tell me!”
“Stages in a quest,” said Cadfael. “It seems to me there’s a hunt afoot for something. I do not know what, but some quite single, small thing, and precious, which was, or was thought to be, in the possession of Master Thomas. On the night he came here he was murdered, and his body stripped. The first search. And it was fruitless, for the next day his barge was visited and ransacked. The second search.”
“Not altogether fruitless this time,” said Beringar dryly, “for we know on the best authority, do we not, that whoever paid that visit left the richer by three things, a silver chain, a girdle with a gold clasp, and a pair of embroidered gloves.”
“Hmmm!” Cadfael twitched his brown nose doubtfully between finger and thumb, and eyed the young man sidewise.
“Oh, come!” said Hugh indulgently, and flashed his sudden smile. “I may not stumble on these subtleties as quickly as you, but since knowing you I’ve had to keep my wits about me. The lady has a bold mind and an excellent memory, and I have no hope in the world of getting her to make a mistake in one detail of the embroidery on those lost gloves, but for all that, I doubt if they ever existed.”
“You might,” Cadfael suggested, though without much hope, “try asking her outright what it is she’s hiding.”
“I did!” owned Hugh, ruefully grinning. “She opened great, hurt eyes at me, and could not understand me! She knows nothing, she’s hiding nothing, she has nothing to tell more than she’s already told, and every word of that is truth.
But for all that, and however angelically, the girl’s lying. What was it stuck in your craw, and brought you up against the same shock before ever it dawned upon me?”
“I should be sorry,” said Cadfael slowly, “if anything I have done or said made you think any evil of the girl, for I think none.”
“Neither do I, you need not fear it. But I do think she may be meddling in something she would do better to let well alone, and I would rather, as you would, as Abbot Radulfus would, that no harm should come to her under our care.
Or ever, for that matter. I like her well.”
“When we went together to the barge,” said Cadfael,” and she took no more than a minute within to cry out that someone had been there, pawing through all their belongings, I never doubted she was telling truth. Women know how they leave things, it needs only a wrong fold to betray an alien hand, and certainly it shocked and startled
