Even if they were using you, think better of it, and who’s to know? Only let me go hence, and you keep a close mouth, and all’s yet well, for you as well as me.”
After another bleak silence Eddi’s voice said with cold suspicion, “Let you loose, and you the only one who knows where you’ve hidden the plunder? Do you take me for a fool? I should never see my share! Tell me the place, exact, and bring me to it with you, or I give you to the law.”
The listeners within felt, rather than heard, the faint sounds of writhing and struggling and baulking, like a horse resisting a rider, and then the sudden collapse, the abject surrender. “I put the money into my pouch with my own few marks,” owned the voice bitterly, “and threw his satchel into the river. The money is in my bed in the abbey. No one paid any heed to my entry with the Foregate dues remaining, why should they? And those I’ve accounted for properly. Come down with me, and I’ll satisfy you, I’ll pay you. More than the half, if you’ll only keep your mouth shut, and let me go free…”
“You within there,” suddenly bellowed Eddi, shaking with detestation, “come forth, for the love of God, and take this carrion away from under me, before I cut his villain throat, and rob the hangman of his own. Come out, and see what we’ve caught!”
And out they came, the sergeant to thrust across at once to bar any escape by the hatch, Cadfael to set his lantern safely on a beam well clear of the hay and straw, and tap away diligently with flint and steel until the tinder caught and glowed, and the wick burned up into a tiny flame. Eddi’s captive had uttered one despairing oath, and made one frantic effort to throw off the weight that held him down and break for the open air, but was flattened back to the boards with a thump, a large, vengeful hand splayed on his chest.
“He dares, he dares,” Eddi was grating through his teeth, “to try and buy my father’s head from me with money stolen money, abbey money! You heard? You heard?”
The sergeant leaned from the hatch and whistled for the two men he had had in hiding below in the barn. He was glad he had given the plan a hearing. The injured man live and mending well, the money located and safe everything would redound to his credit. Now send the prisoner bound and helpless with his escort to the castle, and off to the abbey to unearth the money.
The guarded flame of the lantern burned up and cast a yellow light about the loft. Eddi rose and stood back from his enemy, who sat up slowly and sullenly, still breathless and bruised, and blinked round them all with the large, ingenuous eyes and round, youthful face of Jacob of Bouldon, that paragon of clerks, so quick to learn the value of a rent-roll, so earnest to win the trust and approval of his master, and lift from him every burden, particularly the burden of a full satchel of the abbey’s dues.
He was grazed and dusty now, and the cheerful, lively mask had shrivelled into hostile and malevolent despair. With flickering, sidelong glances he viewed them all, and saw no way out of the circle. Longest he looked at the little, spry, bowed old man who came forth smiling at Cadfael’s shoulder. For in the wrinkled, lively face the lantern- light showed two eyes that caught reflected light though they had none of their own, eyes opaque as grey pebbles and as insensitive. Jacob stared and moaned, and softly and viciously began to curse.
“Yes,” said Brother Cadfael, “you might have saved yourself so vain an effort. I fear I was forced to practise a measure of deceit, which would hardly have taken in a true-born Shrewsbury man. Rhodri Fychan has been blind from birth.”
It was in some way an apt ending, when Brother Cadfael and the sergeant arrived back at the abbey gatehouse, about first light, to find Warin Harefoot waiting in the porter’s room for the bell for Prime to rouse the household and deliver him of his charge, which he had brought here for safety in the night. He was seated on a bench by the empty hearth, one hand clutching firmly at the neck of a coarse canvas sack. “He has not let go of it all night,” said the porter, “nor let me leave sitting t’other side of it as guard.”
Warin was willing enough, however, even relieved, to hand over his responsibility to the law, with a monk of the house for witness, seeing abbot and prior were not yet up to take precedence. He undid the neck of the sack proudly, and displayed the coins within.
“You did say, brother, there might be a reward, if a man was so lucky as to find it. I had my doubts of that young clerk I never trust a too-honest face! And if it was he well, I reasoned he must hide what he stole quickly. And he had a pouch on him the like of the other, near enough, and nobody was going to wonder at seeing him wearing it, or having money in it, either, seeing he had a small round of his own. And if he came a thought late, well, he’d made a point he might make a slower job of it than he’d expected, being a novice at the collecting. So I kept my eye on him, and got my chance this night, when I saw him creep forth after dark. In his bed it was, sewn into a corner of the straw pallet. And here it is, and speak for me with the lord abbot. Trade’s none so good, and a poor pedlar must live…”
Gaping down at him long and wonderingly, the sergeant questioned at last: “And did you never for a moment consider slipping the whole into your own pack, and out through the gates with it in the morning?”
Warin cast up a shy, disarming glance. “Well, sir, for a moment it may be I did. But I was never the lucky sort if I did the like, never a once but I was found out. Wisdom and experience turned me honest. Better, I hold, a small profit come by honestly than great gains gone down the wind, and me in prison for it just the same. So here’s the abbey’s gold again, every penny, and now I look to the lord abbot to treat a poor, decent man fair.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR ELLIS PETERS is the nom-de-crime of English novelist Edith Pargeter, author of many books under her own name. She is also well known as a translator of poetry and prose from the Czech and has been awarded the Gold Medal and Ribbon of the Czechoslovak Society for Foreign Relations for her services to Czech literature. A recipient of the Crime Writers Silver Dagger Award, Miss Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael mysteries have won mounting recognition and success in the United States. The author lives in Shropshire, England.
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