They must surely all have left this shire. They’ll be found, if ever found at all, somewhere in the south, where they and she vanished.”
Humilis lay quiet, his eyelids closed, his lips moving soundlessly on the details of these chattels. “A very small fortune,” he said in a whisper. “But not small to some poor wretched souls. Do you truly believe she may have died for these few things?”
“Men, and women too,” said Hugh starkly, “have died for very much less.”
“Yes, true! A small cross,” said Humilis, lips moving again upon the recollected phrases,”the length of a little finger, set with yellow stones, and green agate and amethyst… Fellow to an altar cross of the same, but made for wearing. Yes, a man would know that again.”
The faint dew of weakness was budding again on his forehead, a great drop ran down into the folds of a closed eyelid. Cadfael wiped the corroding drops away, and frowned Hugh before him out at the door.
“I shall sleep…” said Humilis, and faintly and fleetingly smiled.
In the large room across the stone passage, where a dozen beds lay spaced in two rows, either side an open corridor, Brother Edmund and another brother, his back turned and his strong, erect figure unidentifiable from behind, were lifting a cot and the lay brother in it, to move them a short way along the wall, and make room for a new pallet and a new patient. The helper set down his end of the bed as Cadfael and Hugh passed by the open doorway. He straightened and turned, brushing his hands together to rub out the dents left by the weight, and showed them the dark, level brows and burning eyes of Brother Urien. In unaccustomed content with himself and the walls and persons about him, he wore a slight, taut smile that curled his lips but never damped the smouldering of his eyes. He watched them pass as if a shadow had passed, and crossed their tracks as soon as they were by, to stack an armful of washed linen in the press that stood in the passage.
In the infirmary, by custom, all doors stood open, so that a call for help might safely reach attentive ears, and help come hurrying. Voices, the chant of the office, even bird song, circulated freely. Only in times of storm or heavy rain or winter cold were doors closed and shutters secured, never as now, in the heat of summer.
“The man is lying,” said Hugh, pacing beside Cadfael in the great court, and worrying at the texture of truth and deceit. “But also half the time he is telling the truth, and which half holds the lies? Tell me that!”
“If I could,” said Cadfael mildly, “I should be more than mortal.”
“He had her trust, he knew what she was worth, he rode alone with her the last few miles, and no trace of her since,” said Hugh, gnawing the evidence savagely. “And yet, on the road there, he asked me time and again if I knew whether she lived or was dead, and I would have sworn he was honest in asking. But now see him! Halfway through that business, he stands there unmoved as a rock, and never makes protest against being held, nor shows any further trouble over her fate. What’s to be made of him?”
“Or of any of this,” agreed Cadfael ruefully. “I’m of your mind, he is certainly lying. He knows what he has not declared. Yet if he has possessed himself of all she had, what has he done with it? It may not be great riches, but it would be worth more to a man than the low pay and danger and sweat of a simple soldier, yet here is he manifestly a simple soldier still, and nothing more.”
“Soldier he may be,” said Hugh wryly, “but simple he is not. His twists and turns have me baffled. Winchester he knows well-yes, maybe, but wherever he has served the greater part of these three years, since this winter all forces have closed in on Winchester. How could he not know it? And yet I’d have sworn, at first, that he truly did not know, and longed to know, what had become of the girl. Either that, or he’s the cunningest mime that ever twisted his face to deceive.”
“He did not seem to me greatly uneasy,” said Cadfael thoughtfully, “when you brought him in. Wary, yes, and picking his words with care-and that gives them all the more meaning,” he added, brightening. “I’ll be thinking on that. But fearful or anxious, no, I would not say so.”
They had reached the gatehouse, where the groom waited with Hugh’s horse. Hugh gathered the reins and set toe in stirrup, and paused there to look over his shoulder at his friend.
“I tell you what, Cadfael, the only sure way out of this tangle is for that girl to turn up somewhere, alive and well. Then we can all be easy. But there, you’ve had more than your fair share of miracles already this year, not even you dare ask for more.”
“And yet,” said Cadfael, fretting at the disorderly confusion of shards that would not fit together,”there’s something winks at me in the corner of my mind’s eye, and is gone when I look towards it. A mere will-o’-wisp-not even a spark…”
“Let it alone,” said Hugh, wheeling his horse towards the gate. “Never blow on it for fear it may go out altogether. If you breathe the other way, who knows? It may grow into a candle-flame, and bring the moths in to singe their wings.”
Brother Urien lingered long over stacking the laundered linen in its press in the infirmary. He had let Fidelis pass without a sign, his mind still intent upon the three who were left within the sickroom, and the stone walls brought hollow echoes ringing across the passage, through the open doors. Brother Urien’s senses were all honed into acute sensitivity by his inward anguish, to the point where his skin crawled and his short hairs stood on end at the torture of sounds which might seem soft and gentle to another ear. He moved with precision and obedience to fulfil whatever Edmund required of him: a bed to be moved, without disturbing its occupant, who was half-paralysed and very old, a new cot to be installed ready for another sufferer.
He turned to watch the departure of sheriff and herbalist brother without conceal, his mind still revolving words sharply remembered. All those artifacts of precious metal and semi-precious stones, vanished with a vanished woman. An altar cross-no, that was of no importance here. But a cross made to match, on a silver neck-chain… Benedictine brothers may not retain the trappings of the person, the fruit of the world, however slight, without special permission, seldom granted. Yet there are brothers who wear chains about the neck-one, at least. He had touched, once, to bitter humiliation, and he knew.
The time, too, spoke aloud, the time and the place. Those who have killed for a desperate venture, for gain, and find themselves hard pressed, may seek refuge wherever it offers. Gains may be hidden until flight is again possible and safe. But why, then, follow that broken crusader here into Shrewsbury? Flight would have been easy after Hyde burned, in that inferno who could count heads?
Yet no one knew better than he how love, or whatever the name for this torment truly is, may be generated, nursed, take tyrannical possession of a man’s soul, with far greater fury and intensity here in the cloister than out in the world. If he could be made to suffer it thus, driven blind and mad, why should not another? And how could two such victims not have something to bind them together, if nothing else, their inescapable guilt and pain? And Humilis was a sick man, and could not live long. There would be room for another when he vacated his place, when the void left after him began to ache intolerably. Urien’s heart melted in him like wax, thinking on what Fidelis might
