‘As for seeing,’ said Brother Rhys ruefully, ‘I’m as little profit to you, brother, as I am to myself. I know if another inmate passes by me and I know which of them it is, and I know light from dark, but little more. But my ears, I dare swear, have grown sharper as my eyes have grown dimmer. I heard the door of the chamber opposite, where the sheriff lay, open twice, now you ask me to cudgel my memory. You know it creaks, opening. Closing, it’s silent.’ ‘So someone entered there or at least opened the door. What more did you hear? Did anyone speak?’ ‘No, but I heard a stick tapping, very lightly, and then the door creaked. I reckoned it must be Brother Wilfred, who helps here when he’s needed, for he’s the only brother who walks with a stick, being lame from a young man.’ ‘Did he go in?’ ‘That you may better ask him, for I can’t tell you. All was quiet a while, and then I heard him tap away along the passage to the outer door. He may only have pushed the door open to look and listen if all was well in there.’ ‘He must have drawn the door to again after him,’ said Cadfael, ‘or you would not have heard it creak again the second time. When was it Brother Wilfred paid his visit?’ But Rhys was vague about time. He shook his head and pondered. ‘I did drowse for a while after my dinner. How should I know for how long? But they must have been still in the refectory some time after that, for it wasn’t until later that Brother Edmund came back.’ ‘And the second time?’ ‘That must have been some while later, it might be as much as a quarter, hour. The door creaked again. He had a light step, whoever came, I just caught the fall of his foot on the threshold, and then nothing. The door making no sound, drawn to, I don’t know how long he was within there, but I fancy he did go in. Brother Wilfred might have a proper call to peer inside to see all was well, but this other one had none.’ ‘How long was he within there? How long could he have been? Did you hear him leave?’ ‘I was in a doze again,’ admitted Rhys regretfully. ‘I can’t tell you. And he did tread very soft, a young man’s tread.’ So the second could have been Elis, for there had been no word spoken when Edmund followed him in and expelled him, and Edmund from long sojourning among the sick trod as silently as a cat. Or it might have been someone else, someone unknown, coming and going undisturbed and deadly, before ever Elis intruded with his avowedly harmless errand.
Meantime, he could at least find out if Brother Wilfred had indeed been left here to keep watch, for Cadfael had not numbered the brothers in the refectory at dinner, or noticed who was present and who absent. He had another thought.
‘Did anyone from within here leave this room during all that time? Brother Maurice, for one, seldom sleeps much during the day, and when others are sleeping he may well be restless, wanting company.’ ‘None of them passed by me to the door while I was waking,’ said Rhys positively. ‘And I was not so deep asleep but I think I should have awakened if they had.’ Which might very well be true, yet could not be taken for granted. But of what he had heard he was quite certain. Twice the door had creaked open wide enough to let somebody in.
Brother Maurice had spoken up for himself without even being asked, as soon as the sheriff’s death was mentioned, as daily it would be now until the truth was known and the sensation allowed to fade away into oblivion. Brother Edmund reported it to Cadfael after Compline, in the half, hour of repose before bed.
‘I had prayers said for his soul, and told them tomorrow we should say a Mass for him, an honourable officer who died here among us and had been a good patron of our house. Up stands Maurice and says outright that he will faithfully put up prayers for the man’s salvation, for now at last his debts are fully paid, and divine justice has been done. I asked him by whose hand, seeing he knew so much,’ said Edmund with uncharacteristic bitterness, but even more resignation, ‘and he reproved me for doubting that the hand was God’s. Sometimes I question whether his ailment of the mind is misfortune or cunning. But try to pin him down and he’ll slip through your fingers every time. He is certainly very content with this death. God forgive us all our backslidings and namely those into which we fall unwitting.’ ‘Amen!’ said Cadfael fervently. ‘And he’s a strong, able man, and always in the right, even if it came to murder. But where would he lay hands on such a cloth as I have in mind?’ He remembered to ask: ‘Did you leave Brother Wilfred to keep a close eye on things here, when you went to dinner in the refectory?’ ‘I wish I had,’ owned Edmund sadly. ‘There might have been no such evil then. No, Wilfred was at dinner with us, did you never see him? I wish I had set a watch, with all my heart. But that’s hindsight. Who was ever to suppose that murder would walk in and let loose chaos on us? There was nothing to give me warning.’ ‘Nothing,’ agreed Cadfael and brooded, considering. ‘So Wilfred is out of the reckoning. Who else among us walks with a stick? None that I know of.’ ‘There’s Anion is still on a crutch,’ said Edmund, ‘though he’s about ready to discard it. He rather flies with it now than hobbles, but for the moment it’s grown a habit with him, after so stubborn a break. Why, are you looking for a man with a prop?’ Now there, thought Cadfael, going wearily to his bed at last, is a strange thing. Brother Rhys, hearing a stick tapping, looks for the source of it only among the brothers; and I, making my way round the infirmary, never give a thought to any but those who are brothers, and am likely to be blind and deaf to what any other may be up to even in my presence. For it had only now dawned on him that when he and Brother Edmund entered the long room, already settling for the evening, one younger and more active soul had risen from the corner where he sat and gone quietly out by the door to the chapel, the leather, shod tip of his crutch so light upon the stones that it seemed he hardly needed it, and could only have taken it away with him, as Edmund said, out of habit or in order to remove it from notice.
Well, Anion would have to wait until tomorrow. It was too late to trouble the repose of the ageing sick tonight.
In a cell of the castle, behind a locked door, Elis and Eliud shared a bed no harder than many they had shared before and slept like twin babes, without a care in the world. They had care enough now. Elis lay on his face, sure that his life was ended, that he would never love again, that nothing was left to him, even if he escaped this coil alive, but to go on Crusade or take the tonsure or undergo some barefoot pilgrimage to the Holy Land from which he would certainly never return. And Eliud lay patient and agonising at his back, with an arm wreathed over the rigid, rejecting shoulders, fetching up comfort from where he himself had none. This cousin, brother of his was far too vehemently alive to die for love, or to succumb for grief because he was accused of an infamy he had not committed. But his pain, however curable, was extreme while it lasted.
‘She never loved me,’ lamented Elis, tense and quivering under the embracing arm. ‘If she had, she would have trusted me, she would have known me better. If ever she’d loved me, how could she believe I would do murder?’ As indignantly as if he had never in his transports sworn that he would! That or anything.
‘She’s shocked to the heart for her father,’ pleaded Eliud stoutly. ‘How can you ask her to be fair to you? Only wait, give her time. If she loved you, then still she does. Poor girl, she can’t choose. It’s for her you should be sorry. She takes this death to her own account, have you not told me? You’ve done no wrong and so it will be proved.’ ‘No, I’ve lost her, she’ll never let me near her again, never believe a word I say.’ ‘She will, for it will be proven you’re blameless. I swear to you it will! Truth will come out, it must, it will.’ ‘If I don’t win her back,’ Elis vowed, muffled in his cradling arms, ‘I shall die!’ ‘You won’t die, you won’t fail to win her back,’ promised Eliud in desperation. ‘Hush, hush and sleep!’ He reached out a hand and snuffed out the failing flame of their tiny lamp. He knew the tensions and releases of this body he had slept beside from childhood, and knew that sleep was already a weight on Elis’s smarting eyelids. There are those who come brand, new into the new day and have to rediscover their griefs. Eliud was no such person. He nursed his griefs, unsleeping, into the small hours, with the chief of them fathoms deep under his protecting arm.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
ANION THE CATTLE, MAN, for want of calf or lamb to keep his hand in within the abbey enclave, had taken to spending much of his time in the stables, where at least there was horseflesh to be tended and enjoyed. Very soon now he would be fit to be sent back to the grange where he served, but he could not go until Brother Edmund discharged him. He had a gifted hand with animals, and the grooms were on familiar and friendly terms with him.
Brother Cadfael approached him somewhat sidelong, unwilling to startle or dismay him too soon. It was not
