‘The lord abbot’s been asking after you,’ said the porter, coming out from his lodge at sight of them. ‘He’s in his parlour, and the prior with him, and asks that you’ll join him there.’
They left their horses to the grooms, and went at once to the abbot’s lodging. In the panelled parlour Radulfus looked up from his desk, and Prior Robert, very erect and austere on a bench beside the window, looked down his nose with a marked suggestion of disapproval and withdrawal. The complexities of law and murder and manhunt had no business to intrude into the monastic domain, and he deplored the necessity to recognise their existence, and the very processes of dealing with them when they did force a breach in the wall. Close to his elbow, unobtrusive in his shadow, stood Brother Jerome, his narrow shoulders hunched, thin lips drawn tight, pale hands folded in his sleeves, the image of virtue assailed and bearing the cross with humility. There was always a strong element of complacency in Jerome’s humility, but this time there was also a faintly defensive quality, as though his rightness had somehow, if only by implication, been questioned.
‘Ah, you are back!’ said Radulfus. ‘You have not brought back the body of our guest so quickly?’
‘No, Father, not yet, they will be following us, but on foot it will take some time. It is just as Brother Cadfael reported it to you in the night. The man was stabbed in the back, probably as he was leading his horse, the path there being narrow and overgrown. You will know already that his saddle-roll was cut loose and stolen. By what Brother Cadfael observed of the body when he found it, the thing must have been done about the time of Compline, perhaps a little before. There’s nothing to show by whom. By the hour, he must have been on his way back here to your guest hall. By the way he faced as he fell, also, for the body was not moved, or his ring would have been taken, and he still wears it. But as to where he had been in those parts, there’s no knowing.’
‘I think,’ said the abbot, ‘we have something to show on that head. Brother Jerome here will tell you what he has now told to Prior Robert and me.’
Jerome was usually only too ready to hear his own voice, whether in sermon, homily or reproof, but it was noticeable that this time he was assembling his words with more than normal care.
‘The man was a guest and an upright citizen,’ he said, ‘and had told us at chapter that he was pursuing an offender against the law, one who had committed assault against the person of his steward and done him grievous harm, and then absconded from his master. I took thought afterwards that there was indeed one newcomer in these parts who might well be the man he sought, and I considered it the duty of every one of us to help the cause of justice and law. So I spoke to the lord of Bosiet. I told him that the young man who serves the hermit Cuthred, and who came here with him only a few weeks ago, does answer to the description he gave of his runaway villein Brand, though he calls himself Hyacinth. He is of the right age, his colouring as his master described it. And no one here knows anything about him. I thought it only right to tell him the truth. If the young man proved not to be Brand, there was no harm to him.’
‘And you told him, I believe,’ said the abbot neutrally, ‘how to get to the hermit’s cell, where he could find this young man?’
‘I did, Father, as was my duty.’
‘And he at once set off to ride to that place.’ ‘Yes, Father. He had sent his groom on an errand into the town, he was obliged to saddle up for himself, but he did not wish to wait, since most of the day was gone.’
‘I have spoken to the groom Warin, since we learned of his master’s death,’ said the abbot, looking up at Hugh. ‘He was sent to enquire after any craftsman in fine leather-work in Shrewsbury, for it seems that was the young man’s craft also, and Bosiet thought he might have tried to get work within the borough among those who could use his skills. There is no blame can attach to the servant, by the time he returned his master was long gone. His errand could not wait, it seems, until morning.’ His voice was measured and considered, with no inflection of approval or disapproval. ‘That solves, I think, the problem of where he had been.’
‘And where I must follow him,’ said Hugh, enlightened. ‘I’m obliged to you, Father, for pointing me the next step of the road. If he did indeed talk to Cuthred, at least we may learn what passed, and whether he got the answer he wanted?though plainly he was returning alone. Had he been bringing a captive villein with him, he would hardly have left him with free hands and a dagger about him. With your permission, Father, I’ll keep Brother Cadfael with me as witness, rather than take men-at-arms to a hermitage.’
‘Do so,’ said the abbot willingly. ‘This unfortunate man was a guest of our house, and we owe him every effort which may lead to the capture of his murderer. And every proper rite and service that can still be paid to his corpse. Robert, will you see to it that the body is reverently received when it comes? And Brother Jerome, you may assist. Your zeal to be of help to him should not be frustrated. You shall keep a night vigil with him in prayers for his soul.’
So there would be two lying side by side in the mortuary chapel tonight, Cadfael thought as they went out together from the parlour: the old man who had closed a long life as gently as a spent flower sheds it petals, and the lord of lands taken abruptly in his malice and hatred, with no warning, and no time to make his peace with man or God. Drogo Bosiet’s soul would be in need of all the prayers it could get.
‘And has it yet entered your mind,’ asked Hugh abruptly, as they rode out along the Foregate for the second time, ‘that Brother Jerome in his zeal for justice may have helped Bosiet to his death?’
If it had, Cadfael was not yet minded to entertain the thought. ‘He was on his way back,’ he said cautiously, ‘and empty-handed. It argues that he was disappointed. The boy is not his lost villein.’
‘It could as well argue that he is, and saw his doom bearing down on him in time to vanish. How then? He’s been in the woods there now long enough to know his way about. How if he was the hand that held the dagger?’
No denying that it was a possibility. Who could have better reason for slipping a knife into Drogo Bosiet’s back than the lad he meant to drag back to his own manor court, flay first, and exploit afterwards lifelong? ‘It’s what will be said,’ agreed Cadfael sombrely. ‘Unless we find Cuthred and his boy sitting peacefully at home minding their own business and meddling with no one else’s. Small use guessing until we hear what happened there.’
They approached the projecting tongue of Eaton land by the same path Drogo had used, and saw the small clearing in thick woodland open before them almost suddenly, as he had seen it, but in full daylight, while he had come in early dusk. Muted sunlight filtering through the branches turned the sombre grey of the stone hut to dull gold. The low pales of the fence that marked out the garden were set far apart, a mere sketched boundary, no bar to beast or man, and the door of the hut stood wide open, so that they saw through into the inner room where the constant lamp on the stone altar showed tiny and dim as a single spark, almost quenched by the light falling from the tiny shutterless window above. Saint Cuthred’s cell, it seemed, stood wide open to all who came.
A part of the enclosed garden was still wild, though the grass and herbage had been cut, and there the hermit himself was at work with mattock and spade, heaving up the matted clods and turning the soil below as he cleared it. They watched him at it as they approached, inexpert but dogged and patient, plainly unused to handling such tools or stooping to such labours as should have fallen to Hyacinth. Who, by the same token, was nowhere to be
