“They said?unless I did all perfectly, spoke the right words, made all above suspicion … Huon would have his life…”
“Yes … Hush now, softly! Yes, I know!”
“But if I did all well, he should go free …”
Yes, she had been ready to sell herself, body and will and hopes and all, to see Joscelin delivered. She had her own bravery.
“Help him!” she said, huge eyes like purple flowers overblown, and closed her small hand, fine-boned like a little bird, but with a little bird’s strong and compelling grip, on Cadfael’s hand. “He has not stolen or killed … I know!”
“If I can!” breathed Cadfael, and stooped to conceal her from Agnes in the doorway. She was very quick, she lay back in mute acceptance, eyes veiled; the hand was empty and limp as before. Not for several more minutes did she raise her lids again and look up, answer faintly and wonderingly when Agnes asked her, with genuine anxiety but little kindness, how she did, and drink the bitter, aromatic draught Cadfael presented to her lips.
“She should be left alone in quietness,” he advised when he took his leave, minded to procure for her, if he could, the solitude she needed, deliverance from the company of people whose very presence was oppression. “She will sleep. Such seizures are as exhausting as great exertion. If Father Abbot permits, I will look in on her before Vespers, and bring her a syrup that will ensure her a peaceful night.”
That, at least, they might allow her. They had her securely in their power, she could not escape, but at present no more could be done with her or to her. Domville was dead, there would have to be reconsideration now, the field was open to other bidders. It was not deliverance, but it was a respite. Time to give some thought to the circumstances of this violent death, and the fate of the unfortunate young man at whose door it was being laid. There were a great many questions not yet asked, let alone answered.
It was towards noon that one of the men-at-arms combing the copses and gardens behind the houses of the Foregate on the north side came to his sergeant and said brightly: “There’s but one garden left unexamined in all this array, and now I mind me there could be good sense in looking there, too. Bishop de Clinton’s house itself!” And when he was cried down with mention of the folly of hiding in the very lion’s mouth, he defended his notion earnestly.
“Not such folly, neither! Suppose this fellow’s listening to the pack of you now, making mock of the very idea! He’d have the laugh if he’s lying low within there, and you refusing to believe it possible. The one place you put out of the question is the one place he might have wit enough to be. And don’t forget his horse is within there, and with all this running hither and thither, who’s to care whether the stable’s left open?”
The sergeant thought the argument worth considering, and authorized the search of the bishop’s garden, byres and stables, his orchard, all the ground within his walls. In due course they arrived at the hay-store by the rear wall. They did not find Joscelin Lucy, but they did find plain evidence that someone had lain there in the hay, and left behind him the heel of a loaf and the core of an apple, besides the impress in the fodder of a long young body, clear to be seen. Joscelin Lucy knew this place, and the wicket in the wall was unbarred. No one had any doubt as to who the vanished guest had been.
So the man-at-arms who had insisted on entry here, though he failed of getting the credit for a capture, did well enough out of his suggestion to be commended by his officer, and was not ill-content with the enterprise.
6
Huon de Domville lay naked beneath a linen cerecloth in the mortuary chapel, and round about him stood the abbot and prior, the sheriff of the county, the dead man’s nephew and squire, Sir Godfrid Picard, who should by this time have been his uncle by marriage, and Brother Cadfael.
Simon Aguilon was still cloaked and gloved from his strenuous part in the morning’s search, and looked haggard and worried, as well he might, at the responsibility that had fallen on him as the dead man’s nearest kin here. Picard was gnawing the black, clipped fringe of his beard, and brooding on his losses and the openings now left to him. Radulfus was quietly and scrupulously intent on what Cadfael was expounding.
The abbot was a man of the world and of the church, of wide experience, but not so wide as to include those manifestations of violence which were an open book to Brother Cadfael, who had been soldier and sailor besides. Rare among men of wide experience, Radulfus knew precisely the gaps that were left, and was willing to be instructed. The honour and integrity of his house was his prime concern, and in that criterion pure justice was implied. As for Prior Robert, his Norman loyalties were outraged, since a Norman lord had been removed by murder. In his own way he required a vengeance just as surely as did Picard.
“The head injuries,” said Brother Cadfael, his palm under the newly laved and combed head, “would have been no danger, had they been all. But the blow stunned him and laid him open to assault. Now, see …” He drew down the linen cloth below the great barrel of a breast and the massive upper arms. “He fell asprawl on his back, head against the tree, arms and legs spread. My lord Prestcote here saw him so, and so did Brother Edmund and certain novices of our house. I could not then see what I have seen now, by reason of his clothing. Look here at the inner side of his upper arms, those round black bruisings in the muscle. See those arms spread, and consider what fell upon him, senseless as he was. His enemy kneeled here upon these arms, reached here to his throat.”
“And that would not rouse him?” asked the abbot gravely, following Cadfael’s blunt brown finger as he traced the prints of murder.
“There was some effort made.” Cadfael recalled the deep pits Domville’s boot-heels had scored in the turf. “But by the body only, as men jerk from wounds when they have no more power to resist them. His senses were out of him, he could not fight his assailant. And these were strong hands, and resolute. See here, where both thumbs, one over the other, were driven in. The apple of his neck is ruptured.”
He had not had the opportunity until now to look more closely at that savage injury. Under the short beard the slash made by the rope drew a dark-red line, from which the beads of blood had been washed away. The black bruises left by the strangler’s hands showed up clearly.
“Here is every sign of a madly vindictive attacker,” said Prestcote grimly.
“Or a very frightened one,” Cadfael said mildly. “Desperate at his own act, an act unlike him, suddenly undertaken and monstrously overdone.”
“You could be speaking of the same man,” said Radulfus reasonably. “Is there anything more this body can tell us about him?”
It seemed that there was. On the left side of Domville’s neck, about where the middle fingers of the right hand must have gripped, and had left their shadowy shape, the bruise was crossed by a short, indented wound, as
