to the gathering frost even in his nakedness, and on his bed of stone.
“We must, then, conclude,” said Abbot Radulfus heavily,”that he fell into the pool and drowned. But why was he there at such an hour, and on the eve of the Nativity?”
There was no one prepared to answer that. To reach the place where he had been found he must have passed by every near habitation without word or sign, to end in a barren, unpeopled solitude.
“He drowned, certainly,” said Cadfael.
“Is it known,” wondered Prior Robert, “whether he could swim?”
Cadfael shook his head. “I’ve no knowledge of that, I doubt if anyone here knows. But it might not be of much importance whether he could or no. Certainly he drowned. It is less certain, I fear, that he simply fell into the water. See here?the back of his head
“
He raised the dead man’s head with one hand, and propped head and shoulders with the right arm, and Brother Edmund, who had already viewed this corpse with him before even Abbot Radulfus and Prior Robert were summoned, held a candle to show the nape and the thick circlet of wiry black hair. A broken wound, with edges of skin grazed loose round it and a bleached, moist middle now only faintly discoloured with blood after its soaking in the pool, began just at the rim of the tonsure, and scraped down raggedly through the circle of hair, to end where the inward curve of the nape began.
“He suffered a blow on the head here, before ever he entered the water,” said Cadfael.
“Struck from behind him,” said the abbot, with fastidious disdain, and peered closer. “You are sure he drowned? This blow could not have killed him? For what you are saying is that this was no accident, but a deliberate assault. Or could he have come by this innocently? Is it possible? The track there is rutted, and it was icy. Could he have fallen and injured himself thus?”
“I doubt it. If a man’s feet go from under him he may sit down heavily, even sprawl back on his shoulders, but he seldom goes full-length so violently as to hit his head forcibly on the ground and break his crown. That could not happen on such rough ground, only on smooth sheet ice. And mark, this is not on the round of his head, which would have taken such a shock, but lower, even moving into the curve of his neck, and lacerated, as if he was struck with something rough and jagged. And you saw the shoes he was wearing, felted beneath the sole. I think he went safer from a fall, last night, than most men.”
“Certainly, then, a blow,” said Radulfus. “Could it have killed?”
“No, impossible! His skull is not broken. Not enough to kill, nor even to do him much lasting harm. But he might well have been stunned for a while, or so dazed that he was helpless when he fell into the water. Fell,” said Cadfael with deliberation, but ruefully, “or was pushed in.”
“And of those two,” said the abbot with cold composure, “which is the more likely?”
“In darkness,” said Cadfael, “any man may step too near a sloping edge and misjudge his footing where a bank overhangs water. But whatever his reason for going along that path, why should he persist beyond the last dwelling? But this broken head I do not believe he got by any natural fall, and he got it before he went into the water. Some other hand, some other person, was there with him, and party to this death.”
“There is nothing in the wound, no fragment to show what manner of weapon it was that struck him?” ventured Brother Edmund, who had worked with Brother Cadfael in similar cases, and found good reason to require his judgement even in the minutest details. But he did not sound hopeful.
“How could there be?” said Cadfael simply. “He was lain in the water all through the night, everything about him is bleached and sodden. If there had ever been soil or grass in his grazes, it would have soaked away long ago. But I do not think there was. He cannot alone have staggered far after that blow was struck, and he was just past the tail-race, or it would have drifted him the opposing way. Nor would anyone have carried or dragged him far if he was stunned, he being a big, heavy man, and the blow being only briefly disabling, not killing. Not ten paces from where we found him, I judge, he went into the pool. And close by that same stretch he got this blow. On top of all, there he was on grass unrutted by wheels, being past the mill?only rough and tufted, as winter turf is. If he had slipped and fallen, the ground there might have half-stunned him, but it would not have broken his head and fetched blood. I have told you all I can tell from this poor body,” he said wearily. “Make what you can of it.”
“Murder!” said Prior Robert, rigid with indignation and horror. “Murder is what I make of it. Father Abbot, what is now to be done?”
Radulfus brooded for some minutes over the indifferent corpse which had been Father Ailnoth, and never before so still and quiet, so tolerant of the views of others. Then he said, with measured regret: “I am afraid, Robert, we have no choice but to inform the lord sheriffs deputy, since Hugh Beringar himself is elsewhere about his own duties.” And with his eyes still upon the livid face on the stone slab he said, with bleak wonder: “I knew he had not made himself loved. I had not realised that in so short a time he could make himself so hated.”
Chapter Six
Young alan herbard, who was hugh’s deputy in his absence, came down hot-foot from the castle with the most experienced of his sergeants, William Warden, and two other officers in his train. Even if Herbard had not been well acquainted with the Foregate and its people, Will Warden certainly was, and went in no misapprehension concerning the degree of love the congregation of Holy Cross had for its new priest.
“There’ll be very little mourning for him hereabouts,” he said bluntly, viewing the dead man without emotion. “He made a thorough job of turning every soul in the parish against him. A poor end, though, for any man. A poor, cold end!”
They examined the head wound, noted the account rendered by every man who had taken part in the search, and listened to the careful opinions put forward by Brother Edmund and Brother Cadfael, and to everything Dame Diota had to say of her master’s evening departure, and the anxious night she had spent worrying about his failure to return.
She had refused to depart, and waited all this time to repeat her story, which she did with a drained but steady composure, now that the matter and the mystery were out of her hands. Benet was beside her, attentive and solicitous, a very sombre Benet, with creased brows and hazel eyes clouded by something between anxiety on her account and sheer puzzlement on his own.
“If you’ll give me leave,” said the boy, as soon as the officers had withdrawn from the precinct to go in search of the provost of the Foregate, who knew his people as well as any man could, “I’ll take my aunt back to the house now, and see her settled with a good fire. She needs to rest.” And he added, appealing to Cadfael: “I won’t stay
