Chapter Ten
Cadfael had been back in his workshop no more than half an hour, and the light was only just beginning to dim towards the Vesper office, when Hugh came seeking him, as he usually did if shire affairs brought him to confer with the abbot. He brought in with him a gust of moist, chill air and the quiver of a rising breeze that might bring more snow, now that the hard frost had eased, or might blow away the heavy cloud and clear the sky for the morrow.
“I’ve been with Father Abbot,” said Hugh, and sat down on the familiar bench by the wall and spread his feet appreciatively towards the brazier. “Tomorrow, I hear, you’re burying the priest. Cynric has the grave dug for him so deep you’d think he feared the man might break out of it without six feet of earth on top of him to hold him down. Well, he’s going to his funeral unavenged, for we’re no nearer knowing who killed him. You said from the first that the entire Foregate would turn blind, deaf and dumb. A man would think the whole parish had been depeopled on Christmas Eve, no one will admit to having been out of his own house but to hurry to church, and not a man of them set eyes on any other living being in the streets that night. It took a stranger to let fall even one little word of furtive comings and goings at an ungodly hour, and I place no great credence in that. And how have you been faring?”
Cadfael had been wondering the same thing in his own mind ever since leaving Diota, and could see no possibility of keeping back from Hugh what he had learned. He had not promised secrecy, only discretion, and he owed help to Hugh as surely as to the woman caught in the trap of her own devotion.
“Better, perhaps, than I deserve,” he said sombrely, and put aside the tray of tablets he had just set out to dry, and went to sit beside his friend. “If you had not come to me, Hugh, I should have had to come to you. Last night it was brought back to me what I had seen in Ailnoth’s possession that night, and had not found nor thought to look for again the next day, when we brought him back here dead. Two things, indeed, though the first I did not find myself, but got it from the little boys who went down hopefully to the pool on Christmas morning, thinking it might be frozen over. Wait a moment, I’ll bring both, and you shall hear.”
He brought them, and carried the lamp closer, to show the detail that might mean so much or so little.
“This cap the children found among the reeds of the shallows. You see how the stitches are started in the one seam, and the binding ripped loose. And this staff?this I found only this morning, almost opposite the place where we found Ailnoth.” He told that story simply and truthfully, but for omitting any mention of Ninian, though that, too, might have to come. “You see how the silver band is worn into a mere wafer from age, and crumpled at the edges, being so thin. This notch here
” He set a fingertip to the razor-sharp points. “From this I wormed out these!”
He had dabbed a tiny spot of grease into one of his clay saucers for selecting seed, and anchored the rescued hairs to the congealed fat, so that no chance draught should blow them away. In the close yellow light of the lamp they showed clearly. Cadfael drew out one of them to its full length.
“A metal edge fissured like this might pick up a stray hair almost anywhere,” said Hugh, but not with any great conviction.
“So it might, but here are five, captured at the same mis-stroke. Which makes this a different matter. Well?”
Hugh likewise laid a finger to the glistening threads and said deliberately: “A woman’s. Not young.”
“Whether you yet know it or no,” said Cadfael,”there are but two women in all this coil, and one of them is young, and will not be grey, please God, for many years yet.”
“I think,” said Hugh, eyeing him with a faint, wise smile, “you had better tell me. You were here from the beginning, I came late, and brought with me another matter warranted to confuse the first. I am not interested in preventing young Bachiler from making clean away to Gloucester to fight for his Empress, if he has nothing on his conscience that chances to be more particularly my business. But I am interested in burying the ugly fact of murder along with Ailnoth tomorrow, if by any means I can. I want the town and the Foregate going about their day’s work with a quiet mind, and the way cleared for another priest, and let’s hope one easier to live with. Now, what I make of these hairs is that they came from the head of Dame Diota Hammet. I have not even seen the woman in a good light, to know if this colouring is hers, but even there indoors the bruise on her brow was plain to be seen. She had a fall on the icy step?so I had been told, and so she told me. I think you are saying she came by that injury in a very different manner.”
“She came by it,” said Cadfael, “by the mill that night, when she followed the priest in desperation, to plead with him to let well alone and turn a blind eye to the boy’s deception, instead of confronting him like an avenging demon and fetching your sergeants down on him to throw him into prison. She was Ninian’s nurse, she would dare almost anything for his sake. She clung about Ailnoth’s skirts and begged him to let be, and because he could not shake her off, he clubbed this staff of his and struck her on the head, and would have struck again if she had not loosed him and scrambled away half-stunned, and run for her life back to the house.”
He told the whole of it as he had had it from Diota herself, and Hugh listened with a grave face but the hint of the smile lingering thoughtfully in his eyes. “You believe this,” he said at the end of it; not a question, but a fact, and relevant to his own thinking.
“I do believe it. Entirely.”
“And she can add nothing more, to point us to any other person. Or would she, even if she could?” wondered Hugh. “She may very well feel with the Foregate, and prefer to keep her own counsel.”
“So she might, I won’t deny, but for all that, I think she knows no more. She ran from him dazed and in terror. I think there’s no more to be got from her.”
“Nor from your boy Benet?” said Hugh slyly, and laughed at seeing Cadfael turn a sharp glance on him and bridle for a moment. “Oh, come now, I do accept that it was not you who warned the boy to make himself scarce when Giffard brought the law down on him. But only because someone else had already spared you the trouble. You were very well aware that he was gone, when you so helpfully led us all round the garden here hunting for him. I’ll even believe that you had seen him here not half an hour before. You have a way of telling simple truths which is anything but simple. And when did you ever have a young fellow in trouble under your eye, and not wind your way into his confidence? Of course he’ll have opened his mind to you. I daresay you know where he is this very moment. Though I’m not asking!” he added hastily.
“No,” said Cadfael, well satisfied with the way that was phrased, “no, that I don’t know, so you may ask, for I can’t tell you.”
“Having gone to some trouble not to find out or be told,” agreed Hugh, grinning. “Well, I did tell you to keep him out of sight if you should happen on him. I might even turn a blind eye myself, once this other matter is cleared
