?”
It was a reasonable supposition, when the lord sheriff began asking such close questions about any man. Hugh put him out of his defensive agitation, but without over-haste.
“I know no wrong of your man, no. He is the victim of harm, not the cause. This is bad news we have for you, Master Coliar.” Its purport was already implicit in his tone, but he put it into words bleak and blunt enough. “An hour ago the brothers working on the Gaye plucked Bertred out of the river and brought him here, dead. Drowned.”
In the profound silence that followed Miles stood motionless, until finally he stirred and moistened his lips.
“Where is he?”
“Laid decently in the mortuary chapel here,” said the abbot. “The lord sheriff will take you to him.”
In the dim chapel Miles stared down at the known face now so strangely unfamiliar, and shook his head repeatedly and vigorously, as though he could shake away, if not the fact of death, his own shock at its suddenness. He had recovered his down-to-earth calmness and acceptance. One of his weavers was dead, the task of getting him out of here and into his grave with proper rites fell to Miles as his master. What was due from him he would do.
“How could this be?” he said. “Yesterday he came late in the evening for his meal, but there was nothing in that, all day he’d been out abroad with your men, my lord. He went to his bed soon after. He said good night to me, it must have been about the hour of Compline. The house was already quiet, but some of us were still up. I never saw him again.”
“So you don’t know whether he went out again by night?”
Miles looked up sharply, the blue of his eyes at their widest startlingly bright. “It seems that he must have done. But in God’s name, why should he? He was tired out after a long day. I know no reason why he should have stirred again till morning. You said it was but an hour since you took him out of the Severn
“
“I took him out,” said Cadfael, unobtrusive in a dark corner of the chapel. “But he had been there more hours than one. In my judgement, since the small hours of the morning. It is not easy to say how long.”
“And, look, his brow is broken!” The wide, low forehead was dry now, but for the damp fringe of hair. The skin had shrunk apart, leaving the moist wound bared. “Are you sure, Brother, that he drowned?”
“Quite sure. How he came by that knock there’s no knowing, but he surely had it before he went into the water. You can’t tell us anything that may help us, then?”
“I wish I could,” said Miles earnestly. “I’ve seen no change in him, he’s said nothing to me that could shed any light. This comes out of the dark to me. I cannot account for it.” He looked doubtfully at Hugh across the body. “May I take him home? I’ll need to speak with his mother first, but she’ll want him home.”
“Naturally,” agreed Hugh resignedly. “Yes, you may fetch him away when you will. Do you need help with the means?”
“No, my lord, we’ll do all ourselves. I’ll bring down a handcart and decent covering. And I do thank you and this house for the care you’ve had of him.”
He came again about an hour later, looking strained from the ordeal of breaking bad news to a widow now childless. Two of his men from the looms followed him with a simple, high-sided handcart used for wheeling goods, and waited mute and sombre in the great court until Brother Cadfael came to lead them to the mortuary chapel. Between them they carried Bertred’s body out into the early evening light, and laid him on a spread brychan in the cart, and covered him tidily from view. They were still about it when Miles turned to Cadfael, and asked simply: “And his clothes? She should have back with him all that was his. Small comfort for a woman, but she’ll want them. And she’ll need what they’ll fetch, too, poor soul, though I’ll see she’s taken care of still, and so will Judith
when she’s found. If
” His mind seemed to be drifting back into expectations of the worst, and fiercely rejecting them.
“I had forgot,” Cadfael owned, never having handled the clothes stripped from Bertred’s body. “Wait, I’ll bring them.”
The forlorn little bundle of clothes laid aside in the chapel had been folded together as tidily as haste and their sodden condition permitted, and had drained gradually where they lay. The folds of coat and shirt and homespun hose were beginning to dry. Cadfael took the pile in one arm, and picked up in the other hand the boots that stood beside it. He carried them out into the court as Miles was smoothing the blanket neatly over Bertred’s feet. The young man turned to meet him and take the bundle from him, and in the exchange, as Miles leaned to stow the clothes under the blanket, the cart tilted, and the boots, just balanced at the tail, fell to the cobbled paving.
Cadfael stooped to pick them up and restore them to their place. It was the first time he had really looked at them, and the light here in the court was clear and bright. He stood arrested in mid-movement, a boot in either hand, and slowly he turned up the left one to look attentively at the sole. For so long a time that when he did look up he found Miles standing just as still in wonder, gazing at him with open mouth, his head on one side like a puzzled hound on a lost scent.
“I think,” said Cadfael with deliberation, “I had better get leave from the lord abbot, and come up into the town with you. I need to speak once again with the lord sheriff.”
It was but a short walk from the castle to the house at Maerdol-head, and the boy sent in haste to find Hugh brought him within the quarter-hour, cursing mildly at being sidetracked on the point of further action he had intended, but reconciled by sharp curiosity, for Cadfael would not have sent for him again so soon without good reason.
In the hall Dame Agatha, attended by a tearful Branwen, volubly lamented the rockfall of disasters which had befallen the Vestier household. In the kitchen the bereaved Alison mourned with more bitter reason the loss of her son, while all the spinning-girls formed a chorus to her threnody. But in the loom-shed, where Bertred’s body had been laid out decorously on a trestle table to await the visit of Martin Bellecote, the master-carpenter from the Wyle, it was quiet to the point of oppression, even though there were three of them there conversing in low voices and few words.
“There is no shadow of doubt,” said Cadfael, holding the boot sole up to the light of a small lamp one of the girls had set at the head of the table. The light outside was still hardly less bright than in the afternoon, but half the
