by Ellis Peters
“And she has a name,” said Cadfael reflectively. “Gunnild. But not a habitation. She comes from nowhere and is gone, nowhere. Well, you cannot but look diligently for them both, but he should be the easier to find. And as I guess, you already have all your people alerted to look out for him.”
“Both round the shire and over the border,” said Hugh flatly. “His rounds, they say, go no further, apart from journeys to the towns to buy such commodities as salt and spices.”
“And here are we into November, and the season for markets and fairs over, but the weather still fairly mild and dry. He’ll be still on his travels among the villages, but I would guess,” said Cadfael, pondering, “not too far afield. If he still has a base in Ruiton, come the hard frosts and snow he’ll be making for it, and he’ll want to be within a reasonable few miles of it when the pinch comes.”
“About this time of year,” said Hugh, “he remembers he has a mother in Ruiton, and makes his way back there for the winter.”
“And you have someone waiting there for his coming.”
“If luck serves,” said Hugh, “we may pick him up before then. I know Ruiton, it lies barely eight miles from Shrewsbury. He’ll time his journeys to bring bom round by all those Welsh villages and bear east through Knockin, straight for home. There are many hamlets close-set in that corner, he can go on with his selling until the weather changes, and still be near to home. Somewhere there we shall find him.”
*
Somewhere there, indeed, they found him, only three days later. One of Hugh’s sergeants had located the pedlar at work among the villages on the Welsh side of the border, and discreetly waited for him on the English side until he crossed and headed without haste for Meresbrook, on his way to Knockin and home. Hugh kept a sharp eye on his turbulent neighbours in Powys, and as he would tolerate no breach of English law his own side of the border, so he was punctilious in giving them no occasion to complain that he trespassed against Welsh law on their side, unless they had first broken the tacit compact. His relations with Owain Gwynedd, to the north-west, were friendly, and well understood on either part, but the Welsh of Powys were ill-disciplined and unstable, not to be provoked, but not to be indulged if they caused him trouble without provocation. So the sergeant waited until his unsuspecting quarry crossed over the ancient dyke that marked the boundary, somewhat broken and disregarded in these parts but still traceable. The weather was still reasonably mild, and walking the roads not unpleasant, but it seemed that Britric’s pack was as good as empty, so he was making for home ahead of the frosts, apparently content with his takings. If he had stocks at home in Ruiton, he could still sell to his neighbours and as far afield as the local hamlets.
So he came striding into the shire towards Meresbrook, whistling serenely and swinging a long staff among the roadside grasses. And short of the village he walked into a patrol of two light-armed men from the Shrewsbury garrison, who closed in on him from either side and took him by either arm, enquiring without excitement if he owned to the name of Britric. He was a big, powerful fellow half a head taller than either of his captors, and could have broken away from them had he been so minded, but he knew them for what they were and what they represented, and forbore from tempting providence unnecessarily. He behaved himself with cautious discretion, owned cheerfully to his name, and asked with disarming innocence what they wanted with him.
They were not prepared to tell him more than that the sheriff required his attendance in Shrewsbury, and their reticence, together with the stolid efficiency of their handling of him, might well have inclined him to think better of his co-operation and make a break for it, but by then it was too late, for two more of their company had appeared from nowhere to join them, ambling unhurriedly from the roadside, but both with bows slung conveniently to hand, and the look of men who knew how to use them. The thought of an arrow in the back did not appeal to Britric. He resigned himself to complying with necessity. A great pity, with Wales only a quarter of a mile behind. But if the worst came to the worst, there might be a better opportunity of flight later if he remained docile now.
They took him into Knockin, and for the sake of speed found a spare horse for him, brought him into Shrewsbury before nightfall, and delivered him safely to a cell in the castle. By that time he showed signs of acute uneasiness, but no real fear. Behind a closed and unrevealing face he might be weighing and measuring whatever irregularities he had to account for, and worrying about which of them could have come to light, but if so, the results seemed to bewilder rather than enlighten or alarm him. All his efforts to worm information out of his captors had failed. All he could do now was wait, for it seemed that the sheriff was not immediately on hand.
The sheriff, as it happened, was at supper in the abbot’s lodging, together with Prior Robert and the lord of the manor of Upton, who had just made a gift to the abbey of a fishery on the River Tern, which bordered his land. The charter had been drawn up and sealed before Vespers, with Hugh as one of the witnesses. Upton was a crown tenancy, and the consent and approval of the king’s officer was necessary to such transactions. The messenger from the castle was wise enough to wait patiently in the ante-room until the company rose from the table. Good news will keep at least as well as bad, and the suspect was safe enough within stone walls.
“This is the man you spoke of?” asked Radulfus, when he heard what the man had to say. The one who is known to have made free with Brother Ruald’s croft last year?”
“The same,” said Hugh. “And the only one I can hear of who is known to have borrowed free lodging there. And if you’ll hold me excused, Father, I must go and see what can be got out of him, before he has time to get his breath and his wits back.”
“I am as concerned as you for justice,” the abbot avowed. “Not so much that I want the life of this or any man, but I do want an accounting for the woman’s. Of course, go. I hope we may be nearer the truth this time. Without it there can be no absolution.”
“May I borrow Brother Cadfael, Father? He first brought me word of this man, he knows best what the old fellow at Saint Giles said of him. He may be able to pick up details that would elude me.”
Prior Robert looked down his patrician nose at the suggestion, and thinned his long lips in disapproval. He considered that Cadfael was far too often allowed a degree of liberty outside the enclave that offended the prior’s strict interpretation of the Rule. But Abbot Radulfus nodded thoughtful agreement.
“Certainly a shrewd witness may not come amiss. Yes, take him with you. I do know his memory is excellent, and his nose for discrepancies keen. And he has been in this business from the beginning, and has some right, I think, to continue with it to the end.”
So it came about that Cadfael, coming from supper in the refectory, instead of going dutifully to Collations in the chapter-house, or less dutifully recalling something urgent to be attended to in his workshop, in order to avoid the dull, pedestrian reading of Brother Francis, whose turn it was, was haled out of his routine to go with Hugh up through the town to the castle, there to confront the prisoner.
*
He was as the old man had reported him, big, red-haired, capable of throwing out far more powerful intruders than a scabby old vagabond and, to an unprejudiced eye, a personable enough figure of a man to captivate a high-spirited and self-sufficient woman as streetwise as himself. At any rate for a time. If they had been together long enough to fall easily into fighting, he might well use those big, sinewy hands too freely and once too often, and find that he had killed without ever meaning to. And if ever he blazed into the real rage his bush of flaming hair suggested, he might kill with intent. Here in the cell where Hugh had chosen to encounter him, he sat with wide shoulders braced back against the wall, stiffly erect and alert, his face as stony as the wall itself, but for the wary eyes that fended off questions and questioners with an unwavering stare. A man, Cadfael judged, who had been in trouble before, and more than once, and coped with it successfully.
Nothing mortal, probably, a deer poached here and there, a hen lifted, nothing that could not be plausibly talked out of court, in these somewhat disorganised days when in many places the king’s foresters had little time or inclination to impose the rigours of forest law.
As for his present situation, there was no telling what fears, what speculations were going through his mind, how much he guessed at, or what feverish compilations of lies he was putting together against whatever he felt could be urged against him. He waited without protestations, so stiffly tensed that even his hair seemed to be erected and quivering. Hugh closed the door of the cell, and looked him over without haste.
“Well, Britric—that is your name? You have frequented the abbey fair, have you not, these past two years?”
“Longer,” said Britric. His voice was low and guarded, and unwilling to use more words than he need. “Six years in all.” A small sidelong flicker of uneasy eyes took in Cadfael’s habited figure, quiet in the corner of the cell. Perhaps he was recalling the tolls he had evaded paying, and wondering if the abbot had grown tired of turning a blind eye to the small defaulters.
“It’s with last year we’re concerned. Not so long past that your memory should fail you. The eve of Saint Peter ad Vincula, and the three days afterwards, you were offering your wares for sale. Where did you spend the nights?”
He was astray now, and that made him even more cautious, but he answered without undue hesitation: “I knew of a cottage was left empty. They were talking of it in the market, how the potter had taken a fancy to be a monk, and his wife was gone, and left the house vacant. Over the river, by Longner. I thought it was no harm to take shelter there. Is that why I’m brought here? But why now, after so long? I never stole anything. I left all as I found it. All I wanted was a roof over me, and a place to lay down in comfort.”
“Alone?” asked Hugh.
No hesitation at all this time. He had already calculated that the same question must have been answered by others, before ever a hand was laid on him to answer for himself. “I had a woman with me. Gunnild, she was called. She travelled the fairs and markets, entertaining for her living. I met her in Coventry, we kept together a while.”
“And when the fair here was over? Last year’s fair? Did you then leave together, and keep company still?”
Britric’s narrowed glance flickered from one face to the other, and found no helpful clue. Slowly he said: “No. We went separate ways. I was going westward, my best trade is along the border villages.”
“And when and where did you part from her?”
“I left her there at the cottage where we’d slept. The fourth day of August, early. It was barely light when I started out. She was going east from there, she had no need to cross the river.”
“I can find no one in the town or the Foregate,” said Hugh deliberately, “who saw her again.”
“They would not,” said Britric. “I said, she was going east.”
“And you have never seen her since? Never made effort for old kindness” sake to find her again?”
“I never had occasion.” He was beginning to sweat, for whatever that might mean. “Chance met, nothing more than that. She went her way, and I went mine.”
“And there was no falling out between you? Never a blow struck? No loud disputes? Ever gentle and amiable together, were you, Britric? There are some report differently of you,” said Hugh. “There was another fellow, was there not, had hoped to lie snug in that cottage? An old man you drove away. But he did not go far. Not out of earshot of the pair of you, when you did battle in the nights. A stormy partnership, he made it. And she was pressing you to marry her, was she not? And marriage was not to your mind. What happened? Did she grow too wearisome? Or too violent? A hand like yours over her mouth or about her throat could very easily quiet her.”
Britric had drawn his head hard back against the stone like a beast at bay, sweat standing on his forehead in quivering drops under the fall of red hair. Between his teeth he got out, in a voice so short of breath it all but strangled in his throat: “This is mad… mad… I tell you, I left her there snoring, alive and lusty as ever she was. What is this? What are you thinking of me, my lord? What am I held to have done?”
“I will tell you, Britric, what I think you have done. There was no Gunnild at this year’s fair, was there? Nor has she been seen in Shrewsbury since you left her in Ruald’s field. I think you fell out and fought once too often, one of those nights, perhaps the last, and Gunnild died of it. And I think you buried her there in the night, under the headland, for the abbey plough to turn up this autumn. As it did! A woman’s bones, Britric, and a woman’s black hair, a mane of black hair still on the skull.”
Britric uttered a small, half-swallowed sound, and let out his breath in a great, gasping sigh, as if he had been hit in the breast with an iron fist. When he could articulate, though in a strangled whisper understood rather by the shaping of his lips than by any sound, he got out over and over: “No… no… no! Not Gunnild, no!”
Hugh let him alone until he had breath to make sense, and time to consider and believe, and reason about his own situation. For he was quick to master himself, and to accept, with whatever effort, the fact that the sheriff was not lying, that this was the reason for his arrest and imprisonment here, and he had better take thought in his own defence.
“I never harmed her,” he said at length, slowly and emphatically. “I left her sleeping. I have never set eyes on her since. She was well alive.”
“A woman’s body, Britric, a year at least in the ground. Black hair. They tell me Gunnild was black.”
“So she was. So she is, wherever she may be. So are many women along these borderlands. The bones you found cannot be Gunnild’s.” Hugh had let slip too easily that all they had, virtually, was a skeleton, never to be identified by face or form. Now Britric knew that he was safe from too exact an accusing image. “I tell you truly, my lord,” he said, with more insinuating care, she was well alive when I crept out and left her in the cottage. I won’t deny she’d grown too sure of me. Women want to own a man, and that grows irksome. That was why I rose early, while she was deep asleep, and made off westward alone, to be rid of her without a screeching match. No, I never harmed her. This poor creature they found must be some other woman. It is not Gunnild.”
“What other woman, Britric? A solitary place, the tenants already gone, why should anyone so much as go there, let alone die there?”
“How could I know, my lord? I never heard of the place until the eve of the fair, last year. I know nothing about the neighbourhood that side of the river. All I wanted was a place to sleep snug.” He had himself well in hand now, knowing that no name could ever be confidently given to a mere parcel of female bones, however black the hair on her skull. That might not save him, but it gave him some fragile armour against guilt and death, and he would cling to it and repeat his denials as often and as tirelessly as he must. “I never hurt Gunnild. I left her alive and well.”
“What did you know of her?” Cadfael asked suddenly, going off at so abrupt a tangent that for a moment Britric was thrown off-balance, and lost his settled concentration on simple denial. “If you kept company for a while, surely you learned something of the girl, where she came from, where she had kin, the usual pattern of her travelling year. You say she is alive, or at least that you left her alive. Where should she be looked for, to prove as much?”
“Why, she never told much.” He was hesitant and uncertain, and plainly knew little about her, or he would have poured it out readily, as proof of his good intent towards the law. Nor had he had time to put together a neat package of lies to divert attention to some distant region where she might well be pursuing her vagabond living. “I met her in Coventry. We came from there together, but she was close-mouthed. I doubt she went further south than that, but she never said where she was from, nor a word of any kinsfolk.”
“You said she was going east, after you left her. But how can you
know that? She had not said so, and agreed to part there, or you need not have stolen away early to avoid her.”
“I spoke too loosely,” owned Britric, writhing. “I own it. I believed—I believe—she would turn eastward, when she found me gone. Small use taking her singing and tumbling into Wales, not alone. But I tell you truly, I never harmed her. I left her alive.”
And that was his simple, stubborn answer to all further questions, that and the one plea he advanced between obstinate denials.
“My lord, deal fairly with me. Make it known that she is sought, have it cried in the town, ask travellers to carry the word wherever they go, that she should send word to you, and show she is still living. I have not lied to you. If she hears I am charged with her death she will come forward. I never harmed her. She will tell you so.”
*
“And so we will have her name put about, and see if she appears,” agreed Hugh, when they had locked Britric in his stone ceil and left him to his uneasy repose, and were walking back towards the castle gatehouse. “But I doubt if a lady who lives Gunnild’s style of life will be too eager to come near the law, even to save Britric’s neck. What do you think of him? Denials are denials, worth very little by themselves. And he has something on his conscience, and something to do with that place and that woman, too. First thing he cries when we pin him to the place is: “I never stole anything. I left all as I found it.” So I take it he did steal. When it came to the mention of Gunnild dead, then he took fright, until he realised I, like a fool, had let it out that she was mere bones. Then he knew how best to deal, and only then did he begin to plead that we seek her out. It looks and sounds well, but I think he knows she will never be found. Rather, he knows all too well that she is found, a thing he hoped would never happen.”
