The Potter's Field

by Ellis Peters

  “With no will to cheat, yes, it was very easy,” she said simply. “She went out from the room, and neither watched nor listened, while I filled the cups, evenly but that the one contained hemlock. Then I went out, far down the Potter’s Field, while she parted and changed the cups as she thought fit, and set the one on the press and the other on the table, and came and called me hi, and I chose. It was June, the twenty-eighth day of the month, a beautiful midsummer. I remember how the meadow grasses were coming into flower, I came back to the cottage with my skirts spangled with the silver of their seeds. And we sat down together, there within, and drank our wine, and were at peace. And afterwards, since I knew that the draught brought on a rigor of the whole body, from the extremities inward to the heart, we agreed between us to part, she to remain quiet where she was, I to go back to Longner, that whichever of us God—dare I say God, Father, or must I say only chance, or fate?—whichever of us was chosen should die at home. I promise you, Father, I had not forgotten God, I did not feel that he had stricken me from his book. It was as simple as where you have it written: of two, one shall be taken and the other left. I went home, and I span while I waited. And hour by hour—for it does not hurry—I waited for the numbness in the hands to make me fumble at the wool on the distaff, and still my fingers span and my wrist twisted, and there was no change in my dexterity. And I waited for the cold to seize upon my feet, and climb into my ankles, and there was no chill and no clumsiness, and my breath came without hindrance.”

  She drew a deep, unburdened sigh, and let her head rest back against the panelling, eased of the main weight of the load she had brought them.

  “You had won your wager,” said the abbot in a low and grieving voice.

  “No,” said Donata, “I had lost my wager.” And in a moment she added scrupulously: “There is one detail I had forgotten to mention. We kissed, sisterly, when we parted.”

  *

  She had not done, she was only gathering herself to continue coherently to the end, but the silence lasted some minutes. Hugh got up from his place and poured a cup of wine from the flask on the abbot’s table, and went and set it down on the bench beside her, convenient to her hand. “You are very tired. Would you not like to rest a little while? You have done what you came to do. Whatever this may have been, it was not murder.”

  She looked up at him with the benign indulgence she felt now towards all the young, as though she had lived not forty-five years but a hundred, and seen all manner of tragedies pass and lapse into oblivion.

  “Thank you, but I am the better for having resolved this matter. You need not trouble for me. Let me make an end, and then I will rest.” But to accommodate him she put out a hand for the cup, and seeing how even that slight weight made her wrist quiver, Hugh supported it while she drank. The red of the wine gave her grey lips, for a moment, the dew and flush of blood.

  “Let me make an end! Eudo came home, I told him what we had done, and that the lot had failed to fall on me. I wanted no concealment, I was willing to bear witness truly, but he would not suffer it. He had lost her, but he would not let me be lost, or his honour, or his sons’ honour. He went that night, alone, and buried her. Now I see that Sulien, deep in his own pit of grief, must have followed him to an assignation, and discovered him in a funeral rite. But my lord never knew it. Never a word was said of that, never a sign given. He told me how he found her, lying on her bed as if asleep. When the numbness began she must have lain down there, and let death come to her. Those small things about her that gave her a name and a being, those he brought away with him and kept, not secret from me. There were no more secrets between us two, there was no hate, only a shared grief. Whether he removed them for my sake, looking upon what I had done as a terrible crime, as I grant you a man might, and fearing what should fall on me in consequence, or whether he wanted them for himself, as all he could now keep of her, I never knew.

  “It passed, as everything passes. When she was missed, no one ever thought to look sidelong at us. I do not know where the word began that she was gone of her own will, with a lover, but it went round as gossip does, and men believed it. As for Sulien, he was the first to escape from the house. My elder son had never had ado with Ruald or Generys, beyond a civil word if they passed in the fields or crossed by the ferry together. He was busy about the manor, and thinking of marriage, he never felt the pain within the house. But Sulien was another person. I felt his unease, before ever he told us he was set on entering Ramsey. Now I see he had better reason for his trouble than I had thought. But his going weighed yet more heavily on my lord, and the time came when he could not bear ever to go near the Potter’s Field, or look upon the place where she had lived and died. He made the gift to Haughmond, to be rid of it, and when that was completed, he went to join King Stephen at Oxford. And what befell him afterwards you know.

  “I have not asked the privilege of confession, Father,” she said punctiliously, “since I want no more secrecy from those fit to judge me, whether it be the law or the Church. I am here, do as you see fit. I did not cheat her, living, it was a fair wager, and I have not cheated her now she is dead. I have kept my pledge. I take no palliatives now, whatever my state. I pay my forfeit every day of my remaining life, to the end. In spite of what you see, I am strong. The end may still be a long way off.”

  It was done. She rested in quietness, and in a curious content that showed in the comparative ease of her face. Distantly from across the court the bell from the refectory sounded noon.

  *

  The king’s officer and the representative of the Church exchanged no more than one long glance by way of consultation. Cadfael observed it, and wondered which of them would speak first, and indeed, to which of these two authorities the right of precedence belonged, in a case so strange. Crime was Hugh’s business, sin the abbot’s, but what was justice here, where the two were woven together so piteously as to be beyond unravelling? Generys dead, Eudo dead, who stood to profit from further pursuit? Donata, when she had said that the dead should carry their own sins, had counted herself among them. And infinitely slow as the approach of death had been for her, it must now be very near.

  Hugh was the first to speak. “There is nothing here,” he said, “that falls within my writ. What was done, whatever its rights or wrongs, was not murder. If it was an offence to put the dead into the ground unblessed, he who did it is already dead himself, and what would it benefit the long’s law or the good order of my shire to publish it to his dishonour now? Nor could anyone wish to add to your grief, or cause distress to Eudo’s heir, who is innocent of all. I say this case is closed, unsolved, and so let it remain, to my reproach. I am not so infallible that I cannot fail, like any other man, and admit it. But there are claims that must be met. I see no help but we must make it public that Generys is Generys, though how she came to her death will never be known. She has the right to her name, and to have her grave acknowledged for hers. Ruald has the right to know that she is dead, and to mourn her duly. In time people will let the matter sink into the past and be forgotten. But for you there remains Sulien.”

  “And Pernel,” said Donata.

  “And Pernel. True, she already knows the half. What will you do about them?”

  “Tell them the truth,” she said steadily. “How else could they ever rest? They deserve truth, they can endure truth. But not my elder son. Leave him his innocence.”

  “How will you satisfy him,” Hugh wondered practically, “about this visit? Does he even know that you are here?”

  “No,” she admitted with her wan smile, “he was out and about early. No doubt he will think me mad, but when I return no worse than I set out, it will not be so hard to reconcile him. Jehane does know. She tried to dissuade me, but I would have my way, he cannot blame her. I told her I had it in mind to offer my prayers for help at Saint Winifred’s shrine. And that I will make good, Father, with your leave, before I return. If,” she said, “I am to return?”

  “For my par
t, yes,” said Hugh. “And to that end,” he said, rising, “if the lord abbot agrees, I will go and bring your son to you here.”

  He waited for the abbot’s word, and it was long in coming. Cadfael could divine something, at least, of what passed in that austere and upright mind. To bargain with life and death is not so far from self-murder, and the despair that might lead to the acceptance of such a wager is in itself mortal sin. But the dead woman haunted the mind with pity and pain, and the living one was there before his eyes, relentlessly stoical in her interminable dying, inexorable in adhering to the penalty she had imposed upon herself when she lost her wager. And one judgement, the last, must be enough, and that was not yet due.

  “So be it!” said Radulfus at last. “I can neither condone nor condemn. Justice may already have struck its own balance, but where there is no certainty the mind must turn to the light and not the shadow. You are your own penance, my daughter, if God requires penance. There is nothing here for me to do, except to pray that all things remaining may work together for grace. There have been wounds enough, at all costs let us cause no more. Let no word be said, then, beyond these few who have the right to know, for their own peace. Yes, Hugh, if you will, go and bring the boy, and the young woman who has shed, it seems, so welcome a light among these grievous shadows. And, madam, when you have rested and eaten here in my house, we will help you into the church, to Saint Winifred’s altar.”

  “And it shall be my care,” said Hugh, “to see that you get home safely. You do what is needful for Sulien and Pernel. Father Abbot, I am sure, will do what is needful for Brother Ruald.”

  “That,” said Cadfael, “I will undertake, if I may.”

  “With my blessing,” said Radulfus. “Go, find him after dinner in the frater, and let him know her story ends in peace.”

  All of which they did before the day was over.

  *

  They were standing under the high wall of the graveyard, in the furthest corner where modest lay patrons found a place, and stewards and good servants of the abbey and, under a low mound still settling and greening, the nameless woman orphaned after death and received and given a home by Benedictine compassion.

  Cadfael had gone with Ruald after Vespers, in the soft rain that was hardly more than a drifting dew on the face, chill and silent. The light would not last much longer. Vespers was already at its winter hour, and they were alone here in the shadow of the wall, in the wet grass, with the earthy smells of fading foliage and autumnal melancholy about them. A melancholy without pain, an indulgence of the spirit after the passing of bitterness and distress. And it did not seem strange that Ruald had shown no great surprise at learning that this translated waif was, after all, his wife, had accepted without wonder that Sulien had concocted, out of mistaken concern for an old friend, a false and foolish story to disprove her death. Nor had he rebelled against the probability that he would never know how she had died, or why she had been buried secretly and without rites, before she was brought to this better resting-place. Ruald’s vow of obedience, like all his vows, was carried to the ultimate extreme of duty, into total acceptance. Whatever was, was best to him. He did not question.

  “What is strange, Cadfael,” he said, brooding over the new turf that covered her, “is that now I begin to see her face clearly again. When first I entered here I was like a man in fever, aware only of what I had longed for and gained. I could not recall how she looked, it was as if she and all my life aforetime had vanished out of the world.”

  “It comes of staring into too intense a light,” said Cadfael, dispassionately, for he himself had never been dazzled. He had done what he had done in his right senses, made his choice, no easy choice, with deliberation, walked to his novitiate on broad bare feet treading solid earth, not been borne to it on clouds of bliss. “A very fine experience in its way,” he said, “but bad for the sight. If you stare too long you may go blind.”

  “But now I see her clearly. Not as I last saw her, not angry or bitter. As she always used to be, all the years we were together. And young,” said Ruald, marvelling. “Everything I knew and did, aforetime, comes back with her, I remember the croft, and the kiln, and where every small thing had its place in the house. It was a very pleasant place, looking down from the crest to the river, and beyond.”

  “It still is,” said Cadfael. “We’ve ploughed it, and brushed back the headland bushes, and you might miss the field flowers, and the moths at midsummer when the meadow grasses ripen. But there’ll be the young green starting now along the furrows, and the birds in the headlands just the same. Yes, a very fair place.”

  They had turned to walk back through the wet grass towards the chapter-house, and the dusk was a soft blue-green about them, clinging moist in the half-naked branches of the trees.

  “She would never have had a place in this blessed ground,” said Ruald, out of the shadow of his cowl, “but that she was found in land belonging to the abbey, and without any other sponsor to take care of her. As Saint Illtud drove his wife out into the night for no offence, as I, for no offence in her, deserted Generys, so in the end God has brought her back into the care of the Order, and provided her an enviable grave. Father Abbot received and blessed what I misused and misprized.”

  “It may well be,” said Cadfael, “that our justice sees as in a mirror image, left where right should be, evil reflected back as good, good as evil, your angel as her devil. But God’s justice, if it makes no haste, makes no mistakes.”

  Glossary of Terms

  Alltud

  A foreigner living in Wales

  Arbalest

  A crossbow that enables the bow to be drawn with a winding handle

  Baldric

  A sword-belt crossing the chest from shoulder to hip.

  Bannerole

  A thin ribbon attached to a lance tip

  Bodice

  The supportive upper area of a woman’s dress, sometimes a separate item of clothing worn over a blouse

  Brychan

  A woollen blanket

  Caltrop

  A small iron weapon consisting four spikes. Set on the ground and used against horses and infantry

  Capuchon

  A cowl-like hood

  Cariad

  Welsh for ‘beloved’

  Cassock

  A long garment of the clergy

  Castellan

  The ruler of a castle

  Chatelaine

  The lady of a manor house

  Chausses

  Male hose

  Coif

  The cap worn under a nun’s veil

  Conversus

  A man who joins the monkhood after living in the outside world

  Cottar

  A Villein who is leased a cottage in exchange for their work

  Cotte

  A full- or knee-length coat. Length is determined by the class of the wearer

  Croft

  Land used as pasture that abuts a house

  Currier

  A horse comb used for grooming

  Demesne

  The land retained by a lord for his own use

  Diocese

  The district attached to a cathedral

  Dortoir

  Dormitory (monastic)

  Electuary

  Medicinal powder mixed with honey. Taken by mouth

  Eremite

  A religious hermit

  Espringale

  Armament akin to a large crossbow

  Frater

  Dining room (monastic)

  Garderobe

  A shaft cut into a building wall used as a lavatory

  Garth

  A grass quadrangle within the cloisters (monastic)

  Geneth

  Welsh for ‘girl’

  Gentle

  A person of honourable family

  Glebe

  An area of land attached to a clerical office

  Grange

  The lands and buildings of a monastery farm
>
  Groat

  A small coin

  Gruel

  Thin porridge

  Guild

  A trade association

  Gyve

  An iron shackle

  Hauberk

  A chainmail coat to defend the neck and shoulders

  Helm

  A helmet

  Horarium

  The monastic timetable, divided into canonical hours, or offices, of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline

  Husbandman

  A tenant farmer

  Jess

  A short strap attached to a hawk’s leg when practising falconry

  Largesse

  Money or gifts, bestowed by a patron to mark an occasion

  Leat (Leet)

  A man-made waterway

  Litany

  Call and response prayer recited by clergyman and congregation

  Llys

  The timber-built royal court of Welsh princes

  Lodestar

  A star that acts as a fixed navigational point, i.e. the Pole Star

  Lodestone

  Magnetised ore

  Lye

  A solution used for washing and cleaning

  Mandora

  A stringed instrument, precursor to the mandolin

  Mangonel

  Armament used for hurling missiles

  Marl

  Soil of clay and lime, used as a fertiliser

  Messuage

  A house (rented) with land and out-buildings