The Raven in the Foregate bc-12

by Ellis Peters

  “And this time,” said Cadfael, awed, “she really told you truth?”

  “Of course she did, she was rightly afraid for him. Yes, she told truth. Yes, he was out all that night, it was nothing new. But not murdering anyone! No, on that she was insistent, he would not hurt a fly. He’s done his worst by a poor wretch of a wife, however! All he’d been about, she said, was bedding his latest fancy girl, and that was the bold little bitch who’s maidservant to the old woman who lives next to the miller, by the pool.”

  “Ah, now that’s a far more likely thing,” said Cadfael, enlightened. “That rings true! We talked to her,” he recalled, fascinated, “next morning, when we were looking for Ailnoth.” A pretty slut of about eighteen, with a mane of dark hair and bold, inquisitive eyes, saying: “Not a soul that I know of came along here in the night, why should they?” No, she had not been lying. She had never thought of her covert lover as counting among the furtive visitors to the mill in the darkness. His errand was known, and if not innocent, entirely natural and harmless. She spoke according to her understanding.

  “And she never said word of Jordan! No, why should she? She knew what he’d been up to, it was not about him you were asking. Oh, no, I’ve nothing against the girl. But I would stake much that she knows nothing of time, and has no notion exactly when he came or when he left, except by the beginning of light. He could have killed a man before ever he whispered at the deaf woman’s door, for ears that were forewarned and sharp enough.”

  “I doubt if he did,” said Cadfael.

  “So do I. But see how beautiful a case I can make against him! His wife has admitted that he went there. The shepherd saw him leaving. We know that Father Ailnoth went along that same path. After Mistress Hammet had fled from him, still he waited for his prey. And how if he saw a parishioner of his, already in dispute with him, and whose reputation he may well have heard before then, whispering his way furtively into a strange house, and being let in by a young woman? How then? His nose was expert at detecting sinners, he might well be distracted from his first purpose to flush out an evil-doer on the spot. The old woman is stone deaf. The girl, if she witnessed such a collision, and saw its end, would hold her tongue and tell a good story. In such a case, Cadfael, old friend, the priest might well have started too hot a hare, and got the worst of it, ending in the pool.”

  “The blow to Ailnoth’s head,” said Cadfael, jolted, “was deep to the back. Men in conflict go face to face.”

  “True, but one may easily be spun aside and involuntarily turn his back for an instant. But you know how the wound lay, and I know. But do the commons know?”

  “And you will really do this?” marvelled Cadfael.

  “Most publicly, my friend, I will do it. Tomorrow morning, at Ailnoth’s funeral—even those who most hated him will be there to make sure he’s safely underground, what better occasion could there be? If it bears fruit, then we have our answer, and the town can be at peace, once the turmoil’s over. If not, Jordan will be none the worse for a short-lived fright, and a few nights, perhaps,” pondered Hugh, gleaming mischief, “on a harder bed than usual with him, and lying alone. He may even learn that his own bed is the safest from this on.”

  “And how if no man speaks up to deliver him,” said Cadfael with mild malice, “and the thing happened just as you have pictured it to me a minute ago, and Jordan really is your man? What then? If he keep his head and deny all, and the girl bears witness for him, you’ll have trailed your bait in vain.”

  “Ah, you know the man better than that,” said Hugh, undisturbed. “Big-boned and hearty, but no great stiffening in his back. If he did it, deny it as loudly as he may when he’s first accused, a couple of nights on stone and he’ll be blabbing out everything, how he did no more than defend himself, how it was mere accident, and he could not haul the priest out of the water, and took fright, and dared not speak, knowing that the bad blood between them was common knowledge. A couple of nights in a cell won’t hurt him. And if he holds out stoutly any longer than that,” said Hugh, rising, “then he deserves to get away with it. The parish will think so.”

  “You are a devious creature,” said Cadfael, in a tone uncertain between reproach and admiration. “I wonder why I bear with you?”

  Hugh turned in the doorway to give him a flashing glance over his shoulder. “Like calling to like, I daresay!” he suggested, and went striding away along the gravel path, to disappear into the gathering dusk.

  At Vespers the psalms had a penitential solemnity, and at Collations in the chapter house after supper the readings were also of a funereal colouring. The shadow of Father Ailnoth hung over the death of the year, and it seemed that the year of Our Lord 1142 would be born, not at midnight, but only after the burial service was over, and the grave filled in. The morrow might, according to the Church’s calendar, be the octave of the Nativity and the celebration of the Circumcision of Our Lord, but to the people of the Foregate it was rather the propitiatory office that would lift their incubus from them. A wretched departure for any man, let alone a priest.

  “On the morrow,” said prior Robert, before dismissing them to the warming room for the blessed last half-hour of ease before Compline, “the funeral office for Father Ailnoth will follow immediately after the parish Mass, and I myself shall preside. But the homily will be delivered by Father Abbot, at his desire.” The prior’s incisive and well-modulated voice made this statement with a somewhat ambiguous emphasis, as if in doubt whether to welcome the abbot’s decision as a devout compliment to the dead, or to regret and perhaps even resent it as depriving him of an opportunity to exercise his own undoubted eloquence. “Matins and Lauds will be said according to the Office of the Dead.”

  That meant that they would be long, and prudent brothers would be wise to make straight for their beds after Compline. Cadfael had already turfed down his brazier to burn slowly through the night, and keep lotions and medicines from freezing and bottles from bursting, should a hard frost set in again in the small hours. But the air was certainly not cold enough yet for frost, and he thought by the slight wind and lightly overcast sky that they would get through the night safely. He went thankfully to the warming room with his brothers, and settled down to half an hour of pleasant idleness.

  This was the hour when even the taciturn relaxed into speech, and not even the prior frowned upon a degree of loquacity. And inevitably the subject of their exchanges tonight was the brief rule of Father Ailnoth, his grim death, and the coming ceremonial of his burial.

  “So Father Abbot means to pronounce the eulogy himself, does he?” said Brother Anselm in Cadfael’s ear. “That will make interesting listening.” Anselm’s business was the music of the Divine Office, and he had not quite the same regard for the spoken word, but he appreciated its power and influence. “I had thought he’d be only too glad to leave it to Robert. Nil nisi bonum.

  Or do you suppose he looks upon it as a fitting penance for bringing the man here in the first place?”

  “There may be something in that,” admitted Cadfael. “But more, I think, in a resolve that only truth shall be told. Robert would be carried away into paeans of praise. Radulfus intends clarity and honesty.”

  “No easy task,” said Anselm. “Well for me no one expects words from me. There’s been no hint yet of who’s to follow in the parish. They’ll be praying for a man they know, whether he has any Latin or not. Even a man they did not much like would be welcomed, if he belongs here, and knows them. You can deal with the devil you know.”

  “No harm in hoping for better than that,” said Cadfael, sighing. “A very ordinary man, more than a little lower than the angels, and well aware of his own shortcomings, would do very nicely for the Foregate. A pity these few weeks were wasted, wanting him.”

  In the big stone hearth the fire of logs burned steadily, sinking down now into a hot core of ash, nicely timed to last the evening out, and die down with little waste when the bell rang for Compline. Faces pinched with cold
and outdoor labour during the day flushed into rosy content, and chapped hands smoothed gratefully at the ointment doled out from Cadfael’s store. Friends foregathered in their own chosen groups, voices decorously low blended into a contented murmur like a hive of bees. Some of the healthy young, who had been out in the air most of the day, had much ado to keep their eyelids open in the warmth. Compline would be wisely brief tonight, as Matins would be long and sombre.

  “Another year tomorrow,” said Brother Edmund the infirmarer, “and a new beginning.”

  Some said: “Amen!” whether from habit or conviction, but Cadfael stuck fast at the word. ‘Amen’ belongs rather to an ending, a resolution, an acceptance into peace, and as yet they were within reach of none of these things.

  A mile to the west of Cadfael’s bed in his narrow cell in the dortoir, Ninian lay in the plenteous hay of a well stocked loft, rolled in the cloak Sanan had brought for him, and with the heartening warmth of her still in his arms, though she had been gone two hours and more, in time to have her pony back in the town stable before her step-father returned from the night office at Saint Chad’s church. Ninian had been urgent with her that she should not venture alone by night, but as yet he had no authority over her, and she would do what she would do, having been born into the world apparently without fear. This byre and loft on the edge of the forest belonged to the Giffards, who had grazing along the open meadow that rimmed the trees, but the elderly hind who kept the cattle was from Sanan’s own household, and her willing and devoted slave. The two good horses she had bought and stabled here were his joy, and his privity to Sanan’s marriage plans would keep him proud and glad to the day of his death.

  She had come, and she had lain with Ninian in the loft, the two rolled in one cloak and anchored with embracing arms, not yet for the body’s delight but rather for its survival and comfort. Snug like dormice in their winter sleep, alive and awake enough to be aware of profound pleasure, they had talked together almost an hour, and now that she had left him he hugged the remembrance of her and got warmth from it to keep him glowing through the night. Some day, some night, please God soon, she would not have to rise and leave him, he would not have to open reluctant arms and let her go, and the night would be perfect, a lovely, starry dark shot through with flame. But now he lay alone, and ached a little, and fretted about her, about the morrow, about his own debts, which seemed to him so inadequately paid.

  With her hair adrift against his cheek, and her breath warm in the hollow of his throat, she had told him everything that had happened during these last days of the old year, how Brother Cadfael had found the ebony staff, how he had visited Diota and got her story out of her, how Father Ailnoth’s funeral was to take place next day after the parish Mass. And when he started up in anxiety for Diota, she had drawn him down to her again with her arms wreathed about his neck, and told him he need have no uneasiness, for she had promised to go with Diota to the priest’s funeral Mass, and take as great care of her as he himself could have done, and deal with any threat that might arise against her as valiantly as even he would have dealt with it. And she had forbidden him to stir from where he lay hidden until she should come to him again. But just as she was a lady not lightly to be disobeyed, so he was a man not lightly to be forbidden.

  All the same, she had got a promise out of him that he would wait, as she insisted, unless something unforeseen should arise to make action imperative. And with that she had had to be content, and they had kissed on it, and put away present anxieties to whisper about the future. How many miles to the Welsh border? Ten? Certainly not much more. And Powys might be a wild land, but it had no quarrel with a soldier of the Empress more than with an officer of King Stephen, and would by instinct take the part of the hunted rather than the forces of English law. Moreover, Sanan had claims to a distant kinship there, through a Welsh grandmother, who had bequeathed her her un-English name. And should they encounter master-less men in the forests, Ninian was a good man of his hands, and there was a good sword and a long dagger hidden away in the hay, arms once carried by John Berničres at the siege of Shrewsbury, where he had met his death. They would do well enough on the journey, they would reach Gloucester and marry there, openly and honourably.

  Except that they could not go, not yet, not until he was satisfied that all danger to Diota was past, and her living secure under the abbot’s protection. And now that he lay alone, Ninian could see no present end to that difficulty. The morrow would lay Ailnoth’s body to rest, but not the ugly shadow of his death. Even if the day passed without threat to Diota, that would not solve anything for the days yet to come.

  Ninian lay wakeful until past midnight, fretting at the threads that would not untangle for him. Over the watershed between the old year and the new he drifted at last into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed of fighting his way through interminable forest tracks overgrown with bramble and thorn towards a Sanan forever withdrawn from him, and leaving behind for him only a sweet, aromatic scent of herbs.

  Under the vast inverted keel of the choir, dimly lit for Matins, the solemn words of the Office of the Dead echoed and re-echoed as sounds never seemed to do by day, and the fine, sonorous voice of Brother Benedict the sacristan was magnified to fill the whole vault as he read the lessons in between the spoken psalms, and at every ending came the insistent versicle and response:

  “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

  “

  “Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

  “

  And Brother Benedict, deep and splendid: “My soul is weary of my life

  I will speak in the bitterness of my soul, I will say unto God, Do not condemn me, show me wherefore thou contendest with me

  “

  Not much comfort in the book of Job, thought Cadfael, listening intently in his stall, but a great deal of fine poetry—could not that in itself be a kind of comfort, after all? Making even discomfort, degradation and death, everything Job complained of, a magnificent defiance?

  “O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou wouldst keep me secret until thy wrath be past

  “

  “My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me

  I have made my bed in the darkness, I have said to corruption, Thou art my father, to the worm, Thou art my mother. And where is now my hope?”

  “Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death

  land without order, where even the light is as darkness

  “

  Yet in the end the entreaty that was itself a reassurance rose again, one step advanced beyond hope towards certainty:

  “Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord

  “

  “And let light perpetual shine upon them.”

  Stumbling up the night stairs back to bed after Lauds, half asleep, Cadfael still had that persistent appeal echoing in his mind, and by the time he slept again it had become almost a triumphant claim reaching up to take what it pleaded for. Rest eternal and light perpetual

  even for Ailnoth.

  Not only for Ailnoth, but for most of us, thought Cadfael, subsiding into sleep, it will be a long journey through purgatory, but no doubt even the most winding way gets there in the end.

  Chapter Eleven

  The first day of the new year, 1142, dawned grey and moist, but with a veiled light that suggested the sun might come through slowly, and abide for an hour or so in the middle of the day, before mist again closed in towards nightfall. Cadfael, who was often up well before Prime, awakened this morning only when the bell sounded, and made his way down the night stairs with the others still drowsy from so short a rest. After Prime he went to make sure that all was well in the workshop, and brought away with him fresh oil for the altar lamps. Cynric had already trimmed the candles, and gone out through the cloister to the graveyard, to see all neat and ready where the open grave waited under the precinct wa
ll, covered decorously with planks. The body in its wooden coffin rested on a bier before the parish altar, decently draped. After the Mass it would be carried in procession from the north door, along the Foregate, and in at the great double gate just round the corner from the horse-fair ground, where the laity had access, instead of through the monastic court. A certain separateness must be preserved, for the sake of the quietude necessary to the Rule.

  There was a subdued bustle about the great court well before the hour for Mass, brothers hurrying to get their work ready for the rest of the day, or finish small things left undone the previous day. And the people of the Foregate began to gather outside the great west door of the church, or hover about the gatehouse waiting for friends before entering. They came with faces closed and shuttered, dutifully grave and ceremonious, but with quick and careful eyes watching from ambush, uncertain still whether they were really out of the shadow of that resented presence. Perhaps after today they would draw breath and come out of hiding, no longer wary of speaking openly to their neighbours. Perhaps! But what if Hugh should spring his trap in vain?

  Cadfael was uneasy about the entire enterprise, but even more dismayed at the thought of this uncertainty continuing for ever, until distrust and fear died at last only from attrition and forgetfulness. Better to have it out into the light, deal with it, and be done. Then at least all but one could be at peace. No—he, too! He most of all!

  The notabilities of the Foregate had begun to appear, Erwald the reeve, sombre-faced and aware of his dignity, as befitted and almost justified his use of the title of provost. The smith from his forge, Rhys ab Owain the Welsh farrier—several of the craftsmen of the Foregate were Welsh—Erwald’s shepherd kinsman, and Jordan Achard the baker, big and burly and well-fleshed, wooden-faced like the rest but nevertheless with a sort of glossy content about him, having survived to bury his detractor. And the little people, too. Aelgar who had worked for the priest and been affronted by the doubt whether he was villein or free, Eadwin whose boundary stone had been shifted by Ailnoth’s too close ploughing, Centwin whose child had been buried in unblessed ground and abandoned as lost, the fathers of boys who had learned the hard way to stay out of range of the ebony staff, and shivered in their shoes at having to attend Ailnoth’s lessons. The boys themselves gathered at a little distance from their elders, whispering, shuffling, shifting to get a view within but never entering, and sometimes their wary faces showed a sudden fleeting grin here and there, and sometimes their whispering turned briefly to sniggering, half from bravado and half from involuntary awe. The Foregate dogs, sensing the general excitement and unease, ran about between the crowding watchers, snapped edgily at the hooves of passing horses, and loosed volleys of high-pitched barking at every sudden noise.