A Virgin In The Ice

by Ellis Peters

  Yves gathered himself sturdily and got to his feet. He took time to draw a deep breath and steady the shaking of his knees before he looked up into the face of the chief of these night-birds.

  Mounted and looming in the twilight, the man had seemed immense. Easy now in his great chair, he was seen to be no more than common tall, but very powerfully built, wide-shouldered, deep-chested. After a savage fashion he was very comely. Now with the candlelight to show him clearly he was more like a lion than ever, for the thick mane of curling hair and the glossy, untrimmed beard were tawny, and the large eyes, narrowed but sharp as a cat’s beneath heavy lids, were of the same coloring. His lips, left naked among all that profusion of dull gold, were full and curled and proud. He eyed Yves in silence from head to foot, while Yves stared as doughtily back at him, and kept his mouth shut rather out of discretion than fright. There could be worse moments to come. At least now they were back from another successful raid, laden with booty, eating and drinking and in high content with themselves. And the lion seemed in good humor. If his slow smile was mocking, it was at least a smile.

  “Loose him,” he said.

  The belt was unbuckled from Yves’ cramped arms, the cord untied from his wrists. He stood rubbing the blood back into aching arms, kept his eyes warily on the lion’s face, and waited. A number of the henchmen in the hall had drawn in at his back, grinning, to watch.

  “You’ve bitten out your tongue on the way?” asked the bearded man amiably.

  “No, my lord. I can speak when I have something to say.”

  “You might be well advised to think of something to say now, at once. Something nearer truth than you told me under the copse there.”

  Yves could not see that boldness was going to do him any harm here, or the discretion of fear very much good. He said bluntly: “I am hungry, my lord. You would hardly find a truer word than that. And I take it as between gentlemen that you feed your guests.”

  The lion threw back his tawny head and loosed a shout of laughter that was echoed down the hall. “And I take that to be a confession. Gentle, are you? Now tell me more, and you shall eat. No more hunting for lost sheep. Who are you?”

  He meant to know. And for all his present easy mood, if he was balked he would not mind by what means he got what he wanted. Yves spent a few seconds too long considering what he had better say, and got an earnest of what might follow obduracy. A long arm reached out, gripped him by the forearm, and with a casual twist dropped him wincing to his knees. The other hand clenched in his hair and forced his head back, to stare up into a face still calmly smiling.

  “When I ask, wise men answer. Who are you?”

  “Let me up and I’ll tell you,” said Yves through his teeth.

  “Tell, brat, and I may let you up. I may even feed you. A strutting little cockerel of the nobility you may be, but many a cock has got his neck wrung for crowing too loud.”

  Yves shifted a little to ease his pain, drew deep breath to have his voice steady, and got out his name. This was no time for the stupidity of heroism, not even for obstinate insistence on his dignity.

  “My name is Yves Hugonin. My family is noble.”

  The hands released him. The bearded man leaned back in his chair at ease. His face had not changed, he had not been at all angry; anger had little part in his proceedings, which were entirely cold. Predatory beasts feel no animosity against their prey, and no compunction, either.

  “A Hugonin, eh? And what were you doing, Yves Hugonin, where we found you, alone in the early morning of such a winter day?”

  “I was trying to find my way to Ludlow,” said Yves. He rose from his knees and shook his disordered hair back from his face. Not a word must be said of anyone but himself; he picked his way delicately between truth and falsehood. “I was at school with the monks in Worcester. When the town was attacked they sent me away to escape the fighting and slaughter there. I was with some other people, trying to reach any safe town, but in the storms we were separated. Country people have fed and sheltered me, and I was making my way to Ludlow as best I could.”

  He hoped it sounded convincing. He did not want to have to invent details. He still recalled with misgivings the shout of laughter it had provoked when he mentioned the manor of Whitbache, and claimed residence there, and wondered uneasily why.

  “Where did you spend last night, then? Not in the open!”

  “In a hut in the fields. I thought I should get to Ludlow before night, but when the snow came on, and I lost my way. When the wind dropped and it stopped snowing,” he said, talking to evade further probing, “I set out again. And then I heard you, and thought you might set me right.”

  The bearded man considered, eyeing him with the disturbing smile that contained merriment without warmth. “And here you are, with a stout roof over your head, a good fire at your back, and food and drink for you if you behave yourself seemly. There’s a price, of course, to pay for your bed and board. Hugonin! And Worcester… Are you son to that Geoffrey Hugonin who died a few years back? The most of his lands, I recall, lay in that shire.”

  “I’m his son and his heir, if ever I come to it.”

  “Ah! There should be no difficulty, then, in paying for your entertainment.” The narrowed eyes gleamed satisfaction. “Who stands guardian to your lordship now? And why did he let you go stravaging off into the winter so poorly provided, and alone?”

  “He was only newly arrived in England from the Holy Land, he knew nothing of it. If you send now, you may hear of him in Gloucester, he is of the empress’s party.” The lion shrugged that off indifferently. In the civil war he belonged to neither side, and cared nothing which side others chose. He had set up his own party, and acknowledged no other. But certainly he would extort ransom as cheerfully from one as from the other. “His name is Laurence d’Angers,” said Yves, “my mother’s brother.” That name was known, and welcomed with satisfaction. “He will pay handsomely to have me back,” said Yves.

  “So sure?” The bearded man laughed. “Uncles are not always to anxious to ransom nephews who will one day come into great estates. Some have been known to prefer to leave them unredeemed, to be hustled out of the world as unprofitable, and come into the inheritance themselves.”

  “He would not come into my inheritance,” said Yves. “I have a sister, and she is not here in this extreme.” It pierced him with sudden renewed dismay that he did not know where she was at this moment, and her situation might be just as dire as his own, but he kept his voice steady and his countenance wooden. “And my uncle is an honorable man,” he said stiffly. “He will ransom me and never grudge it. So he gets me back alive and undamaged,” he added emphatically.

  “Complete to every hair,” said the lion, laughing, “if the price is right.” He gestured to the fellow who stood at Yves’ shoulder. “I put him in your charge. Feed him, let him warm himself by the fire, but if you let him slip through your fingers, your own neck pays for it. When he has eaten, lock him away safe in the tower. He’ll be worth far more than all the plunder we’ve brought from Whitbache.”

  *

  Brother Elyas awoke from the dreamless peace of sleep to the agonizing dream of waking life. It was daylight, lines of pale morning slid between the boards of the hut, cold and white. He was alone. But there had been someone else, that he remembered. There had been a boy, a boy who had kept him company sturdily, and lain by him in the hay, a warmth by his side. Now there was no one. Brother Elyas missed him. In the snow they had clung together in mutual kindness, trying to alleviate more than the cold and the cruelty of the wind. Whatever became of him, he must find the boy, and make sure that no harm should come to him. Children have a right to life, a right so many of their elders have forfeited by follies, by failures, by sins. He was outcast, but the boy was innocent and pure, and must not be surrendered to danger and death.

  Elyas rose, and went to open the door. Under the eaves, where the wind had driven the snow away, leaving only a thin layer, the small fo
otmarks showed clearly, only the powdering of a late squall clouding them. They turned right, down the slope, and there in the deeper snow a short, vigorous body had ploughed a jagged furrow, round the bank of bushes, down into the coppice of trees.

  Elyas followed where the boy had led. Beyond the belt of trees there was a beaten track that crossed on an almost level course, climbing gently towards the east. Horses had passed this way, and men afoot with them, enough men to carve out a flattened road. They had come from the west. Had they taken the boy away with them towards the east? There would be no tracing one child’s passage here, but surely he had run and struggled down the slope to join them.

  In his dream, which neither cold nor pain could penetrate, and only the memory of the boy could influence, Brother Elyas turned towards the east, and set out along the track the unknown company had taken. The furrow they had ploughed through barren level, even fall and drift was simple to follow, the weaving route was surely older than all the pathways here, made to render the climb equable and easy. It wound along the hillside in a long curve. Elyas had gone some three hundred paces when he saw beneath him the first splash of dark red in the white.

  Someone had shed blood. Only a little blood, but a dotted line of ruby beads continued from it, and in a few moments he found another blossom of blood at his feet. The sun was rising now, pale through the mist, which lifted with the day. The red gleamed, frozen on the surface of the snow. Not even the brief noon sun would thaw it away, though the wind might spread blown snow over it. Brother Elyas followed, drop by drop along the way where someone had bled. Blood can requite blood. If someone had taken and hurt the boy, then a man already fingered by despair and death might still die to some purpose.

  Immune from any further onslaughts of cold, pain and fear, on sandalled feet through frozen drifts, Brother Elyas went in search of Yves.

  Chapter 10

  BROTHER CADFAEL CAME OUT from High Mass with Prior Leonard, into the brief and grudging sunshine of the middle hours of the day, and the sudden glitter reflected from the banked piles of snow. A number of the priory tenants had mustered to help in the search for the missing pair, while the light was favorable and no snow falling. Prior Leonard pointed out one of them, a big, bluff fellow in his prime, with red hair just salted with grey, and the weather beaten face and far-gazing blue eyes of the hillman.

  “That is Reyner Dutton, who brought Brother Elyas in to us in the first place. I feel shame to think what he must be feeling, now the poor man has slipped through our fingers after all.”

  “No blame at all to you,” said Cadfael glumly. “The fault was mine, if there’s any question of blame.” He studied Reyner’s solid person thoughtfully. “You know, Leonard, I have been wondering about this flight. Which of us has not! It seems Elyas, once something set him off, went about it with great determination. This was no simple clambering out of bed and wandering at large. Barely a quarter of an hour, and they were well away. And plainly the boy could not turn or dissuade him, but he would go wherever it was he was going. He had an end in view. It need not be a reasonable end, but it meant something to him. How if he had suddenly recalled the attack that all but killed him, and set off to return to that place where it happened? That was the last he knew, before memory and almost life were taken from him. He might feel driven to resume there, in this twilight state of his mind.”

  Prior Leonard conceded, though doubtfully: “It might be so. Or may he not have recalled his own errand from Pershore, and started back to his duty there? It might take a man so, his wits being still so shaken up in him.”

  “It comes to me now,” said Cadfael earnestly, “that I have never been to the spot where Elyas was attacked, though I suppose it must be not far from where our sister was killed. And that again has been fretting me.” But he forbore from spelling out what he found peculiar about it, for Leonard had been a man of the cloister from puberty, serenely content and blissfully innocent, and there was no need to trouble him by reflecting aloud that the night of Hilaria’s death had been a blizzard as intense as the night just past, that even lust has its preference for a modicum of shelter, and of shelter he had seen none close to her icy grave. A bed of snow and ice, and a coverlet of howling wind, do not constitute the most conducive of circumstances for rape. “I was meaning to go out with the rest,” he said, “as soon as I have take a bite to eat. How if I should borrow Reyner to bring me to the place where he found Brother Elyas? As well begin there as anywhere.”

  “That you could,” agreed the prior, “if you are sure the girl will bide quietly here, and not try to take some action of her own.”

  “She’ll bide,” said Cadfael confidently, “and give you no trouble.” And so she would, but not for his asking. She would wait here obediently because one Olivier, a paragon, had ordered her to do so. “Come, and we’ll ask your man if he’ll be my guide.”

  The prior drew his tenant out of the group before it moved off from the gatehouse, and made them acquainted. Clearly Reyner had a warm relationship with his lord, and was ready to fall in cheerfully with whatever course Leonard suggested.

  “I’ll take you there, brother, gladly. The poor man, to be out again in this, when it’s almost been the death of him once. And he making such a good recovery. A madness must have come on him, to want out on such a night.”

  “Had you not better take two of our mules?” wondered the prior. “The place may not be far, but how far beyond may it not take you, if you should find a trace to follow? And your horse has been worked hard since coming here, Cadfael. Our beasts are fresh and hardy.”

  It was not an offer to be refused. Mounted or afoot, travelling would be slow, but better mounted. Cadfael went to snatch a hasty dinner, and returned to help Reyner saddle the mules. They set forth eastward along a road by this time well trampled. The best of the day would last them perhaps four hours, and after that they must be prepared for a possible return of the snow, as well as fading light. They left Ludlow distant on their right hand, and went on along the beaten road. The sky hung heavy and grey before them, though a feeble sun still shone upon this stretch of their way.

  “Surely it was not on the very highroad you found him?” said Cadfael, as Reyner made no move to turn aside.

  “Very close, brother, a little to the north of it. We’d come down the slope below the Lacy woods, and all but fell over him lying naked there in the snow. I tell you,” said Reyner forcibly, “I’ll take it very ill if we lose him now, after such an escape, and him as near death when we picked him up as ever man was and lived to tell it. To filch a good man back from the grave, and cheat those devils who did their worst to thrust him under, that did my heart good. Well, please God we’ll haul him back from the edge a second time. I hear you had a lad went with him,” said Reyner, turning his far-sighted blue eyes on Cadfael. “One that was lost before time, and now to seek again. I call it handsome, in one so young, to stick like a burr where he could not persuade. We’ll be after the pair of them, every hale man who tills or keeps stock around these parts. We are near, brother. Here we leave the road and bear left.”

  But not far. A shallow bowl only a few minutes from the road, lined with bushes and two squat hawthorn trees on the upper side, to the north.

  “Just here he lay,” said Reyner.

  It had been well worth coming, for this posed glaring problems. It fitted the marauding pattern of that night, yes. The outlaws had come from their early raid south of the road, and crossed, it seemed, somewhere here, to climb to some track well known to them, by which they could return unnoticed into the wilderness of Titterstone Clee. Here they could well have happened on Brother Elyas, and killed him more for sport than for his gown and linen, though not despising the small pickings of the supposed corpse. Granted all that, but then, where was Sister Hilaria?

  Cadfael turned to look northwards, into the gentle upland across which he had ridden with Yves before him. The brook where he had found Sister Hilaria lay somewhere up there, well away fr
om the road. North and east from here, he judged at least a mile.

  “Come up the fields with me, Reyner. There is a place I want to view again.”

  The mules climbed easily, the wind having scoured away some of last night’s fall. Cadfael set his course by memory, but it did not fall far astray. One thin little brook clashed under the hooves, in the suave hollows the snow lay cushioned over brushes and low trees. They were long out of sight of the road, waves of snowy ground cutting them off, as they continued to climb. They hit the tributary of the Ledwyche brook somewhat downstream, had there been any stream flowing, from the place where Sister Hilaria had been laid, and retraced its gently rising course until they came to the unmistakable spot where the coffin-shaped hole had been hacked in the ice. Even the previous night’s snow, though it smoothed off the razor-sharp outlines, kept the remembrance alive. This was the place where her murderers had thrown and abandoned her.

  More than a mile from where Brother Elyas had been battered and left for dead!

  Not here, thought Cadfael, looking round at a hillside as bare and bleak, almost, as the bald, craggy head of Clee. It did not happen here. She was brought here afterwards. But why? These outlaws otherwise had left all their victims where they fell, and cared nothing to hide them. And if she had been brought here, from where? No one would choose to carry a dead body very far. Somewhere nearby there must be some kind of shelter.

  “They’ll be running sheep, rather than cattle, up here,” he said, scanning the slopes above them.

  “So they do, but they’ll have got the most of them folded now. It’s ten years since we had a spell such as this.”

  “Then there’ll be a hut or two, somewhere about, for the shepherds’ use. Would you know where the nearest may be?”

  “A piece back along the traverse here towards Bromfield, the half of a mile it might be.” That must be along the selfsame track Cadfael had ridden with Yves on his saddle-bow, going home to Bromfield from Thurstan’s assart in the forest. He could not recall seeing such a hut that day, but evening had been setting in by then.