Roger’s hand had stiffened round the stem of his wine cup. He was not so drunk but he was listening intently.
“Shrewsbury to Woodstock will be a two- or three-day journey to such a rider. All you need do is have a watcher on the road north of you to give warning. The woods are thick enough, masterless men have been known to haunt there. Even if he comes by daylight, your part need never be known. Hide him but a few days, it will be long enough. Then turn him loose by night, and who’s ever to know what footpads held and robbed him? You need not even touch his parchments—robbers would count them worthless. Take what common thieves would take, and theirs will be the blame.”
Roger opened his tight-shut mouth to say in a doubtful growl, “He’ll not be traveling alone.”
“Hah! Two or three abbey servants—they’ll run like hares. You need not trouble yourself over them. Three stout, silent men of your own will be more than enough.”
He brooded, and began to think so, too, and to review in his mind the men of his household, seeking the right hands for such work. Not the Welshman and the clerk, the strangers here,- their part was to be the honest onlookers in case there should ever be questions asked.
THEY LEFT SUTTON MAUDUIT on the twentieth day of November, which seemed unnecessarily early, though as Roger had decreed that they should settle in his hunting lodge in the forest close by Woodstock, which meant conveying stores with them to make the house habitable and provision it for a party for, presumably, a stay of three nights at least. It was perhaps a wise precaution. Roger was taking no chances in his suit, he said; he meant to be established on the ground in good time, and have all his proofs in order.
“But so he has,” said Alard, pricked in his professional pride, “for I’ve gone over everything with him, and the case, if open in default of specific instructions, is plain enough and will stand up.
What the abbey can muster, who knows? They say the abbot is not well, which is why his prior comes in his place. My work is done.“
He had the faraway look in his eye, as the party rode out and faced westward, of one either penned and longing to be where he could but see, or loose and weary and being drawn home. Either a vagus escaping outward, or a penitent flying back in haste before the doors should close against him. There must indeed be something desirable and lovely to cause a man to look toward it with that look on his face.
Three men-at-arms and two grooms accompanied Roger, in addition to Alard and Cadfael, whose term of service would end with the session in court after which they might go where they would, Cadfael horsed, since he owned his own mount, Alard afoot, since the pony he rode belonged to Roger. It came as something of a surprise to Cadfael that the squire Goscelin should also saddle up and ride with the party, very debonair and well armed with sword and dagger.
“I marvel,” said Cadfael dryly, “that the lady doesn’t need him at home for her own protection, while her lord’s absent.”
The Lady Eadwina, however, bade farewell to the whole party with the greatest serenity, and to her husband with demonstrative affection, putting forward her little son to be embraced and kissed. Perhaps, thought Cadfael, relenting, I do her wrong, simply because I feel chilled by that smile of hers. For all I know she may be the truest wife living.
They set out early, and before Buckingham made a halt at the small and penurious priory of Bradwell, where Roger elected to spend the night, keeping his three men-at-arms with him, while Goscelin with the rest of the party rode on to the hunting lodge to make all ready for their lord’s reception the following day. It was growing dark by the time they arrived, and the bustle of kindling fire and torches, and unloading the bed linen and stores from the sumpter ponies went on into the night. The lodge was small, stockaded, well furnished with stabling and mews, and in thick woodland, a place comfortable enough once they had a roaring fire on the hearth and food on the table.
“The road the prior of Shrewsbury will be coming by,” said Alard, warming himself by the fire after supper, “passes through Evesham. As like as not they’ll stay the last night there.” With every mile west, Cadfael had seen him straining forward with mounting eagerness. “The road cannot be far away from us here,-it passes through this forest.”
“It must be nearly thirty miles to Evesham,” Cadfael said. “A long day’s riding for a clerical party. It will be night by the time they ride past into Woodstock. If you’re set on going, stay at least to get your pay, for you’ll need it before the thirty miles is done.”
They went to their slumber in the warmth of the hall without a word more said. But he would go, Alard, whether he himself knew it yet or not. Cadfael knew it. His friend was a tired horse with the scent of the stable in his nostrils,- nothing would stop him now until he reached it.
It was well into the middle of the day when Roger and his escort arrived, and they approached not directly as the advance party had done, but from the woods to the north, as though they had been indulging in a little hunting or hawking by the way, except that they had neither hawk nor hound with them. A fine, clear, cool day for riding, there was no reason in the world why they should not go roundabout for the pure pleasure of it—and indeed, they seemed to come in high content!—but that Roger’s mind had been so preoccupied and so anxious concerning his lawsuit that distractions seemed unlikely. Cadfael was given to thinking about unlikely developments, which from old campaigns he knew to prove significant in most cases. Goscelin, who was out at the gate to welcome them in, was apparently oblivious to the direction from which they came. That way lay Alard’s highway to his rest. But what meaning ought it to have for Roger Mauduit?
The table was lavish that night, and lord and squire drank well and ate well, and gave no sign of any care, though they might, Cadfael thought, watching them from his lower place, seem a little tight and knife-edged. Well, the King’s court could account for that. Shrewsbury’s prior was drawing steadily nearer, with whatever weapons he had for the battle. But it seemed rather an exultant tension than an anxious one. Was Roger counting his chickens already?
The morning of the twenty-second of November dawned, and the noon passed, and with every moment Alard’s restlessness and abstraction grew, until with evening it possessed him utterly, and he could no longer resist. He presented himself before Roger after supper, when his mood might be mellow from good food and wine.
“My lord, with the morrow my service to you is completed. You need me no longer, and with your goodwill I would set forth now for where I am going. I go afoot and need provision for the road. If you have been content with my work, pay me what is due, and let me go.”
It seemed that Roger had been startled out of some equally absorbing preoccupation of his own and was in haste to return to it, for he made no demur but paid at once. To do him justice, he had never been a grudging paymaster. He drove as hard a bargain as he could at the outset, but once the agreement was made, he kept it.
“Go when you please,” he said. “Fill your bag from the kitchen for the journey when you leave. You did good work, I give you that.”
And he returned to whatever it was that so engrossed his thoughts, and Alard went to collect the proffered largesse and his own meager possessions.
“I am going,” he said, meeting Cadfael in the hall doorway. “I must go.” There was no more doubt in voice or face. “They will take me back, though in the lowest place. From that there’s no falling. The blessed Benedict wrote in the Rule that even to the third time of straying a man may be received again if he promise full amendment.”
It was a dark night, without moon or stars but in fleeting moments when the wind ripped apart the cloud covering to let through a brief gleam of moonlight. The weather had grown gusty and wild in the last two days, the King’s fleet must have had a rough crossing from Barfleur.
“You’d do better,” Cadfael urged, “to wait for morning and go by daylight. Here’s a safe bed, and the King’s peace, however well enforced, hardly covers every mile of the King’s high roads.”
But Alard would not wait. The yearning was on him too strongly, and a penniless vagabond who had ventured all the roads of Christendom by day or night was hardly likely to flinch from the last thirty miles of his wanderings.
“Then I’ll go with you as far as the road, and see you on your way,” Cadfael said.
There was a mile or so of track through thick forest between them and the high road that bore away west-northwest on the upland journey to Evesham. The ribbon of open highway, hemmed on both sides by trees, was hardly less dark than the forest itself. King Henry had fenced in his private park at Woodstock to house his wild beasts, but maintained also his hunting chase here, many miles in extent. At the road they parted, and Cadfael stood to watch his friend march steadily away towards the west, eyes fixed ahead, upon his penance and his absolution, a tired man with a rest assured.
Cadfael turned back toward the lodge as soon as the receding shadow had melted into the night. He was in no haste to go in, for the night, though blustery, was not cold, and he was in no mind to seek the company of others of the party now that one best known to him was gone, and gone in so mysteriously rapt a fashion. He walked on among the trees, turning his back on his bed for a while.
The constant thrashing of branches in the wind all but drowned the scuffling and shouting that suddenly broke out behind him, at some distance among the trees, until a horse’s shrill whinny brought him about with a jerk and set him running through the underbrush toward the spot where confused voices yelled alarm and broken bushes thrashed. The clamor seemed some little way off, and he was startled as he shouldered his way headlong through a thicket to collide heavily with two entangled bodies, send them spinning apart, and himself fall asprawl upon one of them in the flattened grass. The man under him uttered a scared and angry cry, and the voice was Roger’s. The other man had made no sound at all, but slid away very rapidly and lightly to vanish among the trees, a tall shadow swallowed in shadows.
Cadfael drew off in haste, reaching an arm to hoist the winded man. “My lord, are you hurt? What, in God’s name, is to do here?” The sleeve he clutched slid warm and wet under his hand. “You’re injured! Hold fast, let’s see what harm’s done before you move…”
Then there was the voice of Goscelin, for once loud and vehement in alarm, shouting for his lord and crashing headlong through bush and brake to fall on his knees beside Roger, lamenting and raging.
“My lord, my lord, what happened here? What rogues were those, loose in the woods? Dared they waylay travelers so close to the King’s highway? You’re hurt—here’s blood…”
Roger got his breath back and sat up, feeling at his left arm below the shoulder, and wincing. “A scratch. My arm… God curse him, whoever he may be, the fellow struck for my heart. Man, if you had not come charging like a bull, I might have been dead. You hurled me off the point of his dagger. Thank God, there’s no great harm, but I bleed… Help me back home!”
“That a man may not walk by night in his own woods,” Goscelin fumed, hoisting his lord carefully to his feet, “without being set upon by outlaws! Help here, you, Cadfael, take his other arm… Footpads so close to Woodstock! Tomorrow we must turn out the watch to comb these tracks and hunt them out of cover, before they kill…”
“Get me withindoors,” snapped Roger, “and have this coat and shirt off me, and let’s staunch this bleeding. I’m alive, that’s the main!”
They helped him back between them, through the more open ways toward the lodge. It dawned on Cadfael, as they went, that the clamor of furtive battle had ceased completely, even the wind had abated, and somewhere on the road, distantly, he caught the rhythm of galloping hooves, very fast and light, as of a riderless horse in panic flight.
THE GASH IN ROGER Mauduit’s left arm, just below the shoulder, was long but not deep and grew shallower as it descended. The stroke that marked him thus could well have been meant for his heart. Cadfael’s hurtling impact, at the very moment the attack was launched, had been the means of averting murder. The shadow that had melted into the night had no form, nothing about it rendered it human or recognizable. He had heard an outcry and run toward it, a projectile to strike attacked and attacker apart,- questioned, that was all he could say.
For which, said Roger, bandaged and resting and warmed with mulled wine, he was heartily thankful. And indeed, Roger was behaving with remarkable fortitude and calm for a man who had just escaped death. By the time he had demonstrated to his dismayed grooms and men-at-arms that he was alive and not much the worse, appointed the hour when they should set out for Woodstock in the morning, and been helped to his bed by Goscelin, there was even a suggestion of complacency about him, as though a gash in the arm was a small price to pay for the successful retention of a valuable property and the defeat of his clerical opponents.
IN THE COURT OF the palace of Woodstock the King’s chamberlains, clerks, and judges were fluttering about in a curiously distracted manner, or so it seemed to Cadfael, standing apart among the commoners to observe their antics. They gathered in small groups, conversing in low voices and with anxious faces, broke apart to regroup with others of their kind, hurried in and out among the litigants, avoiding or brushing off all questions, exchanged documents, hurried to the door to peer out, as if looking for some late arrival. And there was indeed one litigant who had not kept to his time, for there was no sign of a Benedictine prior among those assembled nor had anyone appeared to explain or justify his absence. And Roger Mauduit, in spite of his stiff and painful arm, continued to relax, with ever-increasing assurance, into shining complacency.
The appointed hour was already some minutes past when four agitated fellows, two of them Benedictine brothers, made a hasty entrance, and accosted the presiding clerk.
“Sir,” bleated the leader, loud in nervous dismay, “we here are come from the abbey of Shrewsbury, escort to our prior, who was on his way to plead a case at law here. Sir, you must hold him excused, for it is not his blame nor ours that he cannot appear. In the forest some two miles north, as we rode hither last night in the dark, we were attacked by a band of lawless robbers, and they have seized our prior and dragged him away…”
The spokesman’s voice had risen shrilly in his agitation, he had the attention of every man in the hall by this time. Certainly, he had Cadfael’s. Masterless men some two miles out of Woodstock, plying their trade last night, could only be the same who had happened upon Roger Mauduit and all but been the death of him. Any such gang, so close to the court, was astonishing enough,- there could hardly be two. The clerk was outraged at the very idea.
“Seized and captured him? And you four were with him? Can this be true? How many were they who attacked you?”
“We could not tell for certain. Three at least—but they were lying in ambush,- we had no chance to stand them off. They pulled him from his horse and were off into the trees with him. They knew the woods, and we did not. Sir, we did go after them, but they beat us off.”
It was evident they had done their best, for two of them showed bruised and scratched, and all were soiled and torn as to their clothing.
“We have hunted through the night but found no trace, only we caught his horse a mile down the highway as we came hither. So we plead here that our prior’s absence be not seen as a default, for indeed he would have been here in the town last night if all had gone as it should.”
“Hush, wait!” the clerk said peremptorily.
All heads had turned toward the door of the hall, where a great flurry of officials had suddenly surged into view, cleaving through the press with fixed and ominous haste, to take the center of the floor below the King’s empty dais. A chamberlain, elderly and authoritative, struck the floor loudly with his staff and commanded silence. And at sight of his face silence fell like a stone.
“My lords, gentlemen, all who have pleas here this day, and all others present, you are bidden to disperse, for there will be no hearings today. All suits that should be heard here must be postp
oned three days and will be heard by his Grace’s judges. His Grace the King cannot appear.”
This time the silence fell again like a heavy curtain, muffling even thought or conjecture.
“The court is in mourning from this hour. We have received news of desolating import. His Grace with the greater part of his fleet made the crossing to England safely, as is known, but the Blanche Nef, in which his Grace’s son and heir, Prince William, with all his companions and many other noble souls were embarked, put to sea late, and was caught in gales before ever clearing Barfleur. The ship is lost, split upon a rock, foundered with all hands, not a soul is come safe to land. Go hence quietly, and pray for the souls of the flower of this realm.”
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