The Holy Thief

by Ellis Peters

  It was almost time for Compline when Cadfael came from the gardens after his last round of the evening, and saw horsemen riding in at the gate. Sulien Blount, on a piebald gelding, leading a brown cob on a rein, saddled ready for riding, and after him two grooms in attendance. At this hour, in twilight, an unexpected invasion. Cadfael went to meet them as Sulien lighted down to speak hurriedly to the porter. Only some matter of great urgency could have brought messengers from Longner so late.

  “Sulien, what is it? What brings you here at this hour?”

  Sulien swung round to him gratefully. “Cadfael, I have a request to make of the abbot. Or we may need the good word of this sub-prior from Ramsey, no less… My mother asks for that young musician of his, Tutilo, the one who has played and sung to her before, and helped her to sleep. She took kindly to him, and he to her. This time it will be a long sleep, Cadfael. She can’t last the night through. And there’s something she wants and needs to do… I have not questioned. Neither would you, if you could see her…”

  “The lad you want is under lock and key,” said Cadfael, dismayed. “He’s under suspicion of felonies since the lady sent for him, two nights ago. Is she so near her end? The abbot can scarcely let him out to her except with guarantees for his return.”

  “I know it,” said Sulien. “Hugh Beringar has been with us, I know how things stand. But under escort… You see we’ll keep good hold of him, and bring him back to you bound, if need be. At least ask! Tell Radulfus it is her last request of him. Death’s mercy has held off all too long, but now I swear to you this is ending. He knows all her story, he’ll listen!”

  “Wait,” said Cadfael, “and I will go and ask.”

  “But, Cadfael… two nights ago? No, we never sent for him two nights ago.”

  Well, there was no great surprise there. The possibility had been at the back of Cadfael’s mind for some time. No, it had been too apt, too opportune. He had found out what awaited him, and removed himself from the scene long enough, he had hoped, to escape the judgement. It made no difference now. “No, no matter, that’s understood,” he said. “Wait here for me!”

  Abbot Radulfus was alone in his paneled parlor. He listened to this late embassage with drawn brows, and eyes looking inward. And having heard, he said somberly: “It is high time for her. How can she be denied? You say they have guards enough to keep him safe? Yes, let him go—”

  “And Father Herluin? Should I ask his leave also?”

  “No. Tutilo is within my walls and in my charge. I give him leave. Go yourself, Cadfael, and release him to them. If time is so short for her, waste none of it.”

  Cadfael returned in haste to the gatehouse. “He will come. We have the abbot’s leave. Wait, and I’ll bring the boy.”

  It scarcely surprised him to find, when he plucked the key from its nail in the gatehouse, that the nail beside it was also vacant. Everything was happening now with a distant, dreamlike certainty. Daalny had acted, after all; she must have taken the second key during Vespers, from the nail where at noon she had watched the porter hang the first one, but she had had to wait for near-darkness before using it. Now would be her favored time, now when the brothers would be gathering in the church for Compline. Cadfael left the messengers from Longner waiting uneasily within the gate, and went hurrying round the corner of the schoolroom to the penitential cells beyond, where deeper shadows were already filling the narrow passage to the wicket in the enclave wall, and the mill and the pool beyond.

  And she was there. He was aware of her at once, though she was only a slender additional shadow pressed close within the deep doorway of the cell. He heard the key grating ineffectively in the wards of the lock it did not fit, and her vexed, angry breathing as she wrestled to make it enter where it would not go. He heard her stamp her foot in frustrated rage, and grit her teeth, too intent to become aware of his approach until he reached an arm to put her aside, quite gently.

  “No use, child!” he said. “Let me!”

  She uttered a muted cry of despair, and plucked herself furiously backward out of his grasp. There was no sound from within the cell, though the prisoner’s little lamp was lighted, its faint glow showed at the high, barred window.

  “Wait, now, wait!” said Cadfael. “You have a message to deliver here, and so have I. Let’s be about it.” He stooped to pick up the wrong key, which had been jerked out of the lock and out of her hand when she started away. “Come, and I’ll let you in.”

  The right key turned sweetly in the heavy lock, and Cadfael opened the door. Tutilo was standing fronting them, erect and rigid, his face a narrow, pale flame, his amber eyes wide and wild. He had known nothing of her plans, he did not know now what to expect, why this confining door should ever have been opened now, at this end of the day, after all permitted visits were over.

  “Say what you came to say to him,” said Cadfael. “But briefly. Waste no time, for I have none to waste, and neither has he.”

  Daalny stood tense and at a loss far one moment, before she flung herself bodily into the open doorway, as though she feared the door might be slammed again before she could prevent, though Cadfael made no move. Tutilo stood staring in bewilderment from one of them to the other, without understanding, almost without recognition.

  “Tutilo,” she said, low-voiced and urgent, “come away now. Through the wicket here, and you’re free. No one will see you, once outside the walls. They’re all at Compline. Go, quickly, while there’s time. Go west into Wales. Don’t wait here to be made a scapegoat, go, now… quickly!”

  Tutilo came to life with a shudder and a start, golden flames kindling in his eyes. “Free? What have you done? Daalny, they’ll only turn on you…” He turned to stare at Cadfael, braced and quivering, unsure whether this was friend or enemy facing him. “I do not understand!”

  “That is what she came to say to you,” said Cadfael. “I have a message for you, too. Sulien Blount is here with a horse for you, and begs that you will come to his mother, now, at once, for the Lady Donata is dying, and is asking to see you again, and hear you, before she dies.”

  Tutilo stiffened into marble stillness. The yellow flames darkened and softened into the pure glow of a steady fire. His lips moved, saying her name silently: “Donata?”

  “Go, now!” Daalny ordered, past anger now that the contest was joined and could not be evaded. “I have dared this for you, how dare you now cast it in my face? Go, while there’s time. He is one and we are two. He cannot prevent!”

  “I would not prevent,” said Cadfael. “The choice is his to make.”

  “Dying?” said Tutilo, finding a voice clear, quiet and grieving. “Truly, she is dying?”

  “And asking for you,” said Cadfael. “As you said she did two nights ago. But tonight it is true, and tonight will be the last time.”

  “You have heard,” said Daalny, smouldering but still. “The door is open. He says he will not prevent. Choose, then! I have done.”

  Tutilo did not seem to hear her. “I used her!” he said, lamentably shaken. And to Cadfael he said doubtfully: “And Herluin lets me go?”

  “Not Herluin, but the abbot lets you go. On your honor to return, and under escort.”

  Tutilo took Daalny suddenly between his hands, with grieving gentleness, and moved her aside from the doorway. He raised a hand with abrupt, convulsive passion and stroked her cheek, long fingers smoothing eloquently from temple to chin in a gesture of helpless apology.

  “She wants me,” he said softly. “I must go to her.”

  Chapter Eight

  « ^ »

  Daalny had discarded at once her anger and her pleading as soon as the choice was made, and made in such a fashion that she knew it could not be changed. She followed to the corner of the schoolroom, and there stood watching in silence as Tutilo mounted, and the little cavalcade filed out at the gate and turned along the Foregate. The broader track from the Horse Fair was better for riding; he would not have to pass by on the narrow path where h
e had stumbled over Aldhelm’s body.

  The bell for Compline rang, the time she had set herself for hounding him out at the wicket, into a world he was, perhaps, already beginning to regret surrendering, but which he might have found none too hospitable to a runaway Benedictine novice. Better, at all costs, however, or so she had reasoned, to put twenty miles and a border between him and a hanging. Now she stood thoughtful, with the chime of the bell in her ears, and wondered. And when Cadfael came slowly back to her across the empty court, she stood in his way great-eyed, fronting him gravely as if she would penetrate into the most remote recesses of his mind.

  “You do not believe it of him, either,” she said with certainty. “You know he never harmed this poor shepherd lad. Would you really have stood by and let him go free?”

  “If he had so chosen,” said Cadfael, “yes. But I knew he would not. The choice was his. He made it. And now I am going to Compline.”

  “I’ll wait in your workshop,” said Daalny. “I must talk to you. Now that I’m sure, now I will tell you everything I know. Even if none of it is proof of anything, yet you may see something there that I have not seen. He has need of more wits than mine, and two who will stand by him is better than one.”

  “I wonder, now,” said Cadfael, studying her thin, bright, resolute face, “whether you would be wanting that young man for yourself, or is this pure disinterested kindness?” She looked at him, and slowly smiled. “Well, I’ll come,” he said. “I need a second wit, too. If it’s cold within, you may use the bellows on my brazier. I have turfs enough there to damp it down again before we leave it.”

  In the close, timber-scented air of the hut, with the herbs rustling overhead in the rising warmth from the brazier, she sat leaning forward to the glow, the light gilding her high cheekbones and the broad sweep of brow beneath the curling black hair.

  “You know now,” she said, “that he was not sent for to Longner that night. It was a tale that could be believed, but what he wanted was to have a reason to be somewhere else, not to be here when the shepherd came. That would not have been the end of it, but it would have put off the worst, and Tutilo seldom looks beyond the day. If he could have evaded meeting the poor man for even a few days, this squabble over the saint’s bones would have been settled, one way or another, and Herluin would have been off on his travels, and taken Tutilo with him. Not that that promises him much of a life,” she added, jutting a doubtful lip, “now he’s getting over his saintliness. If the biblical fates go against him, Herluin will take all the vexation and shame out on Tutilo, with usury. You know it as well as I do. These monastics, they are what they are born, only with a vengeance. If they come into the world hard and cold, they end harder and colder, if they come generous and sweet, they grow ever sweeter and more generous. All one or all the other. And just when Tutilo is beginning to wake up to where he belongs, and what he has it in him to be,” she said vehemently. “Well, so it was. He lied about Longner to be out of here all the evening long. Now he owes her a debt, and goes to pay it.”

  “There is more than a debt in it,” said Cadfael. “That lady tamed him the first time he set eyes on her. He would have gone to her no matter what lure you could have put in the other scale. And what you are telling me is that he knew very well Aldhelm was to come here that night. How did he know? It never was made known to the brothers. Only the abbot and I knew, though he may have felt that he must tell Prior Robert.”

  “He knew,” she said simply, “because I told him.”

  “And how did you know?”

  She looked up sharply, stung into alert attention. “Yes, it’s true, few people knew. It was quite by chance. Bénezet overheard Prior Robert and Brother Jerome talking about it, and he came and told me. He knew I should warn Tutilo, I think he meant me to. He knew,” said Daalny, “that I liked Tutilo.”

  The simplest and most temperate words are the best to express complex and intemperate feelings. She had said more than she knew.

  “And he?” said Cadfael with careful detachment.

  But she was not so simple. Women never are, and she was a woman who had experienced more of life than her years would contain. “He hardly knows what he feels,” she said, “for me or for anything. The wind blows him. He sees a splendid dream, and runs headlong. He even persuades himself of the splendor. The monastic dream is fading now. I know it has splendor, but not for him. And he is not the man to go with it for the peace and the quiet bliss.”

  Tell me, then,” said Cadfael mildly, “what happened that night, after he asked and got leave to go to Longner.”

  “I would have told it at once,” she said ruefully, “but that it would not have helped him. For past all doubt he was on that path, he did find the poor soul dead, he did run to the castle, like an honest man, and tell the sheriff what he had found. What I can tell does not change that. But if you can find a grain of good wheat in it, for God’s sake pick it out and show it to me, for I have overlooked it.”

  “Tell me,” said Cadfael.

  “We made it up between us,” she said, “and it was the first time ever we two met outside these walls. He went out and took the path that leads up over the ridge to the ferry. I slipped out through the double gates of the burial ground to the Horse Fair, and we crept into the loft over the stable there. The wicket in the main doors was still unlocked then, after they brought the horses back after the flood. It was more than a week before the stableyard here had dried out. And that is where we stayed together, until we heard the Compline bell. By that time, we thought, he must have been and gone again. So late, and the night dark.”

  “And raining,” Cadfael reminded her.

  That, too. Not a night to linger on the road. We thought he would be off home, and none too keen to make another wasted journey.”

  “And what did you do all that time?” asked Cadfael.

  She smiled ruefully. “We talked. We sat together in the hay to keep warm, and talked. Of his vocation freely entered into, and my being born into slavery with no choice at all, and how the two came to be much alike in the end,” she said hardly. “I was born into the trap, he walked into it in avoiding another kind of servitude, with his eyes open, but not looking where he was going. And now with his own hands and feet tied he has great notions of delivering me.”

  “As you offered him his freedom tonight. Well, and then? You heard the Compline bell, and thought it safe to return. Then how came he alone on the path from the ferry?”

  “We dared not come back together. He might be seen returning, and it was needful he should come by the way he would have taken to Longner. I slipped in by the cemetery gate, as I left, and he went up through the trees to the path by which he had made his way to join me. It would not have done to come together. He has forsworn women,” she said with a bitter smile, “and I must have no dealings with men.”

  “He has not yet taken final vows,” said Cadfael. “A pity he went alone, however. If two together had happened upon a dead man, they could have spoken for each other.”

  “Us two?” she said, staring, and laughed briefly. They would not have believed us… a bondwoman and a novice near his final vows out in the night and fresh from a romp in the hay? They would have said we compounded together to kill the man. And now, I suppose,” she said, cooling from bitterness into a composed sadness, “I have told you everything, and told you nothing. But it is the whole truth. A good liar and a bold thief he may be, but on most counts Tutilo is as innocent as a babe. We even said the night prayers together when the bell rang. Who’s to believe that?”

  Cadfael believed it, but could imagine Herluin’s face if ever the claim had been made to him. “You have told me, at least,” he said, musing, “that there were more people knew Aldhelm would be coming down that path than just the few of us, as it began. If Bénezet heard Jerome baying his knowledge abroad, how many more, I wonder, learned of it before night? Prior Robert can be discreet, but Jerome?… I doubt it. And might not Bénezet have passed on all
his gleanings to Rémy, as he did to you? Whatever the bodyservant picks up may be grist to his master’s mill. And what Rémy hears may very well be talked of with the patron he’s courting. Oh, no, I would not say this hour had been altogether wasted. It means I have much thinking to do. Go to your bed now, child, and leave troubling for this while.”

  “And if Tutilo never comes back from Longner?” she asked, wavering between hope and dread.

  “Never give a thought to that,” said Cadfael. “He will come back.”

  They brought Tutilo back well before Prime, in the pearly light of a clear, still dawn. March had come in more lamb than lion, there were windflowers in the woods, and the first primroses, unburned by frost, undashed and unmired by further rain, were just opening. The two Longner men who rode one on either side their borrowed minstrel brought him as far as the gatehouse, waiting in silence as he dismounted. The farewells they made to him, as they took his pony’s rein and made to turn back for home, were quiet and constrained, but clearly friendly. The elder of the two leaned down from the saddle to clap him amiably on the shoulder, and said a word or two in his ear, before they trotted away along the Foregate towards the Horse Fair.

  Cadfael had been awake and afield more than an hour by then, for want of a quiet mind, and had filled in the time by ranging along the bushy edges of his pease-fields and the shore of the mill-pond to gather the white blossoms of the blackthorn, just out of the bud and at their best for infusing, to make a gentle purge for the old men in the infirmary, who could no longer take the strenuous exercise that had formerly kept their bodies in good trim. A very fine plant, the blackthorn, good for almost anything that ailed a man’s insides, providing bud and flower and bitter black fruit were all taken at their best. Good in the hedges, too, for keeping cattle and sheep out of planted places.

  From time to time he broke off his labors to return to the great court to look out for Tutilo returning. He had a full scrip of the small white flowers when he made the journey for the seventh time, and saw the three riders pace in at the gatehouse, and stood unobserved to watch Tutilo dismount, part amicably from his guards, and come wearily towards the gatehouse door, as if he would himself take the key and deliver himself dutifully back to his captivity.