The Holy Thief

by Ellis Peters

  Cadfael could never be quite sure what it was that prompted him to borrow the key yet again after Compline, and go in to pay a late visit to Tutilo. It might have been the sound of the light, pure voice from within the cell, heard eerily across the court when he came from the last Office of the evening. A faint gleam of light showed through the high, barred window; the prisoner had not yet put out his little lamp. The singing was very soft, not meant to reach anyone outside, but the tone was so piercingly true, in the centre of the note like an arrow in the gold of a target, that it carried on the twilit stillness to the most remote corners of the court, and caused Cadfael to freeze in midstride, stricken to the heart with its beauty. The boy’s timing was a little out: he was still singing the close of the Office. Nothing so wonderful had been heard in the choir of the church. Anselm was an excellent precentor, and long ago in his youth might have sounded like this: but Anselm with all his skills was old, and this was an ageless voice that might have belonged to a child or an angel. Blessed be the human condition, thought Cadfael, which allows us marred and fallible creatures who are neither angels nor children to make sounds like these, that belong in another world. Unlooked-for mercies, undeserved grace!

  Well, that could be meant as a sign. Or again, what sent him to the gatehouse for the key might have been simply a feeling that he must make one more effort to get something useful out of the boy before sleeping, something that might point the way forward, perhaps something Tutilo did not even realize that he knew. Or, Cadfael thought afterwards, it might have been a sharp nudge in the ribs from Saint Winifred, stretching out the grace of a thought all the way from her grave in Gwytherin, having forgiven the graceless youth who had had the excellent taste to covet her, as she had forgiven the graceless old man who had presumed to suppose he was interpreting her will, just as impudently, all those years ago. Whatever it was, to the gatehouse he went, the entrancing and agonizing beauty of Tutilo’s singing following him all the way. Brother Porter let him take the key without question; in his solitude Tutilo had shown every sign of resignation and content, as if he welcomed the peace and quiet to consider his present state and his future prospects. Whatever complex motives had combined to drive Tutilo into the cloister, there was nothing spurious about his faith; if he had done no evil, he was assured no evil would come to him. Or else, of course, being the lad he was, he was lulling everyone into believing in his docility, until they ceased to pay him any careful attention, and let him slide out of the trap like an eel. With Tutilo you would never be quite sure. Daalny was right. You would have to know him very well, to know when he was lying and when he was telling the truth.

  Tutilo was still on his knees in front of the plain, small cross on the cell wall, and did not immediately look round when the key grated in the lock, and the door opened at his back. He had stopped singing, and was gazing musingly before him, eyes wide open, and face placid and absent. He turned, rising when the door swung heavily to again, and beholding Cadfael, smiled rather wanly, and sat down on his cot. He looked mildly surprised, but said nothing, waiting submissively to hear what was now required of him, and in no apprehension about it, because it was Cadfael who came.

  “No, nothing,” said Cadfael with a sigh, answering the look. “Just a gnawing hope that talking to us earlier might have started a hare, after all. Some small thing recalled that might be useful.”

  Tutilo shook his head slowly, willing but blank. “No, I can think of nothing I haven’t told you. And everything I have told you is truth.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt you,” said Cadfael resignedly. “Still, bear it in mind. The merest detail, something you think negligible, might be the very grain that makes the weight. Never mind, leave your wits fallow and something may come back to you.” He looked round the narrow, bare white cell. “Are you warm enough here?”

  “Once in the brychans, snug enough,” said Tutilo. “I’ve slept harder and colder many a time.”

  “And there’s nothing wanting? Any small thing I can do for you?”

  “According to the Rule, you should not so much as offer,” said Tutilo, with a sudden sparkling grin. “But yes, maybe there is one lawful thing I could ask, even to my credit. I have kept the hours, alone here, but there are bits I forget sometimes. And besides, I miss reading in it to pass the time. Even Father Herluin would approve. Could you bring me a breviary?”

  “What happened to your own?” Cadfael asked, surprised. “I know you had one, a little narrow one.” The vellum had been folded many times to make its cramped pages. “Good eyes you’d need for that minuscule, but then, your eyes are young enough to be sharp.”

  “I’ve lost it,” said Tutilo. “I had it at Mass, the day before I was locked in here, but where I’ve left it or dropped it I don’t know. I miss it, but I can’t think what I’ve done with it.”

  “You had it the day Aldhelm was to come here? The day—the night, rather—you found him?”

  “That was the last I can be clear about, and I may have shaken it out of my scrip or dropped it somewhere among the trees in the dark, that’s what I’m afraid of. I was hardly noticing much that night,” he said ruefully, “after I found him. What with bolting down the track and across the river into the town, I could have shed it anywhere. It may be down the Severn by now. I like to have it,” he said earnestly, “and I rise for Matins and Lauds in the night. I do!”

  “I’ll leave you mine,” said Cadfael. “Well, best get your sleep, if you’re going to rise with the rest of us at midnight. Keep your lamp burning till then, if you like, there’s enough oil here.” He had checked it in the little pottery vessel with a fingertip. “Goodnight, son!”

  “Don’t forget to lock the door,” said Tutilo after him, and laughed without a trace of bitterness.

  She was standing in the darkest of the dark, slender and still and erect, pressed against the stones of the cell wall when Cadfael rounded the corner. The faint gleam of Tutilo’s lamp through the grill high out of her reach fell from above over her face as no more than a glowworm’s eerie spark, conjuring out of deep darkness a spectral mask of a face, oval, elusive, with austere carven features, but the remaining light from the west window of the church, hardly less dim, found the large, smoldering luster of her eyes, and a few jeweled points of brightness that were embroidered silver threads along the side hems of her bliaut. She was in her finery, she had been singing for Robert Bossu. A lean, motionless, intent presence in the stillness of the night. Daalny, Partholan’s queen, a demi-goddess from the western paradise.

  “I heard your voices,” she said, her own voice pitched just above a whisper; whispers carry more audibly than soft utterances above the breath. “I could not call to him, someone might have heard. Cadfael, what is to happen to him?”

  “I hope,” said Cadfael, “no great harm.”

  “In long captivity,” she said, “he will stop singing. And then he will die. And the day after tomorrow we ride with the earl for Leicester. I have my orders from Rémy, tomorrow I must begin packing the instruments for safe carriage, and the next morning we ride. Bénezet will be seeing to all the horses, and exercising Rémy’s to make sure his injury’s healed well. And we go. And he remains. At whose mercy?”

  “God’s,” said Cadfael firmly, “and with the intercession of the saints. One saint, at any rate, for she has just nudged me with the seed of an idea. So go to your bed, and keep your heart up, for nothing is ended yet.”

  “And what gain is there for me?” she said. “We might prove ten times over that he did no murder, but still he will be dragged back to Ramsey, and they will have their revenge on him, not so much for being a thief as for making a botch of his thievery. In the earl’s party half the way, and far too strong an escort for him to break loose.” She lowered her burning eyes to the broad brown hand in which Cadfael held the key, and suddenly she smiled. “I know the right key now,” she said.

  “It might be changed over to the wrong nail,” said Cadfael mildly.

 
“I should know it, even so. There are but two alike in size and design, and I remember well the pattern of the wards on the wrong one. I shall not make that mistake again.”

  He was about to urge her to let well alone and trust heaven to do justice, but then he had a sudden vision of heaven’s justice as the Church sometimes applied it, in good but dreadful faith, with all the virtuous narrowness and pitilessness of minds blind and deaf to the infinite variety of humankind, its failings, and aspirations, and needs, and forgetful of all the Gospel reminders concerning publicans and sinners. And he thought of songbirds caged, drooping without air to play on the cords of their throats, without heart to sing, and knew that they might very well die. Half humanity was here in this lean dark girl beside him, and that half of humanity had its right to reason, determine and meddle, no less than the male half. After all, they were equally responsible for humankind continuing. There was not an archbishop or an abbot in the world who had not had a flesh and blood mother, and come of a passionate coupling.

  She would do as she thought fit, and so would he. He was not charged with the keeping of the keys, once he had restored this one to its place.

  “Well, well!” said Cadfael with a sigh. “Let him be for tonight. Let all things be. Who knows how much clearer the skies will be by tomorrow?”

  He left her then, and went on up the court to the gatehouse, to return the key to Brother Porter. Behind him Daalny said softly: “Goodnight!” Her tone was level, courteous, and withdrawn, promising nothing, confiding nothing, a neutral salute out of the dark.

  And what had he to show for that last instinctive return to question the boy yet again, to hope for some sudden blinding recollection that would unveil truth like flinging open the shutters on a summer morning? One small thing only: Tutilo had lost his breviary, somewhere, at some time, on the death-day. With half a mile of woodland and two or three hundred yards of Foregate back-alleys, and the hasty rush into the town and back again, to parcel out in search of it, if it was valued enough. A breviary can be recopied. And yet, if that was all, why was it that he felt Saint Winifred shaking him impatiently by the shoulder and urging in his ear that he knew very well where to begin looking, and that he had better be about it in the morning, for time was running out?

  Chapter Twelve

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  Cadfael arose well before Prime, opening his eyes upon a morning twilight with the pearl-grey promise of clear skies and a windless calm, and upon the consciousness of a task already decided upon and waiting for completion. As well make the enterprise serve two purposes. He went first to his workshop, to select the medicines that might be running short at the hospital of Saint Giles, at the end of the Foregate; ointments and lotions for skin eruptions chiefly, for the strays who came to refuge there were liable to arrive suffering the attendant ills of starvation living and uncleanliness, often through no fault of their own. Those of cold no less, especially among the old, whose breath rattled and rasped in their lungs like dried leaves from wandering the roads. With his scrip already stocked, he looked about him for the jobs most needing attention, and marked down duties enough to keep Brother Winfrid busy through the working hours of the morning.

  After Prime he left Winfrid cheerfully digging over a patch for planting out cabbages later, and went to borrow a key from the porter. Round the eastern corner of the precinct wall, at the far end of the Horse Fair and halfway to Saint Giles, was the large barn and stable, and loft over, to which the horses had been transferred from the stable-yard within the abbey court during the flood. On this stretch of road the Longner cart had stood waiting, while the carters labored to salvage the treasures of the church, and here Tutilo had emerged from the double rear-doors of the cemetery to haul back Aldhelm by the sleeve, and make him an unwitting partner in his sacrilegious theft. And here, on the night of Aldhelm’s death, according to Daalny, she and Tutilo had taken refuge in the hay in the loft, to evade having to face the witness and admit to the sin, and had not dared return until they heard the bell for Compline. By which time their danger was indeed past, for the innocent young man was dead.

  Cadfael opened the main doors, and set one leaf wide. In the straw-scented dimness within the great lower room there were stalls for horses, though none of them was occupied. At seasonal stock sales there would be plenty of country breeders housing their beasts here, but at this season the place was little used. Almost in the middle of the long room a wooden ladder led up through a trapdoor to a loft above. Cadfael climbed it, thrusting up the trap and sliding it aside, to step into an upper room lit by a couple of narrow, unshuttered windows. A few casks ranged along the end wall, an array of tools in the near corner, and ample stores of hay still, for there had been good grass crops two years running.

  They had left their imprint in the piled hay. No question but two people had been here recently, the two snug, hollowed nests were there plain to be seen. But two they were, and that in itself caused Cadfael to stand for some moments in interested contemplation. Close enough for comfort and warmth, but nevertheless clearly separate, and so neatly preserved that they might have been shaped deliberately. There had been no rumbustious rustic coupling here, only two anxious minor sinners crouching in sanctuary from the buffetings of fate for this one night, even if the blow must fall next day. They must have sat very still, to avoid even the rustling of the straw round their feet.

  Cadfael looked about him for the small alien thing he had come to find, with no assurance that it would be here to be found, only an inward conviction that some benevolent finger had pointed him to this place. He had all but put his hand on it when he hoisted the trap, for the corner of the solid wooden square had pushed it some inches aside, and half hidden it from view. A narrow book, bound in coarse leather, the edges rubbed pale from carrying and handling, and the friction of rough sacking scrips. The boy must have laid it down here as they were leaving, to have his hands free to help Daalny down the ladder, and had then been so intent on fitting the trap into place again that he had forgotten to reach through for his book.

  Cadfael took it up in his hands and held it gratefully. There was a stem of clean yellow straw keeping a page in it, and the place it marked was the office of Compline. In the dark here they could not read it, but Tutilo would know it by heart in any case, and this gesture was simply by way of a small celebration to prove that they had observed the hours faithfully. It would be easy, thought Cadfael, to fall into a perilous affection for this gifted rogue, sometimes amused, often exasperated, but affection all the same. Apart, of course, from that angelic voice so generously bestowed on one who was certainly no angel.

  He was standing quite still, a pace or two away from the open trapdoor, when he heard a small sound from below. The door had been left open, anyone could have come in, but he had heard no footsteps. What had caught his ear was the slight rasp of rough ceramic against rough ceramic, crude baked clay, a heavy lid being lifted from a large storage jar. The friction of a slight movement in lifting made a brief, grating sound that carried strangely, and set the teeth on edge. Someone had raised the lid from the cornjar. It had been filled when the horses were moved, and would not have been emptied again, in case of further need, since the rivers were still running somewhat high, and the season was not yet quite safe. And once again, the slightly different but still rasping clap of the lid being replaced. It came very softly, a minute touch, but he heard it.

  He shifted quietly, to be able to look down through the trap, and someone below, hearing him, hallooed cheerfully up to him: “You there, Brother? All’s well! Something I forgot here when we moved the horses.” Feet stirred the straw on the flooring, audible now, and Rémy’s man Bénezet came into view, grinning amiably up into the loft, and flourishing a bridle that showed glints of gilt decoration on headstall and rein. “My lord Rémy’s! I’d been walking his beast out for the first time after he went lame, and brought him in harnessed, and this I left behind here. We’ll be needing it tomorrow. We’re packing.”
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  “So I hear,” said Cadfael. “And setting off with a safe escort.” He tucked the breviary into the breast of his habit, having left his scrip below, and stepped cautiously through the trap and began to descend the ladder. Bénezet waited for him, dangling the bridle. “I recalled in time where I’d left it,” he said, smoothing a thumb along the embossed decorations on the brow and the rein. “I asked at the porter’s, and he told me Brother Cadfael had taken the key and would be here, so I came to collect this while the place was open. If you’re done, Brother, we can walk back together.”

  “I have still to go on to Saint Giles,” said Cadfael, and turned to pick up his scrip. “I’ll lock up, if you’ve no further wants here, and get on to the hospital.”

  “No, I’m done,” said Bénezet. “This was all. Lucky I remembered, or Rémy’s best harness would have been left dangling on that hayrack, and I should have had it docked out of my pay or out of my skin.”

  He said a brisk farewell, and was off towards the corner, and round it into the straight stretch of the Foregate, without a glance behind. Never once had he cast a glance towards the cornbin in its shadowy niche. But the bridle, it seemed, he had reclaimed from the last hayrack. So, at least, he had made unnecessarily plain.

  Cadfael went to the corn jar and lifted the lid. There were grains spilled on the rim within, and on the floor round it. No great quantity, but they were there to be seen. He plunged both arms into the slithering grain, and felt around deeply till his fingers touched the base, and the grain slid coldly about his hands and yielded nothing alien. Not hiding something, but recovering it; and whatever it was had a nature and shape calculated to hoist out a few grains with it in emerging. The bridle would have let them all slide back into the amphora. Something with folds that would trap the grains? Cloth?