Dead Man's Ransom

by Ellis Peters

  “My lord,” she said, “you know where we may be found for the days to come. Let me take my daughter away now, we have things which must be done.”

  “At your pleasure, madam,” said Hugh. “You shall not be troubled more than is needful.” And he added only: “But you should know that the matter of this missing pin remains. There has been more than one intruder into your husband’s privacy. Bear it in mind.”

  “Very gladly I leave it all in your hands,” said Sybilla fervently. And forth she went, her hand imperative at Melicent’s elbow. They passed close by Elis in the doorway, and his starving stare fastened on the girl’s face. She passed him by without a glance, she even drew aside her skirts for fear they should brush him in departing. He was too young, too open, too simple to understand that more than half the hatred and revulsion she felt for him belonged rather to herself, and her dread that she had gone far towards desiring the death she now so desperately repented.

  Chapter 7

  IN THE DEATH CHAMBER, with the door closed fast, Hugh Beringar and Brother Cadfael stood beside Gilbert Prestcote’s body and turned back the brychan and sheet to the sunken breast. They had brought in lamps to set close where they would burn steadily and cast a strong light on the dead face. Cadfael took the small saucer lamp in his hand and moved it slowly across the bruised mouth and nostrils and the grizzled beard, to catch every angle of vision and pick out every mote of dust or thread.

  “No matter how feeble, no matter how deep asleep, a man will fight as best as he can for his breath, and whatever is clamped over his face, unless so hard and smooth it lacks any surface pile, he will inhale. And so did this one.” The dilated nostrils had fine hairs within, a trap for tiny particles of thread. “Do you see colour there?”

  In an almost imperceptible current of air a gossamer wisp quivered, taking the light. “Blue,” said Hugh, peering close, and his breath caused the cobweb strand to dance. “Blue is a difficult and expensive dye. And there’s no such tint in these brychans.”

  “Let’s have it forth,” said Cadfael, and advanced his small tweezers, used for extracting thorns and splinters from unwary labouring fingers, to capture a filament almost too delicate to be seen. There was more of it, however, when it emerged, two or three fine strands that had the springy life of wool.

  “Hold your breath,” said Cadfael, “till I have this safe under a lid from being blown away.” He had brought one of the containers in which he stored his tablets and lozenges when he had moulded and dried them, a little polished wooden box, almost black in colour, and against the glossy dark surface the shred of wool shone brightly, a full, clear blue. He shut the lid upon it carefully, and probed again with the tweezers. Hugh shifted the lamp to cast its light at a new angle, and there was a brief gleam of red, the soft, pale red of late summer roses past their prime. It winked and vanished. Hugh moved the light to find it again. Barely two frail, curling filaments of the many that must have made up this wool that had woven the cloth, but wool carries colour bravely.

  “Blue and rose. Both precious colours, not for the furnishings of a bed.” Cadfael captured the elusive thing after two or three casts, and imprisoned it with the blue. The light, carefully deployed, found no more such traces in the stretched nostrils. “Well, he also wore a beard. Let us see!”

  There was a clear thread of the blue fluttering in the greying beard. Cadfael extracted it, and carefully combed the grizzled strands out into order to search for more. When he shook and stroked out the dust and hairs from the comb into his box, two or three points of light glimmered and vanished, like motes of dust lit by the sun. He tilted the box from side to side to recover them, for they were invisible once dimmed, and one single gold spark rewarded him. He found what he sought caught between the clenched teeth. One strand had frayed from age or use, and the spasm of death had bitten and held it. He drew it forth and held it to the light in his tweezers. A first finger-joint long, brittle and bright, glinting in the lamplight, the gold thread that had shed those invisible, scintillating particles.

  “Expensive indeed!” said Cadfael, shutting it carefully into his box. “A princely death, to be smothered under cloth of fine wool embroidered with thread of gold. Tapestry? Altar-cloth? A lady’s brocaded gown? A piece from a worn vestment? Certainly nothing here within the infirmary, Hugh. Whatever it may have been, some man brought it with him.”

  “So it would seem,” agreed Hugh, brooding.

  They found nothing more, but what they had found was puzzling enough.

  “So where is the cloth that smothered him?” wondered Cadfael, fretting. And where is the gold pin that fastened Einon ab Ithel’s cloak?”

  “Search for the cloth,” said Hugh, “since it has a richness that could well be found somewhere within the abbey walls. And I will search for the pin. I have six Welshmen of the escort and Eliud yet to question and strip, and if that fails, we’ll burrow our way through the entire enclave as best we can. If they are here, we’ll find them.”

  They searched, Cadfael for a cloth, any cloth which could show the rich colours and the gold thread he was seeking, Hugh for the gold pin. With the abbot’s leave and the assistance of Prior Robert, who had the most comprehensive knowledge of the riches of the house and demonstrated its treasures with pride, Cadfael examined every hanging, tapestry and altar-cloth the abbey possessed, but none of them matched the quivering fragments he brought to the comparison. Shades of colour are exact and consistent. This rose and this blue had no companions here.

  Hugh, for his part, thoroughly searched the clothing and harness of all the Welshmen made prisoners by this death, and Prior Robert, though with disapproval, sanctioned the extension of the search into the cells of the brothers and novices, and even the possessions of the boys, for children may be tempted by a bright thing, without realising the gravity of what they do. But nowhere did they find any trace of the old and massive pin that had held the collar of Einon’s cloak close to keep the cold away from Gilbert Prestcote on his journey.

  The day was spent by then and the evening coming on, but after Vespers and supper Cadfael returned to the quest. The inhabitants of the infirmary were quite willing to talk; they had not often so meaty a subject on which to debate. Yet neither Cadfael nor Edmund got much information out of them. Whatever had happened had happened during the half-hour or more when the brothers were at dinner in the refectory, and at that time the infirmary, already fed, was habitually asleep. There was one, however, who, being bedridden, slept a great deal at odd times, and was well able to remain wakeful if something more interesting than usual was going on.

  “As for seeing,” said Brother Rhys ruefully, “I’m as little profit to you, brother, as I am to myself. I know if another inmate passes by me and I know which of them it is, and I know light from dark, but little more. But my ears, I dare swear, have grown sharper as my eyes have grown dimmer. I heard the door of the chamber opposite, where the sheriff lay, open twice, now you ask me to cudgel my memory. You know it creaks, opening. Closing, it’s silent.”

  “So someone entered there or at least opened the door. What more did you hear? Did anyone speak?”

  “No, but I heard a stick tapping—very lightly—and then the door creaked. I reckoned it must be Brother Wilfred, who helps here when he’s needed, for he’s the only brother who walks with a stick, being lame from a young man.”

  “Did he go in?”

  “That you may better ask him, for I can’t tell you. All was quiet a while, and then I heard him tap away along the passage to the outer door. He may only have pushed the door open to look and listen if all was well in there.”

  “He must have drawn the door to again after him,” said Cadfael, “or you would not have heard it creak again the second time. When was it Brother Wilfred paid his visit?”

  But Rhys was vague about time. He shook his head and pondered. “I did drowse for a while after my dinner. How should I know for how long? But they must have been still in the refectory some time
after that, for it wasn’t until later that Brother Edmund came back.”

  “And the second time?”

  “That must have been some while later, it might be as much as a quarter, hour. The door creaked again. He had a light step, whoever came, I just caught the fall of his foot on the threshold, and then nothing. The door making no sound, drawn to, I don’t know how long he was within there, but I fancy he did go in. Brother Wilfred might have a proper call to peer inside to see all was well, but this other one had none.”

  “How long was he within there? How long could he have been? Did you hear him leave?”

  “I was in a doze again,” admitted Rhys regretfully. “I can’t tell you. And he did tread very soft, a young man’s tread.”

  So the second could have been Elis, for there had been no word spoken when Edmund followed him in and expelled him, and Edmund from long sojourning among the sick trod as silently as a cat. Or it might have been someone else, someone unknown, coming and going undisturbed and deadly, before ever Elis intruded with his avowedly harmless errand.

  Meantime, he could at least find out if Brother Wilfred had indeed been left here to keep watch, for Cadfael had not numbered the brothers in the refectory at dinner, or noticed who was present and who absent. He had another thought.

  “Did anyone from within here leave this room during all that time? Brother Maurice, for one, seldom sleeps much during the day, and when others are sleeping he may well be restless, wanting company.”

  “None of them passed by me to the door while I was waking,” said Rhys positively. “And I was not so deep asleep but I think I should have awakened if they had.”

  Which might very well be true, yet could not be taken for granted. But of what he had heard he was quite certain. Twice the door had creaked open wide enough to let somebody in.

  Brother Maurice had spoken up for himself without even being asked, as soon as the sheriff’s death was mentioned, as daily it would be now until the truth was known and the sensation allowed to fade away into oblivion. Brother Edmund reported it to Cadfael after Compline, in the half-hour of repose before bed.

  “I had prayers said for his soul, and told them tomorrow we should say a Mass for him—an honourable officer who died here among us and had been a good patron of our house. Up stands Maurice and says outright that he will faithfully put up prayers for the man’s salvation, for now at last his debts are fully paid, and divine justice has been done. I asked him by whose hand, seeing he knew so much,” said Edmund with uncharacteristic bitterness, but even more resignation, “and he reproved me for doubting that the hand was God’s. Sometimes I question whether his ailment of the mind is misfortune or cunning. But try to pin him down and he’ll slip through your fingers every time. He is certainly very content with this death. God forgive us all our backslidings and namely those into which we fall unwitting.”

  “Amen!” said Cadfael fervently. “And he’s a strong, able man, and always in the right, even if it came to murder. But where would he lay hands on such a cloth as I have in mind?” He remembered to ask: “Did you leave Brother Wilfred to keep a close eye on things here, when you went to dinner in the refectory?”

  “I wish I had,” owned Edmund sadly. “There might have been no such evil then. No, Wilfred was at dinner with us, did you never see him? I wish I had set a watch, with all my heart. But that’s hindsight. Who was ever to suppose that murder would walk in and let loose chaos on us? There was nothing to give me warning.”

  “Nothing,” agreed Cadfael and brooded, considering. “So Wilfred is out of the reckoning. Who else among us walks with a stick? None that I know of.”

  “There’s Anion is still on a crutch,” said Edmund, “though he’s about ready to discard it. He rather flies with it now than hobbles, but for the moment it’s grown a habit with him, after so stubborn a break. Why, are you looking for a man with a prop?”

  Now there, thought Cadfael, going wearily to his bed at last, is a strange thing. Brother Rhys, hearing a stick tapping, looks for the source of it only among the brothers; and I, making my way round the infirmary, never give a thought to any but those who are brothers, and am likely to be blind and deaf to what any other may be up to even in my presence. For it had only now dawned on him that when he and Brother Edmund entered the long room, already settling for the evening, one younger and more active soul had risen from the corner where he sat and gone quietly out by the door to the chapel, the leather, shod tip of his crutch so light upon the stones that it seemed he hardly needed it, and could only have taken it away with him, as Edmund said, out of habit or in order to remove it from notice.

  Well, Anion would have to wait until tomorrow. It was too late to trouble the repose of the ageing sick tonight.

  In a cell of the castle, behind a locked door, Elis and Eliud shared a bed no harder than many they had shared before and slept like twin babes, without a care in the world. They had care enough now. Elis lay on his face, sure that his life was ended, that he would never love again, that nothing was left to him, even if he escaped this coil alive, but to go on Crusade or take the tonsure or undergo some barefoot pilgrimage to the Holy Land from which he would certainly never return. And Eliud lay patient and agonising at his back, with an arm wreathed over the rigid, rejecting shoulders, fetching up comfort from where he himself had none. This cousin, brother of his was far too vehemently alive to die for love, or to succumb for grief because he was accused of an infamy he had not committed. But his pain, however curable, was extreme while it lasted.

  “She never loved me,” lamented Elis, tense and quivering under the embracing arm. “If she had, she would have trusted me, she would have known me better. If ever she’d loved me, how could she believe I would do murder?” As indignantly as if he had never in his transports sworn that he would! That or anything.

  “She’s shocked to the heart for her father,” pleaded Eliud stoutly. “How can you ask her to be fair to you? Only wait, give her time. If she loved you, then still she does. Poor girl, she can’t choose. It’s for her you should be sorry. She takes this death to her own account, have you not told me? You’ve done no wrong and so it will be proved.”

  “No, I’ve lost her, she’ll never let me near her again, never believe a word I say.”

  “She will, for it will be proven you’re blameless. I swear to you it will! Truth will come out, it must, it will.”

  “If I don’t win her back,” Elis vowed, muffled in his cradling arms, “I shall die!”

  “You won’t die, you won’t fail to win her back,” promised Eliud in desperation. “Hush, hush and sleep!” He reached out a hand and snuffed out the failing flame of their tiny lamp. He knew the tensions and releases of this body he had slept beside from childhood, and knew that sleep was already a weight on Elis’s smarting eyelids. There are those who come brand-new into the new day and have to rediscover their griefs. Eliud was no such person. He nursed his griefs, unsleeping, into the small hours, with the chief of them fathoms deep under his protecting arm.

  Chapter 8

  ANION THE CATTLE MAN, for want of calf or lamb to keep his hand in within the abbey enclave, had taken to spending much of his time in the stables, where at least there was horseflesh to be tended and enjoyed. Very soon now he would be fit to be sent back to the grange where he served, but he could not go until Brother Edmund discharged him. He had a gifted hand with animals, and the grooms were on familiar and friendly terms with him.

  Brother Cadfael approached him somewhat sidelong, unwilling to startle or dismay him too soon. It was not difficult. Horses and mules had their sicknesses and injuries, as surely as men, and called frequently for remedies from Cadfael’s store. One of the ponies the lay servants used as packhorses had fallen lame and was in need of Cadfael’s rubbing oils to treat the strain, and he brought the flask himself to the stableyard, as good as certain he would find Anion there. It was easy enough to entice the practised stockman into taking over the massage, and to linger to wa
tch and admire as he worked his thick but agile fingers into the painful muscles. The pony stood like a statue for him, utterly trusting. That in itself had something eloquent to say.

  “You spend less and less time in the infirmary now,” said Cadfael, studying the dour, dark profile under the fall of straight black hair. “Very soon we shall be losing you at this rate. You’re as fast on a crutch as many of us are with two sturdy legs that never suffered a break. I fancy you could throw the prop away anytime you pleased.”

  “I’m told to wait,” said Anion shortly. “Here I do what I’m told. It’s some men’s fate in life, brother, to take orders.”

  “Then you’ll be glad to be back with your cattle again, where they do obedience to you for a change.”

  “I tend and care for them and mean them well,” said Anion, “and they know it.”

  “So does Edmund to you, and you know it.” Cadfael sat down on a saddle beside the stooping man, to come down to his level and view him on equal terms. Anion made no demur, it might even have been the faint shadow of a smile that touched his firmly-closed mouth. Not at all an ill, looking man, and surely no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. “You know the thing that happened there in the infirmary,” said Cadfael. “You may well have been the most active man in there that dinner time. Though I doubt if you stayed long after you’d eaten. You’re over-young to be shut in there with the ailing old. I’ve asked them all, did they hear or see any man go in there, by stealth or any other way, but they slept after they’d eaten. That’s for the aged, not for you. You’d be up and about while they drowsed.”

  “I left them snoring,” said Anion, turning the full stare of his deep-set eyes on Cadfael. He reached for a rag to wipe his hands, and rose nimbly enough, the still troublesome leg drawn up after him.

  “Before we were all out of the refectory? And the Welsh lads led in to their repast?”