Dead Man's Ransom

by Ellis Peters

  “While it was all quiet. I reckon you brothers were in the middle of your meal. Why?” demanded Anion pointblank.

  “Because you might be a good witness, what else? Do you know of anyone who made his way into the infirmary about that time that you left it? Did you see or hear aught to give you pause? Any man lurking who should not have been there? The sheriff had his enemies,” said Cadfael firmly, “like the rest of us mortals, and one of them deadly. Whatever he owed is paid now, or shortly to pay. God send none of us may take with him a worse account.”

  “Amen!” said Anion. “When I came forth from the infirmary, brother, I met no man, I saw no man, friend or enemy, anywhere near that door.”

  “Where were you bound? Down here to view the Welsh horses? If so,” explained Cadfael easily, warding off the sharp glance Anion gave him, “you’d be a witness if any of those lads went off and left his fellows about that time.”

  Anion shrugged that off disdainfully. “I never came near the stables, not then. I went through the garden and down to the brook. With a west wind it smells of the hills down there,” said Anion. “I grow sick of the shut-in smell of tired old men, and their talk that goes round and round.”

  “Like mine!” said Cadfael tolerantly, and rose from the saddle. His eye lingered upon the crutch that was laid carelessly aside against the open door of a stall, a good fifty paces from where its owner was working. “Yes, I see you’re about ready to throw it away. You were still using it yesterday, though, unless Brother Rhys was mistaken. He heard you tap your way out for your walk in the garden, or thought he did.”

  “He well might,” said Anion, and shook back his shaggy black mane from his round brown forehead. “It’s habit with me, after so long, even after the need’s gone. But when there’s a beast to see to, I forget, and leave it behind me in corners.”

  He turned deliberately, laid an arm over the pony’s neck, and led him slowly round on the cobbles, to mark his gait. And that was the end of the colloquy.

  *

  Brother Cadfael was fully occupied with his proper duties all that day, but that did not prevent him from giving a great deal of thought to the matter of Gilbert Prestcote’s death. The sheriff had long ago requested space for his tomb in the abbey church of which he had been a steady patron and benefactor, and the next day was to see him laid to rest there. But the manner of his death would not allow any rest to those who were left behind him. From his distracted family to the unlucky Welsh suspects and prisoners in the castle, there was no one who did not find his own life disrupted and changed by this death.

  The news was surely making its way about the countryside by this time, from village to village and assart to manor round the shire, and no doubt men and women in the streets of Shrewsbury were busily allotting the blame to this one and that one, with Elis ap Cynan their favourite villain. But they had not seen the minute, bright fragments Cadfael nursed in his little box, or hunted in vain through the precinct for any cloth that could show the identical tints and the twisted gold thread. They knew nothing about the massive gold pin that had vanished from Gilbert’s death-chamber and could not be found within the pale.

  Cadfael had caught glimpses of Lady Prestcote about the court, moving between the guest hall and the church, where her husband lay in the mortuary chapel, swathed for his burial. But the girl had not once shown her face. Gilbert the younger, a little bewildered but oblivious of misfortune, played with the child oblates and the two young pupils, and was tenderly shepherded by Brother Paul, the master of the children. At seven years old he viewed with untroubled tolerance the eccentricities of grown-up people, and could make himself at home wherever his mother unaccountably conveyed him. As soon as his father was buried she would certainly take him away from here, to her favourite among her husband’s manors, where his life would resume its placid progress untroubled by bereavement.

  A few close acquaintances of the sheriff had begun to arrive and take up residence ready for the morrow. Cadfael lingered to watch them, and fit noble names to the sombre faces. He was thus occupied, on his way to the herbarium, when he observed one unexpected but welcome face entering. Sister Magdalen, on foot and alone, stepped briskly through the wicket, and looked about her for the nearest known face. To judge by her brightening eye and prompt advance, she was pleased that it should be Cadfael’s.

  “Well, well!” said Cadfael, going to meet her with equal pleasure. “We had no thought of seeing you again so soon. Is all well in your forest? No more raiders?”

  “Not so far,” said Sister Magdalen cautiously, “but I would not say they might not try again, if ever they see Hugh Beringar looking the other way. It must have gone much against the grain with Madog ap Meredith to be bested by a handful of foresters and cottars, he may well want his revenge when he feels it safe to bid for it. But the forest men are keeping a good watch. It’s not we who are in turmoil now, it seems. What’s this I’ve been hearing in the town? Gilbert Prestcote dead, and that Welsh youngster I sent you blamed for the deed?”

  “You’ve been in the town, then? And no stout escort with you this time?”

  “Two,” she said, “but I’ve left them up in the Wyle, where we shall lie overnight. If it’s true the sheriff is to be buried tomorrow I must stay to do him honour among the rest. I’d no thought of such a thing when we set out this morning. I came on quite different business. There’s a reat-niece of Mother Mariana, daughter to a cloth-merchant here in Shrewsbury, who’s coming to take the veil among us. A plain child, none too bright, but willing, and knows she has small hopes of a pleasing marriage. Better with us than sold off like an unpromising heifer to the first that makes a grudging offer for her. I’ve left my men and horses in their yard, where I heard tell of what had happened here. Better to get the tale straight—there are any number of versions up there in the streets.”

  “If you have an hour to spare,” said Cadfael heartily, “come and share a flask of wine of my own making in the herb-garden, and I’ll tell you the whole truth of it, so far as any man knows what’s truth. Who knows, you may find a pattern in it that I have failed to find.”

  In the wood-scented dimness of the workshop in the herbarium he told her, at leisure and in detail, everything he knew or had gathered concerning the death of Gilbert Prestcote, everything he had observed or thought concerning Elis ap Cynan. She listened, seated with spread knees and erect back on the bench against the wall, with her cup nursed in both hands to warm it, for the wine was red and full. She no longer exerted herself to be graceful, if ever she had, but her composed heaviness had its own impressive grace.

  “I would not say but that boy might kill,” she said at the end of it. “They act before they think and regret only too late. But I don’t think he would kill his girl’s father. Very easy, you say, and I believe it, to ease the man out of the world, so that even one not given to murder might do it before ever he realised. Yes, but those a man kills easily are commonly strangers to him. Hardly people at all. But this one would be armoured in identity—her father, no less, the man that begot her. And yet,” she owned, shaking her head, “I may be wrong about him. He may be the one of his kind who does what his kind does not do. There is always one.”

  “The girl believes absolutely that he is guilty,” said Cadfael thoughtfully, “perhaps because she is all too well aware of what she feels to be her own guilt. The sire returns and the lovers are to be torn apart—no great step to dream of his failure to return, and only one more leap to see death as the final and total cause of that failure. But dreams they surely were, never truly even wished. The boy is on firmer ground when he swears he went to try and win her father to look kindly on his suit. For if ever I saw a lad sunlit and buoyed up with hope by nature, Elis is the one.”

  “And this girl?” wondered Sister Magdalen, twirling her wine, cup between nursing palms. “If they’re of an age, then she must be the more mature by some years. So it goes! Is it anyway possible that she…?”

  “No,”
said Cadfael with certainty. “She was with the lady, and Hugh, and the Welsh princelings, throughout. I know she left her father living, and never came near him again until he was dead, and then in Hugh’s company. No, she torments herself vainly. If you had her in your hands,” said Cadfael with conviction, “you would soon find her out for the simple, green child she is.”

  Sister Magdalen was in the act of saying philosophically: “I’m hardly likely to get the chance,” when the tap on the door came. So light and tentative a sound, and yet so staunchly repeated, they fell silent and still to make sure of it.

  Cadfael rose to open it and peer out through the narrowest possible chink, convinced there was no one there; and there she stood, her hand raised to knock again, pallid, wretched and resolute, half a head taller than he, the simple, green child of his description, with a steely core of Norman nobility forcing her to transcend herself. Hastily he flung the door wide. “Come within from the cold. How can I serve you?”

  “The porter told me,” said Melicent, “that the sister from Godric’s Ford came a while ago, and might be here wanting remedies from your store. I should like to speak with her.”

  “Sister Magdalen is here,” said Cadfael. “Come, sit with her by the brazier, and I’ll leave you to talk with her in private.” She came in half afraid, as though this small, unfamiliar place held daunting secrets. She stepped with fastidious delicacy, almost inch by inch, and yet with that determination in her that would not let her turn back. She looked at Sister Magdalen eye to eye, fascinated, doubtless having heard her history both ancient and recent, and found some difficulty in reconciling the two.

  “Sister,” said Melicent, going arrow, straight to the point, “when you go back to Godric’s Ford, will you take me with you?”

  Cadfael, as good as his word, withdrew softly and with alacrity, drawing the door to after him, but not so quickly that he did not hear Sister Magdalen reply simply and practically: “Why?”

  She never did or said quite what was expected of her, and it was a good question. It left Melicent in the delusion that this formidable woman knew little or nothing about her, and necessitated the entire re-telling of the disastrous story, and in the re-telling it might fall into truer proportion, and allow the girl to reconsider her situation with somewhat less desperate urgency. So, at any rate, Brother Cadfael hoped, as he trotted away through the garden to go and spend a pleasant half-hour with Brother Anselm, the precentor, in his carrel in the cloister, where he would certainly be compiling the sequence of music for the burial of Gilbert Prestcote.

  “I intend,” said Melicent, rather grandly because of the jolt the blunt question had given her, “to take the veil, and I would like it to be among the Benedictine sisters of Polesworth.”

  “Sit down here beside me,” said Sister Magdalen comfortably, “and tell me what has turned you to this withdrawal, and whether your family are in your confidence and approve your choice. You are very young, and have the world before you…”

  “I am done with the world,” said Melicent.

  “Child, as long as you live and breathe you will not have done with this world. We within the pale live in the same world as all poor souls without. Come, you have your reasons for wishing to enter the conventual life. Sit and tell me, let me hear them. You are young and fair and nobly born, and you wish to abandon marriage, children, position, honours, all… Why?”

  Melicent, yielding, sank beside her on the bench, hugged her slenderness in the warmth of the brazier, and let fall the barriers of her bitterness to loose the flood. What she had vouchsafed to the preoccupied ears of Sybilla was no more than the thread on which this confession was strung. All that heady dream of minstrels’ love-tales poured out of her.

  “Even if you are right in rejecting one man,” said Magdalen mildly, “you may be most unjust in rejecting all. Let alone the possibility that you mistake even this Elis ap Cynan. For until it is proved he lies, you must bear in mind he may be telling truth.”

  “He said he would kill for me,” said Melicent, relentless, “he went to where my father lay, and my father is dead. There was no other known to have gone near. As for me, I have no doubts. I wish I had never seen his face, and I pray I never may again.”

  “And you will not wait to make your peace with one betrayal, and still show your countenance to others who do not betray?”

  “At least I do know,” said Melicent bitterly, “that God does not betray. And I am done with men.”

  “Child,” said Sister Magdalen, sighing, “not until the day of your death will you have done with men. Bishops, abbots, priests, confessors, all are men, blood-brothers to the commonest of sinful mankind. While you live, there is no way of escape from your part in humanity.”

  “I have finished, then, with love,” said Melicent, all the more vehemently because a morsel of her heart cried out to her that she lied.

  “Oh, my dear soul, love is the one thing with which you must never dispense. Without it, what use are you to us or to any? Granted there are ways and ways of loving,” said the nun come late to her celibacy, recalling what at the time she had hardly recognised as deserving the title, but knew now for one aspect of love, “yet for all there is a warmth needed, and if that fire goes out it cannot be rekindled. Well,” she said, considering, “if your stepmother approve your going with me, then you may come, and welcome. Come and be quiet with us for a while, and we shall see.”

  “Will you come with me to my mother, then, and hear me ask her leave?”

  “I will,” said Sister Magdalen, and rose and plucked her habit about her ready to set forth.

  She told Brother Cadfael the gist of it when she stayed to attend Vespers before going back to the cloth-merchant’s house in the town.

  “She’ll be better out of here, away from the lad, but left with the image of him she already carries about with her. Time and truth are what the pair of them most need, and I’ll see she takes no vows until this whole matter is resolved. The boy is better left to you, if you can keep an eye on him now and then.”

  “You don’t believe,” said Cadfael with certainty, “that he ever did violence to her father.”

  “Do I know? Is there man or woman who might not kill, given the driving need? A proper, upstanding, impudent, open-hearted lad, though,” said Sister Magdalen, who had never repented anything she did, “one that I might have fancied, when my fancying days were.”

  *

  Cadfael went to supper in the refectory, and then to Collations in the chapter-house, which he often missed if he had vulnerable preparations brewing in his workshop. In thinking over such slight gains as he had made in his quest for the truth, he had got nowhere, and it was good to put all that aside and listen with good heart to the lives of saints who had shrugged off the cares of the world to let in the promises of a world beyond, and viewed earthly justice as no more than a futile shadow-play obscuring the absolute justice of heaven, for which no man need wait longer than the life-span of mortality.

  They were past St Gregory and approaching St Edward the Confessor and St Benedict himself—he middle days of March, and the blessed works of spring beginning, with everything hopeful and striving ahead. A good time. Cadfael had spent the hours before Sister Magdalen came digging and clearing the fresh half of his mint-bed, to give it space to proliferate new and young and green, rid of the old and debilitated. He emerged from the chapter-house feeling renewed, and it came at first as no more than a mild surprise when Brother Edmund came seeking him before Compline, looking almost episcopal as he brandished in one hand what at first sight might have been a crozier, but when lowered to the ground reached no higher than his armpit, and was manifestly a crutch.

  “I found it lying in a corner of the stableyard. Anion’s! Cadfael, he did not come for his supper tonight and he is nowhere in the infirmary, neither in the common room, nor in his bed, nor in the chapel. Have you seen him anywhere this day?”

  “Not since morning,” said Cadfael, thinking back
with something of an effort from the peace of the chapter-house. “He came to dinner at midday?’.

  “So he did, but I find no man who has seen him since. I’ve looked for him everywhere, asked every man, and found nothing more of him than this, discarded. Anion is gone! Oh, Cadfael, I doubt he has fled his mortal guilt. Why else should he run from us?”

  It was well past Compline when Hugh Beringar entered his own hall, empty-handed and discontented from his enquiries among the Welshmen, and found Brother Cadfael sitting by the fireside with Aline, waiting for him with a clouded brow.

  “What brings you here so late?” wondered Hugh. “Out without leave again?” It had been known to happen, and the recollection of one such expedition, before the austere days of Abbot Radulfus, was an old and private joke between them.

  “That I am not,” said Cadfael firmly. “There’s a piece of unexpected news even Prior Robert thought had better come to your ears as soon as possible. We had in our infirmary, with a broken leg mending and all but ready to leave us, a fellow named Anion. I doubt if the name means much to you, it was not you had to do with his brother. But do you remember a brawl in the town, two years ago now, when a gatekeeper on the bridge was knifed? Prestcote hanged the Welshman that did it—well, whether he did it or not, and naturally he’d say he didn’t, but he was blind drunk at the time and probably never knew the truth of it himself. However it was, he was hanged for it. A young fellow who used to trade in fleeces to the town market from somewhere in Mechain. Well, this Anion is his brother born the wrong side of the brychan, when the father was doing the trading, and there was no bad blood between the two. They got to know each other and there was a fondness.”

  “If ever I knew of this,” said Hugh, drawing up to the fire with him, “I had forgot it.”

  “So had not Anion. He’s said little, but it’s known he’s nursed his grudge, and there’s enough Welsh in him to make him look upon revenge as a duty, if ever the chance came his way.”