Constance opened the door of the house, and was startled and silenced by the apparition of this young, secular person, instead of the monk she had expected. But Godith was there, intent and burning with impatience at her shoulder, and flew past her with a brief, wordless soundless cry, into his arms and on to his heart. She was Godric again, though for him she would never now be anyone but Godith, whom he had never yet seen in her own proper person. She clung to him, and laughed, and wept, hugged, reviled, threatened him all in a breath, felt tenderly at his swathed shoulder, demanded explanations and cancelled all her demands, finally lifted to him an assuaged face in sudden silence, and waited to be kissed. Stunned and enlightened, Torold kissed her.
“You must be Torold,” said Aline from the background, so serenely that she must have known rather more about their relationship, by now, than he knew himself. “Close the door, Constance, all’s well.” She looked him over, with eyes alert to a young man’s qualities by reason of certain recent experiences of her own, and thought well of him. “I knew Brother Cadfael would send. She wanted to go back as she came this morning, but I said no. He said he would come. I didn’t know he would be sending you. But Cadfael’s messenger is very welcome.”
“She has told you about me?” enquired Torold, a little flushed at the thought.
“Nothing but what I needed to know. She is discretion itself, and so am I,” said Aline demurely. She, too, was flushed and glittering, but with excitement and enjoyment of her own plotting, half-regretful that her share must end here. “If Brother Cadfael is waiting, we mustn’t lose time. The farther you get by daybreak, the better. Here is the bundle Godith brought. Wait here within, until I see if everything is quiet below in the garden.”
She slipped away into the soft darkness, and stood by the edge of the pond, listening intently. She was sure they had left no guard behind, for why should they, when they had searched everywhere, and taken all they had been sent to take? Yet there might still be someone stirring in the houses opposite. But all were in darkness, she thought even the shutters were closed, in spite of the warm night, for fear some solitary Fleming should return to help himself to what he could find, under cover of the day’s official looting. Even the willow leaves hung motionless here, sheltered from the faint breeze that stirred the grasses along the river bank.
“Come!” she whispered, opening the door narrowly. “All’s quiet. Follow where I step, the slope is rough.” She had even thought to change her pale gown for a dark one since afternoon, to be shadowy among the shadows. Torold hoisted FitzAlan’s treasury in its sacking shroud by the rope that secured it, and put off Godith firmly when she would have reached to share the weight with him. Surprisingly, she yielded meekly, and went before him very quickly and quietly to where the boat rode on its short mooring, half-concealed by the stooping willow branches. Aline lay down at the edge of the bank, and leaned to draw the boat in and hold it steady, for there was a two-foot hollow of undercut soil between them and the water. Very quickly and happily this hitherto cloistered and dutiful daughter was learning to be mistress of her own decisions and exploiter of her own powers.
Godith slid down into the boat, and lent both arms to steady the sacking bundle down between the thwarts. The boat was meant for only two people at most, and settled low in the water when Torold also was aboard, but it was buoyant and sturdy, and would get them as far as they needed to go, as it had done once before.
Godith leaned and embraced Aline, who was still on her knees at the edge of the grass. It was too late for spoken thanks then, but Torold kissed the small, well-tended hand held out to him, and then she loosed the end of the mooring-rope, and tossed it aboard, and the boat slipped out softly from under the bank and drifted across in the circling eddies of the outflow, back towards the brook from which the pool had been drawn. The spill from the head-race of the mill caught them and brisked their pace like a gentle push, and Torold sat with paddle idle, and let the silent flow take them out from the pond. When Godith looked back, all she could see was the shape of the willow, and the unlighted house beyond.
Brother Cadfael rose from among the long grasses as Torold paddled the boat across to the abbey shore. “Well done!” he said in a whisper. “And no trouble? No one stirring?”
“No trouble. Now you’re the guide.”
Cadfael rocked the boat thoughtfully with one hand. “Put Godith and the load ashore opposite, and then fetch me. I may as well go dryshod.” And when they were all safely across to the other side of the brook, he hauled the boat out of the water into the grass, and Godith hurried to help him carry it into hiding in the nearest copse. Once in cover, they had leisure to draw breath and confer. The night was still and calm around them, and five minutes well spent here, as Cadfael said, might save them much labour thereafter.
“We may speak, but softly. And since no other eyes, I hope, are to see this burden of ours until you’re well away to the west, I think we might with advantage open it and split the load again. The saddlebags will be far easier to sling on our shoulders than this single lump.”
“I can carry one pair,” said Godith, eager at his elbow.
“So you can, for a short spell, perhaps,” he said indulgently. He was busy disentangling the two pairs of linked bags from the sacks that had swathed them. They had straps comfortably broad for the shoulder, and the weights in them had been balanced in the first place for the horses. “I had thought we might save ourselves half a mile or so by making use of the river for the first part of the way,” he said, “but with three of us and only this hazel-shell we should founder. And it’s not so far we have to go, loaded — something over three miles, perhaps.”
He shook one pair of bags into the most comfortable position over his shoulder, and Torold took the other pair on his sound side. “I never carried goods to this value before in my life,” said Cadfael as he set off, “and now I’m not even to see what’s within.”
“Bitter stuff to me,” said Torold at his back, “it cost Nick his life, and I’m to have no chance to avenge him.”
“You give thought to your own life and bear your own burdens,” said Cadfael. “He will be avenged. Better you should look to the future, and leave Nick to me.”
The ways by which he led his little convoy differed from those he had used in Beringar’s company. Instead of crossing the brook and making directly for the grange beyond Pulley, he bore more strongly to the west, so that by the time they were as far south as the grange they were also a good mile west of it, nearer to Wales, and in somewhat thicker forest.
“How if we should be followed?” wondered Godith.
“We shall not be followed.” He was so positive about it that she accepted the reassurance gladly, and asked nothing more. If Brother Cadfael said it, it was so. She had insisted on carrying Torold’s load for half a mile or so, but he had taken it back from her at the first sign of quickening breath or faltering step.
A lace-work of sky showed paler between the branches ahead. They emerged cautiously into the edge of a broad forest ride that crossed their path on good turf at an oblique angle. Beyond it, their own track continued, a little more open to the night than up to this point.
“Now pay good heed,” said Cadfael, halting them within cover, “for you have to find your way back without me to this spot. This ride that crosses us here is a fine, straight road the old Romans made. Eastward, here to our left, it would bring us to the Severn bridge at Atcham. Westward, to our right, it will take you two straight as an arrow for Pool and Wales, or if you find any obstacle on the way, you may bear further south at the end for the ford at Montgomery. Once you’re on this, you can ride fast enough, though in parts it may be steep. Now we cross it here, and have another half-mile to go to the ford of the brook. So pay attention to the way.”