“I’ll go myself,” said Ivo, and strode away towards the stable-yard at a great pace. Turstan, hesitant, let him pass, since he got no word out of him in passing, but then turned and hurried on his heels, anxiously questioning. For a little way he followed, and they saw Ivo turn his head and snap some hasty orders at his man. Chastened, Turstan drew back and returned towards the gatehouse, and stood at a loss.
Some minutes passed before they heard the sharp sound of hooves on the cobbles of the stable-yard, brittle and lively. Then the tall, dusky bay, glowing like the darkest of copper and restive for want of work, danced out of the yard with the stocky, bearded groom holding his bridle, and Ivo stalking a yard or so ahead.
“Here is my man Ewald,” he said shortly, and stood back, as Cadfael noted, between them and the open gateway. Turstan Fowler drew nearer by discreet inches, and silently, sharp eyes flicking from one face to another in quest of understanding. Ewald stood holding the bridle, uneasy eyes narrowed upon Prestcote’s unrevealing countenance. When the horse, eager for action, stirred and tossed his head, the groom reached his left hand across to take the bridle, and slid the right one up to the glossy neck, caressing by rote, but without for an instant shifting his gaze.
“My lord says your honour has something to ask me,” he said in a slow and grudging voice.
Under his left forearm the cobbled mend in his sleeve showed plainly, the cloth puckered between large stitches, and the end of linen thread shivered in sun and breeze like a gnat dancing.
“Take off your coat,” ordered the sheriff. And as the man gaped in real or pretended bewilderment: “No words! Do it!”
Slowly Ewald slipped out of his coat, somewhat awkwardly because he was at pains to retain his hold on the bridle. The horse had been promised air and exercise, and was straining towards the gate, the way to what he desired. He had already shifted the whole group, except Cadfael, who stood mute and apart, a little nearer the gate.
“Turn back your sleeve. The left.”
He gave one wild glance round, then lowered his head like a bull, set his jaw, and did it, his right arm through the bridle as he turned up the coarse homespun to the elbow. Brother Mark had bound up the gash in a strip of clean linen over his dressing. The very cleanness of it glared.
“You have hurt yourself, Ewald?” said Prestcote, quietly grim.
He has his chance now, thought Cadfael, if he has quick enough wit, to change his story and say outright that he took a knife-wound in a common brawl, and told Brother Mark the lie about a nail simply to cover up the folly. But no, the man did not stop to think; he had his story, and trusted it might still cover him. Yet if Mark, on handling the wound, could tell a cut from a tear, so at the merest glance could Gilbert Prescote.
“I did it on a nail in the stables, my lord, reaching down harness.”
“And tore your sleeve through at the same time? It was a jagged nail, Ewald.
That’s stout cloth you wear.” He turned abruptly to Hugh Beringar. “You have the slip of cloth?”
Hugh drew out from his pouch a folded piece of vellum, and opened it upon the insignificant strip of fabric, that looked like nothing so much as a blade of dried grass fretted into fibres and rotting at the edge. Only the wavy tendril of linen thread showed what it really was, but that was enough. Ewald drew away a pace, so sharply that the horse backed off some yards towards the gateway, and the groom turned and took both hands to hold and soothe the beast. Ivo had to spring hurriedly backwards to avoid the dancing hooves.
“Hand here your coat,” ordered Prestcote, when the bay was appeased again, and willing to stand, though reluctantly.
The groom looked from the tiny thing he had recognised to the sheriff’s composed but unrelenting face, hesitated only a moment, and then did as he was bid, to violent effect. He swung back his arm and flung the heavy cotte into their faces, and with a leap was over the bay’s back and into the saddle. Both heels drove into the glossy sides, and a great shout above the pricked ears sent the horse surging like a flung lance for the gateway.
There was no one between but Ivo. The groom drove the bay straight at him, headlong. The young man leaped aside, but made a tigerish spring to grasp at the bridle as the horse hurtled by, and actually got a hold on it and was dragged for a moment, until the groom kicked out at him viciously, breaking the tenuous hold and hurling Ivo out of the way, to fall heavily and roll under the feet of the sheriff and Hugh as they launched themselves after the fugitive. Out at the gateway and round to the right into the Foregate went Ewald, at a frantic gallop, and there was no one mounted and ready to pursue, and for once the sheriff was without escort or archers.
But Ivo Corbière was not. Turstan Fowler had rushed to help him to his feet, but Ivo waved him past, out into the Foregate, and heaving himself breathlessly from the ground, with grazed and furious face ran limping after. The little group of them stood in the middle of the highroad, helplessly watching the bay and his rider recede into distance, and unable to follow. He had killed, and he would get clear away, and once some miles from Shrewsbury, he could disappear into forest and lie safe as a fox in its lair.
In a voice half-choked with rage, Ivo cried: “Fetch him down!”
Turstan’s arbalest was still braced and ready, and Turstan was used to jumping to his command. The quarrel was out of his belt, fitted and loosed, in an instant, the thrum and vibration of its flight made heads turn and duck and women shriek along the Foregate.
Ewald, stooped low over the horse’s neck, suddenly jerked violently and reared up with head flung high. His hands slackened from the reins and his arms swung lax on either side. He seemed to hang for a moment suspended in air, and then swung heavily sidewise, and heeled slowly out of the saddle. The bay, startled and shocked, ran on wildly, scattering the frightened vendors and buyers on both sides, but his flight was uncertain now, and confused by this sudden lightness.
He would not go far. Someone would halt and soothe him, and lead him back.
As for the groom Ewald, he was dead before ever the first of the appalled stallholders reached him, dead, probably, before ever he struck the ground.
CHAPTER 4
“He was my villein,” asserted Ivo strenuously, in the room in the gatehouse where they had brought and laid the body, “and I enjoy the power of the high justice over my own, and this one had forfeited life. I need make no defence, for myself or my archer, who did nothing more than obey my order. We have all seen, now, that this fellow’s wound is no tear from a nail, but the stroke of a dagger, and the fret you took from the glover’s blade matches this sleeve past question. Is there doubt in any mind that this was a murderer?”
There was none. Cadfael was there with them in the room, at Hugh’s instance, and he had no doubts at all. This was the man Euan of Shotwick had marked, before he himself died. Moreover, some of Euan of Shotwick’s goods and money had been found among the sparse belongings Ewald had left behind him; his saddle-roll held a pouch of fine leather full of coins, and two pairs of gloves made for the hands of girls, presents, perhaps, for wife or sister. This was certainly a murderer. Turstan, who had shot him down, obviously did not consider himself anything of the kind, any more than one of Prestcote’s archers would have done, had he been given the order to shoot. Turstan had taken the whole affair stolidly, as none of his business apart from his duty to his lord, and gone away to his evening meal with an equable appetite.
“I brought him here,” said Ivo bitterly, wiping smears of blood from his grazed cheek. “It is my honour he has offended, as well as the law of the land. I had a right to avenge myself.”