“Father, the lady asks that I will go and play to her, as I have done before. Have I your permission to go?”
Herluin’s mind was rather on his forthcoming dinner, and the marshalling of his arguments in the matter of Saint Winifred. Not a word had been said to him of any untoward suspicions, or of the threat of an eyewitness coming to judgement this very night. Tutilo got his permission with almost dismissive ease. He left by the gatehouse, openly, and took the road along the Foregate, in case anyone happened to notice and check that he set off in the appropriate direction. He was not going far, by no means as far as Longner, but far enough to be absent when the immediate danger threatened. He was not so simple as to believe that the danger would be over when Aldhelm went home frustrated, but what followed he would have to encounter and parry when it came. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, and he had considerable confidence in his own ingenuity.
The news worked its way round by devious stages to the ears of Brother Jerome, that the bird he desired with all his narrow might to ensnare had taken flight to a safe distance. He was sick and sour with rage. Clearly there was no justice to be had, even from heaven. The devil was all too efficiently looking after his own.
He must have sickened on his own gall, for he disappeared for the rest of the evening. It cannot be said that he was missed. Prior Robert was conscious of his shadow only when he had an errand for him to run, or need of his obsequious presence to restore a balance when someone had managed to scar the priorial dignity. Most of the brothers were all too well aware of him, but in his absence relaxed, gave thanks and forgot him; and the novices and schoolboys evaded being in his proximity at all, so far as was possible. It was not until Compline that his non-appearance provoked wonder, comment and finally uneasiness, for he was unrelenting in observance, whatever else might be said of him. Sub-Prior Richard, a kindly soul even to those for whom he had no particular liking, grew anxious, and went to look for the stray, and found him on his bed in the dortoir, pallid and shivering, pleading sickness and looking pinched, grey and cold.
Since he was inclined to be dyspeptic at the best of times, no one was greatly surprised, unless perhaps at the severity of this attack. Brother Cadfael brought him a warming drink, and a draught to settle his stomach, and they left him to sleep it off.
That was the last mild sensation of the evening, for the final one, still to come, certainly could not be described as mild, and occurred somewhat after midnight. The halfhour after Compline seemed to be declining into total anticlimax. For the young man from the Upton manor, the anxiously awaited witness who was to uncover truth at last, did not come.
The abbot’s guests had dispersed decorously, Rémy and Earl Robert in amicable company to the guesthall, where Bénezet was already returned from his evening in the town, in good time to attend his lord, as the earl’s two squires stood ready and waiting for theirs. Daalny was shaking out and combing her long black hair in the women’s rooms, and listening to the chatter of a merchant’s widow from Wem, who had availed herself of a night’s lodging here on her way to Wenlock for her daughter’s lying-in. Everything within the walls was preparing for sleep.
But Aldhelm did not come. And neither did Tutilo return from his visit to the lady of Longner.
The order of the day’s observances being immutable, whoever fell ill and whoever defaulted, the bell for Matins sounded in the dortoir as it did every midnight, and the brothers arose and went sleepily down the night stairs into the church. Cadfael, who could sleep or wake virtually at will, always felt the particular solemnity of the night offices, and the charged vastness of the darkened vault above, where the candle-light ebbed out and died into lofty distances that might or might not stretch into infinity. The silence, also, had an added dimension of cosmic silence in the midnight hours, and every smallest sound that disrupted the ordained sounds of worship seemed to jar the foundations of the earth. Such, he thought, in the pause for meditation and prayer between Matins and Lauds, as the faint, brief creak of the hinges of the south door from the cloister. His hearing was sharper than most, and as yet unmarred by the years; probably few of the others heard it. Yet someone had come in by that door, very softly, and was now motionless just within it, hesitating to advance into the choir and interrupt the second office of the day. And in a few moments a voice from that quarter, low and breathy, joined very softly in the responses.
When they left their stalls at the end of Lauds, and approached the night stairs to return to their beds, a slight, habited figure arose from its knees to confront them, stepping into what light there was very gingerly, but with resigned resolution, like one expecting a bleak welcome, but braced to endure and survive it. Tutilo’s habit shimmered about the shoulders with the soft and soundless rain of spring, which had begun to fall in mid-evening, his curls were damp and ruffled, and the hand he passed across his forehead to brush them back left a dark smear behind. His eyes were wide and peering from within a blank shell of shock and his face, where his hand had not soiled it, was very pale.
At sight of him Herluin started forward from Prior Robert’s side with a sharp explosive sound of exasperation, anger and bewilderment, but before he could recover his breath and pour out the fiery reproaches he undoubtedly intended to vent, Tutilo had found words, few and trenchant, to forestall all other utterance.
“Father, I grieve to come so late, but I had no choice. It was vital I should go first into the town, to the castle, where such news first belongs, and so I did. Father, on my way back, on the path from the ferry and through the wood, I found a dead man. Murdered... Father,” he said, showing the hand that had soiled his brow, “I speak what I know, what was plain even in the pitch dark. I touched him... his head is pulp!”
Chapter Six
WHEN HE SAW HIS HANDS IN THE LIGHT he flinched, and held them away from him, to avoid letting them touch any other part of his person or habit, for the right was engrained with drying blood across the palm and between the fingers, and the fingers of the left were dabbled at the tips, as if they had felt at stained clothing. He would not or could not elaborate on his news until he had washed, twisting hand within hand as though he would scrub off his own defiled skin along with the blood. When at last he was private in the abbot’s parlour with Radulfus, Prior Robert, Herluin, and Brother Cadfael, whose presence Tutilo himself had requested, he launched upon his story baldly enough.
“I was coming back by the path from the ferry, through the woodland, and where the trees are thickest I stumbled over him. He was lying with his legs across the path, and I fell on my knees beside him. It was pitch dark, but a man could follow the path by the pale line of sky between the branches. But on the ground nothing but blackness. But I felt down beside me, and I knew the round of a knee, and cloth. I thought he was drunk, but he never made sound or move. I felt up from thigh to hip, and leaned close where I judged his face to be, but never a breath or a sign of life. God help me, I put my hand on the ruin of his head, and then I knew he was dead. And not by any accident! I felt the splintered bone.”
“Could you by any means guess who this man must be?” asked the abbot, his voice level and gentle.
“No, Father. It was too dark by far. There was no way of knowing, without torch or lantern. And I was knocked clean out of my right wits at first. But then I thought how this was the sheriffs business, and how the Church is held innocent and apart from all dealings in cases of blood. So I went on into the town, and told them at the castle, and the lord Beringar has set a guard on the place now until daylight. What I could tell I have told, and the rest must wait for the light. And, Father, he asked, the lord sheriff asked, that I should beg you to have Brother Cadfael informed also, and when the morning comes, if you permit, I am to lead him to the place, to meet the sheriff there. It is why I asked that he might attend here. And I will willingly show the place tomorrow, and if he has any question to ask me now, I will answer as well as I may. For he said, Hugh Beringar said, that Brother Cadfael understands wounds, having been many years a man-at-arms.” He had run himself out of breath and almost out of effort by then, but heaved a great sigh at having got the load from his shoulders.