“There is more than a debt in it,” said Cadfael. “That lady tamed him the first time he set eyes on her. He would have gone to her no matter what lure you could have put in the other scale. And what you are telling me is that he knew very well Aldhelm was to come here that night. How did he know? It never was made known to the brothers. Only the abbot and I knew, though he may have felt that he must tell Prior Robert.”
“He knew,” she said simply, “because I told him.”
“And how did you know?”
She looked up sharply, stung into alert attention. “Yes, it’s true, few people knew. It was quite by chance. Bénezet overheard Prior Robert and Brother Jerome talking about it, and he came and told me. He knew I should warn Tutilo, I think he meant me to. He knew,” said Daalny, “that I liked Tutilo.”
The simplest and most temperate words are the best to express complex and intemperate feelings. She had said more than she knew.
“And he?” said Cadfael with careful detachment.
But she was not so simple. Women never are, and she was a woman who had experienced more of life than her years would contain. “He hardly knows what he feels,” she said, “for me or for anything. The wind blows him. He sees a splendid dream, and runs headlong. He even persuades himself of the splendour. The monastic dream is fading now. I know it has splendour, but not for him. And he is not the man to go with it for the peace and the quiet bliss.”
“Tell me, then,” said Cadfael mildly, “what happened that night, after he asked and got leave to go to Longner.”
“I would have told it at once,” she said ruefully, “but that it would not have helped him. For past all doubt he was on that path, he did find the poor soul dead, he did run to the castle, like an honest man, and tell the sheriff what he had found. What I can tell does not change that. But if you can find a grain of good wheat in it, for God’s sake pick it out and show it to me, for I have overlooked it.”
“Tell me,” said Cadfael.
“We made it up between us,” she said, “and it was the first time ever we two met outside these walls. He went out and took the path that leads up over the ridge to the ferry. I slipped out through the double gates of the burial ground to the Horse Fair, and we crept into the loft over the stable there. The wicket in the main doors was still unlocked then, after they brought the horses back after the flood. It was more than a week before the stableyard here had dried out. And that is where we stayed together, until we heard the Compline bell. By that time, we thought, he must have been and gone again. So late, and the night dark.”
“And raining,” Cadfael reminded her.
“That, too. Not a night to linger on the road. We thought he would be off home, and none too keen to make another wasted journey.”
“And what did you do all that time?” asked Cadfael.
She smiled ruefully. “We talked. We sat together in the hay to keep warm, and talked. Of his vocation freely entered into, and my being born into slavery with no choice at all, and how the two came to be much alike in the end,” she said hardly. “I was born into the trap, he walked into it in avoiding another kind of servitude, with his eyes open, but not looking where he was going. And now with his own hands and feet tied he has great notions of delivering me.”
“As you offered him his freedom tonight. Well, and then? You heard the Compline bell, and thought it safe to return. Then how came he alone on the path from the ferry?”
“We dared not come back together. He might be seen returning, and it was needful he should come by the way he would have taken to Longner. I slipped in by the cemetery gate, as I left, and he went up through the trees to the path by which he had made his way to join me. It would not have done to come together. He has forsworn women,” she said with a bitter smile, “and I must have no dealings with men.”
“He has not yet taken final vows,” said Cadfael. “A pity he went alone, however. If two together had happened upon a dead man, they could have spoken for each other.”
“Us two?” she said, staring, and laughed briefly. They would not have believed us... a bondwoman and a novice near his final vows out in the night and fresh from a romp in the hay? They would have said we compounded together to kill the man. And now, I suppose,” she said, cooling from bitterness into a composed sadness, “I have told you everything, and told you nothing. But it is the whole truth. A good liar and a bold thief he may be, but on most counts Tutilo is as innocent as a babe. We even said the night prayers together when the bell rang. Who’s to believe that?”
Cadfael believed it, but could imagine Herluin’s face if ever the claim had been made to him. “You have told me, at least,” he said, musing, “that there were more people knew Aldhelm would be coming down that path than just the few of us, as it began. If Bénezet heard Jerome baying his knowledge abroad, how many more, I wonder, learned of it before night? Prior Robert can be discreet, but Jerome?... I doubt it. And might not Bénezet have passed on all his gleanings to Rémy, as he did to you? Whatever the bodyservant picks up may be grist to his master’s mill. And what Rémy hears may very well be talked of with the patron he’s courting. Oh, no, I would not say this hour had been altogether wasted. It means I have much thinking to do. Go to your bed now, child, and leave troubling for this while.”
“And if Tutilo never comes back from Longner?” she asked, wavering between hope and dread.
“Never give a thought to that,” said Cadfael. “He will come back.”
They brought Tutilo back well before Prime, in the pearly light of a clear, still dawn. March had come in more lamb than lion, there were windflowers in the woods, and the first primroses, unburned by frost, undashed and unmired by further rain, were just opening. The two Longner men who rode one on either side their borrowed minstrel brought him as far as the gatehouse, waiting in silence as he dismounted. The farewells they made to him, as they took his pony’s rein and made to turn back for home, were quiet and constrained, but clearly friendly. The elder of the two leaned down from the saddle to clap him amiably on the shoulder, and said a word or two in his ear, before they trotted away along the Foregate towards the Horse Fair.
Cadfael had been awake and afield more than an hour by then, for want of a quiet mind, and had filled in the time by ranging along the bushy edges of his pease-fields and the shore of the mill-pond to gather the white blossoms of the blackthorn, just out of the bud and at their best for infusing, to make a gentle purge for the old men in the infirmary, who could no longer take the strenuous exercise that had formerly kept their bodies in good trim. A very fine plant, the blackthorn, good for almost anything that ailed a man’s insides, providing bud and flower and bitter black fruit were all taken at their best. Good in the hedges, too, for keeping cattle and sheep out of planted places.
From time to time he broke off his labours to return to the great court to look out for Tutilo returning. He had a full scrip of the small white flowers when he made the journey for the seventh time, and saw the three riders pace in at the gatehouse, and stood unobserved to watch Tutilo dismount, part amicably from his guards, and come wearily towards the gatehouse door, as if he would himself take the key and deliver himself dutifully back to his captivity.
He walked a little unsteadily, and with his fair crest drooping over something he cradled in his arms. Once he stumbled on the cobbles. The light, clearing and brightening to the pure pale gold of primroses where its slanting rays could reach, still left the gatehouse and the court within the gates in shadow, and Tutilo kept his eyes on the cobbles and trod carefully, as though he could not see his way clearly. Cadfael went to meet him, and the porter, who had heard the stir of arrival and come out into the doorway of his lodge, halted on the threshold, and left it to Cadfael as an elder of the house to take charge of the returned prisoner.