Tutilo was still on his knees in front of the plain, small cross on the cell wall, and did not immediately look round when the key grated in the lock, and the door opened at his back. He had stopped singing, and was gazing musingly before him, eyes wide open, and face placid and absent. He turned, rising when the door swung heavily to again, and beholding Cadfael, smiled rather wanly, and sat down on his cot. He looked mildly surprised, but said nothing, waiting submissively to hear what was now required of him, and in no apprehension about it, because it was Cadfael who came.
“No, nothing,” said Cadfael with a sigh, answering the look. “Just a gnawing hope that talking to us earlier might have started a hare, after all. Some small thing recalled that might be useful.”
Tutilo shook his head slowly, willing but blank. “No, I can think of nothing I haven’t told you. And everything I have told you is truth.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you,” said Cadfael resignedly. “Still, bear it in mind. The merest detail, something you think negligible, might be the very grain that makes the weight. Never mind, leave your wits fallow and something may come back to you.” He looked round the narrow, bare white cell. “Are you warm enough here?”
“Once in the brychans, snug enough,” said Tutilo. “I’ve slept harder and colder many a time.”
“And there’s nothing wanting? Any small thing I can do for you?”
“According to the Rule, you should not so much as offer,” said Tutilo, with a sudden sparkling grin. “But yes, maybe there is one lawful thing I could ask, even to my credit. I have kept the hours, alone here, but there are bits I forget sometimes. And besides, I miss reading in it to pass the time. Even Father Herluin would approve. Could you bring me a breviary?”
“What happened to your own?” Cadfael asked, surprised. “I know you had one, a little narrow one.” The vellum had been folded many times to make its cramped pages. “Good eyes you’d need for that minuscule, but then, your eyes are young enough to be sharp.”
“I’ve lost it,” said Tutilo. “I had it at Mass, the day before I was locked in here, but where I’ve left it or dropped it I don’t know. I miss it, but I can’t think what I’ve done with it.”
“You had it the day Aldhelm was to come here? The day, the night, rather, you found him?”
“That was the last I can be clear about, and I may have shaken it out of my scrip or dropped it somewhere among the trees in the dark, that’s what I’m afraid of. I was hardly noticing much that night,” he said ruefully, “after I found him. What with bolting down the track and across the river into the town, I could have shed it anywhere. It may be down the Severn by now. I like to have it,” he said earnestly, “and I rise for Matins and Lauds in the night. I do!”
“I’ll leave you mine,” said Cadfael. “Well, best get your sleep, if you’re going to rise with the rest of us at midnight. Keep your lamp burning till then, if you like, there’s enough oil here.” He had checked it in the little pottery vessel with a fingertip. “Goodnight, son!”
“Don’t forget to lock the door,” said Tutilo after him, and laughed without a trace of bitterness.
She was standing in the darkest of the dark, slender and still and erect, pressed against the stones of the cell wall when Cadfael rounded the corner. The faint gleam of Tutilo’s lamp through the grill high out of her reach fell from above over her face as no more than a glowworm’s eerie spark, conjuring out of deep darkness a spectral mask of a face, oval, elusive, with austere carven features, but the remaining light from the west window of the church, hardly less dim, found the large, smouldering lustre of her eyes, and a few jewelled points of brightness that were embroidered silver threads along the side hems of her bliaut. She was in her finery, she had been singing for Robert Bossu. A lean, motionless, intent presence in the stillness of the night. Daalny, Partholan’s queen, a demi-goddess from the western paradise.
“I heard your voices,” she said, her own voice pitched just above a whisper; whispers carry more audibly than soft utterances above the breath. “I could not call to him, someone might have heard. Cadfael, what is to happen to him?”
“I hope,” said Cadfael, “no great harm.”
“In long captivity,” she said, “he will stop singing. And then he will die. And the day after tomorrow we ride with the earl for Leicester. I have my orders from Rémy, tomorrow I must begin packing the instruments for safe carriage, and the next morning we ride. Bénezet will be seeing to all the horses, and exercising Rémy’s to make sure his injury’s healed well. And we go. And he remains. At whose mercy?”
“God’s,” said Cadfael firmly, “and with the intercession of the saints. One saint, at any rate, for she has just nudged me with the seed of an idea. So go to your bed, and keep your heart up, for nothing is ended yet.”
“And what gain is there for me?” she said. “We might prove ten times over that he did no murder, but still he will be dragged back to Ramsey, and they will have their revenge on him, not so much for being a thief as for making a botch of his thievery. In the earl’s party half the way, and far too strong an escort for him to break loose.” She lowered her burning eyes to the broad brown hand in which Cadfael held the key, and suddenly she smiled. “I know the right key now,” she said.
“It might be changed over to the wrong nail,” said Cadfael mildly.
“I should know it, even so. There are but two alike in size and design, and I remember well the pattern of the wards on the wrong one. I shall not make that mistake again.”
He was about to urge her to let well alone and trust heaven to do justice, but then he had a sudden vision of heaven’s justice as the Church sometimes applied it, in good but dreadful faith, with all the virtuous narrowness and pitilessness of minds blind and deaf to the infinite variety of humankind, its failings, and aspirations, and needs, and forgetful of all the Gospel reminders concerning publicans and sinners. And he thought of songbirds caged, drooping without air to play on the cords of their throats, without heart to sing, and knew that they might very well die. Half humanity was here in this lean dark girl beside him, and that half of humanity had its right to reason, determine and meddle, no less than the male half. After all, they were equally responsible for humankind continuing. There was not an archbishop or an abbot in the world who had not had a flesh and blood mother, and come of a passionate coupling.
She would do as she thought fit, and so would he. He was not charged with the keeping of the keys, once he had restored this one to its place.
“Well, well!” said Cadfael with a sigh. “Let him be for tonight. Let all things be. Who knows how much clearer the skies will be by tomorrow?”
He left her then, and went on up the court to the gatehouse, to return the key to Brother Porter. Behind him Daalny said softly: “Goodnight!” Her tone was level, courteous, and withdrawn, promising nothing, confiding nothing, a neutral salute out of the dark.
And what had he to show for that last instinctive return to question the boy yet again, to hope for some sudden blinding recollection that would unveil truth like flinging open the shutters on a summer morning? One small thing only: Tutilo had lost his breviary, somewhere, at some time, on the death-day. With half a mile of woodland and two or three hundred yards of Foregate back-alleys, and the hasty rush into the town and back again, to parcel out in search of it, if it was valued enough. A breviary can be recopied. And yet, if that was all, why was it that he felt Saint Winifred shaking him impatiently by the shoulder and urging in his ear that he knew very well where to begin looking, and that he had better be about it in the morning, for time was running out?