Daalny was standing framed in the doorway. The night behind her was still luminous with the last stored light from pale walls opposite, and from a sky powdered with stars as yet barely visible, in a soft blue scarcely darker than their pinpoint silver. She came in, hasty but silent, until she had closed the door behind her, for within the cell the small lamp was lit, and a betraying bar of light falling through the doorway might bring discovery down upon them at once. She looked at him and frowned, for he seemed to her a little grey and discouraged, and that was not how she thought of him or how she wanted him.
“Speak low,” she said. “If we can hear him, he might hear us. Quickly, you must go. This time you must go. It is the last chance. Tomorrow we leave, all of us. Herluin will take you back to Ramsey into worse slavery than mine, if it rests with him.”
Tutilo came to his feet slowly, staring at her. It had taken him a long, bemused moment to draw himself back from the unhappy world of Brother Jerome’s frenzied prayers, and realize that the door really had opened and let her in, that she was actually standing there before him, urgent, tangible, her black hair shaken loose round her shoulders, and her eyes like blue-hot steady flames in the translucent oval of her face.
“Go, now, quickly,” she said. “I’ll show you. Through the wicket to the mill. Go westward, into Wales.”
“Go?” repeated Tutilo like a man in a dream, feeling his way in an unfamiliar and improbable world. And suddenly he burned bright, as though he had taken fire from her brightness. “No,” he said, “I will go nowhere without you.”
“Fool!” she said impatiently. “You’ve no choice. If you don’t stir yourself you’ll go to Ramsey, and as like as not in bonds once they get you past Leicester and out of Robert Bossu’s hands. Do you want to go back to be flayed and starved and tormented into an early grave? You never should have flown into that refuge, for you it’s a cage. Better go naked into Wales, and take your voice and your psaltery with you, and they’ll know a gift from God, and take you in. Quickly, come, don’t waste what I’ve done.”
She had picked up the psaltery, which lay in its leather bag on the prayer-desk, and thrust it into his arms, and at the touch of it he quivered and clasped it to his heart, staring at her over it with brilliant golden eyes. He opened his lips, she thought to protest again, and to prevent it she shut one palm over his mouth, and with the other hand drew him desperately towards the door. “No, say nothing, just go. Better alone! What could you do with a runaway slave tangling your feet, crippling you? He won’t leave go of me, the law won’t leave go. I’m property, you’re free. Tutilo, I entreat you! Go!”
Suddenly the springy steel had come back into his spine, and the dazzling audacity into his face, and he went with her, no longer holding back, setting the pace out at the door, and along the shadowy passage, the key again turned in the lock, the night air cool and scented with young leafage about them. There were no words at parting, far better silence. She thrust him through the wicket in the wall, out of the abbey pale, and closed the door between. And he had the sullen pewter shield of the mill pond before him, and the path out to the Foregate, and to the left, just before the bridge into the town, was the narrow road bearing westward towards Wales.
Without a glance behind, Daalny set off back towards the great court. She had a thing to do next morning of which he knew nothing, a thing that would, if it prospered, call off all pursuit, and leave him free. Secular law can move at liberty about even a realm divided. Canon law has not the same mobility. And half-proof pales beside irrefutable proof of guilt and innocence.
She heard the voices still chanting in the choir, so she took time to let herself into his cell again, to put out the little lamp. Better and safer if it should be thought he had gone to his bed, and would sleep through the night.
Chapter Thirteen
THE MORNING OF DEPARTURE DAWNED moist and still, the sun veiled, and every green thing looked at its greenest in the soft, amorphous light. Later the veil would thin and vanish, and the sun come forth in its elusive spring brightness. A good day to be riding home. Daalny came out into the great court from a sleepless bed, making her way to Prime, for she needed all her strength for the thing she had to do, and prayer and quietness within the huge solitude of the nave might stiffen her will to the act. For it seemed to her that no one else knew or even suspected what she suspected, so there was no one else to take action.
And still she might be wrong. The chink of coin, the weight of some solid bundle shifting against the pressure of her foot with that soft, metallic sound, what was that to prove anything? Even when she added to it the strange circumstances Brother Cadfael had recounted, the lie about Rémy’s harness being forgotten in the outer stable. Yet he had lied, and what business, therefore, had he in that place, unless he had gone to recover something secret of his own, or, of course, of someone else’s, or why keep it secret?
Well, Tutilo was out and gone, she hoped a good way west by now. The Benedictines had no great hold in Wales, the old, less rigidly organized Christianity of the Celtic Church lingered stubbornly there, even though the Roman rite had prevailed. They would accept a runaway novice, all the more when they heard him sing and play; they would provide him a patron and a house harp, and strip him of his skirts and find him chausses and shirt and cotte in payment for his music. And she, whatever it might cost her, would lift from him the last shadow of suspicion of murder, so that wherever he went he would go a free and vindicated man. And as for his other and lesser sins, they would be forgiven him.
There was an ache within her at his going, but she would not regard it, or regret his leaving her, though he had said in his haste that he would go nowhere without her. Now all that mattered to make her achievement complete was that he should never be recaptured, never subjected to narrow stone walls cramping his wings, or a halter crushing the cords of his throat into silence.
All through Prime she prayed unworded prayers for him, and waited and listened for the first outcry of his loss. It came only when Brother Porter had carried the breakfast bread and thin ale to Brother Jerome, and returned for the like repast for Tutilo, and even then it was hardly an outcry at all, since Brother Porter was not an exclaiming man, and scarcely recognized a crisis when he blundered into one. He emerged quickly from the cell, detached one hand from the wooden tray he was carrying to lock the door behind him, and then, recalling that there was no one within to need the precaution, in recoil not only left it unlocked but flung it wide open again. Daalny, keeping a wary eye on that corner of the court from the doorway of the guesthall, for some reason found this reaction perfectly logical. So did Cadfael, emerging at the same moment from the garden. But in view of this want of surprise and consternation on the custodian’s part, it behoved someone else to supply the deficiency. Daalny slipped back to her preparations within, and left them to deal with it as they thought best.
“He’s gone!” said Brother Porter. “Now, how is that possible?”
It was a serious question, not a protest. He looked at the large, heavy key on his tray, and back to the open door, and knitted his thick grizzled brows.