‘Though he may spill him at the ford,’ Hugh allowed, watching them recede towards the river, ‘if the mood takes him. Well, let’s see what’s left us to find here.’
The sergeant was cutting back deeply into the bank, under the rustling broom brushes. Cadfael turned from the dead to descend with kilted habit into her grave, and cautiously began to shovel out the loose loam and deepen the hollow where she had lain.
‘Nothing,’ he said at last, on his knees upon a floor now packed hard and changing to a paler colour, the subsoil revealing a layer of clay. ‘You see this? Lower, by the river, Ruald had two or three spots where he got his clay. Worked out now, they said, at least where they were easy to reach. This has not been disturbed, in longer time than she has lain here. We need go no deeper, there is nothing to find. We’ll sift around the sides a while, but I doubt not this is all.’
‘More than enough,’ said Hugh, scouring his soiled hands in the thick, fibrous turf. ‘And not enough. All too little to give her an age or a name.’
‘Or a kinship or a home, living,’ Cadfael agreed sombrely, ‘or a reason for dying. We can do no more here. I have seen what there is to be seen of how she was laid. What remains to be done can better be done in privacy, with time to spare, and trusted witnesses.’
It was an hour more before Brother Winfrid and Brother Urien came striding along the headland with their burden of brychans and litter. Carefully they lifted the slender bundle of bones, folded the rugs round them and covered them decently from sight. Hugh’s sergeant was dismissed, back to the garrison at the castle. In silence and on foot the insignificant funeral cortege of the unknown set off for the abbey.
‘It is a woman,’ said Cadfael, reporting in due course to Abbot Radulfus in the privacy of the abbot’s parlour. ‘We have bestowed her in the mortuary chapel. I doubt if there is anything about her that can ever be recognised by any man, even if her death is recent, which I take to be unlikely. The gown is such as any cottage wife might wear, without ornament, without girdle, once the common black, now drab. She wears no shoes, no jewellery, nothing to give her a name.’
‘Her face?’ wondered the abbot, but dubiously, expecting nothing.
‘Father, her face is now the common image. There is nothing left to move a man to say: This is wife, or sister, or any woman ever I knew. Nothing, except, perhaps, that she had a wealth of dark hair. But so have many women. She is of moderate height for a woman. Her age we can but guess, and that very roughly. Surely by her hair she was not old, but I think she was no young girl, either. A woman in her prime, but between five-and-twenty and forty who can tell?’
‘Then there is nothing singular about her at all? Nothing to mark her out?’ said Radulfus.
‘There is the manner of her burial,’ said Hugh. ‘Without mourning, without rites, put away unlawfully in unconsecrated ground. And yetCadfael will tell you. Or if you so choose, Father, you may see for yourself, for we have left her lying as we found her.’
‘I begin to see,’ said Radulfus with deliberation,’that I must indeed view this dead woman for myself. But since so much has been said, you may tell me what it is that outdoes in strangeness the circumstances of her secret burial. And yet?’
‘And yet, Father, she was laid out straight and seemly, her hair braided, her hands folded on her breast, over a cross banded together from two sticks from a hedgerow or a bush. Whoever put her into the ground did so with some show of reverence.’
‘The worst of men, so doing, might feel some awe,’ said Radulfus slowly, frowning over this evidence of a mind torn two ways. ‘But it was a deed done in the dark, secretly. It implies a worse deed, also done in the dark. If her death was natural, without implication of guilt to any man, why no priest, no rites of burial? You have not so far argued, Cadfael, that this poor creature was killed as unlawfully as she was buried, but I do so argue. What other reason can there be for having her underground in secrecy, and unblessed? And even the cross her grave-digger gave her, it seems, was cut from hedgerow twigs, never to be known as any man’s property, to point a finger at the murderer! For from what you say, everything that might have given her back her identity was removed from her body, to keep a secret a secret still, even now that the plough has brought her back to light and to the possibility of grace.’
‘It does indeed seem so,’ Hugh said gravely, ‘but for the fact that Cadfael finds no mark of injury upon her, no bone broken, nothing to show how she died. After so long in the ground, a stroke from dagger or knife might escape finding, but we’ve seen no sign of such. Her neck is not broken, nor her skull. Cadfael does not think she was strangled. It is as if she had died in her bedeven in her sleep. But no one would then have buried her by stealth and hidden everything that marked her out from all other women.’
‘No, true! No one would so imperil his own soul but for desperate reasons.’ The abbot brooded some moments in silence, considering the problem which had fallen into his hands thus strangely. Easy enough to do right to the wronged dead, as due to her immortal soul. Even without a name prayers could be said for her and Mass sung; and the Christian burial once denied her, and the Christian grave, these could be given at last. But the justice of this world also clamoured for recognition. He looked up at Hugh, one office measuring the other. ‘What do you say, Hugh? Was this a murdered woman?’
‘In the face of what little we know, and of the much more we do not know,’ said Hugh carefully, ‘I dare not assume that she is anything else. She is dead, she was thrust into the ground unshriven. Until I see reason for believing better of the deed, I view this as murder.’
‘It is clear to me, then,’ said Radulfus, after a moment’s measuring silence,’that you do not believe she has been long in her grave. This is no infamy from long before our time, or nothing need concern us but the proper amendment of what was done wrong to her soul. The justice of God can reach through centuries, and wait its time for centuries, but ours is helpless outside our own generation. How long do you judge has passed since she died?’
‘I can but hazard, and with humility,’ said Cadfael. ‘It may have been no more than a year, it may have been three or four, even five years, but no more than that. She is no victim from old times. She lived and breathed only a short time ago.’
‘And I cannot escape her,’ said Hugh wryly.
‘No. No more than I can.’ The abbot flattened his long, sinewy hands abruptly on his desk, and rose. ‘The more reason I must see her face to face, and acknowledge my duty towards her. Come let’s go and look at our demanding guest. I owe her that, before we again commit her to the earth, with better auguries this time. Who knows, there may be something, some small thing, to call the living woman to mind, for someone who once knew her.’
It seemed to Cadfael, as he followed his superior out across the great court and in at the southern porch to the cloister and the church, that there was something unnatural in the way they were all avoiding one name. It had not yet been spoken, and he could not choose but wonder who would be the first to utter it, and why he himself had not already precipitated the inevitable. It could not go unspoken for much longer. But in the meantime, as well the abbot should be the first to assay. Death, whether old or new, could not disconcert him.
In the small, chilly mortuary chapel candles burned at head and foot of the stone bier, on which the nameless woman was laid, with a linen sheet stretched over her. They had disturbed her bones as little as possible in examining the remains for some clue to the means of her death, and composed them again as exactly as they could when that fruitless inspection was over. So far as Cadfael could determine, there was no mark of any injury upon her. The odour of earth clung heavy about her in the enclosed space, but the cold of stone tempered it, and the composure and propriety of her repose overcame the daunting presence of old death, thus summarily exposed again to light, and the intrusion of eyes.