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The porter had come out to greet her and ask her business, but she had observed Prior Robert emerging from the cloisters, and made for him like a homing bird, making him so low and unwary a reverence that she almost fell on her knees.

“Father Prior, my master—Father Ailnoth—has he been all night in the church with you?”

“I have not seen him,” said Robert, startled, and put out a hand in haste to help her keep her feet, for the rounded stones were wickedly treacherous. He held on to the arm he had grasped, and peered concernedly into her face. “What is amiss? Surely he has his own Mass to take care of soon. By this time he should be robing. I should not interrupt him now, unless for some very grave reason. What is your need?”

“He is not there,” she said abruptly. “I have been up to see. Cynric is there waiting, ready, but my master has not come.”

Prior Robert had begun to frown, certain that this silly woman was troubling him for no good reason, and yet made uneasy by her agitation. “When did you see him last? You must know when he left his house.”

“Last evening, before Compline,” she said bleakly.

“What? And has not been back since then?”

“No, Father. He never came home all night. I thought he might have come to take part in your night offices, but no one has seen him even here. And as you say, by now he should be robing for his own Mass. But he is not there!”

Halted at the foot of the day stairs, Cadfael could not choose but overhear, and having overheard, inevitably recalled the ominous black-winged bird swooping along the Foregate towards the bridge at very much the same hour, according to Diota, when Ailnoth had left his own house. On what punitive errand, Cadfael wondered? And where could those raven wings have carried him, to cause him to fail of his duty on such a festal day?

“Father,” he said, coming forward with unwary haste, slithering on the frosty cobbles, “I met the priest last night as I was coming back from the town to be in time for Compline. Not fifty paces from the gatehouse here, going towards the bridge, and in a hurry.”

Prior Robert looked round, frowning, at this unsolicited witness, and gnawed a lip in doubt how to proceed. “He did not speak to you? You don’t know where he was bound in such haste?”

“No. I spoke to him,” said Cadfael drily, “but he was too intent to mark me. No, I have no notion where he was bound. But it was he. I saw him pass the light of the torches under the gate. No mistaking him.”

The woman was staring at him now with bruised, hollow eyes and still face, and the hood had slipped back from her forehead unnoticed, and showed a great leaden bruise on her left temple, broken at the centre by a wavering line of dried blood.

“You’re hurt!” said Cadfael, asking no leave, and put back the folds of cloth from her head and turned her face to the dawning light. “This is a bad blow you’ve suffered, it needs tending. How did you come by it?”

She shrank a little from his touch, and then submitted with a resigned sigh. “I came out in the night, anxious about him, to see if there was anyone stirring, or any sign of him. The doorstone was frozen, I fell and struck my head. I’ve washed it well, it’s nothing.”

Cadfael took her hand and turned up to view a palm rasped raw in three or four grazes, took up its fellow and found it marked almost as brutally. “Well, perhaps you saved yourself worse by putting out these hands. But you must let me dress them for you, and your brow, too.”

Prior Robert stood gazing beyond them, pondering what it was best to do. “Truly I wonder… If Father Ailnoth went out at that hour, and in such haste, may not he also have fallen, somewhere, and so injured himself that he’s lying helpless? The frost was already setting in…”

“It was,” said Cadfael, remembering the glassy sheen on the steep slope of the Wyle, and the icy ring of his own steps on the bridge. “And sharply! And I would not say he was minding his steps when I saw him.”

“Some charitable errand…” murmured Robert anxiously. “He would not spare himself…”

No, neither himself nor any other soul! But true enough, those hasty steps might well have lunged into slippery places.

“If he has lain all night helpless in the cold,” said Robert, “he may have caught his death. Brother Cadfael, do you tend to this lady, do whatever is needful, and I will go and speak to Father Abbot. For I think we had best call all the brothers and lay brothers together, and set in hand a hunt for Father Ailnoth, wherever he may be.”

In the dim, quiet shelter of the workshop in the garden Cadfael sat his charge down on the bench against the wall, and turned to his brazier, to uncover it for the day. All the winter he kept it thus turfed overnight, to be ready at short notice if needed, the rest of the year he let it out, since it could easily be rekindled. None of his brews within here required positive warmth, but there were many among them that would not take kindly to frost.

The thick turves now damping it down were almost fresh, though neatly placed, and the fire beneath them live and comforting. Someone had been here during the night, and someone who knew how to lay his hand on the lamp and the tinder without disturbing anything else, and how to tend the fire to leave it much as he had found it. Young Benet had left few traces, but enough to set his signature to the nocturnal invasion. Even by night, it seemed, he practised very little dissembling where Cadfael was concerned, he was intent rather on leaving everything in order than on concealing his intrusion.

Cadfael warmed water in a pan, and diluted a lotion of betony, comfrey and daisy to cleanse the broken bruise on her forehead and the scored grazes in both palms, scratches that ran obliquely from the wrist to the root of the forefinger and thumb, torn by the frozen and rutted ground. She submitted to his ministrations with resigned dignity, her eyes veiled.

“That’s a heavy fall you had,” said Cadfael, wiping away the dried line of blood from her temple.

“I was not minding myself,” she said, so simply that he knew it for plain truth. “I am not of any importance.”

Her face, seen thus below him as he fingered her forehead, was a long oval, with fine, elongated features. Large, arched eyelids hid her eyes, her mouth was well shaped and generous but drooping with weariness. She braided her greying hair severely and coiled it behind her head. Now that she had told what she had come to tell, and laid it in other hands, she was calm and still under his handling.

“You’ll need to get some rest now,” said Cadfael, “if you’ve been up fretting all night, and after this blow. Whatever needs to be done Father Abbot will do. There! I’ll not cover it, better to have it open to the air, but as soon as you’re dismissed go home and keep from the frost. Frost can fester.” He made a leisurely business of putting away such things as he had used, to give her time to think and breathe. “Your nephew works here with me. But of course you know that. I remember you visited him here in the garden a few days ago. A good lad, your Benet.”

After a brief, deep silence she said: “So I have always found him.” And for the first time, though pallidly and briefly, she smiled.

“Hard-working and willing! I shall miss him if he goes, but he’s worth a more testing employment.”

She said nothing to that. Her silence was marked, as though words hovered behind it ready for spilling, and were strongly held back. She said no more, barring a sedate word of thanks, when he led her back to the great court, where a buzzing murmur of voices like a disturbed hive met them before ever they rounded the hedge. Abbot Radulfus was there, and had the brothers already mustering about him, bright and quivering with curiosity, their sleepiness almost forgotten.

“We have cause to fear,” said Radulfus, wasting no words,”that some accident has befallen Father Ailnoth. He went out from his house towards the town last night, before Compline, and no one has any word of him since. He has not been home, nor did he attend with us in church overnight. He may have suffered a fall on the ice, and lain either senseless, or unable to walk, through the night. It is my order that those of you who did not serve throughout the night in the choir should take some food quickly, and go out to search for him. The last we know of him is that he had passed our gate before Compline, hurrying towards the town. From that point we must consider and attempt every path he may have taken, for who knows upon what parish errand he was called forth? Those of you who have been wakeful all night long, take food and then sleep, and you are excused attendance from the office, so that you may be fit to take up the search when your fellows return. Robert, see to it! Brother Cadfael will show where Father Ailnoth was last seen. The searchers had best go forth in pairs or more, for two at least may be needed if he is found injured. But I pray he may be found in reasonable case, and quickly.”