Holy Thief (26 page)
“He
told me,” said Hugh, “as I think he told you, that he did not know in the
darkness who the dead man might be. If the murderer had been before him, that
would be truth. Even by daylight we could not tell who he was until Cadfael
turned up the whole side of his face to the light. He told you, Father Abbot,
how he put his hand upon the shattered left side of the dead man’s head. All
that, everything about him, his bearing, his voice, the cold of horror that was
on him, for he shook as he spoke of it, all rang true to me. And yet it may
still be true that he came within minutes of Jerome’s flight, found the man only
stunned, stooped close and knew him, for then knowing was possible, and killed
him and only then took thought how to escape suspicion, and came running into
the town, to me.”
“Neither
of the pair of them looks a likely case,” said the earl consideringly,” to
crush another man’s head with a stone, though there’s no saying what any man
may do in extremes. But then to have the wit and the cold blood to fit the
stone back and cover the traces, that could be out of reach of most of us.
Well, you have them both under guard, there’s no haste.”
“There
is a matter of timing,” said Cadfael. “You told me, Hugh, what the priest’s man
of Upton said, how he parted from Aldhelm at Preston, while Aldhelm went on to
the ferry.”
“At
about six they separated,” Hugh confirmed positively. “From there, ferry and
all, to the place where he was ambushed, would take him at the most half an
hour. The ferryman speaks to the same effect. By half past six at the latest he
reached the place where he died. If you can show me plainly where Tutilo was
until past that hour, we may strike him from the roll and forget him.”
I
HAVE NOT SO FAR HAD THE OPPORTUNITY,” said Robert Bossu, “of cultivating your
acquaintance. But I must tell you, if you do not already know it, for I think
you miss very little, and can see as far through a forest by moonlight as the
next man, that the name of Hugh Beringar has not gone unnoted by men of sense.
How could it, when the exchequer is in chaos most of the time, and the chancery
clerks out of touch with much of the land? How many shires, how many sheriffs,
do you suppose, pay their annual farms regularly and on time? Yours is known
never to be in default, and your county enjoys at least a kind of peace, a man
can hope to travel to the Abbey fair here safely, and your courts manage to
keep the roads relatively free of what we modestly call evil customs. Moreover,
you contrive to be on amicable terms with Owain Gwynedd, as I know, even if
Powys boils over now and again.”
“I
study and practise to keep my place,” said Hugh with a grin.
“You
study and practise to keep your shire functioning as quietly as may be,” said
the earl. “So do all men of sense, but against the odds.”
They
were sitting in the earl’s apartment in the guest-hall, facing each other
across a small table, with wine passing amiably between them, and a curtained
door closed and shrouded against the world. Robert Bossu was well served. His
squires were prompt to his call, and soft-footed and neat-handed with flask and
glass, and seemed to go in no awe of him, but rather to take pride in matching
his poise and serenity; but for all that, he dismissed them before he opened
his confidence to one almost a stranger, and Hugh had no doubt that they kept
his rules and betook themselves well out of earshot of his conversation, though
close enough to jump to respond if he called.
“I
like order,” said Hugh, “and I have a preference for keeping my people alive
and whole where possible, though you have seen it cannot always be done. I hate
waste. Waste of lives, waste of time that could be profitable, waste of the
earth that could be fruitful. There’s been more than enough of all three. If I
try to keep it out of my bailiwick, at least, is that matter for wonder?”
“Your
opinion,” said the earl with deliberation, “I should value. What you say here,
I have said before you. Now, do you see any ending? How many more years of this
to-ing and fro-ing that always fetches up in stalemate? You are Stephen’s man.
So am I. Men every bit as honourable follow the empress. We entangle ourselves
like this with little thought, but I tell you, Hugh, the time is coming when
men will be forced to think, upon both sides, before waste has wasted all, and
no man can lift a lance any more.”
“And
you and I are conserving what we can for that day?” Hugh enquired, with raised
brows and a rueful mouth.
“Oh,
not for a few years yet, but it will come. It must. There was some vestige of
sense in it when we began, when Stephen had Normandy as well as England, and
victory was in view. But four years and more ago that was all changed, when
Geoffrey of Anjou wormed and bludgeoned his way into Normandy and made it his
past doubt, even if it was in his wife’s right and his son’s name.”
“Yes,”
agreed Hugh flatly, “the year the Count of Meulan left us, to protect his right
in Normandy by coming to terms with Geoffrey as overlord in Stephen’s place.”
“What
else,” asked Robert, undisturbed and unindignant, even wryly smiling, “could my
brother do? His right and title rest there. He is Waleran, Count of Meulan;
however dear his titles in England may be, his line and identity is there. Not
even Normandy, though the greater part of his inheritance is in Normandy. But
the name, the name is in France itself, he owes homage to the king of France
for that, and now for the larger heritage to Geoffrey of Anjou. Whatever else
he jettisons, the root and blood of his name he cannot live without. I am the
luckier of the two, Hugh. I came into my father’s English lands and titles, I
can dig my heels in here, and sit it out. True, my wife brought me Breteuil, but
that is the lesser part of my heart, as my brother’s title of Worcester is the
lesser part of his. So he is there, and written off as a turncoat in Maud’s
favour as I am here, and credited as a loyal man to Stephen. And what
difference, Hugh, do you see between us two? Twin brothers, the closest
blood-kin there can be?”
“None,”
said Hugh, and was silent a moment, weighing and discarding the cautious
selection of words. “I understand very well,” he said then, “that with Normandy
gone, this followed. For others, besides the Beaumont brothers. There’s not a
man among us would not make some concessions to protect his rooted right and
his sons’ inheritance. We may reckon your brother as Anjou’s man now, yet he
will do Stephen as little harm as he can, and give Geoffrey as little active
support. And you, left here still Stephen’s man, you will keep your loyalty,
but keep it as quietly as may be, avoiding action against the brood of Anjou as
Waleran avoids action against Stephen. And there he will gloze over your continued
allegiance and protect your lands and interests, as you are doing here for him.
The division between you is no division at all. It is a drawing together that
will draw together the interests of many others like you. Not in Stephen’s
cause, not in the cause of the empress and her son.”
“In
the cause of sanity,” said the earl flatly, and studied Hugh with alert and
critical interest, and smiled. “You have felt it, too. This has become a war
which cannot be won or lost. Victory and defeat have become alike impossible.
Unfortunately it may take several years yet before most men begin to
understand. We who are trying to ride two horses know it already.”
“If
there is no winning and no losing,” said Hugh, “there has to be another way. No
land can continue for ever in a chaotic stalemate between two exhausted forces,
without governance, while two groups of bewildered old men squat on their
meagre gains and stare helplessly at each other, unable to lift a hand for the
coup de grace.”
Robert
Bossu contemplated that summing up and his own fine finger-ends with a
considering gravity, and then looked up sharply, his eyes, which had sparks of
burning purple in their blackness, meeting Hugh’s unmoving stare with appreciative
attention. “I like your diagnosis. It has gone on too long, and it will go on
some years yet, make no mistake. But there is no ending that way, except by the
death of all the old men, and not from wounds, from stagnation and old age and
disgust. I would rather not wait to make one of them.”
“Nor
I!” said Hugh heartily. “And therefore,” he asked, with an eyebrow cocked
expectantly to meet the bright imperial stare, “what does a sane man do while
he’s enduring such waiting as he can endure?”
“Tills
his own ground, shepherds his own flock, mends his own fences, and sharpens his
own sword,” said Robert Bossu.
“Collects
his own revenues?” suggested Hugh. “And pays his own dues?”
“Both.
To the last penny. And keeps, Hugh... keeps his own counsel. Even while terms
like traitor and turncoat are being bandied about like arrows finding random
marks. You will know better. I loved Stephen. I still do. But I do not love
this ruinous nothing he and his cousin have made between them.”
The
afternoon was drawing on towards the first hint of dusk. Soon it would be time
for the Vesper bell. Hugh drained his cup and set it down on the board. “Well,
I had better be about shepherding my own flock, if I can count the abbot’s two
prisoners as any charge of mine. This is still a murder we have on our hands.
And you, my lord? I take it you will be away now to your own country? These are
no times to turn one’s back for longer than a few days.”
“I’m
loth to go without knowing the ending,” the earl admitted, warming into slightly
self-deprecating laughter. “I know murder is no jest, but these two prisoners
of yours... Can you believe either of them capable of killing? Oh, I know
there’s no reading in the face what the mind can conceive, you handle them as
you best can. As for me, yes, in a day or so I must make ready and take my
leave. I am glad,” he said, rising as Hugh rose, “that I have got to know you.
Oh, and I have made other gains, for Rémy and his servants will be coming with
me. There’s room in my household for so good a poet and maker of songs. My
luck, that I happened on him before he made off to the north, to Chester. His
luck, too, for he’d have wasted his eloquence there. Ranulf has things on his
mind graver than music, even if he has a note of music in him, which I doubt.”
Hugh
took his leave, and was not pressed to remain, though the earl came a few
formal steps towards the hall door with him. He had said what no doubt he was
choosing to say to all such men holding authority, however limited, once he had
measured them and liked and respected what he found. He had seed to sow, and
was selecting the ground where it might root and flourish. When Hugh had
reached the top of the steps the voice behind him said with mild but impressive
emphasis: “Hugh! Bear it in mind!”
Hugh
and Cadfael came together from Tutilo’s cell, and refuged in the herb-garden in
the twilight after Vespers, to consider what little they had got from him; and
it was little enough, but sturdily consistent with what he had affirmed from
the beginning. The boy was puffy-eyed and drunken with sleep, and if he felt
any great anxiety about his fate he was too dulled still to be capable of
appreciating the many pitfalls that lay in wait for him every way. Not a word
of Daalny; for her he was fiercely on guard. He sat on his narrow pallet
languidly composed, close to resignation, answered questions without any
suspect pauses, and listened with dropped jaw and startled eyes when Cadfael
told him how the Gospels had decisively restored Saint Winifred to Shrewsbury,
and how Brother Jerome had babbled out his astonishing confession rather than
wait to be accused by heaven.
“Me?”
blurted Tutilo, incredulous. “He meant it for me? And for one instant he
laughed aloud at the absurdity of the idea of Jerome as assassin, and himself
as victim, and then in revulsion was stricken aghast at himself, and clapped
both hands to his face as if to crush out the very lines of laughter. “And the
poor soul helpless, and someone... Oh, God, how could any man...” And then,
suddenly comprehending what was inferred, and instantly springing to refute it:
“Oh, no, not that! Not Jerome, that’s impossible.” Quite certain, quite firmly
stating his certainty, he who had found the wreckage of a man. “No, of course
you can’t and don’t believe that.” Not protesting, not exclaiming, but stating
another certainty. He was fully awake and alive by then, his golden eyes wide
and confident upon his questioners, both monastic and secular. As sound,
sensible men both, they could not possibly credit that Jerome, narrow, meagre,
malicious little soul though he might be, could have battered a senseless man’s
head to pulp with a heavy stone.
“Since
you were not at Longner,” said Hugh, “where did you take yourself off that
night, to be coming back by that same path?”
“Anywhere
to be out of sight and mind,” said Tutilo fervently. “I lay up in the loft
above the Horse Fair stable until I heard the bell for Compline, and then went
up almost to the ferry, to be seen to come back by the Longner path if anyone
noticed me.”
“Alone?”
said Hugh.
“Of
course alone.” He lied cheerfully and firmly. No use lying at all unless you
can do it with conviction.
And
that was all that was to be got out of him. No, he had met no one, going or
returning, who would be able to vouch for his movements. He had told all the
worst of what he had done, and did not seem greatly concerned about the rest.
They locked the door upon him again, restored the key to its place in the
gatehouse, and withdrew to the privacy of the herbarium to blow the brazier
into a comfortable glow, and shut out the encroaching darkness of the night.