One Corpse Too Many (10 page)

“So I think, too,” said the boy, and drew in hissing breath at the bite of Cadfael’s dressing. “There he must have been. The grass warned me when he made his assay. I don’t know how it is, every man throws up his right arm to ward off blows from his head, and so did I. His cord went round my wrist as well as my throat. I was not clever or a hero, I lashed out in fright and jerked it out of his hands. It brought him down on top of me in the dark. I know only too well,” he said, defensively, “that you may not believe me.”

“There are things that go to confirm you. Spare to be so wary of your friends. So you were man to man, at least, better odds than before. How did you escape him?”

“More by luck than valour,” said Torold ruefully. “We were rolling about in the hay, wrestling and trying for each other’s throat, everything by feel and nothing by sight, and neither of us could get space or time to draw, for I don’t know how long, but I suppose it was no more than minutes. What ended it was that there must have been an old manger there against the wall, half fallen to pieces, and I banged my head against one of the boards lying loose in the hay. I hit him with it, two-handed, and he dropped. I doubt I did him any lasting damage, but it knocked him witless long enough for me to run, and run I did, and loosed both the horses, and made off westward like a hunted hare. I still had work to do, and there was no one but me left to do it, or I might have stayed to try and even the account for Nick. Or I might not,” owned Torold with scowling honesty. “I doubt I was even thinking about FitzAlan’s errand then, though I’m thinking of it now, and have been ever since. I ran for my life. I was afraid he might have had others lying in ambush to come to his aid. All I wanted was out of there as fast as my legs would go.”

“No need to make a penance of it,” said Cadfael mildly, securing his bandage. “Sound sense is something to be glad of, not ashamed. But, my friend, it’s taken you two full days, by your own account, to get to much the same spot you started from. I take it, by that, the king has allies pretty thick between here and Wales, at least by the roads.”

“Thick as bees in swarm! I got well forward by the more northerly road, and all but ran my head into a patrol where there was no passing. They were stopping everything that moved, what chance had I with two horses and a load of valuables? I had to draw off into the woods, and by that time it was getting light, there was nothing to be done but lie up until dark again and try the southerly road. And that was no better, they had loose companies ranging the countryside by then. I thought I might make my way through by keeping off the roads and close to the curve of the river, but it was another night lost. I lay up in a copse on the hill all day Thursday, and tried again by night, and that was when they winded me, four or five of them, and I had to run for it, with only one way to run, down towards the river. They had me penned, I couldn’t get out of the trap. I took the saddle-bags from both horses, and turned the beasts loose, and started them off at a panic gallop, hoping they’d crash through and lead the pursuit away from me, but there was one of the fellows too near, he saw the trick, and made for me instead. He gave me this slash in the thigh, and his yell brought the others running. There was only one thing to do. I took to the water, saddle-bags and all. I’m a strong swimmer, but with that weight it was hard work to stay afloat, and let the current bring me downstream. That’s when they started shooting. Dark as it was, they’d been out in it long enough to have fair vision, and there’s always light from the water when there’s something moving in it. So I got this shoulder wound, and had the sense to go under and stay under as long as I had breath. Severn’s fast, even in summer water it carried me down well. They followed along the bank for a while, and loosed one or two more arrows, but then I think they were sure I was under for good. I worked my way towards the bank as soon as it seemed safe, to get a foot to ground and draw breath here and there, but I stayed in the water. I knew the bridge would be manned, I dared not drag myself ashore until I was well past. It was high time by then. I remember crawling into the bushes, but not much else, except rousing just enough to be afraid to stir when your people came reaping. And then Godric here found me. And that’s the truth of it,” he ended firmly, and looked Cadfael unblinkingly in the eye.

“But not the whole truth,” said Cadfael, placidly enough. “Godric found no saddle-bags along with you.” He eyed the young face that fronted him steadily, lips firmly closed, and smiled. “No, never fret, we won’t question you. You are the sole custodian of FitzAlan’s treasury, and what you’ve done with it, and how, God knows, you ever managed to do anything sensible with it in your condition, that’s your affair. You haven’t the air of a courier who has failed in his mission, I’ll say that for you. And for your better peace, all the talk in the town is that FitzAlan and Adeney were not taken, but broke out of the ring and are got clean away. Now we have to leave you alone here until afternoon, we have duties, too. But one of us, or both, will come and see how you’re faring then. And here’s food and drink, and clothes I hope will fit you well enough to pass. But lie quiet for today, you’re not your own man yet however wholeheartedly you may be FitzAlan’s.”

Godith laid the washed and mended shirt on top of the folded garments, and was following Cadfael to the door when the look on Torold’s face halted her, half uneasy, half triumphant. His eyes grew round with amazement as he stared at the crisp, clean linen, and the fine stitches of the long mend where the blood-stained gash had been. A soft whistle of admiration saluted the wonder.

“Holy Mary! Who did this? Do you keep an expert seamstress within the abbey walls? Or did you pray for a miracle?”

“That? That’s Godric’s work,” said Cadfael, not altogether innocently, and walked out into the early sunshine, leaving Godith flushed to the ears. “We learn more skills in the cloister than merely cutting wheat and brewing cordials,” she said loftily, and fled alter Cadfael.

But she was grave enough on the way back, going over in her mind Torold’s story, and reflecting how easily he might have died before ever she met him; not merely once, in the murderer’s cord, nor the second time from King Stephen’s roaming companies, but in the river, or from his wounds in the bushes. It seemed to her that divine grace was taking care of him, and had provided her as the instrument. There remained lingering anxieties.

“Brother Cadfael, you do believe him?”

“I believe him. What he could not tell truth about, he would not lie about, either. Why, what’s on your mind still?”

“Only that the night before I saw him I said—I was afraid the companion who rode with Nicholas was far the most likely to be tempted to kill him. How simple it would have been! But you said yesterday, you did say, he did not do it. Are you quite sure? How do you know?”

“Nothing simpler, girl dear! The mark of the strangler’s cord is on his neck and on his wrist. Did you not understand those thin scars? He was meant to go after his friend out of this world. No, you need have no fear on that score, what he told us is truth. But there may be things he could not tell us, things we ought to discover, for Nicholas Faintree’s sake. Godith, this afternoon, when you’ve seen to the lotions and wines, you may leave the garden and go and keep him company if you please, and I’ll come there as soon as I can. There are things I must look into, over there on the Frankwell side of Shrewsbury.”

Chapter Six

FROM THE FRANKWELL END OF THE WESTERN BRIDGE, the suburb outside the walls and over the river, the road set off due west, climbing steadily, leaving behind the gardens that fringed the settlement. At first it was but a single road mounting the hill that rose high above Severn, then shortly it branched into two, of which the more southerly soon branched again, three spread fingers pointing into Wales. But Cadfael took the road Nicholas and Torold had taken on the night after the castle fell, the most northerly of the three.

He had thought of calling on Edric Flesher in the town, and giving him the news that one, at least, of the two young couriers had survived and preserved his charge, but then he had decided against it. As yet Torold was by no means safe, and until he was well away, the fewer people who knew of his whereabouts the better, the less likely was word of him to slip out in the wrong place, where his enemies might overhear. There would be time later to share any good news with Edric and Petronilla.

The road entered the thick woodland of which Torold had spoken, and narrowed into a grassy track, within the trees but keeping close to the edge, where cultivated fields showed between the trunks. And there, withdrawn a little deeper into the woods, lay the hut, low and roughly timbered. From this place it would be a simple matter to carry a dead body on horseback as far as the castle ditch. The river, as everywhere here, meandered in intricate coils, and would have to be crossed in order to reach the place where the dead had been flung, but there was a place opposite the castle on this side where a central island made the stream fordable even on foot in such a dry season, once the castle itself was taken. The distance was small, the night had been long enough. Then somewhere off to the right lay Ulf s holding, where Torold had got his exchange of horses. Cadfael turned off in that direction, and found the croft not a quarter of a mile from the track.

Ulf was busy gleaning after carrying his corn, and not at first disposed to be talkative to an unknown monk, but the mention of Torold’s name, and the clear intimation that here was someone Torold had trusted, loosened his tongue.

“Yes, he did come with a lamed horse, and I did let him have the best of mine in exchange. I was the gainer, though, even so, for the beast he left with me came from FitzAlan’s stables. He’s still lame, but healing. Would you see him? His fine gear is well hidden, it would mark him out for stolen or worse if it was seen.”

Even without his noble harness the horse, a tall roan, showed suspiciously fine for a working farmer to possess, and undoubtedly he was still lame of one fore-foot. Ulf showed him the wound.

“Torold said a caltrop did this,” mused Cadfael. “Strange place to find such.”

“Yet a caltrop it was, for I have it, and several more like it that I went and combed out of the grass there next day. My beasts cross there, I wanted no more of them lamed. Someone seeded a dozen yards of the path at its narrowest there. To halt them by the hut, what else?”

“Someone who knew in advance what they were about and the road they’d take, and gave himself plenty of time to lay his trap, and wait in ambush for them to spring it.”

“The king had got wind of the matter somehow,” Ulf opined darkly, “and sent some of his men secretly to get hold of whatever they were carrying. He’s desperate for money—as bad as the other side.”

Nevertheless, thought Cadfael, as he walked back to the hut in the woods, for all that I can see, this was no party sent out by the king, but one man’s enterprise for his own private gain. If he had indeed been the king’s emissary he would have had a company with him. It was not King Stephen’s coffers that were to have profited, if all had gone according to plan.

To sum up, then, it was proven there had indeed been a third here that night. Over and over Torold was cleared of blame. The caltrops were real, a trail of them had been laid to ensure laming one or other of the horses, and so far the stratagem had succeeded, perhaps even better than expected, since it had severed the two companions, leaving the murderer free to deal with one first, and then lie in wait for the other.

Cadfael did not at once go into the hut; the surroundings equally interested him. Somewhere here, well clear of the hut itself, Torold had regarded the pricking of his thumbs, and tethered the horses forward on the road, ready for flight. And somewhere here, too, probably withdrawn deeper into cover, the third man had also had a horse in waiting. It should still be possible to find their traces. It had not rained since that night, nor was it likely that many men had roamed these woods since. All the inhabitants of Shrewsbury were still keeping close under their own roof-trees unless forced to go abroad, and the king’s patrols rode in the open, where they could ride fast.

It took him a little while, but he found both places. The solitary horse had been hobbled and left to graze, and by the signs he had been a fine creature, for the hoof-marks he had left in a patch of softer ground, a hollow of dried mud where water habitually lay after rain, and had left a smooth silt, showed large and well shod. The spot where two had waited together was well to westward of the hut, and in thick cover. A low branch showed the peeled scar where the tether had been pulled clear in haste, and two distinguishable sets of prints could be discerned where the grass thinned to bare ground.

Cadfael went into the hut. He had broad daylight to aid him, and with the door set wide there was ample light even within. The murderer had waited here for his victim, he must have left his traces.

The remains of the winter fodder, mown along the sunlit fringes of the woods, had been left here against the return of autumn, originally in a neat stack against the rear wall, but now a stormy sea of grass was spread and tossed over the entire earthen floor, as though a gale had played havoc within there. The decrepit manger from which Torold had plucked his loose plank was there, drunkenly leaning. The dry grass was well laced with small herbs now rustling and dead but still fragrant, and there was a liberal admixture of hooky, clinging goose-grass in it. That reminded him not only of the shred of stem dragged deep into Nick Faintree’s throat by the ligature that killed him, but also of Torold’s ugly shoulder wound. He needed goose-grass to make a dressing for it, he would look along the fringe of the fields, it must be plentiful here. God’s even-handed justice, that called attention to one friend’s murder with a dry stem of last year’s crop, might well, by the same token, design to soothe and heal the other friend’s injuries by the gift of this year’s.

Meantime, the hut yielded little, except the evident chaos of a hand-to-hand struggle waged within it. But in the rough timbers behind the door there were a few roving threads of deep blue woollen cloth, rather pile than thread. Someone had certainly lain in hiding there, the door drawn close to his body. There was also one clot of dried clover that bore a smaller clot of blood. But Cadfael raked and combed in vain among the rustling fodder in search of the strangler’s weapon. Either the murderer had found it again and taken it away with him, or else it lay deeply entangled in some corner, evading search. Cadfael worked his way backwards on hands and knees from the manger to the doorway, and was about to give up, and prise himself up from his knees, when the hand on which he supported his weight bore down on something hard and sharp, and winced from the contact in surprise. Something was driven half into the earth floor under the thinning layers of hay, like another caltrop planted here for inquisitive monks to encounter to their grief and injury. He sat back on his heels, and carefully brushed aside the rustling grasses, until he could get a hand to the hidden thing and prise it loose. It came away into his hand readily, filling his palm, hard, encrusted and chill. He lifted it to the invading sunlight in the doorway behind him, and it glittered with pinpoints of yellow, a miniature sun.

Brother Cadfael rose from his knees and took it into the full daylight of afternoon to see what he had found. It was a large, rough-cut gem stone, as big as a crab-apple, a deep-yellow topaz still gripped and half-enclosed by an eagle’s talon of silver-gilt. The claw was complete, finely shaped, but broken off at the stem, below the stone it clutched. This was the tip of some excellent setting in silver, perhaps the end of a brooch-pin—no, too large for that. The apex of a dagger-hilt? If so, a noble dagger, no common working knife. Beneath that jagged tip would have been the rounded hand-grip, and on the cross-piece, perhaps, some smaller topaz stones to match this master-stone. Broken off thus, it lay in his hand a sullen, faceted ball of gold.

One man had threshed and clawed here in his death-throes, two others had rolled and flailed in mortal combat; any one of the three, with a thrusting hip and the weight of a convulsed body, could have bored this hilt into the hardpacked earth of the floor, and snapped off the crown-stone thus at its most fragile point, and never realised the loss.

Brother Cadfael put it away carefully in the scrip at his girdle, and went to look for his goose-grass. In the thick herbage at the edge of the trees, where the sun reached in, he found sprawling, angular mats of it, filled his scrip, and set off for home with dozens of the little hooked seeds clinging in his skirts.

Godith slipped away as soon as all the brothers had dispersed to their afternoon work, and made her way by circumspect deviations to the mill at the end of the Gaye. She had taken with her some ripe plums from the orchard, the half of a small loaf of new bread, and a fresh flask of Cadfael’s wine. The patient had rapidly developed a healthy appetite, and it was her pleasure to enjoy his enjoyment of food and drink, as though she had a proprietorial interest in him by reason of having found him in need.

He was sitting on his bed of sacks, fully dressed, his back against the warm timbers of the wall, his long legs stretched out comfortably before him with ankles crossed. The cotte and hose fitted reasonably well, perhaps a little short in the sleeves. He looked surprisingly lively, though still rather greyish in the face, and careful in his movements because of the lingering aches and pains from his wounds. She was not best pleased to see that he had struggled into the cotte, and said so.

“You should keep that shoulder easy, there was no need to force it into a sleeve yet. If you don’t rest it, it won’t heal.”

“I’ve very well,” he said abstractedly. “And I must bear whatever discomfort there may be, if I’m to get on my way soon. It will knit well enough, I dare say.” His mind was not on his own ills, he was frowning thoughtfully over other matters. “Godric, I had no time to question, this morning, but—your Brother Cadfael said Nick’s buried, and in the abbey. Is that truth?” He was not so much doubting their word as marvelling how it had come about. “How did they ever find him?”

“That was Brother Cadfael’s own doing,” said Godith. She sat down beside him and told him. “There was one more than there should have been, and Brother Cadfael would not rest until he had found the one who was different, and since then he has not let anyone else rest. The king knows there was murder done, and has said it should be avenged. If anyone can get justice for your friend, Brother Cadfael is the man.”

“So whoever it was, there in the hut, it seems I did him little harm, only dimmed his wits for a matter of minutes. I was afraid of it. He was fit enough and cunning enough to get rid of his dead man before morning.”

“But not clever enough to deceive Brother Cadfael. Every individual soul must be accounted for. Now at least Nicholas has had all the rites of the church in his own clean name, and has a noble tomb.”

“I’m glad,” said Torold, “to know he was not left there to rot uncoloured, or put into the ground nameless among all the rest, though they were our comrades, too, and not deserving of such a death. If we had stayed, we should have suffered the same fate. If they caught me, I might suffer it yet. And yet King Stephen approves the hunt for the murderer who did his work for him! What a mad world!”

Godith thought so, too; but for all that, there was a difference, a sort of logic in it, that the king should accept the onus of the ninety-four whose deaths he had decreed, but utterly reject the guilt for the ninety-fifth, killed treacherously and without his sanction.

“He despised the manner of the killing, and he resented being made an accomplice in it. And no one is going to capture you,” she said firmly, and hoisted the plums out of the breast of her cotte, and tumbled them between them on the blanket. “Here’s a taste of something sweeter than bread. Try them!”

They sat companionably eating, and slipping the stones through a chink in the floorboards into the river below. “I still have a task laid on me,” said Torold at length, soberly, “and now I’m alone to see it done. And heaven knows, Godric, what I should have done without you and Brother Cadfael, and sad I shall be to set off and leave you behind, with small chance of seeing you again. Never shall I forget what you’ve done for me. But go I must, as soon as I’m fit and can get clear. It will be better for you when I’m gone, you’ll be safer so.”

“Who is safe? Where?” said Godith, biting into another ripe purple plum. “There is no safe place.”

“There are degrees in danger, at any rate. And I have work to do, and I’m fit to get on with it now.”

She turned and gave him a long, roused look. Never until that moment had she looked far enough ahead to confront the idea of his departure. He was something she had only newly discovered, and here he was, unless she was mistaking his meaning, threatening to take himself off, out of her hands and out of her life. Well, she had an ally in Brother Cadfael. With the authority of her master she said sternly:

“If you’re thinking you’re going to set off anywhere until you’re fully healed, then think again, and smartly, too. You’ll stay here until you’re given leave to go, and that won’t be today, or tomorrow, you can make up your mind to that!”

Torold gaped at her in startled and delighted amusement, laid his head back against the rough timber of the wall, and laughed aloud. “You sound like my mother, the time I had a bad fall at the quintain. And dearly I love you, but so I did her, and I still went my own way. I’m fit and strong and able, Godric, and I’m under order that came before your orders. I must go. In my place, you’d have been out of here before now, as fierce as you are.”