The Heretic's Apprentice (15 page)

He had filled his scrip and was on the point of turning back, in no hurry since he had plenty of time before Prime, when his eye caught the pallor of some strange water-flower that floated out on the idle current from under the overhanging bushes, and again drifted back, trailing soiled white petals. The tremor of the water overlaid them with shifting points of light as the early sun came through the veil. In a moment they floated out again into full view, and this time they were seen to be joined to a thick pale stem that ended abruptly in something dark.

There were places along this stretch of the river where the Severn sometimes brought in and discarded whatever it had captured higher upstream. In low water, as now, things cast adrift above the bridge were usually picked up at that point. Once past the bridge, they might well drift in anywhere along this stretch. Only in the swollen and turgid floods of winter storms or February thaws did the Severn hurl them on beyond, to fetch up, perhaps, as far downstream as Attingham, or to be trapped deep down in the debris of storms, and never recovered at all. Cadfael knew most of the currents, and knew now from what manner of root this pallid, languid flower grew. The brightness of the morning, opening like a rose as the gossamer cloud parted, seemed instead to darken the promising day.

He put down his scrip in the grass, kilted his habit, and clambered down through the bushes to the shallow water. The river had brought in its drowned man with just enough impetus and at the right angle to lodge him securely under the bank. He lay sprawled on his face, only the left arm in deep enough water to be moved and cradled by the stream, a lean, stoop-shouldered man in dun-coloured coat and hose, indeed with something dun-coloured about him altogether, as though he had begun life in brighter colours and been faded by the discouragement of time. Grizzled, straggling hair, more grey than brown, draped a balding skull. But the river had not taken him, he had been committed to it with intent. In the back of his coat, just where its ample folds broke the surface of the water, there was a long slit, from the upper end of which a meagre ooze of blood had darkened and corroded the coarse homespun. Where his bowed back rose just clear of the surface, the stain was even drying into a crust along the folds of cloth.

Cadfael stood calf-deep between the body and the river, in case the dead man should be drawn back into the current when disturbed, and turned the corpse face upward, exposing to view the long, despondent, grudging countenance of Girard of Lythwood's clerk, Aldwin.

There was nothing to be done for him. He was sodden and bleached with water, surely dead for many hours. Nor could he be left lying here while help was sought to move him, or the river might snatch him back again. Cadfael took him under the arms and drew him along through the shallows to a spot where the bank sloped gently down, and there pulled him up into the grassy shelf above. Then he set off at speed, back along the riverside path to the bridge. There he hesitated for a moment which way to take, up into the town to carry the news to Hugh Beringar, or back to the abbey to inform abbot and prior, but it was towards the town he turned. Canon Gerbert could wait for the news that the accuser would never again testify against Elave, in the matter of heresy or any other offence. Not that his death would end the case! On the contrary, it was at the back of Cadfael's mind that an even more sinister shadow was closing over that troublesome young man in a penitent's cell at the abbey. He had no time to contemplate the implications then, but they were there in his consciousness as he hurried across the bridge and in at the town gate, and he liked them not at all. Better, far better, to go first to Hugh, and let him consider the meaning of this death, before other and less reasonable beings got their teeth into it.

*

‘How long,' asked Hugh, looking down at the dead man with bleak attention, ‘do you suppose he's been in the water?'

He was asking, not Cadfael, but Madog of the Dead-Boat, summoned hastily from his hut and his coracles by the western bridge. There was very little about the ways of the Severn that Madog did not know, it was his life, as it had been the death of many of his generation in its treacherous flood-times. Given a hint as to where an unfortunate had gone into the stream, Madog would know where to expect the river to give him back, and it was to him everyone turned to find what was lost. He scratched thoughtfully at his bushy beard, and viewed the corpse without haste from head to foot. Already a little bloated, grey of flesh and oozing water and weed into the grass, Aldwin peered back into the bright sky from imperfectly closed eyes.

‘All last night, certainly. Ten hours it might be, but more likely less, it would still have been daylight then. Somewhere, I fancy,' said Madog, ‘he was laid up dead until dark, and then cast into the river. And not far from here. Most of the night he's lain here where Cadfael found him. How else would there still be blood to be seen on him? If he had not washed up within a short distance, face down as you say he was, the river would have bleached him clean.'

‘Between here and the bridge?' Hugh suggested, eyeing the little dark, hairy Welshman with respectful attention. Sheriff and waterman, they had worked together before this, and knew each other well.

‘With the level as it is, if he'd gone in above the bridge I doubt if he'd ever have passed it.'

Hugh looked back along the open green plain of the Gaye, lush and sunny, through the fringe of bushes and trees. ‘Between here and the bridge nothing could happen in open day. This is the first cover to be found beside the water. And though this fellow may be a lightweight, no one would want to carry or drag him very far to reach the river. And if he'd been cast in here, whoever wanted to be quit of him would have made sure he went far enough out for the current to take him down the next reach and beyond. What do you say, Madog?'

Madog confirmed it with a jerk of his shaggy head.

‘There's been no rain and no dew,' said Cadfael thoughtfully. ‘Grass and ground are dry. If he was hidden until nightfall, it would be close where he was killed. A man needs privacy and cover both to kill and to hide his dead. Somewhere there may be traces of blood in the grass, or wherever the murderer bestowed him.'

‘We can but look,' agreed Hugh, with no great expectation of finding anything. ‘There's the old mill offers one place where murder could be done without a witness. I'll have them search there. We'll comb this belt of trees, too, though I doubt there'll be anything here to find. And what should this fellow be doing at the mill, or here, for that matter? You've told me how he spent the morning. What he did afterwards we may find out from the household up there in the town. They know nothing of this yet. They may well be wondering and enquiring about him by this time, if it's dawned on them yet that he's been out all night. Or perhaps he often was, and no one wondered. I know little enough about him, but I know he lived there with his master's family. But beyond the mill, upstream – no, the whole stretch of the Gaye lies open. There's nothing from here on could give shelter to a killing. Nothing until the bridge. But surely, if the man was killed by daylight, and left in the bushes there even a couple of hours until dark, he might be found before he could be put into the river.'

‘Would that matter?' wondered Cadfael. ‘A little more risky, perhaps, but still there'd be nothing to show who slipped the dagger into his back. Sending him downriver does but confuse place and time. And perhaps that was important to whoever did it.'

‘Well, I'll take the news up to the wool-merchants myself, and see what they can tell me.' Hugh looked round to where his sergeant and four men of the castle garrison stood a little apart, waiting for his orders in attentive silence. ‘Will can see the body brought up after us. The fellow has no other home, to my knowledge, they'll need to take care of his burying. Come back with me, Cadfael, we'll at least take a look among the trees by the bridge, and under the arch.'

They set off side by side, out of the fringe of trees into the abbey wheatfields and past the abandoned mill. They had reached the waterside path that hemmed the kitchen gardens when Hugh asked, slanting a brief, oblique and burdened smile along his shoulder: ‘How long did you say that heretical pilgrim of yours was out at liberty yesterday? While Canon Gerbert's grooms went puffing busily up and down looking for him to no purpose?'

It was asked quite lightly and currently, but Cadfael understood its significance, and knew that Hugh had already grasped it equally well. ‘From about an hour before Nones until Vespers,' he said, and clearly heard the unacknowledged but unmistakeable reserve and concern in his own voice.

‘And then he walked into the enclave in all conscious innocence. And has not accounted for where he spent those hours?'

‘No one has yet asked him,' said Cadfael simply.

‘Good! Then do my work for me there, will you? Tell no one in the abbey yet about this death, and let no one question Elave until I do it myself. I'll be with you before the morning's out, and we'll talk privately with the abbot before anyone else shall know what's happened. I want to see this lad for myself, and hear what he has to say for himself before any other gets at him. For you know, don't you,' said Hugh with detached sympathy, ‘what his inquisitors are going to say?'

*

Cadfael left them to their search of the grove of trees and the bushes that cloaked the path down to the riverside, and made his way back to the abbey, though with some reluctance at abandoning the hunt even for a few hours. He was well aware of the immediate implications of Aldwin's death, and uneasily conscious that he did not know Elave well enough to discount them out of hand. Instinctive liking is not enough to guarantee any man's integrity, let alone his innocence of murder, where he had been basely wronged, and was by chance presented with the opportunity to avenge his injury. A high and hasty temper, which undoubtedly he had, might do the rest almost before he could think at all, let alone think better of it.

But
in the back
?

No, that Cadfael could not imagine. Had there been such an encounter it would have been face to face. And what of the dagger? Did Elave even possess such a weapon? A knife for all general purposes he must possess, no sensible traveller would go far without one. But he would not be carrying it on him in the abbey, and he certainly had not taken the time to go and collect it from his belongings in the guest-hall, before hurrying out at the gate after Fortunata. The porter could testify to that. He had come rushing straight up from the chapterhouse without so much as a glance aside. And if by unlikely chance he had had it on him at that hearing, then it must be with him now in his locked cell. Or if he had discarded it, Hugh's sergeants would do their best to find it. Of one thing Cadfael was certain, he did not want Elave to be a murderer.

Just as Cadfael was approaching the gatehouse, someone emerged from it and turned towards the town. A tall, lean, dark man, frowning down abstractedly at the dust of the Foregate as he strode, and shaking his head at some puzzling frustration of his own, probably of no great moment but still puzzling. He jerked momentarily out of his preoccupation when Cadfael gave him good-day, and returned the greeting with a vague glance and an absent smile before withdrawing again into whatever matter was chafing at his peace of mind.

It was altogether too apt a reminder, that Jevan of Lythwood should be calling in at the abbey gatehouse at this hour of the morning, after his brother's clerk had failed to come home the previous night. Cadfael turned to look after him. A tall man with a long, ardent stride, making for home with his hands clasped behind his back, and his brows knotted in so far unenlightened conjecture. Cadfael hoped he would cross the bridge without pausing to look down over the parapet towards the level, sunlit length of the Gaye, where at this moment Will Warden's men might be carrying the litter with Aldwin's body. Better that Hugh should reach the house first, both to warn the household, and to harvest whatever he could from their bearing and their answers, before the inevitable burden arrived to set the busy and demanding rites of death in motion.

‘What was Jevan of Lythwood wanting here?' Cadfael asked of the porter, who was making himself useful holding a very handsome and lively young mare while her master buckled on his saddle-roll behind. A good number of the guests would be moving on today, having paid their annual tribute to Saint Winifred.

‘He wanted to know if his clerk had been here,' said the porter.

‘Why did he suppose his clerk should have been here?'

‘He says he changed his mind, yesterday, about laying charges against that lad we've got under lock and key, as soon as he found out the young fellow had no intention of elbowing him out of his employment. Said he was all for rushing off down here on the spot to take back what he'd laid against him. Much good that would do! Small use running after the arrow once it's loosed. But that's what he wanted to do, so his master says.'

‘What did you tell him?' asked Cadfael.

‘What should I tell him? I told him we've seen nor hide nor hair of his clerk since he went out of the gate here early yesterday afternoon. It seems he's been missing overnight. But wherever he's been, he hasn't been here.'

Cadfael pondered this new turn of events with misgiving. ‘When was it he took this change of heart, and started back here? What time of the day?'

‘Very near as soon as he got home, so Jevan says. No more than an hour after he'd left here. But he never came,' said the porter placidly. ‘Changed his mind again, I daresay, when he got near, and began to reason how it might fall back on him, without delivering the other fellow.'

Cadfael went on down the court very thoughtfully. He had already missed Prime, but there was ample time before the Mass; he might as well take himself off to his workshop and unload his scrip, and try to get all these confused and confusing events clear in his mind. If Aldwin had come running back with the idea of undoing what he had done, then even if he had encountered an angry and resentful Elave, it would have needed only the first hasty words of penitence and restitution to disarm the avenger. Why kill a man who is willing at least to try to make amends? Still, some might argue, an angry man might not wait for any words, but strike on sight.
In the back
? No, it would not do. That Elave had killed his accuser might be the first thought to spring into other minds, but it could find no lodging in Cadfael's. And not for mere obstinate liking, either, but because it made no sense.