The Heretic's Apprentice (35 page)

Brother Cadfael returned alone to the abbey, and asked immediate audience of Abbot Radulfus.

“Father, something unforeseen sends me back to you in this haste. I would not have troubled you for less, but in the Potter's Field the plough has uncovered something which must be of concern both to this house and to the secular law. I have not yet gone further. I need your sanction to report this also to Hugh Beringar, and if he so permits, to pursue what as yet I have left as we found it. Father, the coulter has brought into daylight rags of cloth and a coil of human hair. A woman's hair, or so it seems to me. It is long and fine, I think it has never been cut. And, Father, it is held fast under the earth.”

“You are telling me,” said Radulfus, after a long and pregnant pause, “that it is still rooted in a human head.” His voice was level and firm. There were few improbable situations he had not encountered in his more than fifty years. If this was the first of its kind, it was by no means the gravest he had ever confronted. The monastic enclave is still contained within and contingent upon a world where all things are possible. “In this unconsecrated place there is some human creature buried. Unlawfully.”

“That is what I fear,” said Cadfael. “But we have not gone on to confirm it, wanting your leave and the sheriffs attendance.”

“Then what have you done? How have you left things there in the field?”

“Brother Richard is keeping watch at the place. The ploughing continues, but with due care, and away from that spot. There seemed no need,” he said reasonably, “to delay it. Nor would we want to call too much attention to what is happening there. The ploughing accounts for our presence, no one need wonder at seeing us busy there. And even if it proves true, this may be old, very old, long before our time.”

“True,” said the abbot, his eyes very shrewd upon Cadfael's face, “though I think you do not believe in any such grace. To the best that I know from record and charter, there never at any time was church or churchyard near that place. I pray God there may be no more such discoveries to be made, one is more than enough. Well, you have my authority, do what needs to be done.”

*

What needed to be done, Cadfael did. The first priority was to alert Hugh, and ensure that the secular authority should be witness to whatever followed. Hugh knew his friend well enough to cast no doubts, ask no questions, and waste no time in demur, but at once had horses saddled up, taking one sergeant of the garrison with him to ride messenger should he be needed, and set off with Cadfael for the ford of Severn and the Potter's Field.

The plough team was still at work, lower down the slope, when they rode along the headland to the spot where Brother Richard waited by the bank of broom bushes. The long, attenuated, sinuous S-shapes of the furrows shone richly dark against the thick, matted pallor of the meadow. Only this corner under the headland had been left virgin, the plough drawn well aside after the first ominous turn. The scar the coulter had left ended abruptly, the long, dark filaments drawn along the groove. Hugh stooped to look, and to touch. The threads of cloth disintegrated under his fingers, the long strands of hair curled and clung. When he lifted them tentatively they slid through his hold, still rooted in earth. He stood back, and stared down sombrely into the deep scar.

“Whatever you've found here, we'd best have it out. Your ploughman was a little too greedy for land, it seems. He could have spared us trouble if he'd turned his team a few yards short of the rise.”

But it was already too late, the thing was done and could not be covered again and forgotten. They had brought spades with them, a mattock to peel off, with care, the matted root-felt of long undisturbed growth, and a sickle to cut back the overhanging broom that hampered their movements and had partially hidden this secret burial place. Within a quarter of an hour it became plain that the shape beneath had indeed the length of a grave, for the rotted shreds of cloth appeared here and there in alignment with the foot of the bank, and Cadfael abandoned the spade to kneel and scoop away earth with his hands. It was not even a deep grave, rather this swathed bundle had been laid in concealment under the slope, and the thick sod restored over it, and the bushes left to veil the place. Deep enough to rest undisturbed, in such a spot; a less efficient plough would not have turned so tightly as to reach it, nor the coulter have driven deep enough to penetrate it.

Cadfael felt along the exposed swathes of black cloth, and knew the bones within. The long tear the coulter had made slit the side distant from the bank from middle to head, where it had dragged out with the threads the tress of hair. He brushed away soil from where the face should be. Head to foot, the body was swathed in rotting woollen cloth, cloak or brychan, but there was no longer any doubt that it was a human creature, here laid underground in secret. Unlawfully, Radulfus had said. Buried unlawfully, dead unlawfully.

With their hands they scooped away patiently the soil that shrouded the unmistakable outline of humanity, worked their way cautiously beneath it from either side, to ease it out of its bed, and hoisted it from the grave to lay it upon the grass. Light, slender and fragile it rose into light, to be handled with held breath and careful touch, for at every friction the woollen threads crumbled and disintegrated. Cadfael eased the folds apart, and turned back the cloth to lay bare the withered remains.

Certainly a woman, for she wore a long, dark gown, ungirdled, unornamented, and strangely it seemed that the fullness of the skirt had been drawn out carefully into orderly folds, still preserved by the brychan in which she had been swathed for burial. The face was skeletal, the hands that emerged from the long sleeves were mere bone, but held in shape by her wrappings. Traces of dried and shrunken flesh showed at the wrists and at her bared ankles. The one last recollection of abundant life left to her was the great crown of black, braided hair, from which the one disordered coil had been drawn out by the coulter from beside her right temple. Strangely, she had clearly been stretched out decently for burial, her hands drawn up and crossed on her breast. More strangely still they were clasped upon a crude cross, made from two trimmed sticks bound together with a strip of linen cloth.

Cadfael drew the edges of the rotting cloth carefully back over the skull, from which the dark hair burgeoned in such strange profusion. With the death's-head face covered she became even more awe-inspiring, and they drew a little back from her, all four, staring down in detached wonder, for in the face of such composed and austere death, pity and horror seemed equally irrelevant. They did not even feel any will to question, or admit to notice, what was strange about her burial, not yet; the time for that would come, but not now, not here. First, without comment or wonder, what was needful must be completed.

“Well,” said Hugh drily, “what now? Does this fall within my writ, Brothers, or yours?”

Brother Richard, somewhat greyer in the face than normally, said doubtfully: “We are on abbey land. But this is hardly in accordance with law, and law is your province. I don't know what the lord abbot will wish, in so strange a case.”

“He will want her brought back to the abbey,” said Cadfael with certainty. “Whoever she may be, however long buried unblessed, it's a soul to be salved, and Christian burial is her due. We shall be bringing her from abbey land, and to abbey land he'll want her returned. When,” said Cadfael with deliberation, “she has received what else is her due, if that can ever be determined.”

“It can at least be attempted,” said Hugh, and cast a considering glance along the bank of broom bushes and round the gaping pit they had cut through the turf. “I wonder is there anything more to be found here, put in the ground with her. Let's at least clear a little further and deeper, and see.” He stooped to draw the disintegrating brychan again round the body, and his very touch parted threads and sent motes of dust floating into the air. “We shall need a better shroud if we're to carry her back with us, and a litter if she's to be carried whole and at rest, as we see her. Richard, take my horse and ride back to the lord abbot, tell him simply that we have indeed found a body buried here, and send us litter and decent covering to get her home. No need for more, not yet. What more do we know? Leave any further report until we come.”

“I will so!” agreed Brother Richard, so warmly that his relief was plain. His easy-going nature was not made for such discoveries, his preference was for an orderly life in which all things behaved as they should, and spared him too much exertion of body or mind. He made off with alacrity to where Hugh's raw-boned grey stood peacefully cropping the greener turf under the headland, heaved a sturdy foot into the stirrup, and mounted. There was nothing the matter with his horsemanship but recent lack of practice. He was a younger son from a knightly family, and had made the choice between service in arms and service in the cloister at only sixteen. Hugh's horse, intolerant of most riders except his master, condescended to carry this one along the headland and down into the water-meadow without resentment.

“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 yet—Cadfael 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 bed—even in her sleep. But no one would then have buried her by stealth and hidden everything that marked her out from all other women.”