It was pleasure to walk along the trodden path that was only a paler line in the turf, following the fast, quiet flood downstream. Cadfael went with his eyes on the half-turgid, half-clear eddies that span and mummured under the lip of green, a strong current here hugging this shore. Across the stream, so silent and so fast, the walls of Shrewsbury loomed, at the crest of a steep green slope of gardens, orchards and vineyard, and further downstream fused into the solid bulk of the king’s castle, guarding the narrow neck of land that broke Shrewsbury’s girdle of water.
On this near shore Cadfael had reached the limit of the abbey orchards, where lush copses began, fringing the abbey’s last wheatfield, and the old, disused mill jutted over the river. He passed, threading the trees and bushes, and went on a short way, to where the level of land dipped to water-level in a little cove, shallowly covered by clear water now, the driving current spinning in and out again just clear of disturbing the gravel bottom. Things tended to come in here and be cast ashore if the Severn was in spate, and enclosing shoulders of woodland screened whatever came.
And something wholly unforeseen had come, and was lying here in uneasy repose, sprawled facedown, head butted into the gravelly calm of the bank. A solid body in good homespun cloth, shortish and sturdy, a round bullish head with floating, grizzled brown hair, thinning at the crown. Splayed arms, languidly moving in the gentle stir of the shallows, clear of the deadly purposeful central flow, fingered and fumbled vaguely at the fine gravel. Squat legs, but drawn out by the hungry current tugging at their toes, stretched towards open water. Cast up dead, all four limbs stirred and strained to prove him living.
Brother Cadfael kilted his habit to the knee, plunged down the gentle slope into the water, took the body by the bunched capuchon swaying at his neck and the leather belt at his waist, and hoisted him gradually clear of the surface, to disturb as little as possible the position in which he had been swept ashore, and whatever traces the river had spared in his clothing, hair and shoes. No haste to feel for any life here, it had been gone for some time. Yet he might have something to tell even in his final silence.
The dead weight sagged from Cadfael’s hands. He drew it, streaming, up the first plane of grass, and there let it sink in the same shape it had had in the river. Who knew where it had entered the water and how?
As for naming him, there was no need to turn up that sodden face to the light of day, not yet. Cadfael recognised the russet broadcloth, the sturdy build, the round, turnip head with its thinning crown and bushy brown hedge of hair all round the shiny island of bone. Only two mornings ago he had passed the time of day with this same silenced tongue, very fluent and roguish then, enjoying its mischief without any great malice.
Baldwin Peche had done with toothsome scandal, and lost his last tussle with the river that had provided him with so many fishing sorties, and hooked him to his death in the end.
Cadfael hoisted him by the middle, marked the derisory flow from his mouth, barely moistening the grass, and let him down carefully in the same form. He was a little puzzled to find so meagre a flow, since even the dead may give back the water they have swallowed, for at least a brief while after their death. This one had left a shallow shape scooped in the gravel of the cove, which was hardly disturbed by currents. His outlines in the grass now duplicated the outline he had abandoned there.
Now how had Baldwin Peche come to be beached here like a landed fish? Drunk and careless along the riverside at night? Spilled out of a boat while fishing? Or fallen foul of a footpad in one of the dark alleys and tipped into the water for the contents of his purse? Such things did occasionally happen even in a well-regulated town on dark enough nights, and there did seem to be a thicker and darker moisture in the grizzled hair behind Peche’s right ear, as though the skin beneath was broken. Scalp wounds tend to bleed copiously, and even after some hours in the water or cast up here traces might linger. He was native-born, he knew the river well enough to respect it, all the more as he acknowledged he was a weak swimmer.
Cadfael threaded the belt of bushes to have a clear view over the Severn, upstream and down, and was rewarded by the sight of a coracle making its way against the current, turning and twisting to make use of every eddy, bobbing and dancing like a shed leaf, but always making progress. There was only one man who could handle the paddle and read the river with such ease and skill, and even at some distance the squat, dark figure was easily recognisable. Madog of the Dead-Boat was as Welsh as Cadfael himself, and the best-known waterman in twenty miles of the Severn’s course, and had got his name as a result of the cargo he most often had to carry, by reason of his knowledge of all the places where missing persons, thought to have been taken by the river whether in flood or by felony, were likely to fetch up. This time he had no mute passenger aboard; his natural quarry was here waiting for him.
Cadfael knew him well and for no ascertainable reason, except the customary association of Madog with drowned men, took for granted that even in this case the connection must hold good. He raised a hail and waved an arm as the coracle drew nearer, picking its feathery way across the mid-stream current where it was diffused and moderate. Madog looked up, knew the man who beckoned him in, and with a sweep of his paddle brought his boat inshore, clear of the deceitfully silent and rapid thrust that sped down-river, leaving this cove so placid and clear. Cadfael waded into the shallows to meet him, laying a hand to the rim of hide as Madog hopped out nimbly to join him, his brown feet bare.
‘I thought I knew that shaven sconce of yours,’ he said heartily, and hoisted his cockle-shell of withies and hide on to his shoulder to heft it ashore. ‘What is it with you? When you call me, I take it there’s a sound reason.’
‘Sound enough,’ said Cadfael. ‘I think I may have found what you were looking for.’ He jerked his head towards the plane of grass above, and led the way up without more words. They stood together over the prone body in thoughtful silence for some moments. Madog had taken note in one glance of the position of the head, and looked back to the gravelled shore under its liquid skin of water. He saw the shadowy shape left in the fine shale, and the mute, contained violence of the current that swept past only a man’s length away from that strange calm.
‘Yes. I see. He went into the water above. Perhaps not far above. There’s a strong tow under that bank, upstream from here a piece, under the castle. Then it could have brought him across and thrown him up here just as he lies. A good, solid weight, head-first into the bank. And left him stranded.’
‘So I thought,’ said Cadfael. ‘You were looking for him?’ People along the waterside who had kin go missing usually sought out Madog before they notified the provost or the sheriff’s sergeant.
‘That journeyman of his sent after me this morning. It seems his master went off yesterday before noon, but nobody wondered, he did the like whenever he chose, they were used to it. But this morning he’d never been back. There’s a boy sleeps in his shop, he was fretting over it, so when Boneth came to work and no locksmith he sent the lad to me. This one here liked his bed, even if he sometimes came to it about dawn. Not the man to go hungry or dry, either, and the ale-house he favoured hadn’t seen him.’