‘So I thought, when I hefted him to empty out the water from him and got only a miserable drop or two. The drainings of mud and weed, not of a drowned man.’ He inserted his fingers between the parted lips, and showed the teeth also parted, as if in a grimace of pain or a cry. Carefully he drew them wider. Tendrils of crowfoot clung in the large, crooked teeth. Those peering close could see that the mouth within was clogged completely with the debris of the river.
‘Give me a small bowl,’ said Cadfael, intent, and Hugh was before Madog in obeying. There was a silver saucer under the unlighted lamp on the altar, the nearest receptacle, and Abbot Radulfus made no move to demur. Cadfael eased the stiffening jaw wider, and with a probing finger drew out into the bowl a thick wad of mud and gravel, tinted with minute fragments of vegetation. ‘Having drawn in this, he could not draw in water. No wonder I got none out of him.’ He felt gently about the dead mouth, probing out the last threads of crowfoot, fine as hairs, and set the bowl aside.
‘What you are saying,’ said Hugh, closely following, ‘is that he did not drown.’
‘No, he did not drown.’
‘But he did die in the river. Why else these river weeds deep in his throat?’
‘True. So he died. Bear with me, I am treading as blindly as you. I need to know, like you, and like you, I must examine what we have.’ Cadfael looked up at Madog, who surely knew all these signs at least as well as any other man living. ‘Are you with me so far?’
‘I am before you,’ said Madog simply. ‘But tread on. For a blind man you have not gone far astray.’
‘Then, Father, may we now turn him again on his face, as I found him?’
Radulfus himself set his two long, muscular hands either side of the head, to steady the dead man over, and settled him gently on one cheekbone.
For all his self-indulgent habits of life, Baldwin Peche showed a strong, hale body, broad-shouldered, with thick, muscular thighs and arms. The discolorations of death were beginning to appear on him now, and they were curious enough. The broken graze behind his right ear, that was plain and eloquent, but the rest were matter for speculation.
‘That was never got from any floating branch,’ said Madog with certainty, ‘nor from being swept against a stone, either, not in that stretch of water. Up here among the islands I wouldn’t say but it might be possible, though not likely. No, that was a blow from behind, before he went into the water.’
‘You are saying,’ said Radulfus gravely, ‘that the charge of murder is justified.’
‘Against someone,’ said Cadfael, ‘yes.’
‘And this man was indeed next-door neighbour to the household that was robbed, and may truly have found out something, whether he understood its meaning or not, that could shed light on that robbery?’
‘It is possible. He took an interest in other men’s business,’ agreed Cadfael cautiously.
‘And that would certainly be a strong motive for his removal, if the guilty man got to know of it,’ said the abbot, reflecting. ‘Then since this cannot be the work of one who was here within our walls throughout, it is strong argument in favour of the minstrel’s innocence of the first offence. And somewhere at large is the true culprit.’
If Hugh had already perceived and accepted the same logical consequence, he made no comment on it. He stood looking down at the prone body in frowning concentration. ‘So it would seem he was hit on the head and tossed into the river. And yet he did not drown. What he drew in, in his fight for breath - in his senses or out - was mud, gravel, weed.’
‘You have seen,’ said Cadfael. ‘He was smothered. Held down somewhere in the shallows, with his face pressed into the mud. And set afloat in the river afterwards, with the intent he should be reckoned as one more among the many drowned in Severn. A mistake! The current cast him up before the river had time to wash away all these evidences of another manner of death.’
He doubted, in fact, if they would ever have been completely washed away, however long the body had been adrift. The stems of crowfoot were very tenacious. The fine silt clung tightly where it had been inhaled in the struggle for breath. But what was more mysterious was the diffused area of bruising that spread over Peche’s back at the shoulder-blades, and the two or three deep indentations in the swollen flesh there. In the deepest the skin was broken, only a tiny lesion, as though something sharp and jagged had pierced him. Cadfael could make nothing of these marks. He memorised them and wondered.
There remained the contents of the silver bowl. Cadfael took it out to the stone basin in the middle of the garth and carefully sluiced away the fine silt, drawing aside and retaining the fragments of weed. Fine threads of crowfoot, a tiny, draggled flower, a morsel of an alder leaf. And something else, a sudden speck of colour. He picked it out and dipped it into the water to wash away the dirt that clouded it, and there it lay glistening in the palm of his hand, a mere scrap, two tiny florets, the tip of a head of flowers of a reddish purple colour, speckled at the lip with a darker purple and a torn remnant of one narrow leaf, just large enough to show a blackish spot on its green.
They had followed him out and gathered curiously to gaze. ‘Fox-stones, we call this,’ said Cadfael, ‘for the two swellings at its root like pebbles. The commonest of its kind, and the earliest, but I don’t recall seeing it much here. This, like the broken twig of alder, he took down with him when he was pushed into the water. It might be possible to find that place somewhere on the town bank - where crowfoot and alder and fox-stones all grow together.’
The place where Baldwin Peche had been cast ashore had little to tell beyond what it had already told. The spot where Madog had turned down the dead man’s coracle on the meadow grass was well down-river, and so feather-light a boat, loose without a man’s weight aboard, might well have gone on bobbing gaily downstream a mile or more beyond, before the first strong curve and encroaching sandbank would inevitably have arrested it. They would have to comb the town bank, Madog reckoned, from below the Watergate, to establish where he had been assaulted and killed. A place where crowfoot grew inshore under alders, and fox-stones were in flower close to the very edge of the water.
The first two could be found together all along the reach. The third might occur in only one place.
Madog would search the riverside, Hugh would question the Aurifaber household and the immediate neighbours, as well as the tavern-keepers of the town, for everything they knew about the recent movements of Baldwin Peche: where he had last been seen, who had spoken with him, what he had had to say. For someone, surely, must have seen him after he left his shop about mid-morning of the previous day, which was the last John Boneth knew of him.
Meantime, Cadfael had business of his own, and much to think about. He came back from the riverside too late for Vespers, but in time to visit his workshop and make sure all was in order there before supper. Brother Oswin, left in charge alone, was developing a deft touch and a proprietorial pride. He had not broken or burned anything for several weeks.
After supper Cadfael went in search of Liliwin, and found him sitting in deep shadow in the darkest corner of the porch, drawn up defensively against the stone with his arms locked about his knees. At this hour the light was too far gone for work to proceed on the mending of his rebec, or his new studies under Brother Anselm, and it seemed that the day’s alarms had driven him back into distrust and despair, so that he hunched himself as small as possible into his corner and kept a wary face against the world. Certainly he gave Cadfael a bright, nervous, sidelong flash of his eyes as the monk hitched his habit comfortably and sat down beside him.