‘Try if you can do better,’ said Hugh softly to Cadfael, some time well past midnight. ‘They cannot know you’re here, not yet, you may find a chink in their mail that’s proof against me.’
In those small hours when the heart is low, the least surprise may prick home as it could not do by day, in the noon of the body’s vigour. Cadfael’s very voice, deeper and rougher than Hugh’s, startled Iestyn into leaning out from his watch-tower for one incautious stare at this new visitant.
‘Who’s that? What trick are you playing now?’
‘No trick, Iestyn. I am Brother Cadfael of the abbey, who came sometimes to the house with medicines. You know me, I dare not say well enough to trust me. Let me speak with Susanna, who knows me better.’
He had thought that she might refuse either to speak or to hear him. When she had set her mind upon one course, she might well be stone to any who sought to divert her or stand in her way. But she did come to the hatch, and she did listen. At least that was a further respite. Those two lovers changed places in the loft. Cadfael felt them pass, and now they passed without touching or caressing, for there was no need. They were two halves of one whole, living or dead. One of them, it was clear from the earlier outcry, must keep an eye on their prisoner. They could not bind her, then, or else they had not thought it needful. Perhaps they had not the means. They were trapped in the instant of flight. Was it unpardonable to wish they had ridden away half an hour earlier?
‘Susanna, it is not too late to make restitution. I know your wrongs, my voice shall speak for you. But murder is murder. Never think there is any escape. Though you elude the judgement here, there is another you cannot avoid. Better far to make what amends can be made and be at peace.’
‘What peace?’ she said, bitter and chill. ‘There is none for me. I am a stunted tree, denied the ground to grow, and now, when I am in fruit, in despite of this world, do you think I will abate one particle of my hate or love? Leave me be, Brother Cadfael,’ she said more gently. ‘Your concern is with my soul, mine is all with my body, the only heaven I’ve ever known or ever hope to know.’
‘Come down and bring Iestyn with you,’ said Cadfael simply, ‘and I take it upon myself to promise you, as I must answer to God, that your child and his shall be born and cared for as befits every human soul brought innocent into the world. I will invoke the lord abbot to ensure it.’
She laughed. It was a fresh, wild and yet desolate sound. ‘This is not Holy Church’s child, Brother Cadfael. It belongs to me, and to Iestyn my man, and there is none other shall ever cradle or care for it. Yet I do thank you for your goodwill to my son. And after all,’ she said, with bitter derision in her voice, ‘how do we know the creature would ever be brought forth living and whole? I am old, Brother Cadfael, old for childbirth. The thing may be dead before me.’
‘Make the assay,’ said Cadfael stoutly. ‘He is not wholly yours, he is his own, your maybe child. Do him justice! Why should he pay for your sins? It was not he trampled Baldwin Peche into the gravel of Severn.’
She made a dreadful, muted sound, as if she had choked upon her own rage and grief, and then she was calm and resolved again, and immovable. ‘Three are here together and made one,’ she said, ‘the only trinity I acknowledge now. No fourth has any part in us. What do we owe to any man living?’
‘You forget there is a fourth,’ said Cadfael strongly, ‘and you are making shameful use of her. One who is none of yours and has never done you wrong. She also loves - I think you know it. Why destroy another pair as little blessed as you?’
‘Why not?’ said Susanna. ‘I am all destruction. What else is left to me now?’
Cadfael persisted, but after a while, talking away doggedly there past the mid of the night, he knew that she had risen and left him, unconvinced, unreconciled, and that it was Iestyn who now leaned in the hatch. He waited a considering while, and then took up his pleading for this perhaps more vulnerable ear. A Welshman, less aggrieved than the woman, for all his hardships; and all Welsh are kin, even if they slit one another’s throats now and then, and manure their sparse and stony fields with fratricidal dead in tribal wars. But he knew he had little hope. He had already spoken with the domina of that pair. There was no appeal to this one now that she could not wipe out with a gesture of her hand.
He was eased, if not verily glad, when Hugh came back to relieve him of his watch.
He sat slack and discouraged in the spring grass under the hedge of bushes, and Liliwin came plucking softly but urgently at his sleeve. ‘Brother Cadfael, come with me!’
Come!’ The whisper was excited and hopeful, where hope was in no very lavish supply.
‘What is it? Come with you where?’
‘He said there’s no other way out,’ whispered Liliwin, tugging at the sleeve he held, ‘and by that token none in, but there is... there could be. Come and see!’
Cadfael went where he was led, up through the bushes on the headland, and along the slope in cover, just below the level of the stable roof and at no great distance from it, to the western end of the building. The timbers of the roof projected above the low gable, the fellow to the eastern one in which Iestyn crouched on watch. ‘See there - the starlight shows dappling. They let in a lattice there for air.’
Peering narrowly, Cadfael could just discern a square shape that might well be what Liliwin described, but measured barely the span of hand and forearm either way, as close as he could estimate. The interstices between the slats, which the straining eye could either discern or imagine for a moment, only to lose them again, were surely too small even to admit a fist. Nor was there any way of reaching them, short of a ladder or the light weight and claws of a cat, even though the timbers of the wall below were rough and uneven.
‘That?’ breathed Cadfael, aghast. ‘Child, a spider might get up there and get in, but scarcely a man.’
‘Ah, but I’ve been down there, I know. There are toe-holds enough. And I think one of the slats is hanging loose already, and there’ll be others ready to give way. If a man could get in there, while you hold them busy at the other end... She is up there, I know it! You heard, when they ran to hold her, how far it was to run.’
It was true. Moreover, if she had any choice she would be huddled as far away from her captors as she could get.
‘But, boy, even if you stripped away two or three of the boards - could you do more, unheard? I doubt it! There’s not a man among us could get through that keyhole to her. No, not if you had time to strip the whole square.’
‘Yes, I can! You forget,’ whispered Liliwin eagerly, I’m small and light and I’m an acrobat, bred to it from three or four years old. It’s my craft. I can reach her. Where a cat can go I can go. And she’s even smaller than I, though she may not be trained as a tumbler. If I had a rope, I could make it fast there, and take my time opening up the way for her. Oh, surely, surely it’s worth the attempt! We’ve no other way. And I can do it, and I will!’
‘Wait!’ said Cadfael. ‘Sit you here in cover, and I’ll go broach it to Hugh Beringar and get you your rope, and make ready to hold them fast in talk, as far as may be away from you. Not a word, not a movement until I come back.’