Where love is, Cadfael thought, listening to the controlled voice so abruptly vibrant and fierce, and watching the pale, tired face blaze like a lighted lantern. And it was Niall who was by her when it came to life or death!
The flame burned down a little and steadied, but was not quenched. “Now I have told you,” she said. “What will you do? I promised that I would not urge any charge against - him, the man who snatched me away. I bear him no malice. If you take him and charge him, I will not bear witness against him.”
“Shall I tell you,” asked Hugh gently, “where he is now? He is in a cell in the castle. He rode in at the eastern gate not half an hour before Cadfael came for me, and we whisked him into the wards before he knew what we were about. He has not yet been questioned or charged with anything, and no one in the town knows that we have him. I can let him go, or let him rot there until the assize. Your wish to bury the affair I can understand, your intent to keep your word I respect. But there is still the matter of Bertred. Bertred was abroad that night when you made your plans... “
“Cadfael has told me,” she said, erect and watchful again.
“The night of his death, which may or may not be mere accident. He was prowling with intent to break in and - steal, shall we say? And it is possible that he was helped to his death in the river.”
Judith shook her head decidedly. “Not by the man you say you are holding. I know, for I was with him.” She bit her lips, and considered a moment. There was hardly anything left unsaid but the name she would not name. “We both were within there, we heard his fall, though we did not know then what was happening. We had heard small sounds outside, or thought we had. So we did again, or so he did, afterwards. But by then he was so fraught, every whisper jarred him from head to heel. But he did not leave me. Whatever happened to Bertred, he had no hand in it.”
“That’s proof enough,” agreed Hugh, satisfied. “Very well, you shall have your way. No one need know more than you care to tell. But, by God, he shall know what manner of worm he is, before I kick him out of the wards and send him home with a flea in his ear. That much you won’t grudge me, he may still count himself lucky to get off so lightly.”
“He is of no great weight,” she said indifferently, “for good or ill. Only a foolish boy. But he is no great villain, and young enough to mend. But there is still Bertred. Brother Cadfael tells me it was he who killed the young monk. I understand nothing, neither that nor why Bertred himself should die. Niall told me, last night, how things had been here in the town after I vanished. But he did not tell me about Bertred.”
“I doubt if he knew,” said Cadfael. “It was only in the afternoon we had found him, and though the word was going round in the town, naturally, after he was brought back here, I doubt if it had reached Niall’s end of the Foregate, and certainly I did not mention it to him. How did he come to be there at hand, close by Godric’s Ford, when you needed him?”
“He saw us pass,” said Judith, “before we were into the forest. He was on his way home then, but he knew me, and he followed. Well for me! But Niall Bronzesmith has always been well for me, the few times ever we’ve met or touched.”
Hugh rose to depart. “Well, I’ll have Alan take a patrol down into the forest, and make a thorough drive there. If we have a nest of wild men in those parts, we’ll smoke them out. Madam, there shall be nothing made public of what has been said here. That matter is finished as you would have it. And thank God it ended no worse. Now I trust you may be left in peace.”
“Only I am not easy about Bertred,” Judith said abruptly. “Neither about his guilt nor his death. So strong a swimmer, born and raised by the river. Why should his skill fail him that night, of all nights?”
Hugh was gone, back to the castle to call off his hunters as fast as they came in to report, and either to deal faithfully with the wretched Vivian Hynde, or, more probably, leave him sweating and worrying overnight or longer in a chilly cell. Cadfael took the carefully rolled altar frontal Sister Magdalen had extracted from her saddle-roll, and set off back to the abbey. But first he looked in at the small bare room where Bertred’s coffined body lay on trestles, and the master-carpenter and his son were just fitting the lid, and said a prayer for a young man lost. Sister Magdalen came out with him as far as the street, and there halted, still silent and frowning in intense thought.
“Well?” said Cadfael, finding her so taciturn.
“No, not well. Very ill!” She shook her head dubiously. “I can make nothing of this pattern. Plain enough what happened to Judith, but the rest I cannot fathom. You heard what she said of Bertred’s death? The same doubts I feel about what so nearly might have been her own, but for the smith. Is there anything in all this coil that has happened by pure chance? I doubt it!”
He was still pondering that as he started uphill towards the High Street, and as he neared the corner, for some reason he slowed and turned to look back, and she was still standing in the mouth of the passage, gazing after him, her strong hands folded at her girdle. Nothing by pure chance, no, surely not, even those happenings that seemed wanton carried a false echo. Rather a sequence of events had set off each the following one, and called in motives and interests until then untouched, so that the affair had come about in a circle, and brought up the hapless souls involved in it facing where they had never intended to go. A deal more rapidly and purposefully than he had left her, Cadfael started back towards Sister Magdalen.
“I did wonder,” she said without apparent surprise, “what was going on in your mind. I’ve seldom known you sit through such a conference saying so little and scowling so much. What have you thought of now?”
“There’s something I should like you to do for me, since you’ll be staying in this house,” said Cadfael. “What with the youngster’s burial and Judith’s return, it shouldn’t be too difficult to filch a couple of things for me, and send them down to me at the abbey. By Martin’s boy Edwy, if they’re still here, but not a word to anyone else. Borrowing, not stealing. God knows I shan’t need them for long, one way or the other.”
“You interest me,” said Magdalen. “What are these two things?”
“Two left shoes,” said Cadfael.
Chapter Thirteen
Now that his mind was stringing together a thread of abhorrent sense out of details which hitherto had seemed to make none, he could not turn his thoughts to anything else. Throughout Vespers he struggled to concentrate on the office, but the lamentable sequence of disasters connected with the rose rent marched inexorably through his mind, gradually assembling into a logical order. First there was Judith, still deprived and unhappy after three lonely years, thinking and sometimes speaking of retreating into a nunnery, and vexed by a number of suitors both old and young, who had had an eye on her person and her wealth all this time, and wooed and pleaded without reward, and were now beginning to get desperate in case she carried out her design to become a religious. Then the attempt on the rose-bush, to retrieve at least the possibility of regaining the gift-house, and the resultant death of Brother Eluric, probably, indeed almost certainly, unplanned and committed in panic. After that, however bitterly regretted, one man at least had murder already against him, and would be far more likely afterwards to stick at nothing. But then, to confound and complicate, came the abduction of Judith, another panic measure to prevent her from making her gift unconditional, and try to persuade or threaten her into marriage. Even if he had not been named, the perpetrator of that enormity was known. And the nocturnal death of Bertred might have been logical enough, had the abductor brought it about, but plainly he had not. Judith vouched for that, and so, probably, could Vivian Hynde’s mother, since it seemed clear that once the bargain was made between captive and captor, Judith had been removed to the greater comfort of a house which had already been visted in search of her, and the buried room in the warehouse hurriedly and ingeniously cleared of all traces of her presence. So far, well! But there had been listeners outside in the night, Bertred first and possibly another afterwards, unless Vivian had reached a state in which every stirring of a spider or a mouse in the roof could alarm him. The plan might well have been overheard, and the horse with the double load might have had another follower, besides Niall Bronzesmith. And that would round off the whole disastrous circle, all the more surely if he who began it was also the one who sought to end it.