Ellis Peters - The Potter's Field

Sulien had blanched into a marble pallor, fending him off with a bleak and wary face. He said between his teeth: ‘I have told you all you need to know. I will not say a word more.’

‘Well,’ said Hugh, rising abruptly, as though he had lost patience, ‘I daresay it may be enough. Father, I have two archers with horses outside. I propose to keep the prisoner under guard in the castle for the present, until I have more time to proceed. May my men come in and take him? They have left their arms at the gate.’

The abbot had sat silent all this time, but paying very close attention to all that was said, and by the narrowed intelligence of his eyes in the austere face he had missed none of the implications. Now he said: ‘Yes, call them in.” And to Sulien, as Hugh crossed to the door and went out: ‘My son, however lies may be enforced upon us, or so we may think, there is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.”

Sulien turned his head, and the candle caught and illuminated the dulled blue of his eyes and the exhausted pallor of his face. He unlocked his lips with an effort. ‘Father, will you keep my mother and my brother in your prayers?’

‘Constantly,’ said Radulfus.

‘And my father’s soul?’

‘And your own.’

Hugh was at the parlour door again. The two archers of the garrison came in on his heels, and Sulien, unbidden, rose with the alacrity of relief from the bench, and went out between them without a word or a glance behind. And Hugh closed the door.

‘You heard him,’ said Hugh. ‘What he knew he answered readily. When I took him astray he knew he could not sustain it, and would not answer at all. He was there, yes, he saw her buried. But he neither killed nor buried her.’

‘I understood,’ said the abbot,’ that you put to him points that would have betrayed him‘

‘That did betray him,’ said Hugh.

‘But since I do not know all the details, I cannot follow precisely what you got out of him. Certainly there is the matter of exactly where she was found. That I grasped. He set you right. That was something he knew, and it bore out his story. Yes, he was a witness.’

‘But not a sharer, nor even a close witness,’ said Cadfael. ‘Not close enough to see the cross that was laid on her breast, for it was not silver, but made hastily out of two sticks from the bushes. No, he did not bury her, and he did not kill her, because if he had done so, with his bent for bearing the guilt, he would have set us right about her injuries—or want of them. You know, as I know, that her skull was not broken. She had no detectable injuries. If he had known how she died, he would have told us. But he did not know, and he was too shrewd to risk guessing. He may even have realised that Hugh was setting traps for him. He chose silence. What you do not say cannot betray you. But with eyes like those in his head, even silence cannot shield him. The lad is crystal.’

‘I am sure it was truth,’ said Hugh,’that he was sick with love for the woman. He had loved her unquestioning, unthinking, like a sister or a nurse, from childhood. The very pity and anger he felt on her account when she was abandoned must have loosed all the strings of a man’s passion in him. It must be true, I think, that she did lean on him then, and gave him cause to believe himself elect, while she still thought of him as a mere boy, a child of whom she was fond, offering her a child’s comfort.’

‘True, also,’ the abbot wondered,’that she gave him the ring?’

It was Cadfael who said at once: ‘No.’

‘I was still in some doubt,’ said Radulfus mildly, ‘but you say no?’

‘One thing has always troubled me,” said Cadfael, ‘and that is the manner in which he produced the ring. You’ll recall, he came to ask you, Father, for leave to visit his home. He stayed there overnight, as you permitted, and on his return he gave us to understand that only from his brother, during that visit, had he learned of the finding of the woman’s body, and the understandable suspicion it cast upon Ruald. And then he brought forth the ring, and told his story, which we had then no cause to doubt. But I believe that already, before he came to you to ask leave of absence, he had been told of the case. That was the very reason his visit to Longner became necessary. He had to go home because the ring was there, and he must get it before he could speak out in defence of Ruald. With lies, yes, because truth was impossible. We can be sure, now, that he knew, poor lad, who had buried Generys, and where she was laid. Why else should he take flight into the cloister, and so far distant, from a place where he could no longer endure to be?’

‘There is no help for it,’ said Radulfus reflectively, ‘he is protecting someone else. Someone close and dear to him. His whole concern is for his kin and the honour of his house. Can it be his brother?’

Hugh said: ‘No. Eudo seems to be the one person who has escaped. Whatever happened in the Potter’s Field, not a shadow of it has ever fallen upon Eudo. He is happy, apart from his mother’s sickness he has no cares, he is married to a pleasant wife, and looking forward hopefully to having a son. Better still, he is wholly occupied with his manor, with the work of his hands and the fruits of his soil, and seldom looks below, for the dark things that gnaw on less simple men. No, we can forget Eudo.’

‘There were two,’ said Cadfael slowly, ‘who fled from Longner after Generys vanished. One into the cloister, one into the battlefield.’

‘His father!’ said Radulfus, and pondered in silence for a moment. ‘A man of excellent repute, a hero who fought in the king’s rearguard at Wilton, and died there. Yes, I can believe that Sulien would sacrifice his own life rather than see that record soiled and blemished. For his mother’s sake, and his brother’s, and the future of his brother’s sons, no less than for his father’s memory. But of course,’ he said simply, ‘we cannot let it lie. And now what are we to do?’

Cadfael had been wondering the same thing, ever since Hugh’s springes had caused even obstinate silences to speak with such eloquence, and confirmed with certainty what had always been persistent in a corner of Cadfael’s mind. Sulien had knowledge that oppressed him like guilt, but he carried no guilt of his own. He knew only what he had seen. But how much had he seen? Not the death, or he would have seized on every confirming detail, and offered it as evidence against himself. Only the burial. A boy in the throes of his first impossible love, embraced and welcomed into an all-consuming grief and rage, then put aside, perhaps for no worse reason than that Generys had cared for him deeply, and willed him not to be scorched and maimed by her fire more incurably than he already was, or else because another had taken his place, drawn irresistibly into the same furnace, one deprivation fused inextricably with another. For Donata was already, for several years, all too well acquainted with her interminable death, and Eudo Blount in his passionate and spirited prime as many years forced to be celibate as ever was priest or monk. Two starving creatures were fed. And one tormented boy spied upon them, perhaps only once, perhaps several times, but in any event once too often, feeding his own anguish with his jealousy of a rival he could not even hate, because he worshipped him.

It was conceivable. It was probable. Then how successful had father and son been in dissembling their mutual and mutually destructive obsession? And how much had any other in that house divined of the danger?

Yes, it could be so. For she had been, as everyone said, a very beautiful woman.

‘I think,’ Cadfael,’that with your leave, Father, I must go back to Longner.’