Ellis Peters - The Potter's Field

‘Respect!’ breathed Pernel, marvelling. ‘Where has been the respect for her? I met her only yesterday, and it seems to me I know her better than ail these who move all day and every day under the same roof. You have seen her! Nothing but a handful of slender bones covered with pain for flesh and courage for skin. How dare any man look at her, and say of any matter, however daunting: We mustn’t let this come to her ears, she could not bear it!’

‘I have understood you,’ said Cadfael, making for the strip of sand where the porters had lifted the litter ashore. ‘You were still free, the only one.’

‘One is enough! Yes, I have told her, everything I know, but there’s more that I don’t know, and she will have all. She has a purpose now, a reason for living, a reason for venturing out like this, mad as you may think it—better than sitting waiting for her death.’

A thin hand drew back the linen curtain as Cadfael stooped to the head of the litter. The shell was plaited from hemp, to be light of weight and give with the movement, and within it Donata reclined in folded rugs and pillows. Thus she must have travelled a year and more ago, when she had made her last excursions into the world outside Longner. What prodigies of endurance it cost her now could hardly be guessed. Under the linen awning her wasted face showed livid and drawn, her lips blue-grey and set hard, so that she had to unlock them with an effort to speak. But her voice was still clear, and still possessed its courteous but steely authority.

‘Were you coming to me, Brother Cadfael? Pernel supposed your errand might be to Longner. Be content, I am bound for the abbey. I understand that my son has involved himself in matters of moment both to the lord abbot and the sheriff. I believe I may be able to set the record straight, and see an account settled.’

‘I will gladly ride back with you,’ said Cadfael, ‘and serve you in whatever way I can.’

No point now in urging caution and good sense upon her, none in trying to turn her back, none in questioning how she had eluded the anxious care of Eudo and his wife to undertake this journey. The fierce control of her face spoke for her. She knew what she was doing, no pain, no risk could have daunted her. Brittle energy had burned up in her as in a stirred fire. And a stirred fire was what she was, too long damped down into resignation.

‘Then ride before, Brother,’ she said, ‘if you will be so good, and ask Hugh Beringar if he will come and join us at the abbot’s lodging. We shall be slower on the road, you and he may be there before us. But not my son!’ she added, with a lift of her head and a brief, deep spark in her eyes. ‘Let him be! It is better, is it not, that the dead should carry their own sins, and not leave them for the living to bear?’

‘It is better,’ said Cadfael. ‘An inheritance comes more kindly clear of debts.’

‘Good!’ she said. ‘What is between my son and me may remain as it is until the right time comes. I will deal. No one else need trouble.’

One of her porters was busy rubbing down the cob’s saddle and streaming hide for Pernel to remount. At foot pace they would be an hour yet on the way. Donata had sunk back in her pillows braced and still, all the fleshless lines of her face composed into stoic endurance. On her deathbed she might look so, and still never let one groan escape her. Dead, all the tension would have been wiped away, as surely as the passage of a hand closes the eyes for the last time.

Cadfael mounted his mule, and set off back up the slope, heading for the Foregate and the town.

‘She knows?’ said Hugh in blank astonishment. “The one thing Eudo insisted on, from the very day I went to him first, the one person he would not have drawn into so grim a business! The last thing you said yourself, when we parted last night, was that you were sworn to keep the whole tangle from her. And now you have told her?’

‘Not I,’ said Cadfael. ‘But yes, she knows. Woman to woman she heard it. And she is making her way now to the abbot’s lodging, to say what she has to say to authority both sacred and secular, and have to say it but once.’

‘In God’s name,’ demanded Hugh, gaping, ‘how did she contrive the journey? I saw her, not so long since, every movement of a hand tired her. She had not been out of the house for months.’

‘She had not compelling reason,’ said Cadfael. ‘Now she has. She had no cause to fight against the care and anxiety they pressed upon her. Now she has. There is no weakness in her will. They have brought her these few miles in a litter, at cost to her, I know it, but it is what she would have, and I, for one, would not care to deny her.’

‘And she may well have brought on her death,’ Hugh said, ‘in such an effort.’

‘And if that proved so, would it be so ill an ending?’

Hugh gave him a long, thoughtful look, and did not deny it.

‘What has she said, then, to you, to justify such a wager?’

‘Nothing, as yet, except that the dead should carry their own sins, and not leave them a legacy to the living.’

‘It is more than we have got out of the boy,’ said Hugh. ‘Well, let him sit and think a while longer. He had his father to deliver, she has her son. And all of this while sons and household and all have been so busy and benevolent delivering her. If she’s calling the tune now, we may hear a different song. Wait, Cadfael, and make my excuses to Aline, while I go and saddle up.’

They had reached the bridge, and were riding so slowly that they seemed to be eking out time for some urgent thinking before coming to this conference, when Hugh said: ‘And she would not have Sulien brought in to hear?’

‘No. Very firmly she said: Not my son! What is between them, she said, let it rest until the right time. Eudo she knows she can manipulate, lifelong, if you say no word. And what point is there in publishing the offences of a dead man? He cannot be made to pay, and the living should not.’

‘But Sulien she cannot deceive. He witnessed the burial. He knows. What can she do but tell him the truth? The whole of it, to add to the half he knows already.’

Not until then had it entered Cadfael’s mind to wonder if indeed they knew, or Sulien knew, even the half of it. They were being very sure, because they thought they had discounted every other possibility, that what they had left was truth. Now the doubt that had waited aside presented itself suddenly as a world of unconsidered possibilities, and no amount of thought could rule out all. How much even of what Sulien knew was not knowledge at all, but assumption? How much of what he believed he had seen was not vision, but illusion?

They dismounted in the stable yard at the abbey, and presented themselves at the abbot’s door.

It was the middle of the morning when they assembled at last in the abbot’s parlour. Hugh had waited for her at the gatehouse, to ensure that she should be carried at once the length of the great court to the very door of Radulfus’s lodging. His solicitude, perhaps, reminded her of Eudo, for when he handed her out among the tattered autumnal beds of the abbot’s garden she permitted all with a small, tight but tolerant smile, bearing the too-anxious assiduities of youth and health with the hard-learned patience of age and sickness. She accepted the support of his arm through the anteroom where normally Brother Vitalis, chaplain and secretary, might have been working at this hour, and Abbot Radulfus took her hand upon the other side, and led her within, to a cushioned place prepared for her, with the support of the panelled wall at her back.

Cadfael, watching this ceremonious installation without attempting to take any part in it, thought that it had something of the enthronement of a sovereign lady about it. That might even amuse her, privately. The privileges of mortal sickness had almost been forced upon her, what she thought of them might never be told. Certainly she had an imperishable dignity, and a large and tolerant understanding of the concern and even unease she caused in others and must endure graciously. She had also, thus carefully dressed for an ordeal and a social visit, a fragile and admirable elegance. Her gown was deep blue like her eyes, and like her eyes a little faded, and the bliaut she wore over it, sleeveless and cut down to either hip, was the same blue, embroidered in rose and silver at the hems. ‘The whiteness of her linen wimple turned her drawn cheeks to a translucent grey in the light almost of noon.