Ellis Peters - The Confession of Brother Haluin

De Perronet shut his lips and clenched his teeth on any further questioning, and set himself to wait in uncommitted patience. The night had closed in on the manor of Vivers in hushed stillness, ominous and oppressive. Doubtful if anyone in the hall slept, but if any of them moved it was furtively, and if any spoke it was in whispers.

Nevertheless, the wait was not to be as long as de Perronet had prophesied. The silence was abruptly shivered by the thudding of galloping hooves on the hard-frozen earth of the courtyard, a furious young voice yelling peremptorily for service, the frantic running of grooms without, and the hasty stirring of all the wakeful retainers within. Feet ran blindly in the dark, stumbling and rustling in the rushes, flint and steel spat sparks too brief and hasty to catch the tinder, the first torch was plunged into the turfed-down fire, and carried in haste to kindle others. Before the listeners in the solar could burst out into the hall a fist was thumping at the outer door, and an angry voice demanding entry.

Two or three ran to unbar, knowing the voice, and were sent reeling as the heavy door was flung back to the wall, and into the brightening flurry of torchlight burst the figure of Roscelin, head uncovered, flaxen hair on end from the speed of his ride, blue eyes blazing. The cold of the night blew in with him, and all the torches guttered and smoked, as Cenred, erupting out of the solar, was halted as abruptly on the threshold of the hall by his son’s fiery glare.

“What is this Edred tells me of you?” demanded Roscelin. “What have you done behind my back?”

For once paternal authority was caught at a disadvantage, and Cenred was all too aware of it. Nor had he the past reputation of a family tyrant to fall back on, but he did his best to wrest back the lost initiative.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded sternly. “Did I send for you? Did your lord dismiss you? Has either of us released you from your bond?”

“No,” said Roscelin, glittering. “I have no leave from any man, and have not asked for any. And as for my bond, you loosed me from it when you played me false. It’s not I who have broken faith. And as for the duty I owe to Audemar de Clary, I’ll return to it if I must, and abide whatever his displeasure visits on me, but not until you render me account here openly of what you intended in the dark behind my back. I listened to you, I owned you right, I obeyed you. Did you owe me nothing in return? Not even honesty?”

Another father might well have felled him for such insolence, but Cenred had no such option. Emma was plucking anxiously at his sleeve, troubled for both her menfolk. De Perronet, alert and grim, loomed at his shoulder, eyeing the enraged boy confronting them, and already apprised of an inevitable threat to his own plans. What else could have brought this youngster haring through the night? And by all the signs he had come by the shortest road, dangerous in the dark, or he could not have arrived so soon. Nothing that had happened this night was accident or chance. The marriage of Helisende Vivers had brought about all this coil of murder and search and pursuit, and what more was to come of it there was as yet no knowing.

“I have done nothing,” said Cenred, “of which I need to be ashamed, and nothing for which I need account to you. Well you know what your own part must be, you have agreed to it, do not complain now. I am the master in my own house, I have both rights and duties towards my family. I will discharge them as I see fit. And for the best!”

“Without the courtesy of a word to me!” flared Roscelin, burning up like a stirred fire. “No, I must hear it only from Edred, after the damage has already begun, after a death that can surely be laid at your own door. Was that for the best? or dare you tell me Edgytha is dead for some other cause, by some stranger’s hand? That’s mischief enough, even if it’s no worse than that. But whose plans sent her out into the night? Dare you tell me she was on some other errand? Edred says she was on her way to Elford when someone cut her off. I am here to prevent the rest.”

“Your son refers, as I suppose,” said de Perronet, loudly and coldly, “to the marriage arranged between the lady Helisende and me. In that matter, I think, I too have a say.”

Roscelin’s wide blue stare swung from his father’s face to the guest’s. It was the first time he had looked at him, and the encounter held him silent for a long moment. They were not strangers to each other, Cadfael recalled. The two families were acquainted, perhaps even distant kin, and two years ago de Perronet had made a formal offer for He lisende’s hand. There was no personal animosity in Roscelin’s glare, rather a baffled and frustrated rage against circumstance than against this favored suitor, to whom he could not and must not be a rival.

“You are the bridegroom?” he said bluntly.

“I am, and will maintain my claim. And what have you to urge against it?”

Animosity or not, they had begun to bristle like fighting cocks, but Cenred laid a restraining hand on de Perronet’s arm, and frowned his son back with a forbidding gesture.

“Wait, wait! This has gone too far now to be left in the dark. Do you tell me, boy, that you heard of this marriage, as you heard of Edgytha’s death, only from Edred?”

“How else?” demanded Roscelin. “He came puffing in with his news and roused the household, Audemar and all. Whether he meant me to hear when he blurted out word of this marriage I doubt, but I did hear it, and here am I to find out for myself what you never meant me to question. And we shall see if all is being done for the best!”

“Then you had not seen Edgytha? She never reached you?”

“How could she if she was lying dead a mile or more from Elford?” demanded Roscelin impatiently.

“It was after the snow began that she died. She had been some hours gone, long enough to have reached Elford and been on her way back. Somewhere she had been, from somewhere she was certainly returning. Where else could it have been?”

“So you thought she had indeed reached Elford,” said Roscelin slowly. “I never heard but that she was dead. I thought it was on her way. On her way to me! Is that what you had in mind? To warn me of what was being done here in my absence?”

Cenred’s silence and Emma’s unhappy face were answer enough.

“No,” he said slowly, “I never saw hide or hair of her. Nor did anyone in Audemar’s household as far as I know. If she ever was there at all, I don’t know to whom she came. Certainly not to me.”

“Yet it could have been so,” said Cenred.

“It was not so. She did not come. Nevertheless,” said Roscelin relentlessly, “here am I as if she had, having heard it from another mouth. God knows I am grieved for Edgytha, but what is there now to be done for her but bury her with reverence, and after, if we can, find and bury her murderer? But it is not too late to reconsider what was intended here for tomorrow, it is not too late to change it.”

“I marvel,” said Cenred harshly, “that you do not charge me outright with this death.”

Roscelin was brought up short against an idea so monstrous, and stood open-mouthed with shock, his unclenched hands dangling childishly. Plainly such a notion had never entered his ingenuous head. He stammered a furious, half-inarticulate disclaimer, and abandoned it halfway to turn again upon de Perronet.

“But you - you had cause enough to want her stopped, if you knew she was on her way to warn me. You had good cause to want her silenced, so that no voice should be raised against your marriage, as now I raise mine. Was it you who did her to death on the way?”

“This is foolery,” said de Perronet with disdain. “Everyone here knows that I have been here in plain view all the evening.”