Ellis Peters - The Raven in the Foregate

“What was your intent when you came over from Normandy?” asked Cadfael.

“Why, to make contact with any friends of the Empress who might be lying very low in the south and east, where she’s least loved, and urge them to be ready to rise if FitzAlan should think the time ripe for a return. It looked well for her chances then. But when the wind changed, someone—God knows which of those we’d spoken with—took fright and covered himself by betraying us. You know we were two?”

“I know it,” said Cadfael. “Indeed I know the second. He was of FitzAlan’s household here in Shrewsbury before the town fell to the King. He got off safely from an eastern port, as I heard. You were not so lucky.”

“Is Torold clean away? Oh, you do me good!” cried Ninian, flushed with joy. “We were separated when they almost cornered us near Bury. I feared for him! Oh, if he’s safe home…” He caught himself up there, wincing at the thought of calling Normandy home. “For myself, I can deal! Even if I do end in the King’s prison—but I won’t! Fending for one is not so hard as fretting for two. And Torold’s a married man!”

“And the word is, he’s gone, back to his wife. And what,” wondered Cadfael, “is your intention now? Plainly the one you came with is a lost cause. What now?”

“Now,” said the boy with emphatic gravity, “I mean to get across the border into Wales, and make my way down to join the Empress’s army at Gloucester. I can’t bring her FitzAlan’s army, but I can bring her one able-bodied man to fight for her—and not a bad hand with sword or lance, though I do say it myself.”

By the lift of his voice and the sparkle in his eyes he meant it ardently, and it was a course much more congenial to him than acting as agent to reluctant allies. And why should he not succeed? The Welsh border was not so far, though the journey to Gloucester through the ill-disciplined wilds of Powys might be long and perilous. Cadfael considered his companion thoughtfully, and beheld a young man somewhat lightly clad for winter travelling afoot, without weapons, without a horse, without wealth to grease his journeying. None of which considerations appeared to discourage Ninian.

“An honest enough purpose,” said Cadfael, “and I see nothing against it. We have a few adherents of your faction even in these parts, though they keep very quiet these days. Could not one of them be of use to you now?”

The bait was not taken. The boy closed his lips firmly, and stared Cadfael out with impregnable composure. If he had indeed attempted to contact one of the Empress’s partisans here, he was never going to admit it. With his own confidences he might favour his too perceptive mentor, but he was not going to implicate any other man.

“Well,” said Cadfael comfortably, “it seems that you are not being hunted here with any great zeal, and your position with us is well established, no reason why Benet should not continue to do his work here quietly and modestly, and never be noticed. And if this iron frost goes on as it’s begun, your work will be here among the medicines, so we may as well go on with your lesson. Look lively, now, and pay attention to what I show you.”

The boy burst into a soft, half-smothered peal of laughter in sheer relief and pleasure, like a child, and bounded to Cadfael’s elbow at the mortar like a hound puppy excited by a fresh scent.

“Good, then tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll be half an apothecary before I leave you. Nothing learned,” said Ninian, with an impudently accurate imitation of Cadfael’s more didactic style, “is ever quite wasted.”

“True, true!” agreed Cadfael sententiously. “Nothing observed, either. You never know where it may fit into a larger vision.”

Exactly as certain details were beginning to fit together and elaborate for him the picture he had of this venturesome, light-hearted, likeable young man. A destitute young man, urgently in need of the means to make his way undetected to Gloucester, one who had come to England, no doubt, with a memorised list of names that should prove sympathetic to the Empress’s cause, a few of them even here in Shropshire. A devoted woman all anxiety for her nurseling, bringing honey cakes and carrying away a small token thing that slipped easily into the breast of her gown, from the breast of Benet’s cotte. And shortly thereafter, the lady Sanan Bernières, daughter of a father dispossessed for his adherence to Maud, and step-daughter to another lord of the same party, paying a brief visit from Giffard’s house near Saint Chad’s to buy herbs for her Christmas kitchen, and pausing in the garden to speak to the labouring boy, and look him up and down, as though, as the boy himself had reported, she were in need of a page, ‘and thought I might do, given a little polishing’.”

Well, well! So far everything in harmony. But why, then, was the boy still here at all, if aid had been asked and given?

Upon this incomplete picture the sudden death of Father Ailnoth intruded like a black blot in a half-written page, complicating everything, relating, apparently, to nothing, a bird of as ill omen dead as alive.

THE HUNT FOR NINIAN BACHILER, AS A PROSCRIBED AGENT OF THE EMPRESS MAUD at large in Stephen’s territory, was duly proclaimed in Shrewsbury, and the word went round in voluble gossip, all the more exuberantly as a relief from the former sensation of Ailnoth’s death, concerning which no one in the Foregate had been voluble, unless in privacy. It was good to have a topic of conversation which departed at so marked a tangent from what really preoccupied the parishioners of Holy Cross. Since none of the gossips cared a pin how many dissident agents were at large in the county, none of the talk was any threat to the fugitive, much less to Mistress Hammet’s dutiful nephew Benet, who came and went freely between abbey and parsonage.

In the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of December, Cadfael was called out to the first sufferers from coughs and colds in the Foregate, and extended his visits to one elderly merchant in the town itself, a regular chest patient of his in the winter. He had left Ninian sawing and splitting wood from the pruning of the trees, and keeping cautious watch on a pot of herbs in oil of almonds, which had to warm on the edge of the brazier without simmering, to make a lotion for the frost-nipped hands too tender to endure the hog’s fat base of the ointment. The boy could be trusted to abide by his instructions, and whatever he did he did with his might.

Cadfael’s errands had taken him rather less time than he had expected, and the weather was not such as to encourage him to linger. He re-entered at the gatehouse with more than an hour still in hand before Vespers, and made his way across the great court and out into the garden, rounding the box hedge into the alley that led to his herbarium. In the frost he had wrapped woollen cloths about his boots to give him a grip on the icy roads, and the same sensible precaution made his steps silent on the path. So it happened that he heard the voices before he himself was heard, rapid and soft and vehement from within his workshop. And one of the voices was Ninian’s, a tone above its usual pitch by reason of some fierce but subdued excitement. And the other was a girl’s, insistent and agitated. Curious that she, too, should convey this same foolhardy sense of enjoyment in the experience of danger and dread. A good match! And what other girl had had to do with this place and this youth, but Sanan Bernières?

“Oh, but he would!” she was saying emphatically. “He’s there by now, he’ll tell them everything, where to find you, how you sent to him—all! You must come now, quickly, before they come to take you.”