Ellis Peters - The Pilgrim of Hate

“Oh, there’s something to be said for marriage,” said Hugh idly. “Do I look so poorly on it? Though it’s an odd study for a man of your habit, after all these years of celibacy… And all the stravagings about the world before that! You can’t have thought too highly of the wedded state, or you’d have ventured on it yourself. You took no vows until past forty, and you a well-set-up young fellow crusading all about the east with the best of them. How do I know you have not an Aline of your own locked away somewhere, somewhere in your remembrance, as dear as mine is to me? Perhaps even a Giles of your own,” he added, whimsically smiling, “a Giles God knows where, grown a man now…”

Cadfael’s silence and stillness, though perfectly easy and complacent, nevertheless sounded a mute warning in Hugh’s perceptive senses. On the edge of drowsiness among his cushions after a long day out of doors, he opened a black, considering eye to train upon his friend’s musing face, and withdrew delicately into practical business.

“Well, so this Simeon Poer is known in the south. I’m grateful to you and to Brother Adam for the nudge, though so far the man has set no foot wrong here. But these others you’ve pictured for me… At Wat’s tavern in the Foregate they’ve had practice in marking down strangers who come with a fair or a feast, and spread themselves large about the town. Wat tells my people he has a group moving in, very merry, some of them strangers. They could well be these you name. Some of them, of course, the usual young fellows of the town and the Foregate with more pence than sense. They’ve been drinking a great deal, and throwing dice. Wat does not like the way the dice fall.”

“It’s as I supposed,” said Cadfael, nodding. “For every Mass of ours they’ll be celebrating the Gamblers’ Mass elsewhere. And by all means let the fools throw their money after their sense, so the odds be fair. But Wat knows a loaded throw when he sees one.”

“He knows how to rid his house of the plague, too. He has hissed in the ears of one of the strangers that his tavern is watched, and they’d be wise to take their school out of there. And for tonight he has a lad on the watch, to find out where they’ll meet. Tomorrow night we’ll have at them, and rid you of them in good time for the feast day, if all goes well.”

Which would be a very welcome cleansing, thought Cadfael, making his way back across the bridge in the first limpid dusk, with the river swirling its coiled currents beneath him in gleams of reflected light, low summer water leaving the islands outlined in swathes of drowned, browning weed. But as yet there was nothing to shed light, even by reflected, phantom gleams, upon that death so far away in the south country, whence the merchant Simeon Poer had set out. On pilgrimage for his respectable soul? Or in flight from a law aroused too fiercely for his safety, by something graver than the cozening of fools? Though Cadfael felt too close to folly himself to be loftily complacent even about that, however much it might be argued that gamblers deserved all they got.

The great gate of the abbey was closed, but the wicket in it stood open, shedding sunset light through from the west. In the mild dazzle Cadfael brushed shoulders and sleeves with another entering, and was a little surprised to be hoisted deferentially through the wicket by a firm hand at his elbow.

“Give you goodnight, brother!” sang a mellow voice in his ear, as the returning guest stepped within on his heels. And the solid, powerful, woollen-gowned form of Simeon Poer, self-styled merchant of Guildford, rolled vigorously past him, and crossed the great court to the stone steps of the guest-hall.

THEY WERE EMERGING from High Mass on the morning of the twenty-first day of June, the eve of Saint Winifred’s translation, stepping out into a radiant morning, when the abbot’s sedate progress towards his lodging was rudely disrupted by a sudden howl of dismay among the dispersing multitude of worshippers, a wild ripple of movement cleaving a path through their ranks, and the emergence of a frantic figure lurching forth on clumsy, naked feet to clutch at the abbot’s robe, and appeal in a loud, indignant cry, “Father Abbot, stand my friend and give me justice, for I am robbed! A thief, there is a thief among us!”

The abbot looked down in astonishment and concern into the face of Ciaran, convulsed and ablaze with resentment and distress.

“Father, I beg you, see justice done! I am helpless unless you help me!”

He awoke, somewhat late, to the unwarranted violence of his behaviour, and fell on his knees at the abbot’s feet. “Pardon, pardon! I am too loud and troublous, I hardly know what I say!”

The press of gossiping, festive worshippers just loosed from Mass had fallen quiet all in a moment, and instead of dispersing drew in about them to listen and stare, avidly curious. The monks of the house, hindered in their orderly departure, hovered in quiet deprecation. Cadfael looked beyond the kneeling, imploring figure of Ciaran for its inseparable twin, and found Matthew just shouldering his way forward out of the crowd, open-mouthed and wide-eyed in patent bewilderment, to stand at gaze a few paces apart, and frown helplessly from the abbot to Ciaran and back again, in search of the cause of this abrupt turmoil. Was it possible that something had happened to the one that the other of the matched pair did not know?

“Get up!” said Radulfus, erect and calm. “No need to kneel. Speak out whatever you have to say, and you shall have right.”

The pervasive silence spread, grew, filled even the most distant reaches of the great court. Those who had already scattered to the far corners turned and crept unobtrusively back again, large-eyed and prick-eared, to hang upon the fringes of the crowd already assembled.

Ciaran clambered to his feet, voluble before he was erect. “Father, I had a ring, the copy of one the lord bishop of Winchester keeps for his occasions, bearing his device and inscription. Such copies he uses to afford safe-conduct to those he sends forth on his business or with his blessing, to open doors to them and provide protection on the road. Father, the ring is gone!”

“This ring was given to you by Henry of Blois himself?” asked Radulfus.

“No, Father, not in person. I was in the service of the prior of Hyde Abbey, a lay clerk, when this mortal sickness came on me, and I took this vow of mine to spend my remaining days in the canonry of Aberdaron. My prior-you know that Hyde is without an abbot, and has been for some years-my prior asked the lord bishop, of his goodness, to give me what protection he could for my journey…”

So that had been the starting point of this barefoot journey, thought Cadfael, enlightened. Winchester itself, or as near as made no matter, for the New Minster of that city, always a jealous rival of the Old, where Bishop Henry presided, had been forced to abandon its old home in the city thirty years ago, and banished to Hyde Mead, on the north-western outskirts. There was no love lost between Henry and the community at Hyde, for it was the bishop who had been instrumental in keeping them deprived of an abbot for so long, in pursuit of his own ambition of turning them into an episcopal monastery. The struggle had been going on for some time, the bishop deploying various schemes to get the house into his own hands, and the prior using every means to resist these manipulations. It seemed Henry had still the grace to show compassion even on a servant of the hostile house, when he fell under the threat of disease and death. The traveller over whom the bishop-legate spread his protecting hand would pass unmolested wherever law retained its validity. Only those irreclaimably outlaw already would dare interfere with him.