Ellis Peters - The Pilgrim of Hate

“Father,” said Cadfael, making short work of explanations, “there’s a new twist here. Messire de Bretagne has gone off on a false trail. Those two young men did not leave by the Oswestry road, but crossed the Meole brook and set off due west to reach Wales the nearest way. Nor did they leave together. Ciaran slipped away during the morning, while his fellow was with us in the procession, and Matthew has followed him by the same way as soon as he learned of his going. And, Father, there’s good cause to think that the sooner they’re overtaken and halted, the better surely for one, and I believe for both. I beg you, let me take a horse and follow. And send word of this to Hugh Beringar in the town, to come after us on the same trail.”

Radulfus received all this with a grave but calm face, and asked no less shortly: “How did you come by this word?”

“From the girl who spoke with Ciaran before he departed. No need to doubt it is all true. And, Father, one more thing before you bid me go. Open, I beg you, that scrip they left behind, let me see if it has anything more to tell us of this pair, at the least, of one of them.”

Without a word or an instant of hesitation, Radulfus dragged the linen scrip into the light of his candles, and unbuckled the fastening. The contents he drew out fully upon the desk, sparse enough, what the poor pilgrim would carry, having few possessions and desiring to travel light.

“You know, I think,” said the abbot, looking up sharply, “to which of the two this belonged?”

“I do not know, but I guess. In my mind I am sure, but I am also fallible. Give me leave!”

With a sweep of his hand he spread the meagre belongings over the desk. The purse, thin enough when Prior Robert had handled it before, lay flat and empty now. The leather-bound breviary, well-used, worn but treasured, had been rolled into the folds of the shirt, and when Cadfael reached for it the shirt slid from the desk and fell to the floor. He let it lie as he opened the book. Within the cover was written, in a clerk’s careful hand, the name of its owner: Juliana Bossard. And below, in newer ink and a less practised hand: Given to me, Luc Meverel, this Christmastide, 1140. God be with us all!

“So I pray, too,” said Cadfael, and stooped to pick up the fallen shirt. He held it up to the light, and his eye caught the thread-like outline of a stain that rimmed the left shoulder. His eye followed the line over the shoulder, and found it continued down and round the left side of the breast. The linen, otherwise, was clean enough, bleached by several launderings from its original brownish natural colouring. He spread it open, breast up, on the desk. The thin brown line, sharp on its outer edge, slightly blurred within, hemmed a great space spanning the whole left part of the chest and the upper part of the left sleeve. The space within the outline had been washed clear of any stain, even the rim was pale, but it stood clear to be seen, and the scattered shadowings of colour within it preserved a faint hint of what had been there.

Radulfus, if he had not ventured as far afield in the world as Cadfael, had nevertheless stored up some experience of it. He viewed the extended evidence and said composedly, “This was blood.”

“So it was,” said Cadfael, and rolled up the shirt.

“And whoever owned this scrip came from where a certain Juliana Bossard was chatelaine.” His deep eyes were steady and sombre on Cadfael’s face. “Have we entertained a murderer in our house?”

“I think we have,” said Cadfael, restoring the scattered fragments of a life to their modest lodging. A man’s life, shorn of all expectation of continuance, even the last coin gone from the purse. “But I think we may have time yet to prevent another killing, if you give me leave to go.”

“Take the best of what may be in the stable,” said the abbot simply, “and I will send word to Hugh Beringar, and have him follow you, and not alone.”

SEVERAL MILES north on the Oswestry road, Olivier drew rein by the roadside where a wiry, bright-eyed boy was grazing goats on the broad verge, lush in summer growth and coming into seed. The child twitched one of his long leads on his charges, to bring him along gently where the early evening light lay warm on the tall grass. He looked up at the rider without awe, half-Welsh and immune from servility. He smiled and gave an easy good evening.

The boy was handsome, bold, unafraid; so was the man. They looked at each other and liked what they saw.

“God be with you!” said Olivier. “How long have you been pasturing your beasts along here? And have you in all that time seen a lame man and a well man go by, the pair of them much of my age, but afoot?”

“God be with you, master,” said the boy cheerfully. “Here along this verge ever since noon, for I brought my bit of dinner with me. But I’ve seen none such pass. And I’ve had a word by the road with every soul that did go by, unless he were galloping.”

“Then I waste my hurrying,” said Olivier, and idled a while, his horse stooping to the tips of the grasses. “They cannot be ahead of me, not by this road. See, now, supposing they wished to go earlier into Wales, how may I bear round to pick them up on the way? They went from Shrewsbury town ahead of me, and I have word to bring to them. Where can I turn west and fetch a circle about the town?”

The young herdsman accepted with open arms every exchange that refreshed his day’s labour. He gave his mind to the best road offering, and delivered judgement: “Turn back but a mile or more, back across the bridge at Mont-ford, and then you’ll find a well-used cart-track that bears off west, to your right hand it will be. Bear a piece west again where the paths first branch, it’s no direct way, but it does go on. It skirts Shrewsbury a matter of above four miles outside the town, and threads the edges of the forest, but it cuts across every path out of Shrewsbury. You may catch your men yet. And I wish you may!”

“My thanks for that,” said Olivier “and for your advice also.” He stooped to the hand the boy had raised, not for alms but to caress the horse’s chestnut shoulder with admiration and pleasure, and slipped a coin into the smooth palm. “God be with you!” he said, and wheeled his mount and set off back along the road he had travelled.

“And go with you, master!” the boy called after him, and watched until a curve of the road took horse and rider out of sight beyond a stand of trees. The goats gathered closer; evening was near, and they were ready to turn homeward, knowing the hour by the sun as well as did their herder. The boy drew in their tethers, whistled to them cheerily, and moved on along the road to his homeward path through the fields.

Olivier came for the second time to the bridge over the Severn, one bank a steep, tree-clad escarpment, the other open, level meadow. Beyond the first plane of fields a winding track turned off to the right, between scattered stands of trees, bearing at this point rather south than west, but after a mile or more it brought him on to a better road that crossed his track left and right. He bore right into the sun, as he had been instructed, and at the next place where two dwindling paths divided he turned left, and keeping his course by the sinking sun on his right hand, now just resting upon the rim of the world and glimmering through the trees in sudden blinding glimpses, began to work his way gradually round the town of Shrewsbury. The tracks wound in and out of copses, the fringe woods of the northern tip of the Long Forest, sometimes in twilight among dense trees, sometimes in open heath and scrub, sometimes past islets of cultivated fields and glimpses of hamlets. He rode with ears pricked for any promising sound, pausing wherever his labyrinthine path crossed a track bearing westward out of Shrewsbury, and wherever he met with cottage or assart he asked after his two travellers. No one had seen such a pair pass by. Olivier took heart. They had had some hours start of him, but if they had not passed westward by any of the roads he had yet crossed, they might still be within the circle he was drawing about the town. The barefoot one would not find these ways easy going, and might have been forced to take frequent rests. At the worst, even if he missed them in the end, this meandering route must bring him round at last to the highroad by which he had first approached Shrewsbury from the south-east, and he could ride back into the town to Hugh Beringar’s welcome, none the worse for a little exercise in a fine evening.