Ellis Peters - Sanctuary Sparrow

Jerome, if he had not explicit orders, had received his charge from Prior Robert’s knotted brow and quivering nostril. So low and ragged and miserable a manifestation of humanity as Liliwin, lodged here within the pale, irked Robert like a burr working through his habit and fretting his aristocratic skin. He would have no peace while the alien body remained, he wanted it removed, and the symmetry of his life restored. To be fair, not merely his own life, but the life of this house, which fretted and itched with the infection thus hurled in from the world without. The presence of terror and pain is disruptive indeed.

‘All the abbot wants from me is an account of how my patients fare,’ said Cadfael, with unwonted magnanimity towards the narrow preoccupations of creatures so uncongenial to him as Robert and his clerk. For their distress, however strange to him, was still comprehensible. The walls did, indeed, tremble, the sheltered souls did quake. ‘And I have burdens enough with them, and am hardly looking for any others. Is that lad fed and doctored? That’s all my business with him.’

‘Brother Oswin has taken care of him,’ said Jerome.

‘That’s well! Then I’ll go pay my respects to the lord abbot, and get to my dinner, for I missed breakfast, and those up there in the town are too distraught to think of offering a morsel.’

He wondered, however, as he crossed the court to the abbot’s lodging, how much of what he had gleaned he was about to impart. Salacious gossip can be of no interest to abbatial ears, nor was there much to be said about a tiny plaque of dried blood tethering a couple of flaxen hairs; not, at least, until the vagabond, with every hand against him and his life at stake, had exercised the right to answer for himself.

Abbot Radulfus received without surprise the news that the entire wedding party was united in insisting on the jongleur’s guilt. He was not, however, quite convinced that Daniel, or any other of those attending could be certain who had, or had not, been in full view throughout.

‘With a hall full of so many people, so much being drunk, and over so many hours of celebration, who can say how any man came and went? Yet so many voices all in one tale cannot be disregarded. Well, we must do our part, and leave the law to deal with the rest. The sergeant tells me his master the sheriff is gone to arbitrate in a dispute between neighbour knights in the east of the shire, but his deputy is due in the town before night.’

That was good news in Cadfael’s ear. Hugh Beringar would see to it that the search for truth and justice should not go sliding down the easiest way, and erase such minor details as failed to fit the pattern. Meantime, Cadfael had just such a detail to take up with Liliwin, besides restoring him the tools of his juggling trade. After dinner he went to look for him, and found him sitting in the cloister, with borrowed needle and thread, trying to cobble together the rents in his coat. Beneath the bandaged brow he had washed his face scrupulously, it showed pale and thin but clear-skinned, with good, even delicate features. And if he could not yet wash the dust and mire from his fair hair, at least he had combed it into decent order.

The sop first, perhaps, and then the switch! Cadfael sat down beside him, and dumped the cloth bundle in his lap. ‘Here’s a part of your property restored you, for an earnest. There, open it!’

But Liliwin already knew the faded wrapping. He sat gazing down for a moment in wonder and disbelief, and then untied the knotted cloth and sank his hand among his modest treasures with affection and pleasure, faintly flushing and brightening, as though for the first time recovering faith that some small comforts and kindnesses existed for him in the world.

‘But how did you get them? I never thought I should see them again. And you thought to ask for them... for me... That was kind!’

‘I did not even have to ask. That old dame who struck you, terror though she may be, is honest. She won’t keep what is not hers, if she won’t forgo a groat of what is. She sends them back to you.’ Not graciously, but no need to go into that. ‘There, take it for a good sign. And how do you find yourself today? Have they fed you?’

‘Very well! I’m to fetch my food from the kitchen at breakfast, dinner and supper.’ He sounded almost incredulous, naming three meals a day. ‘And they’ve given me a pallet in the porch here. I’m afraid to be away from the church at night.’ He said it simply and humbly. ‘They don’t all like it that I’m here. I stick in their craw like a husk.’

‘They’re accustomed to calm,’ said Cadfael sympathetically. ‘It is not calm you bring. You must make allowances, as they must. At least from tonight you may sleep secure. The deputy sheriff should be in town by this evening. In his authority, I promise you, you can trust.’

Trust would still come very hardly to Liliwin, after all he had experienced in a short life, but the toys he had tucked away so tenderly under his pallet were a promise. He bent his head over his patient stitching, and said no word.

‘And therefore,’ said Cadfael briskly, ‘You’d best consider on the half-tale you told me, and own to the part you left out. For you did not creep away so docilely as you let us all think, did you? What were you doing, hugging the doorpost of Master Walter’s workshop, long after you claim you had made off into the night? With the door open, and your head against the post, and the goldsmith’s coffer in full view... and also open? And he bending over it!’

Liliwin’s needle had started in his fingers and pricked his left hand. He dropped needle, thread and coat, and sat sucking his pierced thumb, and staring at Brother Cadfael with immense, frightened eyes. He began to protest shrilly: ‘I never went there... I know nothing about it... ‘ Voice and eyes sank together. He blinked down at his open hands, lashes long and thick as a well-bred cow’s brushing his staring cheekbones.

‘Child,’ said Cadfael, sighing, ‘you were there in the doorway, peering in. You left your mark there. A lad your size, with a bloodied head, leaned long enough against that doorpost to leave a little clot of his blood, and two flax-white hairs gummed into it. No, no other has seen it, it’s gone, blown away on the wind, but I saw it, and I know. Now tell me truth. What passed between you and him?’

He did not ask why Liliwin had lied in omitting this part of his story, there was no need. What, place himself there on the spot, there were the blow had been struck? Innocence would have avoided admission every bit as desperately as guilt.

Liliwin sat and shivered, fluttering like a leaf in that same wind which had carried off his stray hairs. Here in the cloister the air was still chilly, and he had only a patched shirt and hose on him, the half-mended coat lying on his knees. He swallowed hard and sighed.

‘It’s true, I did wait... It was not fair!’ he blurted, shaking. ‘I stayed there in the dark. They were not all as hard as she, I thought I might plead... I saw him go to the shop with a light and I followed. He was not so furious when the pitcher was broken, he did try to calm her, I dared approach him. I went in and pleaded for the fee I was promised, and he gave me a second penny. He gave it to me and I went. I swear it!’

He had sworn the other version, too. But fear does so, the fear bred of a lifetime’s hounding and battering.

‘And then you left? And you saw no more of him? More to the point still, did you see ought of any other who may have been lurking as you did, and entered to him afterwards?’

‘No, there was no one. I went, I was glad to go, it was all over. If he lives, he’ll tell you he gave me the second penny.’