Ellis Peters - Sanctuary Sparrow

Things were coming back to him, however foggily, including one incident he would just as soon his mother should not hear about. Money was money, of course, the old woman had the right of it there, but it’s not every day a man marries off his heir, and marries him, moreover, to a most respectable further amount of money. A little flourish towards a miserable menial might surely be forgiven a man, in the circumstances. But would she think so? He regretted it bitterly himself, now, reflecting on the disastrous result of his rare impulse of generosity. No, she must not hear of it!

Walter nursed his thick head and vain regrets, and took some small comfort in seeing his son and his new daughter-in-law off to church at Saint Mary’s, in their best clothes and properly linked, Margery’s hand primly on Daniel’s arm. The money Margery had brought with her, and would eventually bring, mattered now more than anything else until the lost contents of his strong-box could be recovered. His head ached again fiercely when he thought of it. Whoever had done that to the house of Aurifaber should and must hang, if there was any justice in this world.

When Hugh Beringar came, with a sergeant in attendance, to hear for himself what the aggrieved victim had to tell, Walter was ready and voluble. But he was none too pleased when Dame Juliana, awaiting Brother Cadfael’s visit, and foreseeing more strictures as to her behaviour if she wanted to live long, took it into her head to forestall the lecture by being downstairs when her mentor came and stumped her way down, cane in hand, prodding every tread before her and scolding Susanna away from attempting to check her. She was firmly settled on her bench in the corner, propped with cushions, when Cadfael came, and challenged him with a bold, provocative stare. Cadfael chose not to gratify her with homilies, but delivered the ointment he had brought for her, and reassured himself of the evenness of her breathing and heart, before turning to a Walter grown unaccountably short of words.

‘I’m glad to see you so far restored. The tales they told of you were twenty years too soon. But I’m sorry for your loss. I hope it may yet be recovered.’

‘Faith, so do I,’ said Walter sourly. ‘You tell me that rogue you have in sanctuary has no part of it on him, and while you hold him fast within there he can hardly unearth and make off with it. For it must be somewhere, and I trust the sheriff’s men here to find it.’

‘You’re very certain of your man, then?’ Hugh had got him to the point where he had taken his valuables and gone to stow them away in the shop, and there he had suddenly grown less communicative. ‘But he had already been expelled some time earlier, as I understand it, and no one has yet testified to seeing him lurking around your house after that.’

Walter cast a glance at his mother, whose ancient ears were pricked and her faded but sharp eyes alert. ‘Ah, but he could well have stayed in hiding, all the same. What was there to prevent it in the dark of the night?’

‘So he could,’ agreed Hugh unhelpfully, ‘but there’s no man so far claims he did. Unless you’ve recalled something no one else knows? Did you see anything of him after he was thrown out?’

Walter shifted uneasily, looked ready to blurt out a whole indictment, and thought better of it in Juliana’s hearing. Brother Cadfael took pity on him.

‘It might be well,’ he said guilelessly, ‘to take a look at the place where this assault was made. Master Walter will show us his workshop, I am sure.’

Walter rose to it thankfully, and ushered them away with alacrity, along the passage and in again at the door of his shop. The street door was fast, the day being Sunday, and he closed the other door carefully behind them, and drew breath in relief.

‘Not that I’ve anything to conceal from you, my lord, but I’d as lief my mother should not have more to worry her than she has already.’ Plausible cover, at any rate, for the awe of her in which he still went. ‘For this is where the thing happened, and you see from this door how the coffer lies in the opposite corner. And there was I, with the key in the lock and the lid laid back against the wall, wide open, and my candle here on the shelf close by. The light shining straight down into the coffer - you see? - and what was within in plain view. And suddenly I hear a sound behind me, and there’s this minstrel, this Liliwin, creeping in at the door.’

‘Threateningly?’ asked Hugh, straight-faced. If he did not wink at Cadfael, his eyebrow was eloquent. ‘Armed with a cudgel?’

‘No,’ admitted Walter, ‘rather humbly, to all appearance. But then I’d heard him and turned. He was barely into the doorway, he could have dropped his weapon outside when he saw I was ware of him.’

‘But you did not hear it fall? Nor see any sign of such?’

‘No, that I own.’

‘Then what had he to say to you?’

‘He begged me to do him right, for he said he had been cheated of two thirds of his promised fee. He said it was hard on a poor man to be so blamed and docked of his money, and pleaded with me to make it good as promised.’

‘And did you?’ asked Hugh.

‘I tell you honestly, my lord, I could not say he had been hardly used, considering the worth of the pitcher, but I did think him a poor, sad creature who had to live, whatever the rights or wrongs of it. And I gave him another penny - good silver, minted in this town. But not a word of this to Dame Juliana, if you’ll be so good. She’ll have to know, now it’s all come back to me, that he dared creep in and ask, but no need for her to know I gave him anything. She would be affronted, seeing she had denied him.’

‘Your thought for her does you credit,’ said Hugh gravely. ‘What then? He took your bounty and slunk out?’

‘He did. But I wager he has not told you anything of this begging visit. A poor return I got for the favour!’ Walter was sourly vengeful still.

‘You mistake, for he has. He has told us this very same tale that you now tell. And confided to the abbey’s keeping, while he remains there, the two silver pence which is all he has on him. Tell me, had you closed the lid of the coffer as soon as you found yourself observed?’

‘I did!’ said Walter fervently. ‘And quickly! But he had seen. I never gave him another thought at the time but - see here, my lord, how it follows! As soon as he was gone, or I thought he was gone, I opened the coffer again, and was bending over it laying Margery’s dowry away, when I was clouted hard from behind, and that’s the last I knew till I opened an eye in my own bed, hours later. If it was two minutes after that fellow crept out of the door, when someone laid me flat, it was not a moment more. So who else could it be?’

‘But you did not actually see who struck you?’ Hugh pressed. ‘Not so much as a glimpse? No shadow cast, to give him a shape or size? No sense of a bulk heaving up behind you?’

‘Never a chance.’ Walter might be vindictive, but he was honest. ‘See, I was stooping over the coffer when it seemed the wall fell on me, and I pitched asprawl, head-down into the box, clean out of the world. I heard nothing and saw nothing, not even a shadow, no - the last thing I recall was the candle flickering, but what is there in that? No, depend on it, that rogue had seen what I had in my store before I clapped down the lid. Was he going tamely away with his penny, with all that money there to take? Not he! Nor hide nor hair of any other did I see in here that night. You may be certain of it, the jongleur is your man.’

‘And it may still be so,’ admitted Hugh, parting from Cadfael on the bridge some twenty minutes later. ‘Enough to tempt any poor wretch with but two coins to rub together. Whether he had any such thought in his head before the candle shone on our friend’s hoard or no. Equally, I grant the lad may not even have realised what lay beneath his hand, or seen anything but his own need and the thin chance of getting a kinder reception from the goldsmith than from that ferocious mother of his. He may have crept away thanking God for his penny and never a thought of wrong. Or he may have picked up a stone or a stave and turned back.’