Ellis Peters - Sanctuary Sparrow

And he was off at an energetic run to rejoin his friends, leaving Cadfael very thoughtful. A coin silted into the gravel under the bank there, where the river made a shallow cove, and clawed up in the fist of a scrambling urchin who happened to sprawl on his face there in evading pursuit. Nothing so very strange in that. All manner of things might turn up in the waters of Severn, queerer things than a lost coin. All that made it notable was that this one should turn up in that particular place. Too many cobweb threads were tangling around the Aurifaber burgage, nothing that occurred there could any longer be taken as ordinary or happening by chance. And what to make of all these unrelated strands was more than Cadfael could yet see.

He went back to his seedlings, which at least were innocent of any mystery, and worked out the rest of the afternoon until it drew near the time to return for Vespers; but there was still a good half-hour in hand when he was hailed from the river, and looked round to see Madog rowing upstream, and crossing the main current to come to shore where Cadfael was standing. He had abandoned his coracle for a light skiff, quite capable, as Cadfael reflected with a sudden inspiration, of ferrying an inquisitive brother across to take a look for himself at that placid inlet where the boy had dredged up the coin of which he thought so poorly.

Madog brought his boat alongside, and held it by an oar dug into the soft turf of the bank. ‘Well, Brother Cadfael, I hear the old dame’s gone, then. Trouble broods round that house. They tell me you were there to see her set out.’

Cadfael owned it. ‘After fourscore years I wonder if death should be accounted troublous. But yes, she’s gone. Before midnight she left them.’ Whether with a blessing or a curse, or only a grim assertion of her dominance over them and defence of them, loved or unloved, was something he had been debating in his own mind. For she could have spoken, but had said only what she thought fit to say, nothing to the point. The disputes of the day, surely relevant, she had put clean away. They were her people. Whatever needed judgement and penance among them was her business, no concern of the world outside. And yet those few enigmatic words she had deliberately let him hear. Him, her opponent, physician and - was friend too strong a word? To her priest she had responded only with the suggested movements of her eyelids saying yea and nay, confessing to frailties, agreeing to penitence, desiring absolution. But no words.

‘Left them at odds,’ said Madog shrewdly, his seamed oak face breaking into a wry smile. ‘When have they been anything else? Avarice is a destroying thing, Cadfael, and she bred them all in her own shape, all get and precious little give.’

‘I bred them all,’ she had said, as though she admitted a guilt to which her eyelids had said neither yea nor nay for the priest.

‘Madog,’ said Cadfael, ‘row me over to the bank under their garden, and as we go I’ll tell you why. They hold the strip outside the wall down to the waterside. I’d be glad to have a look there.’

‘Willingly!’ Madog drew the skiff close. ‘For I’ve been up and down this river from the water-gate, where Peche kept his boat, trying to find any man who can give me word of seeing it or him after the morning of last Monday, and never a glimpse anywhere. And I doubt Hugh Beringar has done better enquiring in the town after every fellow who knew the locksmith, and every tavern he ever entered. Come inboard, then, and sit yourself down steady, she rides a bit deeper and clumsier with two aboard.’

Cadfael slid down the overhanging slope of grass, stepped nimbly upon the thwart, and sat. Madog thrust off and turned into the current. ‘Tell, then! What is there over there to draw you?’

Cadfael told him what he had witnessed, and in the telling it did not seem much. But Madog listened attentively enough, one eye on the surface eddies of the river, running bland and playful now, the other, as it seemed, on some inward vision of the Aurifaber household from old matriarch to new bride.

‘So that’s what’s caught your fancy! Well, whatever it may mean, here’s the place. That Foregate lad left his marks, look where he hauled his toes up after him, and the turf so moist and tender.’

A quiet and almost private place it was, once the skiff was drawn in until its shallow draught gravelled. A little inlet where the water lay placid, clean speckled gravel under it, and even in that clear bottom the boy’s clutching hands had left small indentations. Out of one of those hollows - the right hand, Cadfael recalled - the small coin had come, and he had brought it ashore with him to examine at leisure. Withies of both willow and alder grew out from the very edge of the water on either side of the plane of grass which opened out above into a broad green slope, steep enough to drain readily, smooth enough to provide an airy cushion for bleaching linen. Only from across the river could this ground be viewed, on this town shore it was screened both ways by the bushes. Clean, washed, white pebbles, some of considerable size, had been piled inshore of the bushes for weighting down the linens spread here to dry on washing days when the weather was favourable. Cadfael eyed them and noted the one larger stone, certainly fallen from the town wall, which had not their water-smoothed polish, but showed sharp corners and clots of mortar still adhering. Left here as it had rolled from the crest, perhaps used sometimes for tying up boats in the shallows.

‘D’you see ought of use to you?’ asked Madog, holding his skiff motionless with an oar braced into the gravel. The boy Griffin had long since enjoyed his bathe, dried and clothed himself, and carried away his reclaimed coin to the locksmith’s shop where John Boneth now presided. He had known John for a long time as second only to his master; for him John was now his master in succession.

‘All too much!’ said Cadfael.

There were the boy’s traces, clutching hands under the clear water, scrabbling toes above in the grass. Down here he had found his trophy, above he had sat to burnish and examine it, and had it snatched from him by Griffin. Who knew it as his master’s, and was honest as only the simple can be. Here all round the boat the withies crowded, there above in the sward lay the pile of heavy pebbles and the fallen stone. Here swaying alongside danced the little rafts of water-crowfoot, under the leaning alders. And most ominous of all, here in the sloping grass verge, within reach of his hand, not one, but three small heads of reddish purple blossoms stood up bravely in the grass, the fox-stones for which they had hunted in vain downstream.

The piled pebbles and the one rough stone meant nothing as yet to Madog, but the little spires of purple blossoms certainly held his eyes. He looked from them to Cadfael’s face, and back to the sparkling shallow where a man could not well drown, if he was in his senses.

‘Is this the place?’

The fragile, shivering white rafts of crowfoot danced under the alders, delicately anchored. The little grooves left by the boy’s fingers very gradually shifted and filled, the motes of sand and gravel sliding down in the quiver of water to fill them. ‘Here at the foot of their own land?’ said Madog, shaking his head. ‘Is it certain? I’ve found no other place where this third witness joins the other two.’

‘Under the certainty of Heaven,’ said Cadfael soberly, ‘nothing is ever quite certain, but this is as near as a man can aim. Had he stolen and been found out? Or had he found out too much about the one who had stolen, and was fool enough to let it be known what he knew? God sort all! Ferry me back now, Madog, I must hurry back to Vespers.’

Madog took him, unquestioning, except that he kept his deep-browed and sharp-sighted old eyes fixed on Cadfael’s face all the way across to the Gaye.