Ellis Peters - St Peter's Fair

Cadfael received the abbot’s dispensation to attend the hearing at the castle, and to escort the abbey’s bereaved guest, without question. A civic duty could not be evaded, whether by secular or monastic. Radulfus had already shown himself both an austere but just disciplinarian and a shrewd and strong-minded business man. He owed his preferment to the abbacy as much to the king as to the papal legate, and valued and feared for the order of the realm at least as keenly as for the state of his own cure. Consequently, he had a use for those few among the brothers who shared his wide experience of matters outside the cloister.

“This death,” he said, closeted with Cadfael alone after Beringar’s departure, “casts a shadow upon our house and our fair. Such a burden cannot be shifted to other shoulders. I require of you a full account of what passes at this hearing.

It was of me that the elders of the town asked a relief I could not grant. On me rests the load of resentment that drove those younger men to foolish measures.

They lacked patience and thought, and they were to blame, but that does not absolve me. If the man’s death has arisen out of my act, even though I could not act otherwise, I must know it, for I have to answer for it, as surely as the man who struck him down.”

“I shall bring you all that I myself see and hear, Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.

“I require also all that you think, brother. You saw part of what happened yesterday between the dead man and the living youth. Is it possible that it could have brought about such a death as this? Stabbed in the back? It is not commonly the method of anger.”

“Not commonly.” Cadfael had seen many deaths in the open anger of battle, but he knew also of rages that had bred and festered into killings by stealth, with the anger as hot as ever, but turned sour by brooding. “Yet it is possible. But there are other possibilities. It may indeed be what it first seems, a mere crude slaughter for the clothes on the body and the rings on the fingers, opportune plunder in the night, when no one chanced to be by. Such things happen, where men are gathered together and there is money changing hands.”

“It is true,” said Radulfus, coldly and sadly. “The ancient evil is always with us.”

“Also, the man is of great importance in his trade and his region, and he may have enemies. Hate, envy, rivalry, are as powerful motives even as gain. And at a great fair such as ours, enemies may be brought together, far from the towns where their quarrels are known, and their acts might be guessed at too accurately. Murder is easier and more tempting, away from home.”

“Again, true,” said the abbot. “Is there more?”

“There is. There is the matter of the girl, niece and heiress to the dead man. She is of great beauty,” said Cadfael plainly, asserting his right to recognise and celebrate even the beauty of women, though their enjoyment he had now voluntarily forsworn, “and there are three men in her uncle’s service, shut on board a river barge with her. Only one of them old enough, it may be, to value his peace more. One, I think, God’s simpleton, but not therefore blind, or delivered from the flesh. And one whole, able, every way a man, and enslaved to her. And this one it was who followed his master from the booth on the fairground, some say a quarter of an hour after him, some say a little more. God forbid I should therefore point a finger at an honest man. But we speak of possibilities. And will speak of them no more until, or unless, they become more than possibilities.”

“That is my mind, also,” said Abbot Radulfus, stirring and almost smiling. He looked at Cadfael steadily and long. “Go and bear witness, brother, as you are charged, and bring me word again. In your report I shall set my trust.”

Emma had on, perforce, the same gown and bliaut she had worn the evening before, the gown dark blue like her eyes, but the tunic embroidered in many colours upon bleached linen. The only concession she could make to mourning was to bind up her great wealth of hair, and cover it from sight within a borrowed wimple.

Nevertheless, she made a noble mourning figure. In the severe white frame her rounded, youthful face gained in concentrated force and meaning what it lost in pure grace. She had a look of single-minded gravity, like a lance in rest.

Brother Cadfael could not yet see clearly where the lance was aimed.

When she caught sight of him approaching, she looked at him with pleased recognition, as the man behind the lance might have looked round at the fixed, partisan faces of his friends before the bout, but never shifted the focus of her soul’s intent, which reached out where he could not follow.

“Brother Cadfael - have I your name right? It’s Welsh, is it not? You were kind, yesterday. Lady Beringar says you will show me where to find the master-carpenter. I have to order my uncle’s coffin, to take him back to Bristol.” She was quite composed, yet still as simple and direct as a child.

“Have we time, before we must go to the castle?”

“It’s on the way,” said Cadfael comfortably. “You need only tell Martin Bellecote, whatever you ask of him he’ll see done properly.”

“Everyone is being very kind,” she said punctiliously, like a well brought-up little girl giving due thanks. “Where is my uncle’s body now? I should care for it myself, it is my duty.”

“That you cannot yet,” said Cadfael. “The sheriff has him at the castle, he must needs see the body for himself, and have the physician also view it. You need be put to no distress on that account, the abbot has given orders. Your uncle will be brought with all reverence to lie in the church here, and the brothers will make him decent for burial. I think he might well wish, could he tell you so now, that you should leave all to us. His care for you would reach so far, and your obedience could not well deny him.”

Cadfael had seen the dead man, and felt strongly that she should not have the same experience. Nor was it for her sake entirely that he willed so. The man she had respected and admired in his monumental dignity, living, had the right to be preserved for her no less decorously in death.

He had found the one argument that could deflect her absolute determination to take charge of all, and escape nothing. She thought about it seriously as they passed out at the gatehouse side by side, and he knew by her face the moment when she accepted it.

“But he did believe that I ought to take my full part, even in his business. He wished me to travel with him, and learn the trade as he knew it. This is the third such journey I have made with him.” That reminded her that it must also be the last. “At least,” she said hesitantly, “I may give money to have Masses said for him, here where he died? He was a very devout man, I think he would like that.”

Well, her reserves of money might now be far longer than her reserves of peace of mind were likely to be; she could afford to buy herself a little consolation, and prayers are never wasted.

“That you may surely do.”

“He died unshriven,” she said, with sudden angry grief against the murderer who had deprived him of confession and absolution.

“Through no fault of his own. So do many. So have saints, martyred without warning. God knows the record without needing word or gesture. It’s for the soul facing death that the want of shriving is pain. The soul gone beyond knows that pain for needless vanity. Penitence is in the heart, not in the words spoken.”

They were out on the highroad then, turning left towards the reflected sparkle that was the river between its green, lush banks, and the stone bridge over it, that led through the drawbridge turret to the town gate. Emma had raised her head, and was looking at Brother Cadfael along her shoulder, with faint colour tinting her creamy cheeks, and a sparkle like a shimmer of light from the river in her eyes. He had not seen her smile until this moment, and even now it was a very wan smile, but none the less beautiful.