Ellis Peters - Virgin in the Ice

They found her, after some questing and probing in new snow, swept the fresh fall from the ice, and looked down upon her, a girl in a mirror, a girl spun from glass.

“Good God!” said Hugh in awe. “She’s younger than the boy!” So slight, so childlike, did the shadowy form appear.

But they were there, perforce, to break her rest and take her away for Christian burial, though it seemed almost a violation to shatter the smoothness of the ice that encase her. They did it with care, well aside from the delicate, imprisoned flesh, and it proved hard work enough. For all the bite of the frost, they were sweating when they hoisted out heavily the girl and her cold coffin, laid her like a piece of statuary in the thongs of the litter, covered her with the linen cloth, and carried her slowly back to Bromfield. Not a drop fell from the ice until they had it stowed privately in the chill, bare mortuary of the priory. Then the glittering edges began to soften and slide, and drip into the channel where the water flowed away from the washing of the dead.

The girl lay remote and pale within her lucid shroud, and yet grew steadily more human and closer to life, to pain and pity and violence, and all the mortal lot of mankind. Cadfael dared not leave the place for long, because the boy Yves was now up and active, and inquisitive about everything, and no one could guess where he would appear next. He was well brought up, and his manners were charming, but with his inbred conviction of privilege and his very proper thirteen-year-old energy, he might yet prove a hazard.

It was past ten, and High Mass in progress, when the shell of ice had dwindled so far that the girl began to emerge, the tips of thin, pale fingers and stretched toes, her nose, as yet only a minute pearl, and the first curling strands of hair, a fine lace on either side her forehead. It was those curls that first caught Cadfael’s acute attention. For they were short. He wound a few fine threads on his finger, and they made but a turn and a half. And they were no darker than dark gold, and would be even fairer as they dried. Then he bent to the calm stare of her open eyes, still thinly veiled with ice. Their color seemed to him the soft, dim purple of irises, or the darkest grey of lavender flowers.

The face emerged as Mass ended. After the air touched her, bruises began to darken on cheek and mouth. The tips of her small breasts broke the glaze over them. And now Cadfael could see clearly the smear that darkened her flesh and her linen there, on the right side, a reddish mark like a graze, faintly mottled from shoulder to breast. He knew the traces of blood. The ice had taken her before the stilling water could wash the stain away. Now it might pale as the remaining ice thawed, but he would know how it had lain, and where to look for the source.

Well before noon she was freed of her shell, and softening into his hands, slender and young, her small, shapely head covered all over with an aureole of short bronze curls, like an angel in an Annunciation. Cadfael went to fetch Prior Leonard, and they cared for her together, not yet to wash her body, not until Hugh Beringar had viewed it, but to compose her worthily in her everlasting stillness. To the throat they covered her with a linen sheet, and made her ready to be seen.

Hugh came, and stood by her silently. Eighteen could well be her age, so white and slim and tranquil, gone far beyond them. And beautiful, as reported? Yes, that she was. But was this the dark, headstrong, spoiled daughter of the nobility, who had insisted on her own way in despite of the times, the winter, the war and all?

“Look!” said Cadfael, and turned back the linen to show the crumpled folds of her shift, just as they had emerged from the ice. The dull, reddish smear speckled her right shoulder, the edge of her shift, and the creases over her right breast.

“Stabbed?” said Hugh, looking up into Cadfael’s face.

“There is no wound. See now!” He drew down the linen and showed the flesh beneath. Only a smudge or two showed on her pale skin. He wiped them away, and she shone white without blemish. “Certainly not stabbed. The night frost that took her closed in very quickly, and preserved these marks, faint as they are. But she did not bleed. Or if she did,” he added bleakly, “it was not from knife-wounds, and not there. More likely she fought him - him or them, such wolves hunt happiest in packs! - and drew blood. A clawed face, it might be, or a hand or wrist as she tried to force him off. Bear it in mind, Hugh, as I will also.” He covered her again reverently. The alabaster face looked up from veiled eyes into the vault, supremely unmoved, and her head of clipped curls was beginning to shine like a halo as it dried.

“She begins to bruise,” said Hugh, and drew a fingertip over her cheekbone and down to the faint discolorations round her lips. “But her throat is unmarked. She was not strangled.”

“Smothered, surely, in the act of ravishment.”

They were all three so intent upon the dead girl that they had not heard the footsteps that approached the closed door of the room, and even had they been listening, the footsteps were light enough to be missed, though they came briskly and without conceal. The first they knew of the boy’s coming was the white burst of reflected light from the snow, as the door was opened wide to the wall, and Yves marched over the threshold with the innocent boldness of his kind. No creeping ingratiatingly through a narrow chink for him, nothing he did was done by half-measures. The abruptness with which they all whirled upon him, and their frowning consternation gave him sharp pause and mild offense. Both Hugh and Prior Leonard stepped quickly between him and the trestle on which the body lay.

“You should not be here, child,” said the prior, flustered.

“Why should I not, Father? No one has told me I should be at fault. I was looking for Brother Cadfael.”

“Brother Cadfael will come out to you in a little while. Go back to the guest-hall and wait for him there …”

It was late to ward him off, he had seen, beyond the sheltering shoulders, enough to tell him what lay behind. The linen sheet, quickly drawn up, the unmistakable shape, and one glimpse of short, bright hair where the linen, too hastily drawn, had folded back on itself. His face grew still and wary, his eyes large, and his tongue was silenced.

The prior laid a hand gently on his shoulder and made to turn him back to the doorway. “Come, you and I will go together. Whatever is to be told, you shall hear later, but leave it now.”

Yves stood his ground, and went on staring.

“No,” said Cadfael unexpectedly, “let him come.” He came out from behind the trestle, and took a step or two towards the boy. “Yves, you are a sensible man, no need to pretend to you, after your travels, that violence and danger and cruelty do not exist, and men do not die. We have here a dead body, not known to us. I would have you look at it, if you will, and say if you know this face. You need not fear anything ill to see.”

The boy drew near steadily and with set face, and eyed the shrouded form with nothing worse than awe. Doubtful if it had ever entered his head, thought Cadfael, that this might be his sister, or indeed a woman. He had seen the dilated eyes fix on the short, curling hair; it was a young man Yves expected. Nevertheless, Cadfael would have approached this somewhat differently if he had not been certain already, in his own mind, that this dead girl, whoever she might be, was not Ermina Hugonin. Beyond that he had only a pitiful suspicion. But Yves would know.

He drew down the sheet from her face. The boy’s hands, clenched together before him, tightened abruptly. He drew in breath hard, but made no other sound for a long moment. He shook a little, but not much. The wide-eyed stare he raised to Cadfael’s questioning face was one of shocked bewilderment, almost of disbelief.