Ellis Peters - Virgin in the Ice

“He was only newly arrived in England from the Holy Land, he knew nothing of it. If you send now, you may hear of him in Gloucester, he is of the empress’s party.” The lion shrugged that off indifferently. In the civil war he belonged to neither side, and cared nothing which side others chose. He had set up his own party, and acknowledged no other. But certainly he would extort ransom as cheerfully from one as from the other. “His name is Laurence d’Angers,” said Yves, “my mother’s brother.” That name was known, and welcomed with satisfaction. “He will pay handsomely to have me back,” said Yves.

“So sure?” The bearded man laughed. “Uncles are not always to anxious to ransom nephews who will one day come into great estates. Some have been known to prefer to leave them unredeemed, to be hustled out of the world as unprofitable, and come into the inheritance themselves.”

“He would not come into my inheritance,” said Yves. “I have a sister, and she is not here in this extreme.” It pierced him with sudden renewed dismay that he did not know where she was at this moment, and her situation might be just as dire as his own, but he kept his voice steady and his countenance wooden. “And my uncle is an honorable man,” he said stiffly. “He will ransom me and never grudge it. So he gets me back alive and undamaged,” he added emphatically.

“Complete to every hair,” said the lion, laughing, “if the price is right.” He gestured to the fellow who stood at Yves’ shoulder. “I put him in your charge. Feed him, let him warm himself by the fire, but if you let him slip through your fingers, your own neck pays for it. When he has eaten, lock him away safe in the tower. He’ll be worth far more than all the plunder we’ve brought from Whitbache.”

Brother Elyas awoke from the dreamless peace of sleep to the agonizing dream of waking life. It was daylight, lines of pale morning slid between the boards of the hut, cold and white. He was alone. But there had been someone else, that he remembered. There had been a boy, a boy who had kept him company sturdily, and lain by him in the hay, a warmth by his side. Now there was no one. Brother Elyas missed him. In the snow they had clung together in mutual kindness, trying to alleviate more than the cold and the cruelty of the wind. Whatever became of him, he must find the boy, and make sure that no harm should come to him. Children have a right to life, a right so many of their elders have forfeited by follies, by failures, by sins. He was outcast, but the boy was innocent and pure, and must not be surrendered to danger and death.

Elyas rose, and went to open the door. Under the eaves, where the wind had driven the snow away, leaving only a thin layer, the small footmarks showed clearly, only the powdering of a late squall clouding them. They turned right, down the slope, and there in the deeper snow a short, vigorous body had ploughed a jagged furrow, round the bank of bushes, down into the coppice of trees.

Elyas followed where the boy had led. Beyond the belt of trees there was a beaten track that crossed on an almost level course, climbing gently towards the east. Horses had passed this way, and men afoot with them, enough men to carve out a flattened road. They had come from the west. Had they taken the boy away with them towards the east? There would be no tracing one child’s passage here, but surely he had run and struggled down the slope to join them.

In his dream, which neither cold nor pain could penetrate, and only the memory of the boy could influence, Brother Elyas turned towards the east, and set out along the track the unknown company had taken. The furrow they had ploughed through barren level, even fall and drift was simple to follow, the weaving route was surely older than all the pathways here, made to render the climb equable and easy. It wound along the hillside in a long curve. Elyas had gone some three hundred paces when he saw beneath him the first splash of dark red in the white.

Someone had shed blood. Only a little blood, but a dotted line of ruby beads continued from it, and in a few moments he found another blossom of blood at his feet. The sun was rising now, pale through the mist, which lifted with the day. The red gleamed, frozen on the surface of the snow. Not even the brief noon sun would thaw it away, though the wind might spread blown snow over it. Brother Elyas followed, drop by drop along the way where someone had bled. Blood can requite blood. If someone had taken and hurt the boy, then a man already fingered by despair and death might still die to some purpose.

Immune from any further onslaughts of cold, pain and fear, on sandalled feet through frozen drifts, Brother Elyas went in search of Yves.

Brother Cadfael came out from High Mass with Prior Leonard, into the brief and grudging sunshine of the middle hours of the day, and the sudden glitter reflected from the banked piles of snow. A number of the priory tenants had mustered to help in the search for the missing pair, while the light was favorable and no snow falling. Prior Leonard pointed out one of them, a big, bluff fellow in his prime, with red hair just salted with grey, and the weather beaten face and far-gazing blue eyes of the hillman.

“That is Reyner Dutton, who brought Brother Elyas in to us in the first place. I feel shame to think what he must be feeling, now the poor man has slipped through our fingers after all.”

“No blame at all to you,” said Cadfael glumly. “The fault was mine, if there’s any question of blame.” He studied Reyner’s solid person thoughtfully. “You know, Leonard, I have been wondering about this flight. Which of us has not! It seems Elyas, once something set him off, went about it with great determination. This was no simple clambering out of bed and wandering at large. Barely a quarter of an hour, and they were well away. And plainly the boy could not turn or dissuade him, but he would go wherever it was he was going. He had an end in view. It need not be a reasonable end, but it meant something to him. How if he had suddenly recalled the attack that all but killed him, and set off to return to that place where it happened? That was the last he knew, before memory and almost life were taken from him. He might feel driven to resume there, in this twilight state of his mind.”

Prior Leonard conceded, though doubtfully: “It might be so. Or may he not have recalled his own errand from Pershore, and started back to his duty there? It might take a man so, his wits being still so shaken up in him.”

“It comes to me now,” said Cadfael earnestly, “that I have never been to the spot where Elyas was attacked, though I suppose it must be not far from where our sister was killed. And that again has been fretting me.” But he forbore from spelling out what he found peculiar about it, for Leonard had been a man of the cloister from puberty, serenely content and blissfully innocent, and there was no need to trouble him by reflecting aloud that the night of Hilaria’s death had been a blizzard as intense as the night just past, that even lust has its preference for a modicum of shelter, and of shelter he had seen none close to her icy grave. A bed of snow and ice, and a coverlet of howling wind, do not constitute the most conducive of circumstances for rape. “I was meaning to go out with the rest,” he said, “as soon as I have take a bite to eat. How if I should borrow Reyner to bring me to the place where he found Brother Elyas? As well begin there as anywhere.”

“That you could,” agreed the prior, “if you are sure the girl will bide quietly here, and not try to take some action of her own.”

“She’ll bide,” said Cadfael confidently, “and give you no trouble.” And so she would, but not for his asking. She would wait here obediently because one Olivier, a paragon, had ordered her to do so. “Come, and we’ll ask your man if he’ll be my guide.”