Ellis Peters - Virgin in the Ice

The prior drew his tenant out of the group before it moved off from the gatehouse, and made them acquainted. Clearly Reyner had a warm relationship with his lord, and was ready to fall in cheerfully with whatever course Leonard suggested.

“I’ll take you there, brother, gladly. The poor man, to be out again in this, when it’s almost been the death of him once. And he making such a good recovery. A madness must have come on him, to want out on such a night.”

“Had you not better take two of our mules?” wondered the prior. “The place may not be far, but how far beyond may it not take you, if you should find a trace to follow? And your horse has been worked hard since coming here, Cadfael. Our beasts are fresh and hardy.”

It was not an offer to be refused. Mounted or afoot, travelling would be slow, but better mounted. Cadfael went to snatch a hasty dinner, and returned to help Reyner saddle the mules. They set forth eastward along a road by this time well trampled. The best of the day would last them perhaps four hours, and after that they must be prepared for a possible return of the snow, as well as fading light. They left Ludlow distant on their right hand, and went on along the beaten road. The sky hung heavy and grey before them, though a feeble sun still shone upon this stretch of their way.

“Surely it was not on the very highroad you found him?” said Cadfael, as Reyner made no move to turn aside.

“Very close, brother, a little to the north of it. We’d come down the slope below the Lacy woods, and all but fell over him lying naked there in the snow. I tell you,” said Reyner forcibly, “I’ll take it very ill if we lose him now, after such an escape, and him as near death when we picked him up as ever man was and lived to tell it. To filch a good man back from the grave, and cheat those devils who did their worst to thrust him under, that did my heart good. Well, please God we’ll haul him back from the edge a second time. I hear you had a lad went with him,” said Reyner, turning his far-sighted blue eyes on Cadfael. “One that was lost before time, and now to seek again. I call it handsome, in one so young, to stick like a burr where he could not persuade. We’ll be after the pair of them, every hale man who tills or keeps stock around these parts. We are near, brother. Here we leave the road and bear left.”

But not far. A shallow bowl only a few minutes from the road, lined with bushes and two squat hawthorn trees on the upper side, to the north.

“Just here he lay,” said Reyner.

It had been well worth coming, for this posed glaring problems. It fitted the marauding pattern of that night, yes. The outlaws had come from their early raid south of the road, and crossed, it seemed, somewhere here, to climb to some track well known to them, by which they could return unnoticed into the wilderness of Titterstone Clee. Here they could well have happened on Brother Elyas, and killed him more for sport than for his gown and linen, though not despising the small pickings of the supposed corpse. Granted all that, but then, where was Sister Hilaria?

Cadfael turned to look northwards, into the gentle upland across which he had ridden with Yves before him. The brook where he had found Sister Hilaria lay somewhere up there, well away from the road. North and east from here, he judged at least a mile.

“Come up the fields with me, Reyner. There is a place I want to view again.”

The mules climbed easily, the wind having scoured away some of last night’s fall. Cadfael set his course by memory, but it did not fall far astray. One thin little brook clashed under the hooves, in the suave hollows the snow lay cushioned over brushes and low trees. They were long out of sight of the road, waves of snowy ground cutting them off, as they continued to climb. They hit the tributary of the Ledwyche brook somewhat downstream, had there been any stream flowing, from the place where Sister Hilaria had been laid, and retraced its gently rising course until they came to the unmistakable spot where the coffin-shaped hole had been hacked in the ice. Even the previous night’s snow, though it smoothed off the razor-sharp outlines, kept the remembrance alive. This was the place where her murderers had thrown and abandoned her.

More than a mile from where Brother Elyas had been battered and left for dead!

Not here, thought Cadfael, looking round at a hillside as bare and bleak, almost, as the bald, craggy head of Clee. It did not happen here. She was brought here afterwards. But why? These outlaws otherwise had left all their victims where they fell, and cared nothing to hide them. And if she had been brought here, from where? No one would choose to carry a dead body very far. Somewhere nearby there must be some kind of shelter.

“They’ll be running sheep, rather than cattle, up here,” he said, scanning the slopes above them.

“So they do, but they’ll have got the most of them folded now. It’s ten years since we had a spell such as this.”

“Then there’ll be a hut or two, somewhere about, for the shepherds’ use. Would you know where the nearest may be?”

“A piece back along the traverse here towards Bromfield, the half of a mile it might be.” That must be along the selfsame track Cadfael had ridden with Yves on his saddle-bow, going home to Bromfield from Thurstan’s assart in the forest. He could not recall seeing such a hut that day, but evening had been setting in by then.

“We’ll go that way,” he said, and turned his mule back along the path.

A good half-mile it certainly was before Reyner pointed left, to a shallow bowl below the track. The roof of the hut was almost completely screened by the mounds of snow that covered it. Only a straight black shadow under the eaves betrayed its presence from above. They descended the gentle slope to come round to the southern side, where the door was, and found it thrust open, and saw by the sill of the previous night’s snow along the threshold that it had not stood thus longer than a matter of hours, for within there was no snow, except for the infinitely fine powder blown between the boards.

Cadfael halted on the brink. In two places, close together, a foot had trampled flat the ridge of snow which had built against the door while it remained closed. A line of icicles fringed the eaves, and successive noons had warmed them enough to drip for a brief while each day, and freeze again before the approach of evening, for the roof was open to the south, and sheltered from the north by the rise of the land. A slow drip fell as Cadfael gazed, and a line of fine black perforations punctured the whiteness of the layer of snow below the eaves, where the wind during the night had already thinned it. At the corner of the hut the drips had bored a small pit, revealing the ripe, rounded brownness of something that was not turf nor soil. Cadfael stirred more snow away with the toe of his boot.

Frost is a great preserver. All the sunshine of all the noons had not produced thaw enough to do more than pierce the crest of this pile of horse-droppings with one tiny shaft. The next snow would cover it again, and the frost seal it. But the hole the drip had bored in it went too deep to be the result of this one day’s grudging sun. No knowing exactly how many days had passed since a horse had stood here, but Cadfael judged it might be as many as five or six. Tethered? The wood of the hut was rough-hewn, and there were props under the low, projecting eaves to which a bridle could easily be hitched.

He might never have noticed the hair, pale almost to white as it was, if a sudden rising breeze had not caused it to flutter, somewhat above the level of his eye, from the rough timber of the corner. Had it been motionless it would have passed for one with the snow plastered and frozen there. It was the wind that had shaken the weight from its waving strands, and given it play to catch his eyes. He detached it carefully from the splinters that held it, and smoothed out in his hand a tress of coarse, springy hair the color of fading primroses. The horse tethered here had rubbed shoulder and mane against the corner of the hut, and left a token behind.