Ellis Peters - The Virgin in the Ice

“What is it I do not know?”

There was no way but forward, and plainly. “What will give you no comfort in the hearing, and me no joy in the telling,” said Brother Cadfael simply. “On the night when your upland wolves sacked Druel’s house, they had already done as much to a lonely hamlet nearer here, barely two miles from Ludlow. Between the two, on their way back to their lair, it seems that they encountered, by cruel ill-luck, the two after whom you ask. It was already evening when they left Druel’s holding, and the night was wild, with high winds and blinding snow. It may be they went astray. It may be they tried to take shelter somewhere through the worst. They fell in the way of thieves and murderers.”

Her face was marble. Her hands gripped desperately at the arms of her chair, the knuckles bone-white. In a mere thread of a whisper she asked: “Dead?”

“Brother Elyas was brought back here barely alive. Your brother was watching with him last night when they both went out into the snow, who can guess why? Sister Hilaria we found dead.”

There was no sound from her for a long moment, no tear, no exclamation, no protest. She sat containing whatever grief and guilt and hopeless anger possessed her, and would show none of it to the world. After a while she asked in a low and level voice: “Where is she?”

“She is here, in the church, coffined and awaiting burial. In this iron frost we cannot break the ground, and it may be the sisters at Worcester will want to have her taken back to them when that is possible. Until then Father Prior will find her a tomb in the church.”

“Tell me,” said Ermina with bleak but quiet urgency, “all that befell her. Better to know the whole of it than to guess.”

In simple and plain words he told her the manner of that death. At the end of it she stirred out of her long stillness, and asked: “Will you take me to her? I should like to see her again.”

Without a word and without hesitation he rose, and led the way. His readiness she accepted thankfully; he knew that he had gained with her. She would not be hemmed in, or sheltered from what was her due. In the chapel where Sister Hilaria lay in her new coffin, made in the brothers’ own workshop and lined with lead, it was almost as cold as out in the frost, and the body had not suffered any flawing of its serene beauty. She was not yet covered. Ermina stood motionless by the trestles a long time, and then herself laid the white linen face-cloth back over the delicate face.

“I loved her very much,” she said, “and I have destroyed her. This is my work.”

“It is nothing of the kind,” said Cadfael firmly. “You must not take to yourself more than your due. What you yourself did, that you may rue, and confess, and do penance for, to your soul’s content, but you may not lift another man’s sins from his shoulders, or usurp God’s right to be the only judge. A man did this, ravisher and murderer, and he, and only he, must answer for it. Whatever action of any other creature may have thrown our sister in his way, he had command of the hands that killed and outraged her, he and no other. It’s of him her blood will be required.”

For the first time she shook, and when she would have spoken she had not her voice under control, and was forced to wait and wrestle for clear speech.

“But if I had not set my heart on that foolish marriage, if I had consented to go with Brother Elyas straight here to Bromfield, she would be living now…”

“Do we know that? Might not you, too, have fallen into such hands? Child, if men had not done as they did, any time these five centuries, of course things would have gone on differently, but need they have been better? There is no profit in ifs . We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil, and leave to God our good.”

Ermina wept, suddenly and irresistibly, but would not be seen to weep. She swept away from him to kneel trembling at the altar, and remained there a long time. He did not follow her, but waited patiently until she chose to rejoin him. When she came back her face was drained but calm. She looked very tired, and very young and vulnerable.

“Come back to the fire,” said Cadfael. “You’ll take cold here.”

She went with him docilely, glad to settle beside the hearth again. The shivering left her, she lay back and half-closed her eyes, but when he made a move as if to leave her she looked up quickly. “Brother Cadfael, when they sent from Worcester to ask for news of us, was there word said of our uncle d’Angers being in England?”

“There was. Not only in England but in Gloucester, with the empress.” That was what she had meant, though she had been feeling her way towards it cautiously. “Openly and fairly he asked leave to come into the king’s territories himself to look for you, and leave was refused. The sheriff promised a search by his own men, but would not admit any of the empress’s party.”

“And should any such be found here and taken—in the search of us—what would happen to him?”

“He would be held prisoner of war. It is the sheriff’s duty to deny to the king’s enemies the service of any fighting man who falls into his hands, you must not wonder at it. A knight lost to the empress is a knight’s gain to the king.” He saw how doubtfully and anxiously she eyed him, and smiled. “It is the sheriff’s duty. It is not mine. Among men of honor and decent Christian life I see no enemies, on either side. Mine is a different discipline. With any man who comes only to rescue and fetch away children to their proper guardian, I have no quarrel.”

She frowned momentarily at the word children, and then laughed, with angry honesty, at the very instinct that showed her still a child. “Then you would not betray such a man even to your friend?”

Cadfael sat down opposite her and settled himself comfortably, for it seemed she had matters on her mind, and wished to unburden herself. “I have told you, I take no side here, and Hugh Beringar would not expect me to go always his way in every particular. He does his work and I mine. But I must tell you that he has already some knowledge of a presence in these parts, a stranger, who came to Cleeton enquiring for all you three who left Worcester together. A countryman by his dress, they said, young, tall and dark, eyed and beaked like a hawk, black-haired and dark-skinned.” She was listening intently, her underlip caught between her teeth, and at every detail the color flamed and faded in her cheeks. “And one that wore a sword under his cloak,” said Cadfael.

She sat very still, making up her mind. The face at her shoulder in the torchlight of the gatehouse hung vividly in Cadfael’s imagination, and surely even more urgently in hers. For a moment he thought she would prevaricate, shrug off the image, declare her guide to be no more than she had said, a forester’s son. But then she leaned forward and began to speak with vehement eagerness.

“I will tell you! I will tell you, and not even exact any promise, for I know I need not. You will not give him up. What I said was true, that I was taken in and helped by the forester and his wife. But the second day that I was there with them, there came a youth asking for news of such a company as I had, before I shattered it. Dressed as I was when you first saw me today, still he knew me for what I was, and so did I him, for nothing could show him less than noble. He spoke French freely, but English a little slowly. He told me that my uncle had returned, and was in Gloucester with the empress, and had sent him secretly to find us and bring us safe to him. His errand is that, and nothing more, but here he goes with danger all about him, knowing he may fall into the sheriff’s hands.”

“He has eluded them so far,” said Cadfael mildly. “He may very well go on slipping through our fingers to the end, and hale you away with him to Gloucester.”