Ellis Peters: The Sanctuary Sparrow

“I swear to you,” insisted the young man vehemently, “the goldsmith was hale and well the last time I set eyes on him. There was no quarrelling, no violence but what they used on me, they were laughing and drinking and singing still. What’s happened since I know no more than you. I left the place—what use was there in staying? Brother, for God’s sake believe me! I’ve touched neither the man nor his money.”

“Then so it will be found,” said Cadfael sturdily. “Here you’re safe enough in the meantime, and you must needs put your trust in justice and Abbot Radulfus, and tell your tale as you’ve told it to me when they question you. We have time, and given time, truth will out. You heard Father Abbot—stay here within the church tonight, but if they come to a decent agreement tomorrow you may have the run of the household.” Liliwin was very cold to the touch, with fear and shock, and still trembling. “Oswin,” said Cadfael briskly, “go and fetch me a couple of brychans from the store, and then warm me up another good measure of wine on the brazier, and spice it well. Let’s get some warmth into him.”

Oswin, who had held his tongue admirably while his eyes devoured the stranger, departed in a flurry of zeal to do his errands. Liliwin watched him go, and then turned to watch Cadfael no less warily. Small wonder if he felt little trust in anyone just now.

“You won’t leave me? They’ll be peering in at the door again before the night’s out.”

“I won’t leave you. Be easy!”

Advice difficult to follow, he admitted wryly, in Liliwin’s situation. But with enough mulled wine in him he might sleep. Oswin came again glowing with haste and the flush of bending over the brazier, and brought two thick, rough blankets, in which Liliwin thankfully wound himself. The spiced draught went down gratefully. A little colour came back to the gaunt, bruised face.

“You go to your bed, lad,” said Cadfael, leading Oswin towards the night stairs. “You can, now, he’ll do till morning. Then we shall see.”

Brother Oswin looked back in some wonder at the swaddled body almost swallowed up in Prior Robert’s capacious stall, and asked in a whisper: “Do you think he can really be a murderer, though?”

“Child,” said Cadfael, sighing, “until we get some sensible account of what’s happened in Walter Aurifaber’s burgage tonight, I doubt if there’s been murder done at all. With enough drink in them, the fists may well have started flying, and a few noses been bloodied, and some fool may very well have started a panic, with other fools ready enough to take up the cry. You go to your bed, and wait and see.”

And so must I wait and see, he thought, watching Oswin obediently climb the stair. It was all very well distrusting the alarms of the moment, but for all that, not all those voluble accusers had been drunk. And something unforeseen had certainly happened in the goldsmith’s house, to put a violent end to the celebrations of young Daniel’s marriage. How if Walter Aurifaber had really been struck dead? And his treasury robbed? By that woebegone scrap of humanity huddled in his brychans, half-drunk with the wine they had poured into him, half asleep but held alert by terror? Would he dare, even with a bitter grievance? Could he have managed the affair, even if he had dared? One thing was certain, if he had robbed he must have disposed of his gains in short order in the dark, in a town surely none too well known to him. In those scanty garments of his, that threadbare motley, there was barely room to conceal the single penny the old dame had thrown at him, much less the contents of a goldsmith’s coffer.

When he approached the stall, however quietly, the bruised eyelids rolled wide from the dark blue eyes, and they fixed on him in instant dread.

“Never shrink, it’s I. No one else will trouble you this night. And my name, if you need it, is Cadfael. And yours is Liliwin.” A name strangely right for a vagabond player, very young and solitary and poor, and yet proud of his proficiency in his craft, tumbler, contortionist, singer, juggler, dancer, purveying merriment for others while he found little cause to be merry himself. “How old are you, Liliwin?”

Half asleep and afraid to give way and sleep in earnest, he looked ever younger, dwindling into a swaddled child, reassuringly flushed now as the chill ebbed out of him. But he himself did not know the answer. He could only knit his fair brows and hazard doubtfully: “I think I may be turned twenty. It could be more. The mummers may have said I was less than I was—children draw more alms.”

So they would, and the boy was lightly built, spare and small. He might be as much as two and twenty, perhaps, surely no more.

“Well, Liliwin, if you can sleep do so, it will be aid and comfort, and you have need of it. You need not watch, I shall be doing that.”

Cadfael sat down in the abbot’s stall, and trimmed the attendant candles, so that he might have a fair view of his charge. The quiet came in, on the heels of their silence, very consolingly. The night without might well have its disquiets, but here the vault of the choir was like linked hands sheltering their threatened and precarious peace. It was strange to Cadfael to see, after prolonged calm, two great tears welling from beneath Liliwin’s closed eyelids, and rolling slowly over the jut of his gaunt cheek-bone, to fall into the brychan.

“What is it? What troubles you?” For himself he had shivered, argued, burned, but not wept.

“My rebec—I had it with me in the bushes, in a linen bag for my shoulder. When they flushed me out—I don’t know how, a branch caught in the string, and plucked it away. And I dared not stop to grope for it in the dark… And now I can’t go forth! I’ve lost it!”

“In the bushes, this side the bridge—across the highway from here?” It was a grief Cadfael could comprehend. “You cannot go forth lad, no, not yet, true enough. But I can. I’ll look for it. Those who hunted you would not go aside once they had you in view. Your rebec may be lying safe enough among the bushes. Go to sleep and leave grieving,” said Cadfael. “It’s too early to despair. For despair,” he said vigorously, “it is always too early. Remember that, and keep up your heart.”

One startled blue eye opened at him, he caught the gleam of the candles in it before it closed again. There was silence. Cadfael lay back in the abbot’s stall, and resigned himself to a long watch. Before Prime he must rouse himself to remove the interloper to a less privileged place, or Prior Robert would be rigid with offence. Until then, let God and his saints take charge, there was nothing more mere man could do.

As soon as the first light of dawn began to pluck colours out of the dark, on this clear May morning, Griffin, the locksmith’s boy who slept in the shop as a watchman, got up from his pallet and went to draw water from the well in the rear yard. Griffin was always the first up, from either household of the two that shared the yard, and had usually kindled the fire and made all ready for the day’s work before his master’s journeyman came in from his home two streets away. On this day in particular Griffin took it for granted that all those who had kept it up late at the wedding would be in no condition to rise early about their work. Griffin himself had not been invited to the feast, though Mistress Susanna had sent Rannilt across to bring him a platter of meats and bread, a morsel of cake and a draught of small ale, and he had eaten his fill, and slept innocently through whatever uproar had followed at midnight.

Griffin was thirteen years old, offspring of a maidservant and a passing tinker. He was well-grown, comely, of contented nature and good with his hands, but he was a simpleton. Baldwin Peche the locksmith preened himself on his goodness in giving house-room to such an innocent, but the truth was that Griffin, for all his dimness of wit, had a gift for picking up practical skills, and far more than earned his keep.