Ellis Peters - The Sanctuary Sparrow

The goldsmith, his balding head swathed and his long, suspicious face fallen slack in sleep, was snoring heavily, and it seemed the best treatment to let him continue sleeping. Cadfael went down thoughtfully to find Susanna, who was out in the kitchen at the rear of the house. A skinny little girl laboured at feeding a sluggish fire and heaving a great pot to the hook over it. Cadfael had caught a glimpse of the child once before, all great dark eyes in a pale, grubby face, and a tangle of dark hair. Some poor maidservant’s by-blow by her master, or her master’s son, or a passing guest. For all the parsimony in this household, the girl could have fallen into worse hands. She was at least fed, and handed down cast-off clothing, and if the old matriarch was grim and frightening, Susanna was quiet and calm, no scold and no tyrant.

Cadfael reported on his patient, and Susanna watched his face steadily, nodded comprehension, and asked no questions.

“And your father is asleep. I left him so. What better could anyone do for him?”

“I fetched his own physician to him last night,” she said, “when we found him. She’ll have none but you now, but father relies on Master Arnald, and he’s close. He says the blow is not dangerous, though it was enough to lay him senseless some hours. Though it may be the drink had something to do with that, too.”

“He hasn’t yet been able to tell you what happened? Whether he saw who the man was who struck him?”

“Not a word. When he comes to, his head aches so he can remember nothing. It may come back to him later.”

For the saving or the damning of Liliwin! But whichever way that went, and whatever else he might be, Walter Aurifaber was not a liar. Meantime, there was nothing to be learned from him, but from the rest of the household there might be, and this girl was the gravest and most reasonable of the tribe.

“I’ve heard the general cry against this young fellow, but not the way the thing happened. I know there was some horse-play with the lads, nothing surprising at a wedding feast, and the pitcher got broken. I know your grandmother lashed out at him with her stick, and had him cast out with only one penny of his fee. His story is that he made off then, knowing it was hopeless to protest further, and he knew nothing of what followed until he heard the hunters baying after him, and ran to us for shelter.”

“He would say so,” she agreed reasonably.

“Every man’s saying may as well be true as untrue,” said Cadfael sententiously. “How long after his going was it when Master Walter went to his workshop?”

“Nearly an hour it must have been. Some of the guests were leaving then, but the more lively lads would stay to see Margery bedded, a good dozen of them were up the stair to the chamber. The wedding gifts were on the table to be admired, but seeing the night was ending, father took them and went to lock them away safely in his strong-box in the workshop. And it must have been about half an hour later, with all the merriment above, that I began to wonder that he hadn’t come back. There was a gold chain and rings that Margery’s father gave her, and a purse of silver links, and a breast ornament of silver and enamel—fine things. I went out by the hall door and round to the shop, and there he was, lying on his face by the coffer, and the lid open, and all but the heavy pieces of plate gone.”

“So the singing lad had been gone a full hour before this happened. Did anyone see him lurking after he was put out?”

She smiled, shaking a rueful head. “There was darkness enough to hide a hundred loiterers. And he did not go so tamely as you suppose. He knows how to curse, too, he cried us names I’d never heard before, I promise you, and howled that he’d have his own back for the wrong we did him. And I won’t say but he was hard done by, for that matter. But who else should it be? People we’ve known lifelong, neighbours here in the street? No, you may be sure he hung about the yard in the dark until he saw my father go alone to the shop, and he stole in there, and saw what wealth there was in the open coffer. Enough to tempt a poor man, I grant you. But even poor men must needs resist temptation.”

“You are very sure,” said Cadfael.

“I am sure. He owes a life for it.”

The little maidservant turned her head sharply, gazing with lips parted. Such eyes, huge and grieved. She made a very small sound like a kitten’s whimper.

“Rannilt is daft about the boy,” said Susanna simply, scornfully tolerant of folly. “He ate with her in the kitchen, and played and sang for her. She’s sorry for him. But what’s done is done.”

“And when you found your father lying so, of course you ran back here to call help for him?”

“I couldn’t lift him alone. I cried out what had happened, and those guests who were still here came running, and Iestyn, our journeyman, came rushing up the stairs from the undercroft where he sleeps—he’d gone to bed an hour or more earlier, knowing he’d have to man the shop alone this morning…” Of course, in expectation of the goldsmith’s thick head and his son’s late tarrying with his bride. “We carried father up to his bed, and someone—I don’t know who was the first—cried out that this was the jongleur’s doing, and that he couldn’t be far, and out they all went streaming, every man, to hunt for him. And I left Margery to watch by father, while I ran off to fetch Master Arnald.”

“You did what was possible,” Cadfael allowed. “Then when was it Dame Juliana took her fit?”

“While I was gone. She’d gone to her chamber, she may even have been asleep, though with the larking and laughing in the gallery I should doubt it. But I was hardly out of the door when she hobbled along to father’s room, and saw him lying, with his bloody head, and senseless. She clutched at her heart, Margery says, and fell down. But it was not such a bad fit this time. She was already wake and talking,” said Susanna, “when I came back with the physician. We had help then for both of them.”

“Well, they’ve both escaped the worst,” said Cadfael, brooding, “for this time. Your father is a strong, hale man, and should live his time out without harm. But for the dame, more shocks of the kind could be the death of her, and so I’ve told her.”

“The loss of her treasury,” said Susanna drily, “was shock enough to kill her. If she lives through that, she’s proof against all else until her full time comes. We are a durable kind, Brother Cadfael, very durable.”

Cadfael turned aside from leaving by the passage to the street, and entered Walter Aurifaber’s workshop by the side door. Here Walter would have let himself in, when he came burdened with several choice items in gold and silver, enamel and fine stones, to lock them up with his other wealth in the strong-box; from which, in all likelihood, Mistress Margery would have had much ado to get them out again for her wearing. Unless, of course, that soft and self-effacing shape concealed a spirit of unsuspected toughness. Women can be very deceptive.

As he entered the shop from the passage, the street door was on his left, there was a trestled show-table, cloth-covered, and the rear part of the room was all narrow shelving, the small furnace, cold, and the work-benches, at which Daniel was working on a setting for a clouded mossa gate, brows locked in a gloomy knot. But his fingers were deft enough with the fine tools, for all his preoccupation with the family misfortunes. The journeyman was bent over a scale on the bench beside the furnace, weighing small tablets of silver. A sturdy, compact person, this Iestyn, by the look of him about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, with cropped, straight dark hair in a thick cap. He turned his head, hearing someone entering, and his face was broad but bony, dark-skinned, thick-browed, deep-eyed, wholly Welsh. A better-humoured man than his master, though not so comely.