At the sagging wooden gate that still hung where the path entered, Prior Robert halted, and made the sign of the cross with large, grave gestures. “Wait here!” he said, when Huw would have led him forward. “Let us see if prayer can guide my feet, for I have prayed. You shall not show me the saint’s grave. I will show it to you, if she will be my aid.”
Obediently they stood and watched his tall figure advance with measured steps, as if he felt his way, the skirts of his habit sweeping through the tangles of grass and flowers. Without hesitation and without haste he made his way to a little, overgrown mound aligned with the east end of the chapel, and sank to his knees at its head.
“Saint Winifred lies here,” he said.
Cadfael thought about it every step of the way, as he went up through the woods that afternoon to Rhisiart’s hall. A man could count on Prior Robert to be impressive, but that little miracle had been a master-stroke. The breathless hush, the rippling outbreak of comment and wonder and awe among the men of Gwytherin were with him still. No question but the remotest villein hut and the poorest free holding in the parish would be buzzing with the news by now. The monks of Shrewsbury were vindicated. The saint had taken their prior by the hand and led him to her grave. No, the man had never before been to that place, nor had the grave been marked in any way, by a belated attempt to cut the brambles from it, for instance. It was as it had always been, and yet he had known it from all the rest.
No use at all pointing out, to a crowd swayed by emotion, that if Prior Robert had not previously been to the chapel, Brothers Jerome and Columbanus, his most faithful adherents, had, only the previous day, and with the boy Edwin to guide them, and what more probable than that one of them should have asked the child the whereabouts of the lady they had come all this way to find?
And now, with this triumph already establishing his claim, Robert had given himself three whole days and nights of delay, in which other, similar prodigies might well confirm his ascendancy. A very bold step, but then, Robert was a bold and resourceful man, quite capable of gambling his chances of providing further miracles against any risk of contrary chance refuting him. He meant to leave Gwytherin with what he had come for, but to leave it, if not fully reconciled, then permanently cowed. No scuttling away in haste with his prize of bones, as though still in terror of being thwarted.
But he could not have killed Rhisiart, thought Cadfael with certainty. That I know. Could he have gone so far as to procure… ? He considered the possibility honestly, and discarded it. Robert he endured, disliked, and in a fashion admired. At Brother John’s age he would have detested him, but Cadfael was old, experienced and grown tolerant
He came to the gatehouse of Rhisiart’s holding, a wattle hut shored into a corner of the palisade fence. The man knew him again from yesterday, and let him in freely. Cai came across the enclosed court to meet him, grinning. All grins here were somewhat soured and chastened now, but a spark of inward mischief survived.
“Have you come to rescue your mate?” asked Cai. “I doubt he wouldn’t thank you, he’s lying snug, and feeding like a fighting cock, and no threats of the bailiff yet. She’s said never a word, you may be sure, and Father Huw would be in no hurry. I reckon we’ve a couple of days yet, unless your prior makes it his business, where it’s none. And if he does, we have boys out will give us plenty of notice before any horseman reaches the gate. Brother John’s in good hands.”
It was Engelard’s fellow-worker speaking, the man who knew him as well as any in this place. Clearly Brother John had established himself with his gaoler, and Cai’s mission was rather to keep the threatening world from him, than to keep him from sallying forth into the world. When the key was needed for the right purpose, it would be provided.
“Take care for your own head,” said Cadfael, though without much anxiety. They knew what they were doing. “Your prince may have a lawyer’s mind, and want to keep in with the Benedictines along the border.”
“Ah, never fret! An escaped felon can be nobody’s fault. And everybody’s quarry and nobody’s prize! Have you never hunted zealously in all the wrong places for something you desired not to find?”
“Say no more,” said Cadfael, “or I shall have to stop my ears. And tell the lad I never even asked after him, for I know there’s no need.”
“Would you be wishing to have a gossip with him?” offered Cai generously. “He’s lodged over yonder in a nice little stable that’s clean and empty, and he gets his meals princely, I tell you!”
“Tell me nothing, for I might be asked,” said Cadfael. “A blind eye and a deaf ear can be useful sometimes. I’ll be glad to spend a while with you presently, but now I’m bound to her. We have business together.”
Sioned was not in the hall, but in the small chamber curtained off at its end, Rhisiart’s private room. And Rhisiart was private there with his daughter, stretched out straight and still on draped furs, on a trestle table, with a white linen sheet covering him. The girl sat beside him, waiting, very formally attired, very grave, her hair austerely braided about her head. She looked older, and taller, now that she was the lady-lord of this holding. But she rose to meet Brother Cadfael with the bright, sad, eager smile of a child sure now of counsel and guidance.
“I looked for you earlier. No matter, I’m glad you’re here. I have his clothes for you. I did not fold them; if I had, the damp would have spread evenly through, and now, though they may have dried off, I think you’ll still feel a difference.” She brought them, chausses, tunic and shirt, and he took them from her one by one and felt at the cloth testingly. “I see,” she said, “that you already know where to feel.”
Rhisiart’s hose, though partly covered by the tunic he had worn, were still damp at the back of the thighs and legs, but in front dry, though the damp had spread round through the threads to narrow the dry part to a few inches. His tunic was moist all down the back to the hem, the full width of his shoulders still shaped in a dark patch like spread wings, but all the breast of it, round the dark-rimmed slit the arrow had made, was quite dry. The shirt, though less definitely, showed the same pattern. The fronts of the sleeves were dry, the backs damp. Where the exit wound pierced his back, shirt and tunic were soaked in blood now drying and encrusted.
“You remember,” said Cadfael, “just how he lay when we found him?”
“I shall remember it my life long,” said Sioned. “From the hips up flat on his back, but his right hip turned into the grass, and his legs twisted, the left over the right, like…” She hesitated, frowning, feeling for her own half-glimpsed meaning, and found it. “Like a man who has been lying on his face, and heaves himself over in his sleep on to his back, and sleeps again at once.”
“Or,” said Cadfael, “like a man who has been taken by the left shoulder, as he lay on his face, and heaved over on to his back. After he was well asleep!”
She gazed at him steadily, with eyes hollow and dark like wounds. “Tell me all your thoughts. I need to know. I must know.”
“First, then,” said Brother Cadfael, “I call attention to the place where this thing happened. A close-set, thicketed place, with plenty of bushes for cover, but not more than fifty paces clear view in any direction. Is that an archer’s ground? I think not. Even if he wished the body to be left in woodlands where it might lie undiscovered for hours, he could have found a hundred places more favourable to him. An expert bowman does not need to get close to his quarry, he needs room to draw on a target he can hold in view long enough for a steady aim.”
“Yes,” said Sioned. “Even if it could be believed of him that he would kill, that rules out Engelard.”
“Not only Engelard, any good bowman, and if someone so incompetent as to need so close a shot tried it, I doubt if he could succeed. I do not like this arrow, it has no place here, and yet here it is. It has one clear purpose, to cast the guilt on Engelard. But I cannot get it out of my head that it has some other purpose, too.”