* * *
Having the loan of the abbot’s own mule, Brother Cadfael took with him in this errand the good cloth garments Aline had entrusted to him. It was his way to carry out at once whatever tasks fell him, rather than put them off until the morrow, and there were beggars enough on his way through the town. The hose he gave to an elderly man with eyes whitened over with thick cauls, who sat with stick beside him and palm extended in the shade of the town gate. He looked of a suitable figure, and was in much-patched and threadbare nethers that would certainly fall apart very soon. The good brown cotte went to a frail creature no more than twenty years old who begged at the high cross, a poor feeble-wit with hanging lip and a palsied shake, who had a tiny old woman holding him by the hand and caring for him jealously. Her shrill blessings followed Cadfael down towards the castle gate. The cloak he still had folded before him when he came to the guard-post of the king’s camp, and saw Lame Osbern’s little wooden trolley tucked into the bole of a tree close by, and marked the useless, withered legs, and the hands callused and muscular from dragging all that dead weight about by force. His wooden pattens lay beside him in the grass. Seeing a frocked monk approaching on a good riding mule, Osbern seized them and propelled himself forward into Cadfael’s path. And it was wonderful how fast he could move, over short distances and with intervals for rest, but all the same so immobilised a creature, half his body inert, must suffer cold in even the milder nights, and in the winter terribly.
“Good brother,” coaxed Osbern, “spare an alms for a poor cripple, and God will reward you!”
“So I will, friend,” said Cadfael, “and better than a small coin, too. And you may say a prayer for a gentle lady who sends it to you by my hand.” And he unfolded from the saddle before him, and dropped into the startled, malformed hands, Giles Siward’s cloak.
“You did right to report truly what you found,” said the king consideringly. “Small wonder that my castellan did not make the same discovery, he had his hands full. You say this man was taken from behind by stealth, with a strangler’s cord? It’s a footpad’s way, and foul. And above all, to cast his victim in among my executed enemies to cover the crime — that I will not bear! How dared he make me and my officers his accomplices! That I count an affront to the crown, and for that alone I would wish the felon taken and judged. And the young man’s name — Faintree, you said?”
“Nicholas Faintree. So I was told by one who came and saw him, where we had laid him in the church. He comes from a family in the north of the county. But that is all I know of him.”
“It is possible,” reflected the king hopefully, “that he had ridden to Shrewsbury to seek service with us. Several such young men from north of the county have joined us here.”
“It is possible,” agreed Cadfael gravely; for all things are possible, and men do turn their coats.
“And to be cut off by some forest thief for what he carried — it happens! I wish I could say our roads are safe, out in this new anarchy, God knows, I dare not claim it. Well, you may pursue such enquiries as can be made into this matter, if that’s your wish, and call upon my sheriff to do justice if the murderer can be found. He knows my will. I do not like being made use of to shield so mean a crime.”
And that was truth, and the heart of the matter for him, and perhaps it would not have changed his attitude, thought Cadfael, even if he had known that Faintree was FitzAlan’s squire and courier, even if it were proved, as so far it certainly was not, that he was on FitzAlan’s rebellious business when he died. By all the signs, there would be plenty of killing in Stephen’s realm in the near future, and he would not lose his sleep over most of it, but to have a killer-by-stealth creeping for cover into his shadow, that he would take as a deadly insult to himself, and avenge accordingly. Energy and lethargy, generosity and spite, shrewd action and incomprehensible inaction, would always alternate and startle in King Stephen. But somewhere within that tall, comely, simple-minded person there was a gram of nobility hidden.
“I accept and value your Grace’s support,” said Brother Cadfael truthfully, “and I will do my best to see justice done. A man cannot lay down and abandon the duty God has placed in his hands. Of this young man I know only his name, and the appearance of his person, which is open and innocent, and that he was accused of no crime, and no man has complained of wrong by him, and he is dead unjustly. I think this as unpleasing to your Grace as ever it can be to me. If I can right it, so I will.”
At the sign of the boar’s head in the butcher’s row he was received with the common wary civility any citizen would show to a monk of the abbey. Petronilla, rounded and comfortable and grey, bade him in and would have offered all the small attentions that provide a wall between suspicious people, if he had not at once given her the worn and much-used leaf of vellum on which Godith had, somewhat cautiously and laboriously, inscribed her trust in the messenger, and her name. Petronilla peered and flushed with pleasure, and looked up at this elderly, solid, homely brown monk through blissful tears.
“The lamb, she’s managing well, then, my girl? And you taking good care of her! Here she says it, I know that scrawl, I learned to write with her. I had her almost from birth, the darling, and she the only one, more’s the pity, she should have had brothers and sisters. It was why I wanted to do everything with her, even the letters, to be by her whatever she needed. Sit down, brother, sit down and tell me of her, if she’s well, if she needs anything I can send her by you. Oh, and, brother, how are we to get her safely away? Can she stay with you, if it runs to weeks?”
When Cadfael could wedge a word or two into the flow he told her how her nurseling was faring, and how he woul4 see to it that she continued to fare. It had not occurred to him until then what a way the girl had of taking hold of hearts, without at all designing it. By the time Edric Flesher came in from a cautious skirmish through the town, to see how the land lay, Cadfael was firmly established in Petronilla’s favour, and vouched for as a friend to be trusted.
Edric settled his solid bulk into a broad chair, and said with a gusty breath of cautious relief: “Tomorrow I’ll open the shop. We’re fortunate! Ask me, he rues the vengeance he took for those he failed to capture. He’s called off all pillage here, and for once he’s enforcing it. If only his claims were just, and he had more spine in his body, I think I’d be for him. And to look like a hero, and be none, that’s hard on a man.” He gathered his great legs under him, and looked at his wife, and then, longer, at Cadfael. “She says you have the girl’s good word, and that’s enough. Name your need, and if we have it, it’s yours.”
“For the girl,” said Cadfael briskly, “I will keep her safe as long as need be, and when the right chance offers, I’ll get her away to where she should be. For my need, yes, there you may help me. We have in the abbey church, and we shall bury there tomorrow, a young man you may know, murdered on the night after the castle fell, the night the prisoners were hanged and thrown into the ditch. But he was killed elsewhere, and thrown among the rest to have him away into the ground unquestioned. I can tell you how he died, and when. I cannot tell you where, or why, or who did this thing. But Godith tells me that his name is Nicholas Faintree, and he was a squire of FitzAlan.”
All this he let fall between them in so many words, and heard and felt their silence. Certainly there were things they knew, and equally certainly this death they had not known, and it struck at them like a mortal blow.
“One more thing I may tell you,” he said. “I intend to have the truth out into the open concerning this thing, and see him avenged. And more, I have the king’s word to pursue the murderer. He likes the deed no more than I like it.”