“They will be attending, and others besides. Certainly your witness would be valuable, but to ask it of you at such a time. . .”
“I would rather!” she said firmly. “I want my uncle’s murderer caught, if indeed he was murdered, but I pray no innocent man may be too hurriedly blamed. I don’t know—I would not have thought he looked like a murderer . . . I should like to tell what I do know, it is my duty.”
Beringar cast a brief glance at his wife for enlightenment, and Aline gave him a smile and the faintest of nods.
“If you are resolved on that,” he said, reassured, “I will ask Brother Cadfael to escort you. And for the rest, you need have no anxieties about your own situation. It will be necessary for you to stay here until this matter is looked into, but naturally you will remain here in Aline’s company, and you shall have every possible help in whatever dispositions you need to make.”
“I should like,” said Emma, “to take my uncle’s body back by the barge to Bristol for burial.” She had not considered, until then, that there would be no protector for her on the boat this time, only Roger Dod, whose mute but watchful and jealous devotion was more than she could bear, Warin who would take care to notice nothing that might cause him trouble, and poor Gregory, who was strong and able of body but very dull of wit. She drew in breath sharply, and bit an uncertain lip, and the shadow came back to her eyes. “At least, to send him back . . . His man of law there will take care of his affairs and mine.”
“I have spoken to the prior. Abbot Radulfus sanctions the use of an abbey chapel, your uncle’s body can lie there when he is brought from the castle, and all due preparations will be made for his decent coffining. Ask for anything you want, it shall be at your disposal. I must summon your journeyman to attend at the castle this afternoon, too. How would you wish him to deal, concerning the fair? I will give him whatever instructions you care to send.”
She nodded understanding, visibly bracing herself again towards a world of shrewd daily business which had not ceased with the ending of a life. “Be so kind as to tell him,” she said, “to continue trading for the three days of the fair, as though his master still presided. My uncle would scorn to go aside from his regular ways for any danger or loss, and so will I in his name.” And suddenly, as freely and as simply as a small child, she burst into tears at last.
When Hugh was gone about his business, and Constance had withdrawn at Aline’s nod, the two women sat quietly until Emma had ceased to weep, which she did as suddenly as she had begun. She wept, as some women have the gift of doing, without in the least defacing her own prettiness and without caring whether she did or no. Most lose the faculty, after the end of childhood. She dried her eyes, and looked up straightly at Aline, who was looking back at her just as steadily, with a serenity which offered comfort without pressing it.
“You must think,” said Emma, “that I had no deep affection for my uncle. And indeed I don’t know myself that you would be wrong. And yet I did love him, it has not been only loyalty and gratitude, though those came easier. He was a hard man, people said, hard to satisfy, and hard in his business dealings. But he was not hard to me. Only hard to come near. It was not his fault, or mine.”
“I think,” said Aline mildly, since she was being invited closer, “you loved him as much as he would let you. As he could let you. Some men have not the gift.”
“Yes. But I would have liked to love him more. I would have done anything to please him. Even now I want to do everything as he would have wished. We shall keep the booth open as long as the fair lasts, and try to do it as well as he would have done. All that he had in hand, I want to see done thoroughly.” Her voice was resolute, almost eager. Master Thomas would certainly have approved the set of her chin and the spark in her eye. “Aline, shall I not be a trouble to you by staying here? I—my uncle’s men—there’s one who likes me too well . . .”
“So I had thought,” said Aline. “You’re most welcome here, and we’ll not part with you until you can be sent back safely to Bristol, and your home. Not that I can find it altogether blameworthy in the young man to like you, for that matter,” she added, smiling.
“No, but I cannot like him well enough. Besides, my uncle would never have allowed me to be there on the barge without him. And now I have duties,” said Emma, rearing her head determinedly and staring the uncertain future defiantly in the face. “I must see to the ordering of a fine coffin for him, for the journey home. There will be a master-carpenter, somewhere in the town?”
“There is. To the right, halfway up the Wyle, Master Martin Bellecote. A good man, and a good craftsman. His lad was among these terrible rioters, as I hear,” said Aline, and dimpled indulgently at the thought, “but so were half the promising youth of the town. I’ll come in with you to Martin’s shop.”
“No,” said Emma firmly. “It will all be tedious and long at the sheriff’s court, and you should not tire yourself. And besides, you have to buy your fine wools, before the best are taken. And Brother Cadfael—was that the name?—will show me where to find the shop. He will surely know.”
“There’s very little to be known about this precinct and the town of Shrewsbury,” agreed Aline with conviction, “that Brother Cadfael does not know.”
Cadfael received the abbot’s dispensation to attend the hearing at the castle, and to escort the abbey’s bereaved guest, without question. A civic duty could not be evaded, whether by secular or monastic. Radulfus had already shown himself both an austere but just disciplinarian and a shrewd and strong-minded business man. He owed his preferment to the abbacy as much to the king as to the papal legate, and valued and feared for the order of the realm at least as keenly as for the state of his own cure. Consequently, he had a use for those few among the brothers who shared his wide experience of matters outside the cloister.
“This death,” he said, closeted with Cadfael alone after Beringar’s departure, “casts a shadow upon our house and our fair. Such a burden cannot be shifted to other shoulders. I require of you a full account of what passes at this hearing. It was of me that the elders of the town asked a relief I could not grant. On me rests the load of resentment that drove those younger men to foolish measures. They lacked patience and thought, and they were to blame, but that does not absolve me. If the man’s death has arisen out of my act, even though I could not act otherwise, I must know it, for I have to answer for it, as surely as the man who struck him down.”
“I shall bring you all that I myself see and hear, Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.
“I require also all that you think, brother. You saw part of what happened yesterday between the dead man and the living youth. Is it possible that it could have brought about such a death as this? Stabbed in the back? It is not commonly the method of anger.”
“Not commonly.” Cadfael had seen many deaths in the open anger of battle, but he knew also of rages that had bred and festered into killings by stealth, with the anger as hot as ever, but turned sour by brooding. “Yet it is possible. But there are other possibilities. It may indeed be what it first seems, a mere crude slaughter for the clothes on the body and the rings on the fingers, opportune plunder in the night, when no one chanced to be by. Such things happen, where men are gathered together and there is money changing hands.”
“It is true,” said Radulfus, coldly and sadly. “The ancient evil is always with us.”
“Also, the man is of great importance in his trade and his region, and he may have enemies. Hate, envy, rivalry, are as powerful motives even as gain. And at a great fair such as ours, enemies may be brought together, far from the towns where their quarrels are known, and their acts might be guessed at too accurately. Murder is easier and more tempting, away from home.”