“You had your legs again,” said John reasonably, “and since you wouldn’t let us do anything for you, we thought best to let you go your own way. Let alone, you wouldn’t go far, but if we followed, you might do who knows what, out of contrariness.”
“There was another fellow who looked after you a thought anxiously,” said the butcher’s man, thinking back, “when we left that booth with you. Came out after us, and set off the same way you took. He thought you were already helpless drunk, I fancy, and might need helping home.”
“That was kind in him,” said Philip, stiffening indignantly, and meaning that it was damned officious of whoever it was. “That would be what hour? Not yet eight?”
“Barely. I did hear the bell for Compline shortly after, over the wall. Curious how it carries over all the bustle between.” In the upper air, so it would; people in the Foregate regulated their day by the office bells.
“Who was this who followed me? Did you know him?”
They looked at each other and hoisted indifferent shoulders; among the thousands at a great fair the local people are lost. “Never seen him before. Not a Shrewsbury man. He may not have been following, to call it that, at all, just heading the same way.”
They told him exactly where he had left them, and the direction he had taken. Philip made his way purposefully to the spot indicated, but in that busy concourse, spreading along the Foregate and filling every open space beyond, he was still without a map. All he knew was that before nine, according to the witness in the sheriff’s court, he had been very drunk and still drinking in Wat’s tavern, and blurting out hatred and grievance and the intent of vengeance against Master Thomas of Bristol. The interval it was hard to fill. Perhaps he had made his way there at once, and been well advanced in drink before the stranger noted his threats.
Philip gritted his teeth and set off along the Foregate, so intent on his own quest that he had no ears for anything else, and missed the news that was being busily conveyed back and forth through the fair, with imaginative variations and considerable embellishments before it reached the far corner of the horse-fair. It was news more than two hours old by then, but Philip had heard no word of it, his mind was on his own problem. All round him stalls were being stripped down to trestle and board, and rented booths being locked up, and the keys delivered to abbey stewards. Business was almost put away, but the evening was not yet outworn, there would be pleasure after business.
Walter Renold’s inn lay at the far corner of the horse-fair, not on the London highroad, but on the quieter road that bore away north-eastwards. It was handy for the country people who brought goods to market, and at this hour it was full. It went against the grain with Philip even to order a pot of ale for himself while he was on this desperate quest, but alehouses live by sales, and at least he was so formidably sober now that he could afford the indulgence. The potboy who brought him his drink was hardly more than a child, and he did not remember the tow hair and pock-marked face. He waited to speak with Wat himself, when there was a brief interlude of calm.
“I heard they’d let you go free,” said Wat, spreading brawny arms along the table opposite him. “I’m glad of it. I never thought you’d do harm, and so I told them where they asked. When was it they loosed you?”
“A while before noon.” Hugh Beringar had said he should eat his dinner at home, and so he had, though at a later hour than usual.
“So nobody could point a finger at you over the latest ill-doings. Such a fair as we’ve had! Good weather and good sales, and good attendance all round, even good behaviour,” said Wat weightily, considering the whole range of his experience of fairs. “And yet two merchants murdered, the second of them a northern man found only this morning broken-necked in his stall. You’ll have heard about that? When did we ever have such happenings! It’s not the lads of Shrewsbury, I said when they asked me, that get up to such villainies, you look among the incomers from other parts. We’re decent folk herebouts!”
“Yes, I know of that,” said Philip. “But it’s not that death they pointed at me, it’s the first, the Bristol merchant . . .” North and south had met here, he reflected, fatally for both. Now why should that be? Both the victims strangers from far distances, where some born locally were as well worth plundering.
“This one they could hardly charge to your account,” said Wat, grinning broadly, “even if you’d been at large so early. It’s all past and gone. You hadn’t heard? There was a grand to-do along the Foregate, a few hours ago. The murderer’s found out red-handed, and made a break for his freedom on his lord’s horse, and kicked his lord into the dust on the way. And he’s shot down dead as a storm-struck tree, at his lord’s orders. A master’s shot, they say. The glover’s soon avenged. And you’d not heard of it?”
“Not a word! The last I heard they were looking for a man who might have a slit sleeve to show, and a gash in his arm. When was this, then?” It seemed that Brother Cadfael must have found his man, unaided, after all.
“Not an hour before Vespers it must have been. All I heard was the shouting at the abbey end of the Foregate. But they tell me the sheriff himself was there.”
About five in the afternoon, perhaps less than an hour after Philip had left Brother Cadfael and gone back into the town to look for John Norreys. A short hunt that had been, no need any longer for him to cast a narrowed eye at men’s sleeves wherever he went. “And it’s certain they got the right man?”
“Certain! The merchant had marked him, and they say there were goods and money from the glover’s stall found hi his pack. Some groom called Ewald, I heard . . .”
A mere sneak-thief, then, who had gone too far. Nothing there to bear on Philip’s own quest. He was free to concentrate his mind once again, and even more intently, upon his own pilgrimage. It had begun as a penitential exercise, but was gradually abandoning that aspect. Certainly he had made a fool of himself, but the original impulse on which he had acted, and roused others to act, had not been so foolish, after all, and was nothing to be ashamed of. Only when it collapsed about him in ruins had he thrown good sense to the winds, and indulged his misery like a sulking child.
“Now if only I could find out as certainly who it was did for Master Thomas! It was that night there was grave matter urged against me, and I will own I laid myself open. It’s all very well being let out on my father’s bail, but no one has yet said I’m clear of the charge. The rest I’ll pay my score for, but I want to prove I never did the merchant any violence. I know I was here that night—the eve of the fair, you’ll remember? From what hour? I’ve no recollection of times, myself. According to his men, Master Thomas was alive until a third of the hour past nine.”
“Oh, you were here, no question!” Wat could not help grinning at the memory. “There was noise enough, we were busy, but you made yourself heard! No offence, lad, who hasn’t made a fool of himself in his cups from time to time? It can’t have been more than a quarter after eight when you came in, and I doubt you’d had much, up to then.”
Only a quarter after the hour of Compline—then he must have come straight here after shaking off his friends. Not straight, perhaps that was an inappropriate word, but weavingly and unsteadily, though at that rate not calling anywhere else on the way. It was a natural thing to do, to hurry clean through the thick of the fair, and put as much ground as possible between himself and his solicitous companions before calling a halt.
“I tell you what, boy,” said the expert kindly, “if you’d taken it slowly you’d have been sober enough. But you had to rush the matter. I doubt I’ve ever seen a fellow put so much down in the time, no wonder your belly turned against it.”
It was not cheering listening, but Philip swallowed it doggedly. Evidently he had been as foolish as he had been dreading, and the archer’s account of his behaviour had not been at all exaggerated.