“You are the bridegroom?” he said bluntly.
“I am, and will maintain my claim. And what have you to urge against it?”
Animosity or not, they had begun to bristle like fighting cocks, but Cenred laid a restraining hand on de Perronet’s arm, and frowned his son back with a forbidding gesture.
“Wait, wait! This has gone too far now to be left in the dark. Do you tell me, boy, that you heard of this marriage, as you heard of Edgytha’s death, only from Edred?”
“How else?” demanded Roscelin. “He came puffing in with his news and roused the household, Audemar and all. Whether he meant me to hear when he blurted out word of this marriage I doubt, but I did hear it, and here am I to find out for myself what you never meant me to question. And we shall see if all is being done for the best!”
“Then you had not seen Edgytha? She never reached you?”
“How could she if she was lying dead a mile or more from Elford?” demanded Roscelin impatiently.
“It was after the snow began that she died. She had been some hours gone, long enough to have reached Elford and been on her way back. Somewhere she had been, from somewhere she was certainly returning. Where else could it have been?”
“So you thought she had indeed reached Elford,” said Roscelin slowly. “I never heard but that she was dead. I thought it was on her way. On her way to me! Is that what you had in mind? To warn me of what was being done here in my absence?”
Cenred’s silence and Emma’s unhappy face were answer enough.
“No,” he said slowly, “I never saw hide or hair of her. Nor did anyone in Audemar’s household as far as I know. If she ever was there at all, I don’t know to whom she came. Certainly not to me.”
“Yet it could have been so,” said Cenred.
“It was not so. She did not come. Nevertheless,” said Roscelin relentlessly, “here am I as if she had, having heard it from another mouth. God knows I am grieved for Edgytha, but what is there now to be done for her but bury her with reverence, and after, if we can, find and bury her murderer? But it is not too late to reconsider what was intended here for tomorrow, it is not too late to change it.”
“I marvel,” said Cenred harshly, “that you do not charge me outright with this death.”
Roscelin was brought up short against an idea so monstrous, and stood open-mouthed with shock, his unclenched hands dangling childishly. Plainly such a notion had never entered his ingenuous head. He stammered a furious, half-inarticulate disclaimer, and abandoned it halfway to turn again upon de Perronet.
“But you-you had cause enough to want her stopped, if you knew she was on her way to warn me. You had good cause to want her silenced, so that no voice should be raised against your marriage, as now I raise mine. Was it you who did her to death on the way?”
“This is foolery,” said de Perronet with disdain. “Everyone here knows that I have been here in plain view all the evening.”
“So you may have been, but you have men who may be used to do your work for you.”
“Every man of whom can be vouched for by your father’s household. Also, you have been told already it was not on the outward way this woman was killed, but returning. What purpose would that have served for me? And now may I ask of you, father and son both,” he demanded sharply, “what interest has this boy in his close kinswoman’s marriage, that he dares to challenge either her brother’s rights or her husband’s?”
Now, thought Cadfael, it is all as good as out, though no one will say it plainly. For de Perronet has wits sharp enough to have grasped already what particular and forbidden passion really drives this unhappy boy. And now it depends on Roscelin whether a decent face is kept on the affair or not. Which is asking a lot of a young man torn as he is, and outraged by what he feels as a betrayal. Now we shall see his mettle.
Roscelin had blanched into a fixed and steely whiteness, his fine bones of cheek and jaw outlined starkly in the torchlight. Before Cenred could draw breath to assert his dominance, his son had done it for him.
“My interest is that of a kinsman close as a brother lifelong, and desiring Helisende’s happiness beyond anything else in the world. My father’s right I never have disputed, nor do I doubt he wishes her well as truly as I do. But when I hear of a marriage planned in haste and in my absence, how can I be easy in mind? I will not stand by and see her hustled into a marriage that may not be to her liking. I will not have her forced or persuaded against her will.”
“This is no such matter,” protested Cenred hotly. “She is not being forced, she has consented willingly.”
“Then why was I to be kept in ignorance? Until the thing was done? How can I believe what your own proceedings deny?” He swung round upon de Perronet, his blanched face arduously controlled. “Sir, against you I have no malice. I did not even know who was to be her husband. But you must see how hard it is to believe that all has been done fairly, when it has not been done openly.
“It is in the open now,” said de Perronet shortly. “What hinders but you should hear it from the lady’s own lips? Will that content you?”
Roscelin’s white face tightened yet more painfully, and for a moment he struggled visibly against his fear of inevitable rejection and loss. But he had no choice but to agree.
“If she tells me this is her choice, then I am silenced.” He did not say that he would therefore be content.
Cenred turned to his wife, who all this while had clung loyally to her husband’s side, while her troubled eyes never left her son’s tormented face.
“Go and call Helisende. She shall speak for herself.”
In the heavy and uneasy silence after Emma had departed it was not clear to Cadfael whether any or all of this disturbed household had found it as strange as he did that Helisende should not long ago have come down, to discover for herself the meaning of all these nocturnal comings and goings. He could not get out of his mind the last glimpse he had had of her, standing solitary among so many, suddenly lost and confounded on a road she had believed she could walk to the end with resolute dignity. In a situation so grimly changed she had lost her bearings. A wonder, though, that she had not, in defense of her own integrity, come down with the rest to discover the best or the worst when the searchers returned. Did she even know yet that Edgytha was dead?
Cenred had advanced into the half-lit hall, abandoning even the seclusion of the solar, since there was no longer any privacy to be found behind a closed door. A woman of the household had been killed. A lady of the family found her marriage the occasion of conflict and death. There was no possibility here of any separation between master and man, or mistress and maid. They waited with equal disquiet. All but Helisende, who absented herself still.
Brother Haluin had drawn back into the shadows, and sat mute and still on a bench against the wall, hunched stiffly between the crutches he hugged to his sides. His hollow dark eyes passed intently from face to face, reading and wondering. If he felt weariness, he gave no sign. Cadfael would have liked to send him away to his bed, but there hung on everyone here a compulsion so strong that there could be no departure. Only one had resisted the pull. Only one had escaped.
“What keeps the women?” fretted Cenred as the moments dragged by. “Does it take so long to pull on a gown?”
But it was long minutes more before Emma reappeared in the doorway, her round, gentle face full of consternation and dismay, her linked hands plying agitatedly at her girdle. Behind her the maid Madlyn peered warily, round-eyed. But of Helisende there was no sign.
“She is gone,” said Emma, too shaken and bewildered to make many words of it. “She is not in her bed, not in her chamber, nowhere to be found in all this house. Her cloak is gone. Jehan has been out to the stables. Her saddle horse and harness are gone with her. While you were absent she has saddled up for herself and ridden away secretly, alone.”
For once they were all alike silenced, brother, bridegroom, frustrated lover, and all. While they schemed and agonized and wrangled over her fate she had taken action and fled them all. Yes, even Roscelin, for he stood stricken and amazed, utterly at a loss like all the rest. Cenred might stiffen and frown at his son, de Perronet swing round upon him, in black suspicion, but plainly Roscelin had had no part in this panic flight. Even before Edgytha’s death, thought Cadfael, her secret errand and failure to return had shattered all Helisende’s arduously assembled certainty. Yes, de Perronet was a decent man and an honorable match, and she had pledged herself to him to remove herself from Roscelin’s path, and deliver herself and him from an unbearable situation. But if that sacrifice was to bring only anger, danger, and conflict, even short of death, then all was changed. Helisende had drawn back from the brink, and cut herself free.