“He said I should be his squire, and learn to read Latin hand, and reckon numbers, if ever he came to be knight,” Bran sternly reminded both his present and his absent patron, and allowed himself to be led sleepily towards the inner door. Mark looked back at Cadfael as they went, and at his reassuring nod took the child gently towards the dortoir.
Lazarus made no movement and said no word when Cadfael sat down beside him. Long ago he had outlived surprise, fear and desire, at least on his own account. He sat gazing out with his far-sighted blue-gray eyes at a night sky now beginning to flow like running water, a lofty, thin stream of cloud carried tranquilly eastwards on a fair breeze, while here on earth the very leaves were still.
“You’ll have heard,” said Cadfael, leaning back comfortably against the wall, “what Mark told the child. It was true, thanks be to God! Everything that was wrong has been put right. The murderer of Huon de Domville is taken, guilty past doubt. That is over. Pity is out of reach, short of pentinence, and of that there’s none. The man has not only killed his uncle, but vilely betrayed and misused his friend who trusted him, and shamelessly deceived a harried and forsaken girl. That is over. You need trouble no more.”
The man beside him said no word, asked no question, but he listened. Cadfael continued equably: “All will be well with her now. The king will surely approve our abbot as her new guardian. Radulfus is an austere and high-minded man, but also a human and humane one. She has nothing more to fear, not even for a lover none too well endowed with worldly goods. Her wishes, her happiness, will no longer be brushed aside as of no account.”
Within the great cloak Lazarus stirred, and turned his head. The deep voice, forming words with deliberate, halting care, spoke from behind the muffling veil: “You speak only of Domville. What of the second murder?”
“What second murder?” said Cadfael simply.
“I saw the torches among the trees, an hour and more ago, when they came for Godfrid Picard. I know he is dead. Is that, too, laid at this other man’s door?”
“Aguilon will be tried for the murder of his uncle,” said Cadfael, “where there is proof enough. Why look further? If there are some who mistakenly set Picard’s death to his discredit, how is his fate changed? He will not be charged with that. It could not be maintained. Godfrid Picard was not murdered.”
“How do you know?” asked Lazarus, untroubled but willing to be enlightened.
“There was no snare laid for him, he had all his senses and powers when he was killed, but all his senses and powers were not enough. He was not murdered, he was stopped in the way and challenged to single combat. He had a dagger, his opponent had only his hands. No doubt he thought he had an easy conquest, an armed man against one weaponless, a man in his prime against one seventy years old. He had time to draw, but that was all. The dagger was wrenched away and hurled aside, not turned against him. The hands were enough. He had not considered the weight of a just quarrel.”
“It must, then, have been a very grave quarrel between these two,” said Lazarus, after a long silence.
“The oldest and gravest. The shameful mistreatment of a lady. She is avenged and delivered. Heaven made no mistake.”
The silence fell between them again, but lightly and softly as a girl’s veil might float down and settle, or a moth flutter out of the night and alight without a sound. The old man’s eyes returned to the steady, measured flow of wisps of cloud eastward in the zenith. There was diffused light of stars behind the veil, while the earth lay in darkness. Behind the coarse veil of faded blue cloth Cadfael thought there was the faintest and most tranquil of smiles.
“And if you have divined so much from this day’s deed,” said Lazarus at length, “have not others the same knowledge?”
“No other has seen what I have seen,” said Cadfael simply, “and none will now. The marks will fade. No one wonders. No one questions. And only I know. And only I, and the owner of the hands that did the deed, will ever know that of those hands, the left had but two and a half fingers.”
There was a stir of movement within the mound of dark clothes, and a flash of the ice-clear eyes. Out of the folds of the cloak two hands emerged, and were held to the light of the lamp, the right one whole, long and sinewy, the left lacking index and middle finger and the upper joint of the third, the maimed surfaces showing seamed, whitish and dry.
“Having divined so much from so little, brother,” said the slow, clam voice, “take me with you one step beyond, and divine me his name, for I think you know it.”
“So I think, also,” said Brother Cadfael. “His name is Guimar de Massard.”
The night hung motionless over the Foregate and the valley of the Meole, and the woods through which the sheriff and his men had hunted in vain, plotting clearly, for those longsighted eyes, the passage of Picard’s bright red cap through the trees, and mapping the way by which, later, he must return. Overhead, in contrast to this terrestrial stillness, the sky flowed steadily away, like one man’s floating, fragile life blown across the constant of life itself, to vanish into the unknown.
“Should I know that name?” asked Lazarus, very still.
“My lord, I, too, was at the storming of Jerusalem. Twenty years old I was when the city fell. I saw you breach the gate. I was at the fight at Ascalon, when the Fatimids of Egypt came up against us—and for my part, after the killing that was done in Jerusalem, of so many who held by the Prophet, I say they deserved better luck against us than they had. But there was never brutality or unknightly act charged against Guimar de Massard. Why, why did you vanish after that fight? Why let us, who revered you, and your wife and son here in England, grieve you for dead? Had any of us deserved that of you?”
“Had my wife, had my son, deserved of me that I should lay upon them the load that had fallen upon me?” asked Lazarus, roused and stumbling for once upon the words that tried his mangled mouth. “Brother, I think you ask what you already know.”
Yes, Cadfael knew. Guimar de Massard, wounded and captive after Ascalon, had learned from the doctors who attended him in captivity that he was already a leper.
“They have excellent physicians,” said Lazarus, again calm and still, “wiser than any here. And who should better know and recognize the first bitter signs? They told me truth. They did what I asked of them, sent word of my death from my wounds. They did more. They helped me to a hermitage where I might live with my enemy, as I had died to my friends, and fight that battle as I had fought the commoner kind. My helm and my sword they sent back to Jerusalem, as I asked.”
“She has them,” said Cadfael. “She treasures them. You have not been forgotten in your death. I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.”
“Chivalrous and courteous I found my captors. At all points they respected and supported me through the years of my penance.”
One nobility is kin to another, thought Cadfael. There are alliances that cross the blood-line of families, the borders of countries, even the impassable divide of religion, And it was well possible that Guimar de Massard should find himself closer in spirit to the Fatimid caliphs than to Bohemond and Baldwin and Tancred, squabbling like malicious children over their conquests.
“How long,” he asked, “have you been on your way home?” For it was a long, long journey across Europe from the midland sea, on broken feet, with a clapper-dish for baggage, and nothing more.
“Eight years. Ever since they brought word to my hermitage, from the reports of an English prisoner, of my son’s death, and told me there was a child, a girl, left orphaned to her dead mother’s kin, wanting any remaining of my blood.”
So he had left his cell, the refuge of years, and set off with his begging-bowl and cloak and veil to make that endless pilgrimage to England, to see for himself, at the prescribed distance, that his grandchild enjoyed her lands and had her due of happiness. He had found, instead, her affairs gone far awry, and with his own maimed hands he had straightened them, and set her free.