“Now there is one more thing,” said Cadfael, “in which Yves may be able to help us, if I may keep him from his bed a few minutes more. You know, Yves, you spoke of Brother Elyas, who left you at Foxwood?”
Yves nodded, attentive and wondering.
“Brother Elyas is here in the infirmary. After leaving for home, his errand done, he was attacked by footpads in the night and badly hurt, and the countrymen who found him brought him here to be cared for. I am sure he is on the mend now, but he has not been able to tell us anything about what happened to him. He has no memory of these recent days, only in his sleep he seems to struggle with some half-recalled distress. Waking, his mind is blank, but in sleep he has mentioned you, though not by name. The boy would have gone with me, he said. Now if he claps eyes on you, safe and well, it might be the sight will jog his memory. Will you try it with me?”
Yves rose willingly, if somewhat apprehensively, looking to Beringar for confirmation that he had done all that was required of him here. “I am sorry he has come to harm. He was kind . . . Yes, whatever I can do for him . . .”
On the way to the sickroom, with no other witness by, he slipped his hand thankfully, like an awed child, into Brother Cadfael’s comfortable clasp, and clung tightly.
“You mustn’t mind that he is bruised and disfigured. All that will pass, I promise you.”
Brother Elyas was lying mute and still, while a younger brother read to him from the life of Saint Remigius. His bruises and distortions were already subsiding, he seemed free from pain, he had taken food during the day, and at the office bell his lips would move soundlessly on the words of the liturgy. But his open eyes dwelt unrecognizingly upon the boy who entered, and wandered away again languidly into the shadowy corners of the room. Yves crept to the bedside on tiptoe, great-eyed.
“Brother Elyas, here is Yves come to see you. You remember Yves? The boy you met at Cleobury, and parted from at Foxwood.”
No, nothing, nothing but the faint tremor of desperate anxiety troubling the patient face. Yves ventured close, and timidly laid his hand over the long, lax hand that lay upon the covers, but it remained chill and unresponsive under his touch.
“I am sorry you have been hurt. We walked together those few miles. I wish we had kept your company all the way . . .”
Brother Elyas stared and quivered, shaking his head helplessly.
“No, let him be,” said Cadfael, sighing. “If we press him he grows agitated. No matter, he has time. Only let his body revive as it is doing, and memory can wait. It was worth the trying, but he is not ready for us yet. Come, you’re dropping with sleep, let’s get you safely into your bed.”
They arose at dawn, Cadfael and Hugh and his men, and went out into a world which had again changed its shape in the night, hillocks levelled and hollows filled in, and a spume of fine snow waving like a languid plume from every crest, in the subsiding winds. They took axes with them, and a litter of leather thongs strung between two poles, and a linen cloth to cover her, and they went in dour silence, none of them with anything to say until words were to the point for the grim work in hand. The fall had stopped at the coming of daylight, as it had now ever since that first night when Yves had set off doggedly to trail his errant sister. Iron frost had begun the next night, and that same night some nocturnal beast had ravished and murdered the girl they went out now to seek, for the ice had taken her to itself very shortly after she had been put into an already congealing stream. Of that Cadfael was certain.
They found her, after some questing and probing in new snow, swept the fresh fall from the ice, and looked down upon her, a girl in a mirror, a girl spun from glass.
“Good God!” said Hugh in awe. “She’s younger than the boy!” So slight, so childlike, did the shadowy form appear.
But they were there, perforce, to break her rest and take her away for Christian burial, though it seemed almost a violation to shatter the smoothness of the ice that encase her. They did it with care, well aside from the delicate, imprisoned flesh, and it proved hard work enough. For all the bite of the frost, they were sweating when they hoisted out heavily the girl and her cold coffin, laid her like a piece of statuary in the thongs of the litter, covered her with the linen cloth, and carried her slowly back to Bromfield. Not a drop fell from the ice until they had it stowed privately in the chill, bare mortuary of the priory. Then the glittering edges began to soften and slide, and drip into the channel where the water flowed away from the washing of the dead.
The girl lay remote and pale within her lucid shroud, and yet grew steadily more human and closer to life, to pain and pity and violence, and all the mortal lot of mankind. Cadfael dared not leave the place for long, because the boy Yves was now up and active, and inquisitive about everything, and no one could guess where he would appear next. He was well brought up, and his manners were charming, but with his inbred conviction of privilege and his very proper thirteen-year-old energy, he might yet prove a hazard.
It was past ten, and High Mass in progress, when the shell of ice had dwindled so far that the girl began to emerge, the tips of thin, pale fingers and stretched toes, her nose, as yet only a minute pearl, and the first curling strands of hair, a fine lace on either side her forehead. It was those curls that first caught Cadfael’s acute attention. For they were short. He wound a few fine threads on his finger, and they made but a turn and a half. And they were no darker than dark gold, and would be even fairer as they dried. Then he bent to the calm stare of her open eyes, still thinly veiled with ice. Their color seemed to him the soft, dim purple of irises, or the darkest grey of lavender flowers.
The face emerged as Mass ended. After the air touched her, bruises began to darken on cheek and mouth. The tips of her small breasts broke the glaze over them. And now Cadfael could see clearly the smear that darkened her flesh and her linen there, on the right side, a reddish mark like a graze, faintly mottled from shoulder to breast. He knew the traces of blood. The ice had taken her before the stilling water could wash the stain away. Now it might pale as the remaining ice thawed, but he would know how it had lain, and where to look for the source.
Well before noon she was freed of her shell, and softening into his hands, slender and young, her small, shapely head covered all over with an aureole of short bronze curls, like an angel in an Annunciation. Cadfael went to fetch Prior Leonard, and they cared for her together, not yet to wash her body, not until Hugh Beringar had viewed it, but to compose her worthily in her everlasting stillness. To the throat they covered her with a linen sheet, and made her ready to be seen.
Hugh came, and stood by her silently. Eighteen could well be her age, so white and slim and tranquil, gone far beyond them. And beautiful, as reported? Yes, that she was. But was this the dark, headstrong, spoiled daughter of the nobility, who had insisted on her own way in despite of the times, the winter, the war and all?
“Look!” said Cadfael, and turned back the linen to show the crumpled folds of her shift, just as they had emerged from the ice. The dull, reddish smear speckled her right shoulder, the edge of her shift, and the creases over her right breast.
“Stabbed?” said Hugh, looking up into Cadfael’s face.
“There is no wound. See now!” He drew down the linen and showed the flesh beneath. Only a smudge or two showed on her pale skin. He wiped them away, and she shone white without blemish. “Certainly not stabbed. The night frost that took her closed in very quickly, and preserved these marks, faint as they are. But she did not bleed. Or if she did,” he added bleakly, “it was not from knife-wounds, and not there. More likely she fought him—him or them, such wolves hunt happiest in packs!—and drew blood. A clawed face, it might be, or a hand or wrist as she tried to force him off. Bear it in mind, Hugh, as I will also.” He covered her again reverently. The alabaster face looked up from veiled eyes into the vault, supremely unmoved, and her head of clipped curls was beginning to shine like a halo as it dried.