“And you have no notion who they may be, or from where? You’ve had no rumor beforehand of outlaws setting up anywhere near?”
No, there had been no warning until then. It had come out of the blue, between midnight of the fourth, and pre-dawn of the fifth.
“One more question,” said Hugh. “Since you brought off your family with their lives, what became of the nun of Worcester who lodged with you the night of the second, along with this young man and his sister? That they left you that night we know. What of the nun?”
“Why, she was well out of it,” said Druel thankfully. “I had not her on my heart that night of the burning. She was gone, the afternoon before. Rather late it was for the daylight, but not too far gone. And a safe escort along the way, I reckoned she would do well enough. In a sad, distracted way she’d been, the poor girl, when she found she’d been left alone, but she did not know where to look for her chicks, and neither did we, and what was she to do?”
“Someone came for her?” asked Hugh.
“A Benedictine brother. She knew him, he had walked a part of the way with them before, and urged them to go with him to Bromfield, she said. So he urged then, and when she told him how she was forsaken, he said all the more she should put herself and her trouble into the hands of others, who would search for her charges for her, and keep her safe until they were found. He’d had to make his way here from Foxwood, asking after her,” said John, making allowance for the waning of the day when he had reached them. “I never saw woman so thankful to have a friend take her in care. She went with him, and I make no doubt she came safe to Bromfield.”
Yves stood dumb. “She came,” said Hugh drily, rather to himself than to any other. Safe? Yes, take it as large as words will hold, yes, she came safe. Sinless, conscientious, brave, who at this moment was safer than Sister Hilaria, an innocent gone straight to God?
“A strange thing followed, though,” said Druel, “for the next day, while we were here telling our tale, and the good folk making room for us in their homes, like Christians as they are, there came a young man afoot, up from the road by the proper way, and asked after just such a party as we had housed. Had any here news, he said, of a young nun of Worcester, in company with two young gentlefolk, brother and sister, making towards Shrewsbury. We were full of our own troubles, but we told him all we knew, and how they were all gone from us before ever this evil befell. And he listened and went away. Up to the wreck of my holding, first, but after that I cannot tell where.”
“A stranger to all here?” asked Hugh, looking round the circle that had gathered, for by then the women had come forth, and hung attentive on the outskirts.
“Never seen before,” said the reeve emphatically.
“What manner of man, then?”
“Why, by his dress husbandman or shepherd like any of us here, a brown homespun man. Not so much as thirty years old, nearer five or six and twenty. Bigger than your lordship, but built like you, light and long. And dark, a black-rimmed eye on him with a yellow glint, like a hawk. And black hair under his hood.”
The women had drawn closer in silence, quiet-eyed and prick-eared. Their interest in the stranger was all the plainer because not one of them voiced it, or volunteered any detail concerning him. Whoever he was, he had made an impression upon the women of Cleeton, and they did not mean to miss anything they could glean about him, or surrender anything they had already gleaned.
“Dark-skinned,” said Druel, “and beaked like a hawk, too. A very comely man.” Yes, so the attentive eyes of the women said. “There was something a thought slow about his speech, now I come to recall . . .”
Hugh took him up alertly on that. “As though he were not at home in the common English?”
John had not thought of that for himself; he considered it stolidly. “It might be that. Or as if he had a small stumble of the tongue, like.”
Well, if English was not his proper tongue, what was? Welsh? Easily possible here along the borders, but what would a Welshman be doing asking after the fugitives from Worcester? Angevin, then? Ah, that was another matter.
“If ever you should hear or see more of him,” said Hugh, “send me word into Ludlow or Bromfield, and you shall not be losers. And for you, friend, let’s own honestly there’s little chance of recovering all or most of your losses, but some of your stock we may yet win back for you if we can trace these outlaws to their lair. We’ll do our best to that end, be sure.”
He wheeled his horse, and led the way towards the downward track, the others following, but he did not hurry, for one of the young women had drawn off in that direction, and was eyeing him meaningly over her shoulder. As Hugh came by she closed alongside, and laid a hand to his stirrup-leather. She knew what she was about, she had moved far enough to be out of earshot of the village.
“My lord . . .” She looked up at him with sharp blue eyes, and spoke in a purposeful undertone. “One more thing I can tell you about the dark man, that no one else saw. I said no word, for fear they would close up against him if they knew. He was a very well-looking man, I trusted him, even if he was not what he seemed . . .”
“In what particular?” asked Hugh, just as quietly.
“He kept his cloak close about him, my lord, and in the cold that was no marvel. But when he went away I followed a little, and I saw how the folds hung at his left side. Country lad or no, he wore a sword.”
“So they went from here together,” said Yves, as they rode down towards the highroad, where they must haste if they were to use the remainder of the daylight. He had been very silent, struggling with revelations that seemed only to make the pattern of events more complex and entangled. “He came back to look for us all, and found only Sister Hilaria. It was evening already, they would be caught in the darkness and the snow. And these same robbers and murderers who have ruined poor John must have attacked them, and left them both for dead.”
“So it would seem,” said Hugh somberly. “We have a plague among us that needs burning out before it spreads. But what are we to make of this simple countryman who wore a sword under his cloak?”
“And asking after us!” Yves recalled, marvelling. “But I know no one like that.”
“What like was the young lord who took away your sister?”
“Not black, nor like a hawk, rather fair-skinned, and fair in the hair, too. And besides, even if he came seeking the two of us she’d left behind, he would not come up from the highroad, not according to the way we set off when I followed them. And he would not come dressed as a peasant, either. Nor alone.”
All of which was shrewd sense. There were, of course, other possibilities. The men of Gloucester, elated by their gains, might well be sending agents in disguise into these regions, probing for any weak spots, and such envoys, thought Cadfael, might have been told to pursue, at the same time, the search for Laurence d’Angers’ nephew and nice, strayed in the Worcester panic.
“Let it lie by a while,” said Beringar, half-grim and half-appreciative, as if he looked forward to interesting encounters. “We shall certainly hear more of Cleeton’s dark stranger, if we just bide quiet and bear his image in mind.”
They were within two miles of Ludlow before the expected snow began with the dusk. They drew close cloak and capuchon, and rode sturdily with heads down, but so close to home that they were in no danger of losing the road. Hugh parted from them under the walls of Ludlow, to ride in to his company there, leaving two of his men to escort Cadfael and the boy the short way on to Bromfield. Even Yves had lost his tongue by then, a little drunk with fresh air and exercise, and already growing hungry, for all he had eaten his hunk of bread and strip of hard bacon long before. He sat braced and stolid in the saddle, hunched under his hood, but emerged from it with a face like a rosy apple as soon as they lighted down in the great court at the priory. Vespers was long over. Prior Leonard was hovering, watchful and uneasy, for the return of his fledgling, and ventured out into the thick haze of snow to reclaim him and bring him in to supper.