The Potter's Field (24 page)

“Brother Cadfael was an easy master,” said Sulien, presenting the cup to him with a somewhat strained smile.

“So I believe,” she said, “from all that you have told me of him. And I do remember you, Brother, and the medicines you made for me, some years ago. You were so kind as to send a further supply by Sulien, when he came to see you. He has been persuading me to use the syrup. But I need nothing. You see I am very well tended, and quite content. You should take back the flask, others may need it.”

“It was one of the reasons for this visit,” said Cadfael, “to enquire if you had found any benefit from the draught, or if there is anything besides that I could offer you.”

She smiled directly into his eyes, but all she said was: “And the other reason?”

“The lord abbot,” said Cadfael, “sent me to ask if Sulien will ride back with me and pay him a visit.”

Sulien stood fronting him with an inscrutable face, but betrayed himself for a second by moistening lips suddenly dry. “Now?”

“Now.” The word fell too heavily, it needed leavening. “He would take it kindly of you. He thought of your son,” said Cadfael, turning to Donata, “for a short while as his son. He has not withdrawn that paternal goodwill. He would be glad to see and to know,” he said with emphasis, looking up again into Sulien's face, “that all is well with you. There is nothing we want more than that.” And whatever might follow, that at least was true. Whether they could hope to have and keep what they wanted was another matter.

“Would an hour or two of delay be allowed me?” asked Sulien steadily. “I must escort Pernel home to Withington. Perhaps I should do that first.” Meaning, for Cadfael, who knew how to interpret: It may be a long time before I come back from the abbey. Best to clear up all unfinished business.

“No need for that,” said Donata with authority. “Pernel shall stay here with me over the night, if she will be so kind. I will send a boy over to Withington to let her father know that she is safe here with me. I have not so many young visitors that I can afford to part with her so soon. You go with Brother Cadfael, and we shall keep company very pleasantly together until you come back.”

That brought a certain wary gleam to Sulien's face and Pernel's. They exchanged the briefest of glances, and Pernel said at once: “I should like that very much, if you'll really let me stay. Gunnild is there to take care of the children, and my mother, I'm sure, will spare me for a day.”

Was it possible, Cadfael wondered, that Donata, even in her own extremity, was taking thought for her younger son, and welcomed this first sign in him of interest in a suitable young woman? Mothers of strong nature, long familiar with their own slow deaths, may also wish to settle any unfinished business.

He had just realised what it was that most dismayed him about her. This wasting enemy that had greyed her hair and shrunk her to the bone had still not made her look old. She looked, rather, like a frail waif of a young girl, blighted, withered and starved in her April days, when the bud should just have been unfolding. Beside Pernel's radiance she was a blown wisp of vapour, the ghost of a child. Yet in this or any room she would still be the dominant.

“I'll go and saddle up, then,” said Sulien, almost as lightly as if he had been contemplating no more than a canter through the woods for a breath of air. He stooped to kiss his mother's fallen cheek, and she lifted a hand that felt like the flutter of a dead leaf's filigree skeleton as it touched his face. He said no farewells, to her or to Pernel. That might have spilled over into something betrayingly ominous. He went briskly out through the hall, and Cadfael made his own farewells as gracefully as he could, and hurried down to join him in the stables.

*

They mounted in the yard, and set out side by side without a word being spoken, until they were threading the belt of woodland.

“You will already have heard,” said Cadfael then, “that Hugh Beringar and his levy came back today? Without losses!”

“Yes, we heard. I did grasp,” said Sulien, wryly smiling, “whose voice it was summoning me. But it was well done to let the abbot stand for him. Where are we really bound? The abbey or the castle?”

“The abbey. So much was truth. Tell me, how much
does
she know?”

“My mother? Nothing. Nothing of murder, nothing of Gunnild, or Britric, or Ruald's purgatory. She does not know your plough team ever turned up a woman's body, on what was once our land. Eudo never said a word to her, nor has any other. You have seen her,” said Sulien simply. “There is not a soul about her who would let one more grief, however small, be added to her load. I should thank you for observing the same care.”

“If that can be sustained,” said Cadfael, “it shall. But to tell the truth, I am not sure that you have done her any service. Have you ever considered that she may be stronger than any one of you? And that in the end, to worse sorrow, she may have to know?”

Sulien rode beside him in silence for a while, his head was raised, his eyes fixed steadily ahead, and his profile, seen clearly against the open sky with its heavy clouds, pale and set with the rigidity of a mask. Another stoic, with much of his mother in him.

“What I most regret,” he said at last, with deliberation, “is that I ever approached Pernel. I had no right. Hugh Beringar would have found Gunnild in the end, she would have come forward when she heard of the need, without any meddling. And now see what mischief I have done!”

“I think,” said Cadfael, with respectful care, “that the lady played as full a part as you. And I doubt if she regrets it.”

Sulien splashed ahead of his companion into the ford. His voice came back to Cadfael's ears clear and resolute. “Something may be done to undo what we have done. And as to my mother, yes, I have considered the ending. Even for that I have made provision.”

In the abbot's parlour the four of them were gathered after Vespers, with the window shuttered and the door fast closed against the world. They had had to wait for Hugh. He had a garrison to review, levies newly dismissed from feudal service to pay and discharge home to their families, a few wounded to see properly tended, before he could even dismount stiffly in his own courtyard, embrace wife and son, shed his soiled travelling clothes and draw breath at his own table. The further examination of a doubtful witness, however low his credit stood now, could wait another hour or two without disadvantage.

But after Vespers he came, eased and refreshed but weary. He shed his cloak at the door, and made his reverence to the abbot. Radulfus closed the door, and there was a silence, brief but deep. Sulien sat still and mute on the bench built against the panelled wall. Cadfael had drawn aside into the corner by the shuttered window.

“I must thank you, Father,” said Hugh, “for providing us this meeting place. I should have been sorry to impose upon the family at Longner, and by all counts you have also an interest in this matter, as valid as mine.”

“We have all an interest in truth and justice, I trust,” said the abbot. “Nor can I discard all responsibility for a son because he has gone forth into the world. As Sulien knows. Proceed as you choose, Hugh.”

He had made room for Hugh beside him behind his desk, cleared now of its parchments and the business of the day. Hugh accepted the place and sat down with a great sigh. He was still cramped from the saddle and had stiffening grazes newly healed, but he had brought back his company intact from the Fens, and that was achievement enough. What else he had brought back with him he was about to sift, and these three in company with him here were about to learn.

“Sulien, I need not remind you, or these who were witnesses, of the testimony you gave concerning Ruald's wife's ring, and how you came by it at the shop of John Hinde, in Priestgate, in Peterborough. Name and place I asked, and you told me. From Cambridge, when we were discharged from service, I went to Peterborough. Priestgate I found. The shop I found. John Hinde I found. I have talked to him, Sulien, and I report his testimony as I heard it from him. Yes,” said Hugh with deliberation, his eyes on Sulien's blanched but composed face, “Hinde remembers you well. You did come to him with the name of Abbot Walter to commend you, and he took you in for a single night, and set you on your way home next day. That is truth. That he confirms.”

Recalling how readily Sulien had supplied the jeweller's name and the place where his shop was to be found, Cadfael had had little doubt of the truth of that part of the story. It had not seemed likely, then, that the rest of it would ever be tested. But Sulien's face continued as marble-blank as resolution could make it, and his eyes never left Hugh's face.

“But when I asked him of the ring, he asked, what ring was that? And when I pictured it to him, he was absolute that he had never seen such a ring, never bought that or anything else from such a woman as I described. So recent a transaction he could not possibly forget, even if he did not keep good records, as he does. He never gave you the ring, for he never had the ring. What you told us was a fabric of lies.”

The new silence fell like a stone, and seemed to be arrested in Sulien's braced stillness. He neither spoke nor lowered his eyes. Only the small, spasmodic movement of Radulfus's muscular hand upon the desk broke the tension within the room. What Cadfael had foreseen from the moment he had conveyed the abbot's summons, and observed the set of Sulien's face as he received it, came as a shock to Radulfus. There was not much of human behaviour he had not encountered in his life. Liars he had known and dealt with, without surprise, but this one he had not expected.

“Yet you produced the ring,” Hugh continued steadily, “and Ruald recognised and verified the ring. Since you did not get it from the silversmith, how did you come by it? One story you told is shown to be false. Now you have your chance to tell another and a truer. Not all liars have that grace. Now say what you have to say.”

Sulien opened his lips with a creaking effort, like one turning a key in a lock unwilling to respond.

“I already had the ring,” he said. “Generys gave it to me. I have told the lord abbot, I tell you now, all my life long I held her in affection, deeper than I knew. Even as I grew a man, I never understood how that affection was changing, until Ruald deserted her. Her rage and grief made me to know. What moved her I hardly know. It may be she was avenging herself upon all men, even me. She did receive and make use of me. And she gave me the ring. It did not last long,” he said, without bitterness. “I could not satisfy, green as I was. I was not Ruald, nor of sufficient weight to pierce Ruald to the heart.”

There was something strange, Cadfael thought, in his choice of words, as though at times the blood of passion did run in them, and at others they came with detached care, measured and contrived. Perhaps Radulfus had felt the same unease, for this time he did speak, impatient for plainer telling.

“Are you saying, my son, that you were this woman's lover?”

“No,” said Sulien. “I am saying that I loved her, and she admitted me some small way into her grief, when she was in mortal need. If my torment was any ease to hers, that time was not wasted. If you mean, did she admit me even into her bed, no, that she never did, nor I never asked nor hoped for it. My significance, my usefulness, never came so high.”

“And when she vanished,” Hugh pursued with relentless patience, “what did you know of that?”

“Nothing, no more than any other man.”

“What did you suppose had become of her?”

“My time,” said Sulien, “was over by then, she had done with me. I believed what the world believed, that she had taken up her roots and fled the place that had become abhorrent to her.”

“With another lover?” Hugh asked evenly. “The world believed so.”

“With a lover or alone. How could I know?”

“Truly! You knew no more than any other man. Yet when you came back here, and heard that we had found a woman's body buried in the Potter's Field, you knew that it must be she.”

“I knew,” said Sulien with aching care, “that it was the common belief that it must be. I did not know that it was.”

“True, again! You had no secret knowledge, so equally you could not know that it was
not
Generys. Yet you felt it necessary at once to make up your lying story, and produce the ring she had given you, as you now say, in order to prove that she was well alive and far enough away to make confirmation hard, and to lift the shadow of suspicion from Ruald. Without respect to his guilt or innocence, for according to the account you give of yourself now, you did not know whether she was alive or dead, nor whether he had or had not killed her.”

“No!” said Sulien, with a sudden flush of energy and indignation that jerked his braced body forward from the panelled wall, “That I did know, because I know him. It is inconceivable that he could ever have harmed her. It is not in the man to do murder.”

“Happy the man whose friends can be so sure of him!” said Hugh drily. “Very well, pass on to what followed. We had no cause to doubt your word then; you had proved, had you not, that Generys was alive? Therefore we looked about us for other possibilities, and found another woman who had frequented there, and not been seen of late. And behold, your hand is seen again moulding matters. From the moment you heard of the pedlar's arrest you began a hunt for some manor where the woman might have found a shelter through the winter, where someone might be able to testify to her being alive well after she parted from Britric. I doubt if you expected to find her still settled there, but I am sure you were glad of it. It meant you need not appear, she could come forward of her own accord, having heard there was a man charged with her murder. Twice, Sulien? Twice are we to accept your hand for the hand of God, with no more pressing motive than pure love of justice? Since you had so infallibly proved the dead woman could not be Generys, why should you be so sure she was not Gunnild? Two such rescues were one too many to be believed in. Gunnild's survival was proven, she came, she spoke, she was flesh and blood beyond doubt. But for the life of Generys we have only your word. And your word is shown to be false. I think we need look no further for a name for the woman we found. By denying her a name, you have named her.”