Chapter One

(Spring of 1140)

Friday midnight to Saturday morning

IT BEGAN, AS THE GREATEST OF storms do begin, as a mere tremor in the air, a thread of sound so distant and faint, yet so ominous, that the ear that was sharp enough to catch it instantly pricked and shut out present sounds to strain after it again, and interpret the warning. Brother Cadfael had a hare’s hearing, readily alerted and sharply focused. He caught the quiver and bay, at this point surely still on the far side of the bridge that crossed Severn from the town, and stiffened into responsive stillness, braced to listen.

It could have been an innocent sound enough, or if not innocent of murderous intent, at any rate natural, the distant voices of hunting owls, and the predatory bark of a dog-fox prowling his nocturnal barony. Certainly the ferocious note of the hunt sounded clearly in it to Cadfael’s ear. And even Brother Anselm the precentor, wholly absorbed into his chanting of the office, wavered and slipped off-key for an instant, and took up the cadence jealously, composing his mind sternly to duty.

For there could not be anything in it to trouble the midnight rite of Matins, here in this kindly spring, barely four weeks past Easter of the year of Our Lord 1140, with Shrewsbury and all this region secure within the king’s peace, whatever contentions raged farther south between king and empress, cousins at odds for the throne. The winter had been hard indeed, but was blessedly over, the sun had shone on Easter Day, and continued shining ever since, with only light, scattered showers to confirm the blessing. Only westward in Wales had there been heavy spring rains, swelling the river level. The season promised well, the town enjoyed fair rule under a dour but just sheriff, and defended stoutly by a sensible provost and council. In a time of civil war, Shrewsbury and its shire had good cause to thank God and King Stephen for relative order. Not here, surely, should the conventual peace of Matins fear any disruption. And yet Brother Anselm, for one instant, had faltered.

In the dim space of the choir, partially shut off from the nave of the church by the parish altar and lit only by the constant lamp and the candles on the high altar, the brothers in their stalls showed like carven copies, in this twilight without age or youth, comeliness or homeliness, so many matched shadows. The height of the vault, the solid stone of the pillars and walls, took up the sound of Brother Anselm’s voice, and made of it a disembodied magic, high in air. Beyond where the candle-light reached and shadows ended, there was darkness, the night within, the night without. A benign night, mild, still and silent.

Not quite silent. The tremor on the air became a faint, persistent murmur. In the dimness under the rood loft, to the right of the entrance to the choir, Abbot Radulfus stirred in his stall. To the left, Prior Robert’s habit rustled briefly, with an effect of displeasure and reproof rather than uneasiness. The merest ripple of disquiet shivered along the ranks of the brothers, and again subsided.

But the sound was drawing nearer. Even before it grew so loud as to compel notice there was no mistaking the anger in it, the menace and the dangerous excitement, all the marks of the hunt. It sounded as if the pursuit had reached the point where the van chasseours had run the quarry to exhaustion, and the parfytours were closing in for the kill. Even at this distance it was clear that some creature’s life was in peril.

The sound drew nearer now very rapidly, hard to ignore, though the precentor continued valiantly leading his flock in the office, and raised his voice and quickened his tempo to ride over the challenge. The younger brothers and novices were shifting uneasily, even whispering, half stimulated, half affrighted. The murmur had become a ferocious, muted howl, as if gigantic bees were in swarm after an intruder. Even abbot and prior had leaned forward ready to rise from their stalls, and were exchanging questioning looks in the dimness.

With obstinate devotion Brother Anselm lifted the first phrase of Lauds. He got no farther. At the west end of the church the unlatched leaf of the great parish door was suddenly hurled open to crash against the wall, and something unseen came hurtling and scrabbling and gasping down the length of the nave, reeling and fumbling and fending itself off from wall and pillar, heaving at breath as though run to death already.

They were on their feet, every man. The younger ones broke out in frightened exclamation and wonder, nudging and wavering in doubt what to do. Abbot Radulfus in his own domain was hampered by no such hesitation. He moved with speed and force, plucked a candle from the nearest sconce, and went striding out round the parish altar in great, loping strides that sent his gown billowing out behind him. After him went Prior Robert, more tender of his dignity, and therefore slower to reach the scene of need, and after Robert all the brothers in jostling agitation. Before they reached the nave they were met by a great, exultant bellow of triumph, and a rushing and scrambling of dozens of frenzied bodies, as the hunt burst in at the west door after its prey.

Brother Cadfael, once well accustomed to night alarms by land and by sea, had surged out of his stall as soon as the abbot moved, but took time to grasp a double candelabrum to light his way. Prior Robert in full sail was already blocking the right-hand way round the parish altar, too patrician to make enough haste to ruffle his silvery beauty. Cadfael doubled round to the left and emerged into the nave before him, with his light thrust out ahead, as much weapon as illumination.

The hounds were streaming in by then, a quarter of the town, and not the best quarter, though not necessarily the worst either; decent craftsmen, merchants, traders, jostled with the riff-raff always ready for any brawl, and all of them beyond themselves either with drink or excitement or both together, howling for blood. And blood there was, slippery on the tiles of the floor. On the three steps to the parish altar lay sprawled some poor wretch flattened beneath a surge of trampling, battering foes, all hacking away with fist and boot, happily in such a tangle that comparatively few of their kicks and blows got home. All Cadfael could see of the quarry was a thin arm and a fist hardly bigger than a child’s, that reached out of the chaos to grip the edge of the altar-cloth with life-and-death desperation.

Abbot Radulfus, all the long, lean, muscular length of him, with his gaunt, authoritative lantern head blazing atop, sailed round the altar, smoky candle in hand, slashed the skirts of his habit like a whip across the stooping beast-faces of the foremost attackers, and with a long bony leg bestrode the fallen creature that clawed at the fringes of the altar.

“Rabble, stand off! Blasphemers, quit this holy place, and be ashamed. Back, before I blast your souls eternally!”

He had no need to raise his voice to a shout, he had only to unsheathe it like a knife, and it sliced through the babble as through cheese. They recoiled as though his nearness seared, but they did not go far, only out of range of the burning. They hopped and hovered and clamoured, indignant, aggrieved, but wary of tempting Heaven. They drew off from a miserable fragment of a man, flat on his face up the altar steps, soiled and crumpled and bloodied, and no bigger than a boy fifteen years old. In the brief, daunted silence before they screamed their charge against him, every soul present could hear how his breath heaved and laboured and clapped in his ribs, toiling for dear life, threatening to break his meagre frame apart. Flaxen hair dabbled with dust and blood spilled against the fringes of the altar-cloth he gripped so frantically. Skinny arms and legs hugged the stone as if his life depended upon the contact. If he could speak, or lift his head, he had too much sense left in him to venture the attempt.

“How dare you so affront the house of God?” demanded the abbot, darkly smouldering. He had not missed the steely flash of reflected light in the hand of one squat fellow who was sliding roundabout to get at his victim privily. “Put up that knife or court your soul’s damnation!”

The hunters recovered breath and rage together. A dozen at least gave tongue, crying their own justification and the hunted man’s offences, so variously that barely a word conveyed any meaning. Radulfus brandished a daunting arm, and their clamour subsided into muttering. Cadfael, observing that the armed man had done no more than slide his weapon out of sight, took his stand firmly between, and advanced his candles with a flourish in the direction of a fine bushy beard.

“Speak one, if you have anything of worth to say,” ordered the abbot. “The rest be silent. You, young man, you would seem to put yourself forward...”

The young man who had taken a pace ahead of his supporters, and whose prior right they seemed to acknowledge, stood forth flushed and important, an unexpected figure enough to be out man-hunting at midnight. He was tall and well-made and assured of manner, a little too well aware of a handsome face, and he was very elegant in festival finery, even if his best cotte was now somewhat crumpled and disordered from the turmoil of pursuit, and his countenance red and slack from the effects of a good deal of wine drunk. Without that induced courage, he would not have faced the lord abbot with quite so much impudence.

“My lord, I will speak for all, I have the right. We mean no disrespect to the abbey or your lordship, but we want that man for murder and robbery done tonight. I accuse him! All here will bear me out. He has struck down my father and plundered his strong-box, and we are come to take him. So if your lordship will allow, we’ll rid you of him.”

So they would, never a doubt of it. Radulfus kept his place, the brothers crowding close to complete the barrier.

“I had thought to hear you make some amend,” said the abbot sharply, “for this intrusion. Whatever this fellow may or may not have done, it is not he who has shed blood and drawn steel here within the church on the very steps of the altar. Violence he may have done elsewhere, but here none, he does but suffer it. The crime of sacrilege is yours, all of you here breaking our peace. You had best be considering on the health of your own souls. And if you have a lawful complaint against this person, where is the law? I see no sergeant here among you. I see no provost, who could at least make a case for the town. I see a rabble, as far at fault in law as robber and murderer can be. Now get hence, and pray that your offence may be pardoned. Whatever charges you have to make, take them to the law.”

Some among them were drawing back stealthily by then, sobering and thinking better of their invasion, and only too anxious to sneak away to their homes and beds. But the vagabonds, always ready for mischief, stood their ground with sullen, sly faces, and had no intention of going far, and the more respectable, if they abated their noisy ardour, kept their bitter indignation. Cadfael knew most of them. Perhaps Radulfus himself, though no Shrewsbury man by birth, was better-read in them than they supposed. He kept his place, and bent his steady, menacing brow against them, forbidding action.

“My lord abbot,” ventured the fine young man, “if you will let us take him hence we will deliver him up to the law.”

To the nearest tree, thought Cadfael. And there were trees in plenty between here and the river. He snipped at the wicks of his candles and let them flare afresh. The beard was still hovering in the shadows.

“That I cannot do,” said the abbot crisply. “If the law itself were here, there is no power can now take away this man from the sanctuary he has sought. You should know the right of it as well as I, and the peril, body and soul, to any who dare to breach that sanctuary. Go, take the pollution of your violence out of this holy place. We have duties here which your presence in hatred defiles. Go! Out!”

“But my lord,” bleated the angry young man, tossing his curled head but keeping his distance, “you have not heard us as to the crime...”

“I will hear you,” said Radulfus with a snap, “by daylight, when you come with sheriff or sergeant to discuss this matter calmly, and in proper form. But I warn you, this man has claimed sanctuary, and the rights of sanctuary are his, according to custom, and neither you nor any other shall force him away out of these walls until the time of his respite is over.”

“And I warn you, my lord,” flared the youth, blazing red, “that should he venture a step outside, we shall be waiting for him, and what falls out of your lordship’s lordship will be no concern of yours, or the church’s.” Yes, unquestionably he was moderately drunk, or he would never have gone so far, an ordinary young burgess of the town, if a wealthy one. Even with an evening’s wine in him, he blenched at his own daring, and shuffled back a pace or two.

“Or God’s?” said the abbot coldly. “Go hence in peace, before his bolt strike you.”

They went, shadows edging backwards into shadow, through the open west door and out into the night, but always with their faces turned towards the miserable bundle prostrate clutching the altar-cloth. Mob madness is not so easily subdued, and even if their grievance proved less than justified, it was real enough to them. Murder and robbery were mortal crimes. No, they would not all go away. They would set a watch on the parish door and the gatehouse, with a rope ready.

“Brother Prior,” said Radulfus, running an eye over his shaken flock, “and Brother Precentor, will you again begin Lauds? Let the office proceed, and the brothers return to their beds according to the order. The affairs of men require our attention, but the affairs of God may not be subordinated.” He looked down at the motionless fugitive, too tensely still not to be aware of everything that passed above him, and again looked up to catch Brother Cadfael’s concerned and thoughtful eye. “We two, I think, are enough to take what confession this guest of ours wills to make, and tend his needs. They are gone,” said the abbot dispassionately to the prone figure at his feet. “You may get up.”

The thin body stirred uneasily, keeping one hand firmly on the fringe of the altar-cloth. He moved as if every flinching movement hurt, as well it might, but it seemed that he had at least escaped broken bones, for he used his free arm to help him up to his knees on the steps, and raised to the light a gaunt, bruised face smeared with blood and sweat and the slime of a running nose. Before their eyes he seemed to dwindle both in years and size. They might have been gazing at some unlucky urchin of the Foregate who had been set upon by a dozen or more of his capricious fellows for some trivial offence, and left howling in a ditch, but for the desperation of fear that emanated from him, and the memory of the pack that had been beaten off from his heels just in time.

A poor little wretch enough to be credited with murder and robbery. On his feet he might perhaps be about as tall as Cadfael, who was below the middle height, but width-ways Cadfael would have made three of him. His cotte and hose were ragged and threadbare, and had several new rents in them now from clawing hands and trampling feet, besides the dust and stains of long use, but originally they had been brightly-coloured in crude red and blue. He had a decent width of shoulder, better feeding might have made a well-proportioned man of him, but as he moved stiffly to look up at them he seemed all gangling limbs, large of elbow and knee, and very low in flesh to cover them. Seventeen or eighteen years old, Cadfael guessed. The eyes raised to them in such desolate entreaty were hollow and evasive, and one of them half-closed and swelling, but in the light of the candles they flared darkly and brilliantly blue as periwinkle flowers.

“Son,” said Radulfus, with chill detachment, for murderers come in all shapes, ages and kinds, “you heard what is charged against you by those who surely sought your life. Here you have committed body and soul to the care of the church, and I and all here are bound to keep and succour you. On that you may rely. As at this moment, I offer you only one channel to grace, and ask of you but one question. Whatever the answer, here you are safe as long as the right of sanctuary lasts. I promise it.”

The wretch crouched on his knees, watching the abbot’s face as though he numbered him among his enemies, and said no word.

“How do you answer to this charge?” asked Radulfus. “Have you this day murdered and robbed?”

Distorted lips parted painfully to loose a light, high, wary voice like a frightened child’s. “No, Father Abbot, I swear it!”

“Get up,” said the abbot, neither trusting nor judging. “Stand close, and lay your hand upon this casket on the altar. Do you know what it contains? Here within are the bones of the blessed Saint Elerius, the friend and director of Saint Winifred. On these holy relics, consider and answer me once again, as God hears you: are you guilty of that which they charge you?”

With all the obstinate, despairing fervour so slight a body could contain, and without hesitation, the light voice shrilled: “As God sees me, I am not! I have done no wrong.”

Radulfus considered in weighty silence an unnerving while. Just so would a man answer who had nothing to hide and nothing to fear from being heard in Heaven. But no less, so would a godless vagabond answer for his hide’s sake, having no faith in Heaven, and no fear of anything beyond the terrors of this world. Hard to decide between the two. The abbot suspended judgement.

“Well, you have given a solemn word, and whether it be true or no, you have the protection of this house, according to law, and time to think on your soul, if there is need.” He looked at Cadfael, and eye to eye they considered the needs that came before all. “He had best keep to the church itself, I think, until we have spoken with the officers of law, and agreed on terms.”

“So I think, also,” said Cadfael.

“Should he be left alone?” They were both thinking of the pack recently expelled from this place, still hungry and ripe for mischief, and surely not gone far.

The brothers had withdrawn, led back to the dortoir by Prior Robert, very erect and deeply displeased. The choir had grown silent and dark. Whether the brethren, particularly the younger and more restless, would sleep, was another matter. The smell of the dangerous outer world was in their nostrils, and the tremor of excitement quivering like an itch along their skins.

“I shall have work with him a while,” said Cadfael, eyeing the smears of blood that marked brow and cheek, and the painful list with which the man stood. A young, willowy body, accustomed to going lightly and lissomely. “If you permit, Father, I will stay here with him, and take his care upon me. Should there be need, I can call.”

“Very well, do so, brother. You may take whatever is necessary for his provision.” The weather was mild enough, but the hours of the night would be cold, in this sanctified but stony place. “Do you need a helper to fetch and carry for you? Our guest should not be left unfellowed.”

“If I may borrow Brother Oswin, he knows where to find all the things I may need,” said Cadfael.

“I will send him to you. And should this man wish to tell his own side of this unhappy story, mark it well. Tomorrow, no doubt, we shall have his accusers here in proper form, with one of the sheriff’s officers, and both parties will have to render account.”

Cadfael understood the force of that. A small discrepancy in the accused youth’s story between midnight and morning could be revealing indeed. But by morning the voluble accusers might also have cooled their heads, and come with a slightly modified tale, for Cadfael, who knew most of the inhabitants of the town, had by this time recalled the reason for their being up so late in their best clothes, and well gone in drink. The young cockerel in the festival finery should by rights have been bedding a bride rather than pursuing a wretched wisp of manhood over the bridge with hunting cries of murder and robbery. Nothing less than the marriage of the heir could have unloosed the purse-strings of the Aurifaber household enough to provide such a supply of wine.

“I leave the watch to you,” said Radulfus, and departed to hale out Brother Oswin from his cell, and send him down to join the vigil, He came so blithely that it was plain he had been hoping for just such a recall. Who but Brother Cadfael’s apprentice should be admitted to his nocturnal ministrations? Oswin came all wide eyes and eager curiosity, as excited as a truant schoolboy at being footloose at midnight, and attendant on the fringes of a sensational villainy. He hung over the shivering stranger, between fascinated horror at viewing a murderer close, and surprised pity at seeing so miserable a human being, where a brutal monster should have been.

Cadfael gave him no time to marvel. “I want water, clean linen, the ointment of centaury and cleavers, and a good measure of wine. Hop to it, sharp! Better light the lamp in the workshop, we may need more things yet.”

Brother Oswin plucked out a candle from its socket, and departed in such a gust of dutiful enthusiasm that it was a marvel his light was not blown out in the doorway. But the night was still, and the flame recovered, streaming smokily across the great court towards the gardens.

“Light the brazier!” called Cadfael after him, hearing his wretched charge’s teeth begin to chatter. A close brush with death is apt to leave a man collapsing like a pricked bladder, and this one had little flesh or strength about him to withstand the shock. Cadfael got an arm about him before he folded like an empty coat, and slid to the stones.

“Here, come... Let’s get you into a stall.” The weight was slight as a child’s, he hoisted it bodily, and made to withdraw round the parish altar to the somewhat less draughty confines of the choir, but the skinny fist that had all this time held fast to the altar-cloth would not let go. The thin body jerked in his arms.

“If I loose, they’ll kill me...”

“Not while I have hands or voice,” said Cadfael. “Our abbot has held his hand over you, they’ll make no further move tonight. Leave go of the cloth and come within. There are relics enough there, trust me, holier even than this.”

The grubby fingers, with black and bitten nails, released the cloth reluctantly, the flaxen head drooped resignedly on Cadfael’s shoulder. Cadfael bore him round into the choir and laid him in the nearest and most commodious stall, which was that of Prior Robert. The usurpation was not unpleasing. The young man was shivering violently from head to toe, but relaxed into the stall with a huge sigh, and was still.

“They’ve hunted you into the ground,” Cadfael allowed, settling him into shelter, “but at least into the right earth. Abbot Radulfus won’t give you up, never think it. You can draw breath, you have a home here for some days to come. Take heart! Nor are that pack out there so bad as you suppose, once the drink’s out of them they’ll cool. I know them.”

“They meant to kill me,” said the youth, trembling.

No denying that. So they would have done, had they got their hands on him out of this enclave. And there was a note of simple bewilderment in the high voice, of terror utterly at a loss, that caught Cadfael’s leaning ear. The lad was far gone in weakness, and relief from fear, and truly it sounded as if he did not know why he had ever been threatened. So the fox must feel, acting innocently after his kind, and hearing the hounds give tongue.

Brother Oswin came, burdened with a scrip full of wine-flask and unguent-jar, a roll of clean linen under one arm, and a bowl of water in both hands. His lighted candle he must have stuck to the bench in the porch, where a tiny, flickering light played. He arrived abrupt, urgent and glowing, the light-brown curls round his tonsure erected like a thorn-hedge. He laid down his bowl, laid out his linen, and leaned eagerly to support the patient as Cadfael drew him to the light.

“Be thankful for small mercies, I see no sign of broken bones in you. You’ve been trampled and hacked, and I make no doubt you’re a lump of bruises, but that we can deal with. Lean here your head – so! That’s a nasty welt across your temple and cheek. A cudgel did that. Hold still, now!”

The fair head leaned submissively into his hands. The weal grazed the crest of the left cheekbone, and broke the skin along the left side of his head, oozing blood into the pale hair. As Cadfael bathed it, stroking back the tangled locks, the skin quivered under the cold water, and the muck of dust and drying blood drained away. This was not the newest of his injuries. The smoothing of the linen over brow, cheek and chin uncovered a thin, pure, youthful face.

“What’s your name, child?” said Cadfael.

“Liliwin,” said the young man, still eyeing him warily.

“Saxon. So are your eyes, and your hair. Where born? Not here along the borders.”

“How should I know?” said the youth, listless. “In a ditch, and left there. The first I know is being taught to tumble, as soon as I walked.”

He was past fending for himself; perhaps he was even past lying. As well to get out of him whatever he was willing to tell, now, while he was forced to surrender himself to the hands of others, with his own helplessness like a weight of black despair on him.

“Is that how you’ve lived? Travelling the road, cutting capers at fairs, doing a little juggling and singing for your supper? It’s a hard life, with more kicks than kindnesses, I dare say. And from a child?” He could guess at the manner of training that went to school a childish body to the sort of contortions a fairground crowd would gape at. There were ways of hurting, by way of punishment, without spoiling the agility of growing limbs. “And solitary now? They’re gone, are they, that picked you out of your ditch and bent you to their uses?”

“I ran from them as soon as I was half-grown,” said the soft, weary voice. “Three mummers padding the road, a lad come by for nothing was a gift to them, they had their worth out of me. All I owed them was kicks and blows. I work for myself now.”

“At the same craft?”

“It’s all I know. But that I know well,” said Liliwin, suddenly raising his head proudly, and not wincing from the sting of the lotion bathing his grazed cheek.

“And that’s what brought you to Walter Aurifaber’s house last night,” said Cadfael mildly, stripping back a torn sleeve from a thin, sinewy forearm marked by a long slash from a knife. “To play at his son’s wedding-feast.”

One dark-blue eye peered up at him sidelong. “You know them?”

“There are few people in the town that I don’t know. I tend many folk within the walls, the old Aurifaber dame among them. Yes, I know that household. But it had slipped my mind that the goldsmith was marrying his son yesterday.” Knowing them as well as he did, he was sure that for all their wish to make an impressive show, they would not pay out money enough to attract the better sort of musicians, such as the nobility welcomed as guests. But a poor vagrant jongleur trying his unpromising luck in the town, that they might consider. All the more if his performance outdid his appearance, and genuine music could be had dead cheap. “So you heard of the celebration, and got yourself hired to entertain the guests. Then what befell, to bring the jollity to such a grim ending? Reach me here a pad of cloth, Oswin, and hold the candle nearer.”

“They promised me three pence for the evening,” said Liliwin, trembling now as much with indignation as fear and cold, “and they cheated me. It was none of my fault! I played and sang my best, did all my tricks... The house was full of people, they crowded me, and the young fellows, they were drunk and lungeous, they hustled me! A juggler needs room! It was not my fault the pitcher was broken. One of the youngsters jumped to catch the balls I was spinning, he knocked me flying, and the pitcher went over from the table, and smashed. She said it was her best... the old beldame... she screeched at me, and hit out with her stick...”

“She did this?” questioned Cadfael gently, touching the swathed wound on the jongleur’s temple.

“She did! Lashed out like a fury, and swore the thing was worth more than I’d earned, and I must pay for it. And when I complained, she threw me a penny, and told them to put me out!”

So she would, thought Cadfael ruefully, seeing her life-blood spilled if a prized possession was broken, she who hoarded every groat that was not spent on her perverse tenderness for her soul, which brought alms flowing to the abbey altars, and rendered Prior Robert her cautious friend.

“And they did it?” It would not have been a gentle ejection, they would all have been inflamed and boisterous by them. “How late was that? An hour before midnight?”

“More. None of them had left, then. They tossed me out of door, and wouldn’t let me in again.” He had long experience of his own helplessness in similar circumstances, his voice sagged despondently. “I couldn’t even pick up my juggling balls, I’ve lost them all.”

“And you were left chill in the night, thrown out of the burgage. Then how came this hunt after you?” Cadfael smoothed a turn of his linen roll round the thin arm that jerked in his hands with frustrated rage. “Hold still, child, that’s right! I want this slit well closed, it will knit clean if you take ease. What did you do?”

“Crept away,” said Liliwin bitterly. “What else could I do? The watch let me out of the wicket in the town gate, and I crossed the bridge and slipped into the bushes this side, meaning to make off from this town in the morning, and make for Lichfield. There’s a decent grove above the path down to the river, the other side the highroad from the abbey here, I went in there and found me a good place in the grass to sleep the night out.” But with his grievance boiling and festering in him, and his helplessness over and above, if what he told was truth. And long acquaintance with injustice and despite does not reconcile the heart.

“Then how comes it the whole pack of them should be hunting you an hour or so later, and crying murder and theft on you?”

“As God sees me,” blurted the youth, quaking, “I know no more than you! I was near to sleeping when I heard them come howling across the bridge. I’d no call to suppose it was ought to do with me, not until they were streaming down into the Foregate, but it was a noise to make any man afraid, whether he’d anything on his conscience or no. And then I could hear them yelling murder and vengeance, and crying it was the mummer who did it, and baying for my blood. They spread out and began to beat the bushes, and I ran for my life, being sure they’d find me. And all the pack of them came roaring after. They were all but plucking at my hair when I stumbled in here at the door. But God strike me blind if I know what I’m held to have done – and dead if I’m lying to you now!”

Cadfael completed his bandage, and drew the tattered sleeve down over it. “According to young Daniel, it seems his father’s been struck down and his strong-box emptied. A poor way of rounding off a wedding night! Do you tell me all this can have happened after you were put out without your pay? On the face of it, that might turn their minds to you and your grievance, if they were casting about for a likely felon.”

“I swear to you,” insisted the young man vehemently, “the goldsmith was hale and well the last time I set eyes on him. There was no quarrelling, no violence but what they used on me, they were laughing and drinking and singing still. What’s happened since I know no more than you. I left the place – what use was there in staying? Brother, for God’s sake believe me! I’ve touched neither the man nor his money.”

“Then so it will be found,” said Cadfael sturdily. “Here you’re safe enough in the meantime, and you must needs put your trust in justice and Abbot Radulfus, and tell your tale as you’ve told it to me when they question you. We have time, and given time, truth will out. You heard Father Abbot – stay here within the church tonight, but if they come to a decent agreement tomorrow you may have the run of the household.” Liliwin was very cold to the touch, with fear and shock, and still trembling. “Oswin,” said Cadfael briskly, “go and fetch me a couple of brychans from the store, and then warm me up another good measure of wine on the brazier, and spice it well. Let’s get some warmth into him.”

Oswin, who had held his tongue admirably while his eyes devoured the stranger, departed in a flurry of zeal to do his errands. Liliwin watched him go, and then turned to watch Cadfael no less warily. Small wonder if he felt little trust in anyone just now.

“You won’t leave me? They’ll be peering in at the door again before the night’s out.”

“I won’t leave you. Be easy!”

Advice difficult to follow, he admitted wryly, in Liliwin’s situation. But with enough mulled wine in him he might sleep. Oswin came again glowing with haste and the flush of bending over the brazier, and brought two thick, rough blankets, in which Liliwin thankfully wound himself. The spiced draught went down gratefully. A little colour came back to the gaunt, bruised face.

“You go to your bed, lad,” said Cadfael, leading Oswin towards the night stairs. “You can, now, he’ll do till morning. Then we shall see.”

Brother Oswin looked back in some wonder at the swaddled body almost swallowed up in Prior Robert’s capacious stall, and asked in a whisper: “Do you think he can really be a murderer, though?”

“Child,” said Cadfael, sighing, “until we get some sensible account of what’s happened in Walter Aurifaber’s burgage tonight, I doubt if there’s been murder done at all. With enough drink in them, the fists may well have started flying, and a few noses been bloodied, and some fool may very well have started a panic, with other fools ready enough to take up the cry. You go to your bed, and wait and see.”

And so must I wait and see, he thought, watching Oswin obediently climb the stair. It was all very well distrusting the alarms of the moment, but for all that, not all those voluble accusers had been drunk. And something unforeseen had certainly happened in the goldsmith’s house, to put a violent end to the celebrations of young Daniel’s marriage. How if Walter Aurifaber had really been struck dead? And his treasury robbed? By that woebegone scrap of humanity huddled in his brychans, half-drunk with the wine they had poured into him, half asleep but held alert by terror? Would he dare, even with a bitter grievance? Could he have managed the affair, even if he had dared? One thing was certain, if he had robbed he must have disposed of his gains in short order in the dark, in a town surely none too well known to him. In those scanty garments of his, that threadbare motley, there was barely room to conceal the single penny the old dame had thrown at him, much less the contents of a goldsmith’s coffer.

When he approached the stall, however quietly, the bruised eyelids rolled wide from the dark blue eyes, and they fixed on him in instant dread.

“Never shrink, it’s I. No one else will trouble you this night. And my name, if you need it, is Cadfael. And yours is Liliwin.” A name strangely right for a vagabond player, very young and solitary and poor, and yet proud of his proficiency in his craft, tumbler, contortionist, singer, juggler, dancer, purveying merriment for others while he found little cause to be merry himself. “How old are you, Liliwin?”

Half asleep and afraid to give way and sleep in earnest, he looked ever younger, dwindling into a swaddled child, reassuringly flushed now as the chill ebbed out of him. But he himself did not know the answer. He could only knit his fair brows and hazard doubtfully: “I think I may be turned twenty. It could be more. The mummers may have said I was less than I was – children draw more alms.”

So they would, and the boy was lightly built, spare and small. He might be as much as two and twenty, perhaps, surely no more.

“Well, Liliwin, if you can sleep do so, it will be aid and comfort, and you have need of it. You need not watch, I shall be doing that.”

Cadfael sat down in the abbot’s stall, and trimmed the attendant candles, so that he might have a fair view of his charge. The quiet came in, on the heels of their silence, very consolingly. The night without might well have its disquiets, but here the vault of the choir was like linked hands sheltering their threatened and precarious peace. It was strange to Cadfael to see, after prolonged calm, two great tears welling from beneath Liliwin’s closed eyelids, and rolling slowly over the jut of his gaunt cheek-bone, to fall into the brychan.

“What is it? What troubles you?” For himself he had shivered, argued, burned, but not wept.

“My rebec – I had it with me in the bushes, in a linen bag for my shoulder. When they flushed me out – I don’t know how, a branch caught in the string, and plucked it away. And I dared not stop to grope for it in the dark... And now I can’t go forth! I’ve lost it!”

“In the bushes, this side the bridge – across the highway from here?” It was a grief Cadfael could comprehend. “You cannot go forth lad, no, not yet, true enough. But I can. I’ll look for it. Those who hunted you would not go aside once they had you in view. Your rebec may be lying safe enough among the bushes. Go to sleep and leave grieving,” said Cadfael. “It’s too early to despair. For despair,” he said vigourously, “it is always too early. Remember that, and keep up your heart.”

One startled blue eye opened at him, he caught the gleam of the candles in it before it closed again. There was silence. Cadfael lay back in the abbot’s stall, and resigned himself to a long watch. Before Prime he must rouse himself to remove the interloper to a less privileged place, or Prior Robert would be rigid with offence. Until then, let God and his saints take charge, there was nothing more mere man could do.

As soon as the first light of dawn began to pluck colours out of the dark, on this clear May morning, Griffin, the locksmith’s boy who slept in the shop as a watchman, got up from his pallet and went to draw water from the well in the rear yard. Griffin was always the first up, from either household of the two that shared the yard, and had usually kindled the fire and made all ready for the day’s work before his master’s journeyman came in from his home two streets away. On this day in particular Griffin took it for granted that all those who had kept it up late at the wedding would be in no condition to rise early about their work. Griffin himself had not been invited to the feast, though Mistress Susanna had sent Rannilt across to bring him a platter of meats and bread, a morsel of cake and a draught of small ale, and he had eaten his fill, and slept innocently through whatever uproar had followed at midnight.

Griffin was thirteen years old, offspring of a maidservant and a passing tinker. He was well-grown, comely, of contented nature and good with his hands, but he was a simpleton. Baldwin Peche the locksmith preened himself on his goodness in giving house-room to such an innocent, but the truth was that Griffin, for all his dimness of wit, had a gift for picking up practical skills, and far more than earned his keep.

The great wooden bucket, its old boards worn and fretted within and without from long use, came up out of the depths sparkling in the first slanting ray of the rising sun. Griffin filled his two pails, and was slinging the bucket back over the shaft when the gleam caught a flash of silver between two of the boards, lodged edgeways in the crevice. He balanced the bucket on the stone rim of the well, and leaned and fished out the shining thing, tugging it free between finger and thumb, and shaking off a frayed shred of blue cloth that came away with it. It lay in his palm shining, a round disc of silver prettily engraved with a head, and some strange signs he did not know for letters. On the reverse side there was a round border and a short cross within it, and more of the mysterious signs. Griffin was charmed. He took his prize back with him to the workshop, and when Baldwin Peche finally arose from his bed and came forth blear-eyed and cross-grained, the boy presented him proudly with what he had found. Whatever belonged here belonged to his master.

The locksmith clapped eyes on it and kindled like a lighted lamp, head and eyes clearing marvellously. He turned it in his fingers, examining both sides closely, and looked up with a curious, private grin and a cautious question:

“Where did you find this, boy? Have you shown it to anyone else?”

“No, master, I brought it straight in for you. It was in the bucket of the well,” said Griffin, and told him how it had lodged between the boards.

“Good, good! No need to let others know I have such. Stuck fast in the boards, was it?” mused Baldwin, brooding gleefully over his treasure. “You’re a good lad! A good lad! You did right to bring it straight to me, I set a great value on this! A great value!” He was grinning to himself with immense satisfaction, and Griffin reflected his content proudly. “I’ll give you some sweetmeats to your dinner I got from last night’s feast. You shall see I can be grateful to a dutiful boy.”