Chapter Six

AUGUST CONTINUED BLESSEDLY FINE, and all hands turned gladly to making sure of the harvest. Hugh Beringar and Aline set off with their hopes and purchases for Maesbury, as did the merchant of Worcester for his home town, a day late, but well compensated with a fee for the hire of his horse in an emergency, on the sheriff’s business, and a fine story which he would retail on suitable occasions for the rest of his life. The provost and council of Shrewsbury drafted a dignified acknowledgement to the abbey for its gift, warm enough to give proper expression to their appreciation of the gesture, canny enough not to compromise any of their own just claims for the future. The sheriff put on record the closure of a criminal affair, as related to him by the young woman who had been lured away on false pretences, with the apparent design of stealing from her a letter left in her possession, but of the contents of which she was ignorant. There was some suspicion of a conspiracy involved, but as Mistress Vernold had never seen nor been told the significance of what she held, and as in any case it was now irrevocably lost by fire, no further action was necessary or possible. The malefactor was dead, his servant, self-confessed a murderer at his master’s orders, awaited trial, and would plead that he had been forced to obey, being villein-born and at his lord’s mercy. The dead man’s overlord had been informed. Someone else, at the discretion of the earl of Chester, would take seisin of the manor of Stanton Cobbold.

Everyone drew breath, dusted his hands, and went back to work.

Brother Cadfael went up into the town on the second day, to tend Emma’s hand. The provost and his son were at work together, in strong content with each other and the world. Mistress Corviser returned to her kitchen, and left leech and patient together.

“I have wanted to talk to you,” said Emma, looking up earnestly into his face as he renewed the dressing. “There must be one person who hears the truth from me, and I would rather it should be you.”

“I don’t believe,” said Cadfael equably, “that you told the sheriff a single thing that was false.”

“No, but I did not tell him all the truth. I said that I had no knowledge of what was in the letter, or even for whom it was intended, or by whom it was sent. That was true, I had no such knowledge of my own, though I did know who brought it to my uncle, and that it was to be handed to the glover for delivery. But when Ivo demanded the letter of me, and I span out the time asking what could be so important about a letter, he told me what he believed to be in it. King Stephen’s kingdom stood at stake, he said, and the gain to the man who provided him the means to wipe out his enemies would stretch as wide as an earldom. He said the empress’s friends were pressing the earl of Chester to join them, and he would not move unless he had word of all the other powers her cause could muster, and this was the promised despatch, to convince him his interest lay with them. As many as fifty names there might be, he said, of those secretly bound to the empress, perhaps even the date when Robert of Gloucester hopes to bring her to England, even the port where they plan to land. All these sold in advance to the king’s vengeance, life and limb and lands, he said, and the earl of Chester with them, who had gone so far as to permit this approach! All these offered up bound and condemned, and he would get his own price for them. This is what he told me. This is what I do not know of my own knowledge, and yet in my heart and soul I do know it, for I am sure what he said was true.” She moistened her lips, and said carefully: “I do not know King Stephen well enough to know what he would do, but I remember what he did here, last summer. I saw all those men, as honest in their allegiance as those who hold with the king, thrown into prison, their lives forfeit, their families stripped of land and living, some forced into exile… I saw deaths and revenges and still more bitterness if the tide should turn again. So I did what I did.”

“I know what you did,” said Brother Cadfael gently. He was bandaging the healing proof of it.

“But still, you see,” she persisted gravely, “I am not sure if I did right, and for right reasons. King Stephen at least keeps a kind of peace where his writ runs. My uncle was absolute for the empress, but if she comes, if all these who hold with her rise and join her, there will be no peace anywhere. Whichever way I look I see deaths. But all I could think of, then, was preventing him from gaining by his treachery and murders. And there was only one way, by destroying the letter. Since then I have wondered… But I think now that I must stand by what I did. If there must be fighting, if there must be deaths, let it happen as God wills, not as ambitious and evil men contrive. Those lives we cannot save, at least let us not help to destroy. Do you think I was right? I have wanted someone’s word, I should like it to be yours.”

“Since you ask what I think,” said Cadfael, “I think my child, that if you carry scars on the fingers of this hand lifelong, you should wear them like jewels.”

Her lips parted in a startled smile. She shook her head over the persistent tremor of doubt. “But you must never tell Philip,” she said with sudden urgency, holding him by the sleeve with her good hand. “As I never shall. Let him believe me as innocent as he is himself…” She frowned over the word, which did not seem to her quite what she had wanted, but she could not find one fitter for her purpose. If it was not innocence she meant—for of what was she guilty?—was it simplicity, clarity, purity? None of them would do. Perhaps Brother Cadfael would understand, none the less. “I felt somehow mired,” she said. “He should never set foot in intrigue, it is not for him.”

Brother Cadfael gave her his promise, and walked back through the town in a muse, reflecting on the complexity of women. She was perfectly right. Philip, for all his two years advantage, his intelligence, and his new and masterful maturity, would always be the younger, and the simpler, and—yes, she had the just word, after all!—the more innocent. In Cadfael’s experience, it made for very good marriage prospects, where the woman was fully aware of her responsibilities.

On the thirtieth of September, just two months after Saint Peter’s Fair, the Empress Maud and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed near Arundel and entered into the castle there. But Earl Ranulf of Chester sat cannily in his own palatine, minded his own business, and stirred neither hand nor foot in her cause.