Sanctuary Sparrow (7 page)

“Then show him you are, and he’ll give you your due.”

“You mean it?” wondered Liliwin, shaken between hope and doubt. “You will truly ask him? If he would teach me, perhaps I could learn the art.” He faltered there, losing his momentary brightness with a suddenness that was all too eloquent. Whenever he took heart for the future, the bleak realisation came flooding over him afresh that he might have no future. Cadfael cast about hurriedly in his mind for some crumb of distraction to ward off the recurrent despair.

“Never suppose that you’re friendless, that’s black ingratitude when you have forty days of grace, a fair-minded man like Hugh Beringar enquiring into your case, and one creature at least who stands by you stoutly and won’t hear a word against you.” Liliwin kindled a little at that, still doubtfully, but at least it had put the gallows and the noose out of his mind for the moment. “You’ll remember her—a girl named Rannilt.”

Liliwin’s face at once paled and brightened. It was the first smile Cadfael had yet seen from him, and even now tentative, humble, frightened to reach for anything desired, for fear it should vanish like melting snow as he clutched it.

“You’ve seen her? Talked to her? And she does not believe what they all say of me?”

“Not a word of it! She affirms—she knows—you never did violence nor theft in that house. If all the tongues in Shrewsbury cried out against you, she would still stand her ground and speak for you.”

Liliwin sat cradling his broken rebec, as gently and shyly as if he clasped a sweetheart indeed. His faint, frightened smile shone in the dimming light within the cloister.

“She is the first girl who ever looked kindly at me. You won’t have heard her sing—such a small, sweet voice, like a reed. We ate in the kitchen together. It was the best hour of my life, I never thought… And it’s true? Rannilt believes in me?”

Chapter Four

Sunday

LILIWIN FOLDED AWAY HIS BRYCHANS and made himself presentable before Prime on the sabbath, determined to cause as little disruption as possible in the orderly regime within these walls. In his wandering life he had had little opportunity to become familiar with the offices of the day, and Latin was a closed book to him, but at least he could attend and pay his reverences, if that would make him more acceptable.

After breakfast Cadfael dressed the gash in the young man’s arm again, and unwound the bandage from the graze on his head. “This is healing well,” he said approvingly. “We’d best leave it uncovered, and let in the air to it now. Good clean flesh you have, boy, if something too little of it. And you’ve lost that limp that had you going sidewise. How is it with all those bruises?”

Liliwin owned with some surprise that most of his aches and pains were all but gone, and performed a few startling contortions to prove it. He had not lost his skills. His fingers itched for the coloured rings and balls he used for his juggling, safely tucked away in their knotted cloth under his bed, but he feared they would be frowned on here. The ruin of his rebec also reposed in the corner of the porch next the cloister. He returned there after his breakfast to find Brother Anselm turning the wreck thoughtfully in his hands, and running a questing finger along the worst of the cracks.

The precentor was past fifty, a vague, slender, shortsighted person who peered beneath an untidy brown tonsure and bristling brows to match, and smiled amiably and encouragingly at the owner of this disastrous relic.

“This is yours? Brother Cadfael told me how it had suffered. This has been a fine instrument. You did not make it?”

“No. I had it from an old man who taught me. He gave it to me before he died. I don’t know,” said Liliwin, “how to make them.”

It was the first time Brother Anselm had heard him speak since the shrill terror of the first invasion. He looked up alertly, tilting his head to listen. “You have the upper voice, very true and clear. I could use you, if you sing? But you must sing! You have not thought of taking the cowl, here among us?” He recalled with a sigh why that was hardly likely under present circumstances. “Well, this poor thing has been villainously used, but it is not beyond help. We may try. And the bow is lost, you say.” Liliwin had said no such thing, he was mute with wonder. Evidently Brother Cadfael had given precise information to a retentive enthusiast. “The bow, I must say, is almost harder to perfect than the fiddle, but I have had my successes. Have you skills on other instruments?”

“I can get a tune out of most things,” said Liliwin, charmed into eagerness.

“Come,” said Brother Anselm, taking him firmly by the arm, “I will show you my workshop and you and I between us, after High Mass, will try what can best be done for this rebec of yours. I shall need a helper to tend my resins and gums. But this will be slow and careful work, mind, and matter for prayer, not to be hastened for any cause. Music is study for a lifetime, son—a lifetime however long.”

He blew so like a warm gale that Liliwin went with him in a dream, forgetting how short a lifetime could also be.

Walter Aurifaber woke up that morning with a lingering headache, but also with a protesting stiffness in his limbs and restless animation in his mind that made him want to get up and stretch, and stamp, and move about briskly until the dullness went out of him. He growled at his patient, silent daughter, enquired after his journeyman, who had had the sense to make sure of his Sunday rest by vanishing from both shop and town for the day, and sat down to eat a substantial breakfast and stare his losses in the face.

Things were coming back to him, however foggily, including one incident he would just as soon his mother should not hear about. Money was money, of course, the old woman had the right of it there, but it’s not every day a man marries off his heir, and marries him, moreover, to a most respectable further amount of money. A little flourish towards a miserable menial might surely be forgiven a man, in the circumstances. But would she think so? He regretted it bitterly himself, now, reflecting on the disastrous result of his rare impulse of generosity. No, she must not hear of it!

Walter nursed his thick head and vain regrets, and took some small comfort in seeing his son and his new daughter-in-law off to church at Saint Mary’s, in their best clothes and properly linked, Margery’s hand primly on Daniel’s arm. The money Margery had brought with her, and would eventually bring, mattered now more than anything else until the lost contents of his strong-box could be recovered. His head ached again fiercely when he thought of it. Whoever had done that to the house of Aurifaber should and must hang, if there was any justice in this world.

When Hugh Beringar came, with a sergeant in attendance, to hear for himself what the aggrieved victim had to tell, Walter was ready and voluble. But he was none too pleased when Dame Juliana, awaiting Brother Cadfael’s visit, and foreseeing more strictures as to her behaviour if she wanted to live long, took it into her head to forestall the lecture by being downstairs when her mentor came and stumped her way down, cane in hand, prodding every tread before her and scolding Susanna away from attempting to check her. She was firmly settled on her bench in the corner, propped with cushions, when Cadfael came, and challenged him with a bold, provocative stare. Cadfael chose not to gratify her with homilies, but delivered the ointment he had brought for her, and reassured himself of the evenness of her breathing and heart, before turning to a Walter grown unaccountably short of words.

“I’m glad to see you so far restored. The tales they told of you were twenty years too soon. But I’m sorry for your loss. I hope it may yet be recovered.”

“Faith, so do I,” said Walter sourly. “You tell me that rogue you have in sanctuary has no part of it on him, and while you hold him fast within there he can hardly unearth and make off with it. For it must be somewhere, and I trust the sheriff’s men here to find it.”

“You’re very certain of your man, then?” Hugh had got him to the point where he had taken his valuables and gone to stow them away in the shop, and there he had suddenly grown less communicative. “But he had already been expelled some time earlier, as I understand it, and no one has yet testified to seeing him lurking around your house after that.”

Walter cast a glance at his mother, whose ancient ears were pricked and her faded but sharp eyes alert. “Ah, but he could well have stayed in hiding, all the same. What was there to prevent it in the dark of the night?”

“So he could,” agreed Hugh unhelpfully, “but there’s no man so far claims he did. Unless you’ve recalled something no one else knows? Did you see anything of him after he was thrown out?”

Walter shifted uneasily, looked ready to blurt out a whole indictment, and thought better of it in Juliana’s hearing. Brother Cadfael took pity on him.

“It might be well,” he said guilelessly, “to take a look at the place where this assault was made. Master Walter will show us his workshop, I am sure.”

Walter rose to it thankfully, and ushered them away with alacrity, along the passage and in again at the door of his shop. The street door was fast, the day being Sunday, and he closed the other door carefully behind them, and drew breath in relief.

“Not that I’ve anything to conceal from you, my lord, but I’d as lief my mother should not have more to worry her than she has already.” Plausible cover, at any rate, for the awe of her in which he still went. “For this is where the thing happened, and you see from this door how the coffer lies in the opposite corner. And there was I, with the key in the lock and the lid laid back against the wall, wide open, and my candle here on the shelf close by. The light shining straight down into the coffer—you see?—and what was within in plain view. And suddenly I hear a sound behind me, and there’s this minstrel, this Liliwin, creeping in at the door.”

“Threateningly?” asked Hugh, straight-faced. If he did not wink at Cadfael, his eyebrow was eloquent. “Armed with a cudgel?”

“No,” admitted Walter, “rather humbly, to all appearance. But then I’d heard him and turned. He was barely into the doorway, he could have dropped his weapon outside when he saw I was ware of him.”

“But you did not hear it fall? Nor see any sign of such?”

“No, that I own.”

“Then what had he to say to you?”

“He begged me to do him right, for he said he had been cheated of two thirds of his promised fee. He said it was hard on a poor man to be so blamed and docked of his money, and pleaded with me to make it good as promised.”

“And did you?” asked Hugh.

“I tell you honestly, my lord, I could not say he had been hardly used, considering the worth of the pitcher, but I did think him a poor, sad creature who had to live, whatever the rights or wrongs of it. And I gave him another penny—good silver, minted in this town. But not a word of this to Dame Juliana, if you’ll be so good. She’ll have to know, now it’s all come back to me, that he dared creep in and ask, but no need for her to know I gave him anything. She would be affronted, seeing she had denied him.”

“Your thought for her does you credit,” said Hugh gravely. “What then? He took your bounty and slunk out?”

“He did. But I wager he has not told you anything of this begging visit. A poor return I got for the favour!” Walter was sourly vengeful still.

“You mistake, for he has. He has told us this very same tale that you now tell. And confided to the abbey’s keeping, while he remains there, the two silver pence which is all he has on him. Tell me, had you closed the lid of the coffer as soon as you found yourself observed?”

“I did!” said Walter fervently. “And quickly! But he had seen. I never gave him another thought at the time but—see here, my lord, how it follows! As soon as he was gone, or I thought he was gone, I opened the coffer again, and was bending over it laying Margery’s dowry away, when I was clouted hard from behind, and that’s the last I knew till I opened an eye in my own bed, hours later. If it was two minutes after that fellow crept out of the door, when someone laid me flat, it was not a moment more. So who else could it be?”

“But you did not actually see who struck you?” Hugh pressed. “Not so much as a glimpse? No shadow cast, to give him a shape or size? No sense of a bulk heaving up behind you?”

“Never a chance.” Walter might be vindictive, but he was honest. “See, I was stooping over the coffer when it seemed the wall fell on me, and I pitched asprawl, head-down into the box, clean out of the world. I heard nothing and saw nothing, not even a shadow, no—the last thing I recall was the candle flickering, but what is there in that? No, depend on it, that rogue had seen what I had in my store before I clapped down the lid. Was he going tamely away with his penny, with all that money there to take? Not he! Nor hide nor hair of any other did I see in here that night. You may be certain of it, the jongleur is your man.”

“And it may still be so,” admitted Hugh, parting from Cadfael on the bridge some twenty minutes later. “Enough to tempt any poor wretch with but two coins to rub together. Whether he had any such thought in his head before the candle shone on our friend’s hoard or no. Equally, I grant the lad may not even have realised what lay beneath his hand, or seen anything but his own need and the thin chance of getting a kinder reception from the goldsmith than from that ferocious mother of his. He may have crept away thanking God for his penny and never a thought of wrong. Or he may have picked up a stone or a stave and turned back.”

At about that same time, in the street outside Saint Mary’s church, which was the common ground for exchanging civilities and observing fashions on a fine Sunday morning after Mass, Daniel and Margery Aurifaber in their ceremonial progression, intercepted by alternate well-wishers and commiserators—wedding and robbery being equally relished subjects of comment and speculation in Shrewsbury-came face to face with Master Ailwin Corde, the wool-merchant, and his wife, Cecily, and halted by general consent to pass the time of day as befitted friends and neighbours.

This Mistress Cecily looked more like a daughter to the merchant, or even a granddaughter, than a wife. She was twenty-three years old to his sixty, and though small and slender of stature, was so opulent in colouring, curvature and gait, and everything that could engage the eye, that she managed to loom large as a goddess and dominate whatever scene she graced with her presence. And her elderly husband took pleasure in decking her out with sumptuous fabrics and fashions the gem he should rather have shrouded in secretive, plain linens. A gilt net gathered on her head its weight of auburn hair, and a great ornament of enamel and gemstones jutted before her, calling attention to a resplendent bosom.

Faced with this richness, Margery faded, and knew that she faded. Her smile became fixed and false as a mask, and her voice tended to sharpen like a singer forced off-key. She tightened her clasp on Daniel’s arm, but it was like trying to hold a fish that slid through her fingers without even being aware of restraint.

Master Corde enquired solicitously after Walter’s health, was relieved to hear that he was making a good recovery, was sad, nonetheless, to know that so far nothing had been found of all that had been so vilely stolen. He sent his condolences, while thanking God for life and health spared. His wife echoed all that he said, modest eyes lowered, and voice like distant wood-doves.

Daniel, his eyes wandering more often to Mistress Cecily’s milk-and-roses face than to the old man’s flabby and self-satisfied countenance, issued a hearty invitation to Master Corde to bring his wife and take a meal with the goldsmith as soon as might be, and cheer him by his company. The wool-merchant thanked him, and wished it no less, but must put off the pleasure for a week or more, though he sent his sympathetic greetings and promised his prayers.

“You don’t know,” confided Mistress Cecily, advancing a small hand to touch Margery’s arm, “how fortunate you are in having a husband whose trade is rooted fast at home. This man of mine is for ever running off with his mules and his wagon and his men, either west into Wales or east into England, over business with these fleeces and cloths of his, and I’m left lonely days at a time. Now tomorrow early he’s off again, if you please, as far as Oxford, and I shall lack him for three or four days.”