The Devils Novice (16 page)

Cadfael
fixed him with an acute stare, took him by the arm and turned him promptly
towards the town. “Come on then and save your breath to tell the tale but once.
I’m earlier back than anyone will expect me, I can stretch my license an hour
or two, for you and for Meriet.”

So
they were two who arrived at the house near Saint Mary’s, where Hugh had
settled his family. By luck he was home before supper, and free of his labours
for the day. He haled them in warmly, and had wit enough not to offer Brother
Mark respite or refreshment until he had heaved his whole anxiety off his
narrow chest. Which he did very consideringly, measuring words. He stepped
meticulously from fact to fact, as on sure stepping-stones through a perilous
stream.

“I
called him round to me because I had seen that on the side of that stack where
I was, and where the pile was burned out, the wind had carried fine ash right
into the trees, and the near branches of the trees were scorched, the leaves
browned and withered. I meant to call his attention to these things, for such a
fire was no long time ago. Those were this year’s leaves scorched brown, that
was ash not many weeks old still showing grey. And he came readily, but as he
came he held on to the rake and tugged it with him, to bring down the top of
the stack, where it had not burned out. So he brought down a whole fall of wood
and earth and leaves, and this thing rolled down between, at our feet.”

“You
saw it plainly,” said Hugh gently, “tell us as plainly.”

“It
is a fashionable long-toed riding shoe,” said Mark steadily, “shrunk and dried
and twisted by fire, but not consumed. And in it a man’s leg-bone, in the ashes
of hose.”

“You
are in no doubt,” said Hugh, watching him with sympathy.

“None.
I saw projecting from the pile the round knee-joint from which the shin-bone
had parted,” said Brother Mark, pale but tranquil. “It so happened I saw it
break away. I am sure the man is there. The fire broke through on the other
side, a strong wind drove it, and left him, it may be, almost whole for
Christian burial. At least we may collect his bones.”

“That
shall be done with all reverence,” said Hugh, “if you are right. Go on, you
have more to tell. Brother Meriet saw what you had seen. What then?”

“He
was utterly stricken and shocked. He had spoken of coming there as a child, and
helping the old charcoal-burner. I am certain he knew of nothing worse there
than what he remembered. I told him first we must get our people home
undisturbed, and he did his part valiantly,” said Brother Mark, “We have left
all as we found it—or as we disturbed it unwitting. In the morning light I can
show you the place.”

“I
think, rather,” said Hugh with deliberation, “Meriet Aspley shall do that. But
now you have told us what you had to tell, now you may sit down with me and eat
and drink a morsel, while we consider this matter.”

Brother
Mark sat down obediently, sighing away the burden of his knowledge. Grateful
for the humblest of hospitality, he was equally unawed by the noblest, and
having no pride, he did not know how to be servile. When Aline herself brought
him meat and drink, and the same for Cadfael, he received it gladly and simply,
as saints accept alms, perpetually astonished and pleased, perpetually serene.

“You
said,” Hugh pressed him gently over the wine, “that you had cause, in the blown
ash and the scorching of the trees, to believe that the fire was of this
season, and not from a year ago, and that I accept. Had you other reasons to
think so?”

“I
had,” said Mark simply, “for though we have brought home, to our gain, a whole
cord of good coppice-wood, yet not far aside from ours there were two other
flattened and whitened shapes in the grass, greener than the one we have now
left, but still clear to be seen, which I think must have been bared when the
wood was used for this stack. Meriet told me the logs must be left to season.
These would have seasoned more than a year, dried out, it may be, too far for
what was purposed. No one was left to watch the burning, and the over-dried
wood burned through and burst into a blaze. You will see the shapes where the
wood lay. You will judge better than I how long since it was moved.”

“That
I doubt,” said Hugh, smiling, “for you seem to have done excellently well. But
tomorrow we shall see. There are those can tell to a hair, by the burrowing
insects and the spiders, and the tinder fringing the wood. Sit and take your
ease awhile, before you must return, for there’s nothing now can be done before
morning.”

Brother
Mark sat back, relieved, and bit with astonished pleasure into the game pasty
Aline had brought him. She thought him underfed, and worried about him because
he was so meagre; and indeed he may very well have been underfed, through
forgetting to eat while he worried about someone else. There was a great deal
of the good woman in Brother Mark, and Aline recognised it.

“Tomorrow
morning,” said Hugh, when Mark rose to take his leave and make his way back to
his charges, “I shall be at Saint Giles with my men immediately after Prime.
You may tell Brother Meriet that I shall require him to come with me and show
me the place.”

That,
of course, should occasion no anxiety to an innocent man, since he had been the
cause of the discovery in the first place, but it might bring on a very uneasy
night for one not entirely innocent, at least of more knowledge than was good
for him. Mark could not object to the oblique threat, since his own mind had
been working in much the same direction. But in departing he made over again
his strongest point in Meriet’s defence.

“He
led us to the place, for good and sensible reasons, seeing it was fuel we were
after. Had he known what he was to find there, he would never have let us near
it.”

“That
shall be borne in mind,” said Hugh gravely. “Yet I think you found something
more than natural in his horror when he uncovered a dead man. You, after all,
are much of his age, and have had no more experience of murder and violence
than has he. And I make no doubt you were shaken to the soul—yet not as he was.
Granted he knew nothing of this unlawful burial, still the discovery meant to
him something more, something worse, than it meant to you. Granted he did not
know a body had been so disposed of, may he not, nevertheless, have had
knowledge of a body in need of secret disposal, and recognised it when he
uncovered it?”

“That
is possible,” said Mark simply. “It is for you to examine all these things.”
And he took his leave, and set off alone on the walk back to Saint Giles.

“There’s
no knowing, as yet,” said Cadfael, when Mark was gone, “who or what this dead
man may be. He may have nothing to do with Meriet, with Peter Clemence or with
the horse straying in the mosses. A live man missing, a dead man found—they
need not be one and the same. There’s every reason to doubt it. The horse more
than twenty miles north of here, the rider’s last night halt four miles
southeast, and this burning hearth another four miles south-west from there.
You’ll have hard work linking those into one sequence and making sense of it. He
left Aspley travelling north, and one thing’s certain by a number of witnesses,
he was man alive then. What should he be doing now, not north, but south of
Aspley? And his horse miles north, and on the right route he would be taking,
bar a little straying at the end?”

“I
don’t know but I’ll be the happier,” owned Hugh, “if this turns out to be some
other traveller fallen by thieves somewhere, and nothing to do with Clemence,
who may well be down in the peat-pools this moment. But do you know of any
other gone missing in these parts? And another thing, Cadfael, would common
thieves have left him his riding shoes? Or his hose, for that matter. A naked
man has nothing left that could benefit his murderers, and nothing by which he
may be easily known, two good reasons for stripping him. And again, since he
wore long-toed shoes, he was certainly not going far afoot. No sane man would
wear them for walking.”

A
rider without a horse, a saddled horse without a rider, what wonder if the mind
put the two together?

“No
profit in racking brains,” said Cadfael, sighing, “until you’ve viewed the
place, and gathered what there is to be gathered there.”

“We,
old friend! I
want you with me, and I think Abbot Radulfus will give me leave to take you.
You’re better skilled than I in dead men, in how long they may have been dead,
and how they died. Moreover, he’ll want a watching eye on all that affects
Saint Giles, and who better than you? You’re waist-deep in the whole matter
already, you must either sink or haul clear.”

“For
my sins!” said Cadfael, somewhat hypocritically. “But I’ll gladly come with
you. Whatever devil it is that possess young Meriet is plaguing me by
contagion, and I want it exorcised at all costs.”

Meriet
was waiting for them when they came for him next day, Hugh and Cadfael, a
sergeant and two officers, equipped with crows and shovels, and a sieve to sift
the ashes for every trace and every bone. In the faint mist of a still morning,
Meriet eyed all these preparations with a face stonily calm, braced for everything
that might come, and said flatly: “The tools are still there, my lord, in the
hut. I fetched the rake from there, Mark will have told you—a corrack, the old
man called it.” He looked at Cadfael, with the faintest softening in the set of
his lips. “Brother Mark said I should be needed. I’m glad he need not go back
himself.” His voice was in as thorough control as his face; whatever confronted
him today, it would not take him by surprise.

They
had brought a horse for him, time having its value. He mounted nimbly, perhaps
with the only impulse of pleasure that would come his way that day, and led the
way down the high road. He did not glance aside when he passed the turning to
his own home, but turned on the other hand into the broad ride, and within half
an hour had brought them to the shallow bowl of the charcoal hearth. Ground
mist lay faintly blue over the shattered mound as Hugh and Cadfael walked round
the rim and halted where the log that was no log lay tumbled among the ashes.

The
tarnished buckle on the perished leather strap was of silver. The shoe had been
elaborate and expensive. Slivers of burned cloth fluttered from the almost
fleshless bone.

Hugh
looked from the foot to the knee, and on above among the exposed wood for the
joint from which it had broken free. “There he should be lying, aligned thus.
Whoever put him there did not open a deserted stack, but built this new, and
built him into the centre. Someone who knew the method, though perhaps not well
enough. We had better take this apart carefully. You may rake off the earth
covering and the leaves,” he said to his men, “but when you reach the logs
we’ll hoist them off one by one where they’re whole. I doubt he’ll be little
but bones, but I want all there is of him.”

They
went to work, raking away the covering on the unburned side, and Cadfael
circled the mound to view the quarter from which the destroying wind must have
been blowing. Low to the ground a small, arched hole showed in the roots of the
pile. He stooped to look more closely, and ran a hand under the hanging leaves
that half-obscured it. The hollow continued inward, swallowing his arm to the
elbow. It had been built in as the stack was made. He went back to where Hugh
stood watching.

“They
knew the method, sure enough. There’s a vent built in on the windward side to
let in a draught. The stack was meant to burn out. But they overdid it. They
must have had the vent covered until the stack was well alight, and then opened
and left it. It blew too fiercely, and left the windward half hardly more than
scorched while the rest blazed. These things have to be watched day and night.”

Meriet
stood apart, close to where they had tethered the horses, and watched this
purposeful activity with an impassive face. He saw Hugh cross to the edge of the
arena, where three paler, flattened oblongs in the herbage showed where the
wood had been stacked to season. Two of them showed greener than the third, as
Mark had said, where new herbage had pierced the layer of dead grass and risen
to the light. The third, the one which had supplied such a harvest for the
inmates of Saint Giles, lay bleached and flat.

“How
long,” asked Hugh, “to make this much new growth, and at this season?”

Cadfael
pondered, digging a toe into the soft mat of old growth below. “A matter of
eight to ten weeks, perhaps. Difficult to tell. And the blown ash might show as
long as that. Mark was right, the heat reached the trees. If this floor had
been less bare and hard, the fire might have reached them, too, but there was
no thick layer of roots and leaf-mould to carry it along the ground.”

They
returned to where the covering of earth and leaves now lay drawn aside, and the
ridged surfaces of logs showed, blackened but keeping their shape. The sergeant
and his men laid down their tools and went to work with their hands, hoisting
the logs off one by one and stacking them aside out of the way. Slow work; and
throughout Meriet stood watching, motionless and mute. The dead man emerged
from his coffin of timber piecemeal after more than two hours of work. He had
lain close to the central chimney on the leeward side, and the fire had been
fierce enough to burn away all but a few tindery flakes of his clothing, but
had passed by too rapidly to take all the flesh from his bones, or even the
hair from his head. Laboriously they brushed away debris of charcoal and ash
and half-consumed wood from him, but could not keep him intact. The collapse of
part of the stack had started his joints and broken him apart. They had to
gather up his bones as best they could, and lay them out on the grass until
they had, if not the whole man, all but such small bones of finger and wrist as
would have to be sifted from the ashes. The skull still retained, above the
blackened ruin of a face, the dome of a naked crown fringed with a few wisps
and locks of brown hair, cropped short.