Brother Cadfael 01: A Morbid Taste for Bones

blind eye and a deaf ear can be useful sometimes. I'll be glad to spend a while with you presently, but now I'm bound to her. We have business together."
    Sioned was not in the hall, but in the small chamber curtained off at its end, Rhisiart's private room. And Rhisiart was private there with his daughter, stretched out straight and still on draped furs, on a trestle table, with a white linen sheet covering him. The girl sat beside him, waiting, very formally attired, very grave, her hair austerely braided about her head. She looked older, and taller, now that she was the lady-lord of this holding. But she rose to meet Brother Cadfael with the bright, sad, eager smile of a child sure now of counsel and guidance.
    "I looked for you earlier. No matter, I'm glad you're here. I have his clothes for you. I did not fold them; if I had, the damp would have spread evenly through, and now, though they may have dried off, I think you'll still feel a difference." She brought them, chausses, tunic and shirt, and he took them from her one by one and felt at the cloth testingly. "I see," she said, "that you already know where to feel."
    Rhisiart's hose, though partly covered by the tunic he had worn, were still damp at the back of the thighs and legs, but in front dry, though the damp had spread round through the threads to narrow the dry part to a few inches. His tunic was moist all down the back to the hem, the full width of his shoulders still shaped in a dark patch like spread wings, but all the breast of it, round the dark-rimmed slit the arrow had made, was quite dry. The shirt, though less definitely, showed the same pattern. The fronts of the sleeves were dry, the backs damp. Where the exit wound pierced his back, shirt and tunic were soaked in blood now drying and encrusted.
    "You remember," said Cadfael, "just how he lay when we found him?"
    "I shall remember it my life long," said Sioned. "From the hips up flat on his back, but his right hip turned into the grass, and his legs twisted, the left over the right, like..." She hesitated, frowning, feeling for her own half-glimpsed meaning, and found it. "Like a man who has been lying on his face, and heaves himself over in his sleep on to his back, and sleeps again at once."
    "Or," said Cadfael, "like a man who has been taken by the left shoulder, as he lay on his face, and heaved over on to his back. After he was well asleep!"
    She gazed at him steadily, with eyes hollow and dark like wounds. "Tell me all your thoughts. I need to know. I must know."
    "First, then," said Brother Cadfael, "I call attention to the place where this thing happened. A close-set, thicketed place, with plenty of bushes for cover, but not more than fifty paces clear view in any direction. Is that an archer's ground? I think not. Even if he wished the body to be left in woodlands where it might lie undiscovered for hours, he could have found a hundred places more favourable to him. An expert bowman does not need to get close to his quarry, he needs room to draw on a target he can hold in view long enough for a steady aim."
    "Yes," said Sioned. "Even if it could be believed of him that he would kill, that rules out Engelard."
    "Not only Engelard, any good bowman, and if someone so incompetent as to need so close a shot tried it, I doubt if he could succeed. I do not like this arrow, it has no place here, and yet here it is. It has one clear purpose, to cast the guilt on Engelard. But I cannot get it out of my head that it has some other purpose, too."
    "To kill!" said Sioned, burning darkly.
    "Even that I question, mad though it may seem. See the angle at which it enters and leaves. And then see how the blood is all at the back, and not where the shaft entered. And remember all we have said and noted about his clothes, how they were wet behind, though he lay on his back. And how you yourself said it was the attitude of a man who had heaved himself over from lying on his face. And one more thing I found out yesterday, as I kneeled beside him. Under him the thick grass was wet. But all down by his right side, shoulder to hip and body-wide, it was bone-dry. There was a brisk shower yesterday morning, half an hour of rain. When that rain began, your father was lying on his face, already dead. How else could that patch of grass have remained dry, but sheltered by his body?"
    "And then," said Sioned low but clearly, "as you say, he was taken by his left shoulder and heaved over on to his back. When he was