Brother Cadfael 02: One Corpse Too Many

to yourself, as clean-healing flesh as ever I saw. This slice of you that somebody tried to sever will stay with you lifelong, after all, and the arm will even serve you to hold a bow in a month or so. But you'll have the scar as long as you live. Now hold steady, this may burn, but trust me, it's the best salve you could have for green wounds. Torn muscles hurt as they knit, but knit they will.'
    'It doesn't hurt,' said Torold in a dream. 'Brother Cadfael ...'
    'Hold your tongue until we have you all bound up trim. Then you can talk your hearts out, the both of you.'
    And talk they did, as soon as Torold was helped back into his shirt, and the cotte draped over his shoulders. Each of them took up the thread from the other, as though handed it in a fixed and formal ceremony, like a favour in a dance; Even their voices had grown somehow alike, as if they matched tones without understanding that they did it. They had not the least idea, as yet, that they were in love. The innocents believed they were involved in a partisan comradeship, which was but the lesser half of what had happened to them in his absence.
    'So I have told Torold all about myself,' said Godith, 'and he has told me the only thing he did not tell us before. And now he wants to tell you.'
    Torold picked up the tendered thread willingly. 'I have FitzAlan's treasury safely hidden,' he said simply. 'I had it in two pairs of linked saddle-bags, and I kept it afloat, too, all down the river, though I had to shed sword and swordbelt and dagger and all to lighten the load. I fetched up under the first arch of the stone bridge. You'll know it as well as I. That first pier spreads, there used to be a boat-mill moored under it, some time ago, and the mooring chain is still there, bolted to a ring in the stone. A man can hold on there and get his breath, and so I did. And I hauled up the chain and hooked my saddle-bags on to it, and let them down under the water, out of sight. Then I left them there, and drifted on down here just about alive, to where Godith found me.' He found no difficulty in speaking of her as Godith; the name had a jubilant sound in his mouth. 'And there all that gold is dangling in the Severn still, I hope and believe, until I can reclaim it and get it away to its rightful owner. Thank God he's alive to benefit by it.' A last qualm shook him suddenly and severely. 'There's been no word of anyone finding it?' he questioned anxiously. 'We should know if they had?'
    'We should know, never doubt it! No, no one's hooked any such fish. Why should anyone look for it there? But getting it out again undetected may not be so easy. We three must put our wits together,' said Cadfael, 'and see what we can do between us. And while you two have been swearing your alliance, let me tell you what I've been doing.'
    He made it brief enough. 'I found all as you told it. The traces of your horses are there, and of your enemy's, too. One horse only. This was a thief bent on his own enrichment, no zealot trying to fill the king's coffers. He had seeded the path for you liberally with caltrops, your kinsman collected several of them next day, for the sake of his own cattle. The signs of your struggle within the hut are plain enough. And pressed into the earth floor I found this.' He produced it from his scrip, a lump of deep yellow roughly faceted, and clenched in the broken silver-gilt claw. Torold took it from him and examined it curiously, but without apparent recognition.
    'Broken off from a hilt, would you think?'
    'Not from yours, then?'
    'Mine?' Torold laughed. 'Where would a poor squire with his way to make get hold of so fine a weapon as this must have been? No, mine was a plain old sword my grandsire wore before me, and a dagger to match, in a heavy hide sheath. If it had been light as this, I'd have tried to keep it. No, this is none of mine.'
    'Nor Faintree's, either?'
    Torold shook his head decidedly. 'If he had any such, I should have known. Nick and I are of the same condition, and friends three years and more.' He looked up intently into Brother Cadfael's face. 'Now I remember a very small thing that may have meaning, after all. When I broke free and left the other fellow dazed, I trod on something under the hay where we'd been struggling, a small, hard thing that almost threw me. I think it could well have been this. It was his? Yes, it must have been his! Snapped off against the ground as we rolled.'
    'His, almost certainly, and the only thing we