Brother Cadfael 03: Monk's Hood

who threw it there, it may still tell me something.
    He knocked softly at the door, expecting Aldith to answer, or Aelfric, but it was the voice of Richildis herself that called out quietly from within: "Who's there?"
    "Cadfael! Open to me for a few minutes."
    His name had been enough, she opened eagerly, and reached a hand to draw him into the kitchen. "Hush, softly! Aldith is asleep in my bed, and Aelfric within, in the room. I could not sleep yet, I was sitting late, thinking about my boy. Oh, Cadfael, can you give me no comfort? You will stand his friend if you can?"
    "He is well, and still free," said Cadfael, sitting down beside her on the bench against the wall. "But mark me, you know nothing, should any ask. You may truly say he has not been here, and you don't know where he is. Better so!"
    "But you do know!" The tiny, steady light of the rush-candle showed him her face smoothed of its ageing lines and softly bright, very comely. He did not answer; she might read that for herself, and could still say truly that she knew nothing.
    "And that's all you can give me?" she breathed.
    "No, I can give you my solemn word that he never harmed his stepfather. That I know. And truth must come out. That you must believe."
    "Oh, I will, I do, if you'll help to uncover it. Oh, Cadfael, if you were not here I should despair. And such constant vexations, pin-pricks, when I can think of nothing but Edwin. And Gervase not in his grave until tomorrow! Now that he's gone, I no longer have a claim to livery for his horse, and with so many travellers coming now before the feast, they want his stable-room, and I must move him elsewhere, or else sell him ... But Edwin will want him, if ..." She shook her head distractedly, and would not complete that doubt. "They told me they'll find him a stall and feed somewhere until I can arrange for him to be stabled elsewhere. Perhaps Martin could house him ..."
    They might, Cadfael thought indignantly, have spared her such small annoyances, at least for a few days. She had moved a little closer to him, her shoulder against his. Their whispering voices in the dimly lit room, and the lingering warmth from a brazier now mostly ash, took him back many years, to a stolen meeting in her father's outhouse. Better not linger, to be drawn deeper still!
    "Richildis, there's something I came to ask you. Did your husband ever actually draw up and seal the deed that made Edwin his heir?"
    "Yes, he did." She was surprised by the question, "It was quite legal and binding, but naturally this agreement with the abbey has a later date, and makes the will void now. Or it did ..." She was brought back sharply to the realisation that the second agreement, too, had been superseded, more roughly even than the first. "Of course, that's of no validity now. So the grant to Edwin stands. It must, our man of law drew it properly, and I have it in writing."
    "So all that stands between Edwin and his manor, now, is the threat of arrest for murder, which we know he did not do. But tell me this, Richildis, if you know it: supposing the worst happened - which it must not and will not - and he was convicted of killing your husband - then what becomes of Mallilie? The abbey cannot claim it, Edwin could not then inherit it. Who becomes the heir?"
    She managed to gaze resolutely beyond the possibility of the worst, and considered what sense law would make of what was left.
    "I suppose I should get my dower, as the widow. But the manor could only revert to the overlord, and that's the earl of Chester, for there's no other legitimate heir. He could bestow it where he pleased, to his best advantage. It might go to any man he favoured in these parts. Sheriff Prestcote, as like as not, or one of his officers."
    It was true, and it robbed all others here, except Edwin, of any prospect of gaining by Bonel's death; or at least, of any material gain. An enemy sufficiently consumed by hate might find the death in itself gain enough, yet that seemed an excessive reaction to a man no way extreme, however difficult Edwin had found him.
    "You're sure? There's no nephew, or cousin of his somewhere about the shire?"
    "No, no one, or he would never have promised me Mallilie for Edwin. He set great store by his own blood."
    What had been going through Cadfael's mind was the possibility that someone with his own fortune in view might have planned to remove at one stroke both Bonel and Edwin, by ensuring the boy's arrest for the man's murder. But