Brother Cadfael 04: St. Peter's Fair

unburdened and unguarded, truly her own mistress.
    Aline kissed her affectionately, and wished them both a happy journey. Emma cast frequent glances towards the gatehouse until the last moment, in case Hugh should appear, but he did not; she had still to leave her messages to Aline for delivery. Ivo mounted first, since the bay, as he said, was in a skittish mood and inclined to play tricks, and then turned to give her a steady, sustaining hand as Turstan Fowler hoisted her easily to the pillion.
    "Even with two of us up," said Ivo over his shoulder, smiling, "this creature can be mettlesome when he's fresh out. For safety hold me fast about the waist, and close your hands on my belt - so, that's well!" He saluted Aline very gracefully and courteously. "I'll see she reaches Bristol safely, I promise!"
    He rode out at the gatehouse in shirt-sleeves, just as he had ridden in, his men, now two only, at his heels, and the pack-pony trotting contentedly under his light load. Emma's arms easily spanned Ivo's slenderness, and the feel of his spare, strong body was warm and muscular and vital through the fine linen. As they threaded the Foregate, now emptying fast, he laid his own left hand over her clasped ones, pressing them firmly against his flat middle, and though she knew he was simply assuring himself that her hold was secure, she could not help feeling that it was also a caress.
    She had laughed and shaken her head over Aline's romantic fantasies, refusing to believe in any union between landed nobility and trade, except for mutual profit. Now she was not so sure that wisdom was all with the sceptics.
    The hollow where the big, heavy body had lain still showed at least the approximate bulk of Master Thomas's person, and round about it the grass was trodden, as though someone, or perhaps more than one, had circled all round him as he lay dead. And so they surely had, for here he must have been stripped and searched, the first of those fruitless searches Brother Cadfael had deduced from the events following. Out of the hollow, down to the raised bank of the river, went the track by which he had been dragged, the grass, growing longer as it emerged from shade, all brushed in one direction. Nor was there any doubt about the traces of blood, meagre though they were. The sliver of birch bark under the tree showed a thin crust, dried black. Careful search found one or two more spots, and a thin smear drawn downhill, where it seemed the dead man had been turned on his back to be hauled the more easily down to the water.
    "It's deep here," said Hugh, standing on the green hillock above the river, "and undercuts the bank, it would take him well out into the current. I fancy the clothes went after him at once, we may find the rest yet. One man could have done it. Had they been two, they would have carried him."
    "Would you say," wondered Cadfael, "that this is a reasonable way he might take to get back to his barge? He'd know his boat lay somewhat down-river from the bridge, I suppose he might try a chance cut through from the Foregate, and overcast by a little way. You see the end of the jetty, where the barge tied up, is only a small way upstream from us. Would you say he was alone, and unsuspecting, when he was struck down?"
    Hugh surveyed the ground narrowly. It was not the scene of a struggle, there was the flattened area of the body's fall, and the trampling of feet all round its stillness. The brushings of the grass this way and that were ordered, not the marks of a fight.
    "Yes. There was no resistance. Someone crept behind, and pierced him without word or scruple. He went down and lay. He was on his way back, preferring the byways, and came out a little downstream of where he aimed. Someone had been watching and following him."
    "The same night," said Philip flatly, "someone had been watching and following me."
    He had their attention at once, both of them eyeing him with sharp interest. "The same someone?" suggested Cadfael mildly.
    "I haven't told you my own part," said Philip. "It went out of my head when I stumbled on this place, and guessed at what it meant. What I set out to do was to find out just what I did that night, and prove I never did murder. For I'd come to think that whoever intended this killing had his eye on me from the start. I came from that riot on the jetty, with my head bleeding and my mood for murder, I was a gift, if I could but be out of sight and mind when murder was done." He told them