Brother Cadfael 04: St. Peter's Fair

as it was, and never remarkable for beauty, seemed to her the most pleasing and comforting she had ever seen. The face on which her eyes had last looked, before it became a frightful lantern of flame, had been the face of ambition, greed and murder, in a plausible shell of beauty. This face was the other side of the human coin.
    Only when she stirred slightly, and he moved his position to accommodate her more comfortably, did she realise that she was lying in his arms. Feeling and awareness came back gradually, even pain took its time. Her head was cradled in the hollow of his shoulder, her cheek rested against the breast of his cotte. A craftsman's working clothes, homespun. Of course, he was a shoemaker. A shopkeeper's boy, of no account! There was much to be said for it. The stink of smoke and burning still hung about them both, in spite of Cadfael's attentions with a pannikin of water from the well. The shopkeeper's boy of no account had come into the manor after her, and brought her out alive. She had mattered as much as that to him. A little shopkeeper's girl ...
    "Her eyes are open," said Philip in an eager whisper. "She's smiling."
    Cadfael stooped to her. "How is it with you now, daughter?"
    "I am alive," she said, almost inaudibly, but with great joy.
    "So you are, God be thanked, and Philip here next after God. But lie still, we'll find you a cloak to wrap you in, for you'll be feeling the cold that comes after danger. There'll be pain, too, my poor child." She already knew about the pain. "You've a badly burned hand, and I've no salves here, I can do no more than cover it from the air, until we get back to town. Leave your hand lie quiet, if you can, the stiller the better. How did it come that you escaped clean, but for the one hand so badly burned?"
    "I put it into the brazier," said Emma, remembering. She saw with what startled eyes Philip received this, and realised what she had said; and suddenly the most important thing of all seemed to her that Philip should not know everything, that his candid clarity should not be made to explore the use of lies, deceptions and subterfuges, no matter how right the cause they served. Some day she might tell someone, but it would not be Philip. "I was afraid of him," she said, carefully amending, "and I tipped over the brazier. I never meant to start such a fire ..."
    Somewhere curiously distant from the corner of peace where she lay, Hugh Beringar and the sergeant and officers who had followed him from Shrewsbury were mustering the distracted servants in salvage, and damping down all the outhouses that were still in danger from flying sparks and debris, so that the beasts could be housed, and a roof, at least, provided for the men and maids. The fire had burned so fiercely that it was already dying down, but not for some days would the heat have subsided enough for them to sift through the embers for Ivo Corbiere's body.
    "Lift me," entreated Emma. "Let me see!"
    Philip raised her to sit beside him in the clean, green grass. They were in a corner of the court, their backs against the stockade. Round the perimeter the barns and byres steamed in the early evening sun from the buckets of water which had been thrown over them. Close to the solar end, men were still at work carrying buckets in a chain from the well. There would be roofs enough left to shelter horses, cattle and people, until better could be done for them. They had the equipment of the kitchen, the stores in the undercroft might be damaged, but would not all be spoiled. In this summer weather they would do well enough, and someone must make shift to have the manor restored before the winter. All that terror, in the end, had taken but one life.
    "He is dead," she said, staring at the ruin from which she, though not he, had emerged alive.
    "No other possibility," said Cadfael simply.
    He surmised, but she knew. "And the other one?"
    "Turstan Fowler? He's prisoner. The sergeant has him in charge. It was he, I believe," said Cadfael gently, "who killed your uncle."
    She had expected that at the approach of Beringar and the law he would have helped himself to a horse and taken to his heels, but after all, he had known of no reason why he should. No one had been accusing him when he left Shrewsbury. Everyone at the abbey ought to have taken it for granted that Emma had been duly conducted home to Bristol. Why should they question it? Why had they questioned it? She had much to learn, as well as much to tell.