Brother Cadfael 09: Dead Man's Ransom

too bright but willing, and knows she has small hopes of a pleasing marriage. Better with us than sold off like an unpromising heifer to the first that makes a grudging offer for her. I've left my men and horses in their yard, where I heard tell of what had happened here. Better to get the tale straight, there are any number of versions up there in the streets.'
    'If you have an hour to spare,' said Cadfael heartily, 'come and share a flask of wine of my own making in the herb, garden, and I'll tell you the whole truth of it, so far as any man knows what's truth. Who knows, you may find a pattern in it that I have failed to find.' In the wood-scented dimness of the workshop in the herbarium he told her, at leisure and in detail, everything he knew or had gathered concerning the death of Gilbert Prestcote, everything he had observed or thought concerning Elis ap Cynan. She listened, seated with spread knees and erect back on the bench against the wall, with her cup nursed in both hands to warm it, for the wine was red and full. She no longer exerted herself to be graceful, if ever she had, but her composed heaviness had its own impressive grace.
    'I would not say but that boy might kill,' she said at the end of it. 'They act before they think and regret only too late. But I don't think he would kill his girl's father. Very easy, you say, and I believe it, to ease the man out of the world, so that even one not given to murder might do it before ever he realised. Yes, but those a man kills easily are commonly strangers to him. Hardly people at all. But this one would be armoured in identity, her father, no less, the man that begot her. And yet,' she owned, shaking her head, 'I may be wrong about him. He may be the one of his kind who does what his kind does not do. There is always one.' 'The girl believes absolutely that he is guilty,' said Cadfael thoughtfully, 'perhaps because she is all too well aware of what she feels to be her own guilt. The sire returns and the lovers are to be torn apart, no great step to dream of his failure to return, and only one more leap to see death as the final and total cause of that failure. But dreams they surely were, never truly even wished. The boy is on firmer ground when he swears he went to try and win her father to look kindly on his suit. For if ever I saw a lad sunlit and buoyed up with hope by nature, Elis is the one.'
    'And this girl?' wondered Sister Magdalen, twirling her wine, cup between nursing palms. 'If they're of an age, then she must be the more mature by some years. So it goes! Is it anyway possible that she ...?'
    'No,' said Cadfael with certainty. 'She was with the lady, and Hugh, and the Welsh princelings throughout. I know she left her father living, and never came near him again until he was dead, and then in Hugh's company. No, she torments herself vainly. If you had her in your hands,' said Cadfael with conviction, 'you would soon find her out for the simple, green child she is.'
    Sister Magdalen was in the act of saying philosophically: 'I'm hardly likely to get the chance,' when the tap on the door came. So light and tentative a sound, and yet so staunchly repeated, they fell silent and still to make sure of it.
    Cadfael rose to open it and peer out through the narrowest possible chink, convinced there was no one there; and there she stood, her hand raised to knock again, pallid, wretched and resolute, half a head taller than he, the simple, green child of his description, with a steely core of Norman nobility forcing her to transcend herself. Hastily he flung the door wide. 'Come within from the cold. How can I serve you?'
    'The porter told me,' said Melicent, 'that the sister from Godric's Ford came a while ago, and might be here wanting remedies from your store. I should like to speak with her.'
    'Sister Magdalen is here,' said Cadfael. 'Come, sit with her by the brazier, and I'll leave you to talk with her in private.'
    She came in half afraid, as though this small, unfamiliar place held daunting secrets. She stepped with fastidious delicacy, almost inch by inch, and yet with that determination in her that would not let her turn back. She looked at Sister Magdalen eye to eye, fascinated, doubtless having heard her history both ancient and recent, and found some difficulty in reconciling the two.
    'Sister,' said Melicent, going arrow, straight to the point, 'when you go back to Godric's Ford, will you take me with you?'
    Cadfael, as good as his word,