Brother Cadfael 11: An Excellent Mystery

father's household, yes. My father was newly dead, and the Earl of Worcester, my overlord, demanded a draft of men, and this Adam Heriet offered himself.'
    'How old?' asked Hugh.
    'A year or so past fifty. A strong man with sword or bow. He had been forester and huntsman to my father, Waleran would think himself lucky to get him. The rest were younger, but raw.'
    'And where did this Heriet hail from? Your father's man must belong to one of your own manors.'
    'Born at Harpecote, a younger son of a free man who farmed a yardland there. His elder brother farmed it after him. A nephew has it now. They were not on good terms, or so my father said. But for all that there may be some trace of him to be picked up there.'
    'Had they any other kin? And the fellow never took a wife?'
    'No, he never did. I know of no others of his family, but there well may be some around Harpecote.'
    'Let them be,' said Hugh decidedly. 'It had best be left to me to probe there. Though I doubt if a man with no ties here will have come back to the shire, once having taken to the fighting life. More likely to be found where you're bound for, Nicholas. Do your best!'
    'I mean to,' said Nicholas grimly, and rose to be off about the work without delay. The scroll of Julian's possessions he rolled and thrust into the breast of his coat. 'I must say a word first to my lord Godfrid, and let him know I'll not abandon this hunt while there's a grain of hope left. Then I'm on the road!' And he was away at a fast stride that became a light, long-paced run before he was out of sight. Cruce rose in his turn, eyeing Hugh somewhat grudgingly, as if he doubted to find in him a sufficient force of vengeful fury for the undertaking.
    'Then I may leave this with you, my lord? And you will pursue it vigorously?'
    'I will,' said Hugh dryly. 'And you will be at Lai? That I may know where to find you, at need?'
    Cruce went away silenced, for the time being, but none too content, and looked back from the turn of the hedge dubiously, as if he felt that the lord sheriff should already have been on horseback, or at least shaping for it, in the cause of Cruce vengeance. Hugh stared him out coolly, and watched him round the thick screen of box and disappear.
    'Though I had best move speedily,' he said then, wryly smiling, 'for if that one found the fellow first I would not give much for his chances of escaping a few broken bones, if not a stretched neck. And even if it may come to that in the end, it shall not be at Reginald Cruce's hands, nor without a fair trial.' He clapped Cadfael heartily on the back, and turned to go. 'Well, if it's close season for kings and empresses, at least it gives us time to hunt the smaller creatures.'
    Cadfael went to Vespers with an unquiet mind, troubled by imaginings of a girl on horseback, with silver and rough gems and coin in her saddle-bags, parting from her last known companions only a few miles from her goal, and then vanishing like morning mist in the summer sun, as if she had never been. A wisp of vapour over the meadow, and then gone. If those who agonised after her, the old and the young, had known her dead and with God, they, too, could have been at peace. Now there was no peace for any man drawn into this elaborate web of uncertainty.
    Among the novices and schoolboys and the child oblates, last of their kind, for Abbot Radulfus would accept no more infants into a cloistered life decreed for them by others, Rhun stood rapt and radiant, smiling as he sang. A virgin by nature and aptitude, as well as by years, untroubled by the bodily agonies that tore most men, but miraculously aware of them and tender towards them, as few are to pains that leave their own flesh unwrung.
    Vespers at this time of year shone with filtered summer light, that showed Rhun's flaxen beauty in crystalline pallor, and flashed across into the ranks of the brothers to burn in the sullen, smouldering darkness of Brother Urien, and the dilated brilliance of his black eyes, and cool into discreet shade where Brother Fidelis stood withdrawn into the shadows of the wall, alert at his lord's elbow, with no eyes and no thought for what went on around him, as he had no voice to join in the chant. His shadowed eyes looked nowhere but at Humilis, his slight body stood braced to receive and support at any moment the even frailer form that stood lance-straight beside him.
    Well, worship has its own priorities, and a duty once assumed is a duty to the end. God and Saint