Brother Cadfael 11: An Excellent Mystery

very much less.'
    'Yes, true! A small cross,' said Humilis, lips moving again upon the recollected phrases, 'the length of a little finger, set with yellow stones, and green agate and amethyst…Fellow to an altar cross of the same, but made for wearing. Yes, a man would know that again.'
    The faint dew of weakness was budding again on his forehead, a great drop ran down into the folds of a closed eyelid. Cadfael wiped the corroding drops away, and frowned Hugh before him out at the door.
    'I shall sleep…' said Humilis, and faintly and fleetingly smiled.
    In the large room across the stone passage, where a dozen beds lay spaced in two rows, either side an open corridor, Brother Edmund and another brother, his back turned and his strong, erect figure unidentifiable from behind, were lifting a cot and the lay brother in it, to move them a short way along the wall, and make room for a new pallet and a new patient. The helper set down his end of the bed as Cadfael and Hugh passed by the open doorway. He straightened and turned, brushing his hands together to rub out the dents left by the weight, and showed them the dark, level brows and burning eyes of Brother Urien. In unaccustomed content with himself and the walls and persons about him, he wore a slight, taut smile that curled his lips but never damped the smouldering of his eyes. He watched them pass as if a shadow had passed, and crossed their tracks as soon as they were by, to stack an armful of washed linen in the press that stood in the passage.
    In the infirmary, by custom, all doors stood open, so that a call for help might safely reach attentive ears, and help come hurrying. Voices, the chant of the office, even bird song, circulated freely. Only in times of storm or heavy rain or winter cold were doors closed and shutters secured, never as now, in the heat of summer.
    'The man is lying,' said Hugh, pacing beside Cadfael in the great court, and worrying at the texture of truth and deceit. 'But also half the time he is telling the truth, and which half holds the lies? Tell me that!'
    'If I could,' said Cadfael mildly, 'I should be more than mortal.'
    'He had her trust, he knew what she was worth, he rode alone with her the last few miles, and no trace of her since,' said Hugh, gnawing the evidence savagely. 'And yet, on the road there, he asked me time and again if I knew whether she lived or was dead, and I would have sworn he was honest in asking. But now see him! Halfway through that business, he stands there unmoved as a rock, and never makes protest against being held, nor shows any further trouble over her fate. What's to be made of him?'
    'Or of any of this,' agreed Cadfael ruefully. 'I'm of your mind, he is certainly lying. He knows what he has not declared. Yet if he has possessed himself of all she had, what has he done with it? It may not be great riches, but it would be worth more to a man than the low pay and danger and sweat of a simple soldier, yet here is he manifestly a simple soldier still, and nothing more.'
    'Soldier he may be,' said Hugh wryly, 'but simple he is not. His twists and turns have me baffled. Winchester he knows well - yes, maybe, but wherever he has served the greater part of these three years, since this winter all forces have closed in on Winchester. How could he not know it? And yet I'd have sworn, at first, that he truly did not know, and longed to know, what had become of the girl. Either that, or he's the cunningest mime that ever twisted his face to deceive.'
    'He did not seem to me greatly uneasy,' said Cadfael thoughtfully, 'when you brought him in. Wary, yes, and picking his words with care - and that gives them all the more meaning,' he added, brightening. 'I'll be thinking on that. But fearful or anxious, no, I would not say so.'
    They had reached the gatehouse, where the groom waited with Hugh's horse. Hugh gathered the reins and set toe in stirrup, and paused there to look over his shoulder at his friend.
    'I tell you what, Cadfael, the only sure way out of this tangle is for that girl to turn up somewhere, alive and well. Then we can all be easy. But there, you've had more than your fair share of miracles already this year, not even you dare ask for more.'
    'And yet,' said Cadfael, fretting at the disorderly confusion of shards that would not fit together, 'there's something winks at me in the corner of my mind's eye, and is gone when I look towards it. A mere will-o'-wisp - not even a spark…'
    'Let it