Brother Cadfael 12: The Raven in the Foregate

noise, no one acknowledged it or mentioned it, no one visibly exulted. Nevertheless, the parishioners of the Foregate kept Christmas with the heartfelt fervour of a people from whom an oppressive shadow had been lifted overnight. In the mortuary chapel, where even at this end of the year no warmth could be employed, those gathered about the bier shivered and blew into their bunched fingers wringing the rough, fingerless mittens to set the chill blood flowing and work off the numbness. Father Ailnoth, colder than them all, nevertheless lay indifferent to the gathering frost even in his nakedness, and on his bed of stone.
    "We must, then, conclude," said Abbot Radulfus heavily, "that he fell into the pool and drowned. But why was he there at such an hour, and on the eve of the Nativity?"
    There was no one prepared to answer that. To reach the place where he had been found he must have passed by every near habitation without word or sign, to end in a barren, unpeopled solitude.
    "He drowned, certainly," said Cadfael.
    "Is it known," wondered Prior Robert, "whether he could swim?"
    Cadfael shook his head. "I've no knowledge of that, I doubt if anyone here knows. But it might not be of much importance whether he could or no. Certainly he drowned. It is less certain, I fear, that he simply fell into the water. See here - the back of his head ..."
    He raised the dead man's head with one hand, and propped head and shoulders with the right arm, and Brother Edmund, who had already viewed this corpse with him before even Abbot Radulfus and Prior Robert were summoned, held a candle to show the nape and the thick circlet of wiry black hair. A broken wound, with edges of skin grazed loose round it and a bleached, moist middle now only faintly discoloured with blood after its soaking in the pool, began just at the rim of the tonsure, and scraped down raggedly through the circle of hair, to end where the inward curve of the nape began.
    "He suffered a blow on the head here, before ever he entered the water," said Cadfael.
    "Struck from behind him," said the abbot, with fastidious disdain, and peered closer. "You are sure he drowned? This blow could not have killed him? For what you are saying is that this was no accident, but a deliberate assault. Or could he have come by this innocently? Is it possible? The track there is rutted, and it was icy. Could he have fallen and injured himself thus?"
    "I doubt it. If a man's feet go from under him he may sit down heavily, even sprawl back on his shoulders, but he seldom goes full-length so violently as to hit his head forcibly on the ground and break his crown. That could not happen on such rough ground, only on smooth sheet ice. And mark, this is not on the round of his head, which would have taken such a shock, but lower, even moving into the curve of his neck, and lacerated, as if he was struck with something rough and jagged. And you saw the shoes he was wearing, felted beneath the sole. I think he went safer from a fall, last night, than most men."
    "Certainly, then, a blow," said Radulfus. "Could it have killed?"
    "No, impossible! His skull is not broken. Not enough to kill, nor even to do him much lasting harm. But he might well have been stunned for a while, or so dazed that he was helpless when he fell into the water. Fell," said Cadfael with deliberation, but ruefully, "or was pushed in."
    "And of those two," said the abbot with cold composure, "which is the more likely?"
    "In darkness," said Cadfael, "any man may step too near a sloping edge and misjudge his footing where a bank overhangs water. But whatever his reason for going along that path, why should he persist beyond the last dwelling? But this broken head I do not believe he got by any natural fall, and he got it before he went into the water. Some other hand, some other person, was there with him, and party to this death."
    "There is nothing in the wound, no fragment to show what manner of weapon it was that struck him?" ventured Brother Edmund, who had worked with Brother Cadfael in similar cases, and found good reason to require his judgement even in the minutest details. But he did not sound hopeful.
    "How could there be?" said Cadfael simply. "He was lain in the water all through the night, everything about him is bleached and sodden. If there had ever been soil or grass in his grazes, it would have soaked away long ago. But I do not think there was. He cannot alone have staggered far after that blow was struck, and