Brother Cadfael 13: The Rose Rent

"Wait, I'll bring them."
    The forlorn little bundle of clothes laid aside in the chapel had been folded together as tidily as haste and their sodden condition permitted, and had drained gradually where they lay. The folds of coat and shirt and homespun hose were beginning to dry. Cadfael took the pile in one arm, and picked up in the other hand the boots that stood beside it. He carried them out into the court as Miles was smoothing the blanket neatly over Bertred's feet. The young man turned to meet him and take the bundle from him, and in the exchange, as Miles leaned to stow the clothes under the blanket, the cart tilted, and the boots, just balanced at the tail, fell to the cobbled paving.
    Cadfael stooped to pick them up and restore them to their place. It was the first time he had really looked at them, and the light here in the court was clear and bright. He stood arrested in mid-movement, a boot in either hand, and slowly he turned up the left one to look attentively at the sole. For so long a time that when he did look up he found Miles standing just as still in wonder, gazing at him with open mouth, his head on one side like a puzzled hound on a lost scent.
    "I think," said Cadfael with deliberation, "I had better get leave from the lord abbot, and come up into the town with you. I need to speak once again with the lord sheriff."
    It was but a short walk from the castle to the house at Maerdol-head, and the boy sent in haste to find Hugh brought him within the quarter-hour, cursing mildly at being side-tracked on the point of further action he had intended, but reconciled by sharp curiosity, for Cadfael would not have sent for him again so soon without good reason.
    In the hall Dame Agatha, attended by a tearful Branwen, volubly lamented the rockfall of disasters which had befallen the Vestier household. In the kitchen the bereaved Alison mourned with more bitter reason the loss of her son, while all the spinning-girls formed a chorus to her threnody. But in the loom-shed, where Bertred's body had been laid out decorously on a trestle table to await the visit of Martin Bellecote, the master-carpenter from the Wyle, it was quiet to the point of oppression, even though there were three of them there conversing in low voices and few words.
    "There is no shadow of doubt," said Cadfael, holding the boot sole up to the light of a small lamp one of the girls had set at the head of the table. The light outside was still hardly less bright than in the afternoon, but half the shed was shuttered because the looms were at rest. "This is the boot that made the print I took from the soil under Niall's vine, and the man who wore it is the man who tried to hack down the rose-bush, the same who also killed Brother Eluric. I made the mould, I know I am not mistaken. But here is the mould itself, for I brought it with me. You will find it matches exactly."
    "I take your word for it," said Hugh. But as one who must verify for himself every morsel of evidence, he took the boot and the waxen mould, and carried them out to the doorway to match the two together. "There is no doubt." The two fitted like seal and matrix. There was the oblique tread that had worn down outer heel and inner toe, and the crack reaching half across the sole at the ball of the foot. "It seems," said Hugh, "the Severn has saved us the cost of a trial, and him a worse fate than drowning."
    Miles had remained standing somewhat apart, looking from face to face with the same baffled wonder with which he had brooded over Bertred's body in the mortuary chapel.
    "I don't understand," he said dubiously at last. "Are you saying that it was Bertred who got into the smith's garden to spoil Judith's rose-bush? And killed..." The same vigorous, even violent, shaking of his head, trying to toss the unwelcome belief from him, like a bull trying to throw off a dog that had him by the soft nose. And with as little success, for slowly the conviction began to penetrate his mind, to judge by the slackening of the lines of his face, and his final resigned calm and glint of rising interest. A very eloquent face, had Miles; Cadfael could follow every change. "Why should he do such a thing?" he said slowly, but rather as if his own wit was already beginning to supply answers.
    "The killing he never meant, as like as not," said Hugh reasonably. "But as for hacking down the bush - it was you yourself gave us a good reason why a man might do so."
    "But what did it benefit Bertred?