Brother Cadfael 13: The Rose Rent

saddle-roll, and set off back to the abbey. But first he looked in at the small bare room where Bertred's coffined body lay on trestles, and the master-carpenter and his son were just fitting the lid, and said a prayer for a young man lost. Sister Magdalen came out with him as far as the street, and there halted, still silent and frowning in intense thought.
    "Well?" said Cadfael, finding her so taciturn.
    "No, not well. Very ill!" She shook her head dubiously. "I can make nothing of this pattern. Plain enough what happened to Judith, but the rest I cannot fathom. You heard what she said of Bertred's death? The same doubts I feel about what so nearly might have been her own, but for the smith. Is there anything in all this coil that has happened by pure chance? I doubt it!"
    He was still pondering that as he started uphill towards the High Street, and as he neared the corner, for some reason he slowed and turned to look back, and she was still standing in the mouth of the passage, gazing after him, her strong hands folded at her girdle. Nothing by pure chance, no, surely not, even those happenings that seemed wanton carried a false echo. Rather a sequence of events had set off each the following one, and called in motives and interests until then untouched, so that the affair had come about in a circle, and brought up the hapless souls involved in it facing where they had never intended to go. A deal more rapidly and purposefully than he had left her, Cadfael started back towards Sister Magdalen.
    "I did wonder," she said without apparent surprise, "what was going on in your mind. I've seldom known you sit through such a conference saying so little and scowling so much. What have you thought of now?"
    "There's something I should like you to do for me, since you'll be staying in this house," said Cadfael. "What with the youngster's burial and Judith's return, it shouldn't be too difficult to filch a couple of things for me, and send them down to me at the abbey. By Martin's boy Edwy, if they're still here, but not a word to anyone else. Borrowing, not stealing. God knows I shan't need them for long, one way or the other."
    "You interest me," said Magdalen. "What are these two things?"
    "Two left shoes," said Cadfael.
    Chapter Thirteen
    Now that his mind was stringing together a thread of abhorrent sense out of details which hitherto had seemed to make none, he could not turn his thoughts to anything else. Throughout Vespers he struggled to concentrate on the office, but the lamentable sequence of disasters connected with the rose rent marched inexorably through his mind, gradually assembling into a logical order.
    First there was Judith, still deprived and unhappy after three lonely years, thinking and sometimes speaking of retreating into a nunnery, and vexed by a number of suitors both old and young, who had had an eye on her person and her wealth all this time, and wooed and pleaded without reward, and were now beginning to get desperate in case she carried out her design to become a religious.
    Then the attempt on the rose-bush, to retrieve at least the possibility of regaining the gift-house, and the resultant death of Brother Eluric, probably, indeed almost certainly, unplanned and committed in panic.
    After that, however bitterly regretted, one man at least had murder already against him, and would be far more likely afterwards to stick at nothing.
    But then, to confound and complicate, came the abduction of Judith, another panic measure to prevent her from making her gift unconditional, and try to persuade or threaten her into marriage. Even if he had not been named, the perpetrator of that enormity was known.
    And the nocturnal death of Bertred might have been logical enough, had the abductor brought it about, but plainly he had not. Judith vouched for that, and so, probably, could Vivian Hynde's mother, since it seemed clear that once the bargain was made between captive and captor, Judith had been removed to the greater comfort of a house which had already been visted in search of her, and the buried room in the warehouse hurriedly and ingeniously cleared of all traces of her presence. So far, well!
    But there had been listeners outside in the night, Bertred first and possibly another afterwards, unless Vivian had reached a state in which every stirring of a spider or a mouse in the roof could alarm him. The plan might well have been overheard, and the horse with the double load might have had another