Brother Cadfael 14: The Hermit of Eyton Forest

willing to wait, death might not be.
    At last she asked, in a perfectly ordinary voice, perhaps milder than any she normally used to her household or tenants, but without moving, or withdrawing her eyes from her ultimate enemy: 'Where is the lord sheriff?'
    'He's gone to get hold of a party to carry the hermit away from here,' said the abbot. 'To Eaton, if you so wish, to be cared for there, since you were his patroness. Or, if it will spare you painful reminders, to the abbey. He shall be properly received there.'
    'It would be a kindness,' she said slowly, 'if you would take him. I no longer know what to think. Fulke has told me what my grandson says. The hermit cannot answer for himself now, nor can I for him. I believed without question that he was a priest.'
    'That, madam,' said Radulfus, 'I never doubted.'
    The focus of her stare had shortened, a little colour had come back into her waxen face. She was on her way back, soon she would stir and brace herself, and turn to look at the real world about her, instead of the bleak distances of judgement day. And she would face whatever she had to face with the same ferocious courage and obstinacy with which she had formerly conducted her battles.
    'Father,' she said, turning towards him with abrupt resolution, 'if I come to the abbey tonight, will you yourself hear my confession? I shall sleep the better when I have shed my sins.'
    'I will,' said the abbot.
    She was ready then to be taken home, and Fulke was all too anxious to escort her. No doubt he, who had very little to say here in company, would be voluble enough in private with her. He had not her intelligence, nor nearly so acute an imagination. If Cuthred's death had cast any shadow on him, it was merely the vexation of not being able to claim proof of his daughter's marriage, not at all a bony hand on his shoulder. So at any rate thought Brother Cadfael, watching him arm Dionisia to where her jennet was tethered, in haste to have her away and be free of the abbot's daunting presence.
    At the last moment, with the reins gathered in her hand, she suddenly turned back. Her face had regained all its proud tension and force, she was herself again.
    'I have only now remembered,' she said, 'that the lord sheriff was wondering about the casket in there on the altar. That was Cuthred's. He brought it with him.'
    When the abbot and the litter-bearers and Hugh were all on their slow and sombre way back to the abbey, Cadfael took a last look round the deserted chapel, the more attentively because he was alone and without distractions. There was not a single stain of blood on the flags of the floor where the body had lain, only the drop or two left by the point of Cuthred's own dagger. He had certainly wounded his adversary, though the wound could not be deep. Cadfael sighted a course from the altar to the doorway, and followed it with a newly lighted candle in his hand. In the chapel he found nothing more, and in the outer room the floor was of beaten earth, and such faint traces would be hard to find after the passage of hours. But on the doorstone he found three drops shaken, dried now but plain to be seen, and on the new and unstained timber with which the left jamb of the doorway had been repaired there was a blurred smear of blood at the level of his own shoulder, where a gashed and bloodied sleeve had brushed past.
    A man no taller than himself, then, and Cuthred's dagger had taken him in the shoulder or upper arm on the left side, as a stroke aimed at his heart might well do.
    Cadfael had intended to ride on to Eilmund's cottage, but on impulse he changed his mind, for it seemed to him that after all he could not afford to miss whatever might follow when Cuthred's body was brought into the court at the abbey, to the consternation of most, the relief, perhaps, of some, and the possible peril of one in particular. Instead of cutting through the forest rides, he mounted and rode back in haste towards Shrewsbury, to overtake the funeral procession.
    They had a curious audience as soon as they entered the Foregate, and the camp-following of inquisitive boys and attendant dogs followed at their heels all along the highroad, and even the respectable citizens came after them at a more discreet distance, wary of abbot and sheriff but avid for information, and breeding rumours as fast as flies breed on summer middens. Even when the cortege turned in at the gatehouse the good folk from market and smithy and tavern gathered