Brother Cadfael 14: The Hermit of Eyton Forest

and went on south next day. I can't say the exact day, but it was towards the end of September.'
    'Then if you know him again,' said Hugh, 'changed as his condition is, would your father also have recognised him at sight?'
    'Surely he would, my lord. His eyes were sharper than mine. He'd sat over a chessboard with the man, eye to eye. He'd know him again.'
    And so he had, thought Cadfael, when he went man-hunting to the cell in the forest, and came face to face with the hermit Cuthred who had been no hermit a month or so earlier. And he had not lived to return to the abbey and let out to any man what he knew. And what if he knew no great evil of this transformed being? He might still let fall to other ears the casual word that would mean more to them than ever it had to him, and bring to the cell in Eyton forest someone in search of more than a runaway villein, and worse, surely, than a spurious priest. But he had not lived to get further on his return journey than a close forest thicket, sufficiently far from the hermitage to remove suspicion from a local saint reputed never to leave his cell.
    The evidence of circumstances is not positive proof, yet Cadfael had no doubts left. There before them the coffined body and the new corpse rested for a few moments side by side, before Prior Robert directed the bearers to the mortuary chapel, and Aymer Bosiet covered Cuthred's face again, and turned afresh to his own preparations for departure. His mind was on other things, why distract and detain him now? But Cadfael did suddenly take thought to ask one curious question.
    'What manner of horse was he riding when he halted overnight at Thame?'
    Aymer turned from fastening the straps of his saddlebags in detached surprise, opened his mouth to answer, and found himself at a loss, frowning thoughtfully over his recollections of that night.
    'He was there before us. There were two horses in the priory stables when we came. And he'd left before us next morning. But now you come to ask, when we got to horse, the same two beasts we saw there the night before were still in their stalls. That's strange! What would such a well-found man, knightly by the look of him and his arms - what would he be doing without a horse?'
    'Ah, well, he may have stabled it somewhere else,' said Cadfael, abandoning the puzzle as trivial.
    But it was not trivial, it was the key to open a very strange door in the mind. There before so many eyes lay the slayer and the slain, side by side, justice already done. But who, then, had slain the slayer?
    They were gone, all of them, Aymer on his father's handsome light roan horse, Warin with the horse Aymer had ridden on the outward journey now on a leading rein, the young groom with the carter and the cart. After the first day-stages Aymer would probably be off at speed, leaving the grooms to bring the coffin after at their slower pace, and most likely sending other retainers back along the way to relieve them, once he reached home. In the mortuary chapel Cadfael had seen Cuthred's body laid out in seemly fashion, hair and beard trimmed, not, perhaps, so closely as the knight at Thame had worn them, but enough to display, in the fixed and austere tranquillity of death, a face appropriate enough to a dignified religious. Unfair that a murderer should look as noble in death as any of the empress's paladins.
    Hugh was closeted with the abbot, and as yet had said no word to Cadfael of what he made of Aymer's witness, but by the very questions he had asked it was clear he had made the same connections Cadfael had made, and could not have failed to arrive at the same conclusion. He would speak of it first with Radulfus. My part now, thought Cadfael, is to bring Hyacinth out of hiding, and let him shake himself loose from all suspicion of wrongdoing. Barring, of course, the occasional theft to fill his belly while he lived wild, and a lie or two by way of preserving himself alive at all. And Hugh won't grudge him those. And that should settle the matter of Cuthred's ordination once for all, if there's still any lingering question about it. A sudden conversion can turn a soldier into a hermit, yes, but it takes much longer than that to make a priest.
    He waited for Hugh in his workshop in the herb garden, where Hugh would certainly come looking for him as soon as he left the abbot. It was quiet and aromatic and homely within there, and Cadfael had been too much away from it of late. He would have to be thinking of