Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

'I will so!' agreed Brother Richard, so warmly that his relief was plain. His easy-going nature was not made for such discoveries, his preference was for an orderly life in which all things behaved as they should, and spared him too much exertion of body or mind. He made off with alacrity to where Hugh's raw-boned grey stood peacefully cropping the greener turf under the headland, heaved a sturdy foot into the stirrup, and mounted. There was nothing the matter with his horsemanship but recent lack of practice. He was a younger son from a knightly family, and had made the choice between service in arms and service in the cloister at only sixteen. Hugh's horse, intolerant of most riders except his master, condescended to carry this one along the headland and down into the water-meadow without resentment.

'Though he may spill him at the ford,' Hugh allowed, watching them recede towards the river, 'if the mood takes him. Well, let's see what's left us to find here.'

The sergeant was cutting back deeply into the bank, under the rustling broom brushes. Cadfael turned from the dead to descend with kilted habit into her grave, and cautiously began to shovel out the loose loam and deepen the hollow where she had lain.

'Nothing,' he said at last, on his knees upon a floor now packed hard and changing to a paler colour, the subsoil revealing a layer of clay. 'You see this? Lower, by the river, Ruald had two or three spots where he got his clay. Worked out now, they said, at least where they were easy to reach. This has not been disturbed, in longer time than she has lain here. We need go no deeper, there is nothing to find. We'll sift around the sides a while, but I doubt not this is all.'

'More than enough,' said Hugh, scouring his soiled hands in the thick, fibrous turf. 'And not enough. All too little to give her an age or a name.'

'Or a kinship or a home, living,' Cadfael agreed sombrely, 'or a reason for dying. We can do no more here. I have seen what there is to be seen of how she was laid. What remains to be done can better be done in privacy, with time to spare, and trusted witnesses.'

It was an hour more before Brother Winfrid and Brother Urien came striding along the headland with their burden of brychans and litter. Carefully they lifted the slender bundle of bones, folded the rugs round them and covered them decently from sight. Hugh's sergeant was dismissed, back to the garrison at the castle. In silence and on foot the insignificant funeral cortege of the unknown set off for the abbey.

'It is a woman,' said Cadfael, reporting in due course to Abbot Radulfus in the privacy of the abbot's parlour. 'We have bestowed her in the mortuary chapel. I doubt if there is anything about her that can ever be recognised by any man, even if her death is recent, which I take to be unlikely. The gown is such as any cottage wife might wear, without ornament, without girdle, once the common black, now drab. She wears no shoes, no jewellery, nothing to give her a name.'

'Her face...?' wondered the abbot, but dubiously, expecting nothing.

'Father, her face is now the common image. There is nothing left to move a man to say: This is wife, or sister, or any woman ever I knew. Nothing, except, perhaps, that she had a wealth of dark hair. But so have many women. She is of moderate height for a woman. Her age we can but guess, and that very roughly. Surely by her hair she was not old, but I think she was no young girl, either. A woman in her prime, but between five-and-twenty and forty who can tell?'

'Then there is nothing singular about her at all? Nothing to mark her out?' said Radulfus.

'There is the manner of her burial,' said Hugh. 'Without mourning, without rites, put away unlawfully in unconsecrated ground. And yet - Cadfael will tell you. Or if you so choose, Father, you may see for yourself, for we have left her lying as we found her.'

'I begin to see,' said Radulfus with deliberation, 'that I must indeed view this dead woman for myself. But since so much has been said, you may tell me what it is that outdoes in strangeness the circumstances of her secret burial. And yet...?'

'And yet, Father, she was laid out straight and seemly, her hair braided, her hands folded on her breast, over a cross banded together from two sticks from a hedgerow or a bush. Whoever put her into the ground did so with some