Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

On the following morning, which was Sunday, Sulien Blount came riding in from Longner to attend Mass in the abbey church, and brought with him, shaken and brushed and carefully folded, the habit in which he had made his way home after the abbot dismissed him. In his own cotte and hose, linen shirt and good leather shoes, he looked, if anything, slightly less at ease than in the habit, so new was his release after more than a year of the novitiate. He had not yet regained the freedom of a young man's easy stride, unhampered by monastic skirts. Nor, strangely, did he look any the happier or more carefree for having made up his mind. There was a solemn set to his admirable jaw, and a silent crease of serious thought between his straight brows. The ring of hair that had grown over-long on his journey from Ramsey had been trimmed into tidiness, and the down of dark gold curls within it had grown into a respectable length to blend with the brown. He attended Mass with the same grave concentration he had shown when within the Order, delivered up the clothing he had abandoned, paid his reverences to Abbot Radulfus and Prior Robert, and went to find Brother Cadfael in the herb garden.

'Well, well!' said Cadfael. 'I thought you might be looking in on us soon. And how do you find things out in the world? You've seen no reason to change your mind?'

'No,' said the boy starkly, and for the moment had nothing more to say. He looked round the high-walled garden, its neat, patterned beds now growing a little leggy and bare with the loss of leaves, the bushy stems of thyme dark as wire. 'I liked it here, with you. But no, I wouldn't turn back. I was wrong to run away. I shall not make the same mistake again.'

'How is your mother faring?' asked Cadfael, divining that she might well be the insoluble grief from which Sulien had attempted flight. For the young man to live with the inescapable contemplation of perpetual pain and the infinitely and cruelly slow approach of lingering death might well be unendurable. For Hugh had reported her present condition very clearly. If that was the heart of it, the boy had braced himself now to make reparation, and carry his part of the load in the house, thereby surely lightening hers.

'Poorly,' said Sulien bluntly. 'Never anything else. But she never complains. It's as if she had some hungry beast for ever gnawing at her body from within. Some days are a little better than others.'

'I have herbs that might do something against the pain,' said Cadfael. 'Some time ago she did use them for a while.'

'I know. We have all told her so, but she refuses them now. She says she doesn't need them. All the same,' he said, warming, 'give me some, perhaps I may persuade her.'

He followed Cadfael into the workshop, under the rustling bunches of dried herbs hanging from the roof beams, and sat down on the wooden bench within while Cadfael filled a flask from his supply of the syrup he made from his eastern poppies, calmer of pain and inducer of sleep.

'You may not have heard yet,' said Cadfael, with his back turned, 'that the sheriff has a man in prison for the murder of the woman we thought was Generys, until you showed us that was impossible. A fellow named Britric, a pedlar who works the border villages, and bedded down in Ruald's croft last year, through Saint Peter's Fair.'

He heard a soft stir of movement at his back, as Sulien's shoulders shifted against the timber wall. But no word was said.

'He had a woman there with him, it seems, one Gunnild, a tumbler and singer entertaining at the fairground. And no one has seen her since last year's fair ended. A black-haired woman, they report her. She could very well be the poor soul we found. Hugh Beringar thinks so.'

Sulien's voice, a little clipped and quiet, asked: 'What does Britric say to that? He will not have admitted to it?'

'He said what he would say, that he left the woman there the morning after the fair, safe and well, and has not seen her since.'

'So he may have done,' said Sulien reasonably.

'It is possible. But no one has seen the woman since. She did not come to this year's fair, no one knows anything of her. And as I heard it, they were known to quarrel, even to come to blows. And he is a powerful man, with a hot temper, who might easily go too far. I would not like,' said Cadfael with intent, 'to