Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

to suffer his first disastrous experience of love for a woman long familiarly known, and loved in another fashion, a woman out of his generation and out of his reach. But how if there was more to it than mere flight to escape from insoluble problems and incurable pain? Consider the situation, when a husband she had loved and trusted was wrenching himself away from her as it were in blood, her blood, and yet leaving her bound and lonely! In her rage and bitterness at such a desertion a passionate woman might well have set herself to take revenge on all men, even the vulnerable young. Taken him up, comforted herself in his worshipping dog's eyes, and then cast him off. Such affronts the young in their first throes feel mortally. But the death may have been hers. Reason enough to fly from the scene and from the world into a distant cloister, out of sight even of the trees that sheltered her home.'

    

'It is logical,' said Hugh, echoing Cadfael's own words, 'it is possible, it is credible.'

    

'My only objection,' agreed Cadfael, 'is that I find I do not credit it. Nor cannot, for good sound reasons - simply do not.'

    

'Your reservations,' said Hugh philosophically, 'always have me reining in and treading very carefully. Now as ever! But I have another thought: How if Sulien had the ring in his possession all along, ever since he parted with Generys - living or dead? How if she herself had given it to him? Tossed away her husband's love gift in bitterness at his desertion - upon the most innocent and piteous lover she could ever have had. And she did say that she had a lover.'

    

'If he had killed her,' said Cadfael, 'would he have kept her token?'

    

'He might! Oh, yes, he very well might. Such things have been known, when love at its most devilish raises hate as another devil, to fight it out between them. Yes, I think he would keep her ring, even through a year of concealing it from abbot and confessor and all, in Ramsey.'

    

'As he swore to Radulfus,' remarked Cadfael, suddenly reminded, 'that he did not. He could lie, I think, but would not lie wantonly, for no good reason.'

    

'Have we not attributed to him good reason enough for lying? Then, if all along he had the ring, the time came when it was urgent, for Ruald's sake, to produce it in evidence, with this false story of how he came by it. If indeed it is false. If I had proof it is not,' said Hugh, fretting at the frustration of chance, 'I could put Sulien almost - almost - out of my mind.'

    

'There is also,' said Cadfael slowly, 'the question of why he did not tell Ruald at once, when they met, that he had heard news of Generys in Peterborough, and she was alive and well. Even if, as he says, his intent was to keep the ring for himself, still he could have told the man what he must have known would come as great ease and relief to him. But he did not.'

    

'The boy did not know, then,' Hugh objected fairly, 'that we had found a dead woman, nor that any shadow lay over Ruald. He knew of no very urgent need to give him news of his wife, not until he heard the whole story at Longner. Indeed, he might well have thought it better to leave well alone, since the man is blessedly happy where he is.'

    

'I am not altogether sure,' Cadfael said slowly, peering back into the brief while he had spent with Sulien as helper in the herbarium, 'that he did not know of the case until he went home. The same day that he asked leave to visit Longner and see his family again, Jerome had been with him in the garden, for I met him as he left, and he was at once in haste, and a shade more civil and brotherly than usual. And I wonder now if something had not been said of a woman's bones discovered, and a man's reputation under threat. That same evening Sulien went to the lord abbot, and was given leave to ride to Longner. When he came back next day, it was to declare his intent to leave the Order, and to bring forth the ring and the story of how he got it.'

    

Hugh was drumming his fingers softly on the table, his eyes narrowed in thought. 'Which first?' he demanded.

    

'First he asked and obtained his dismissal.'

    

'Would it, you think, be easier, to a man usually truthful, to lie to the abbot after that than before?'

    

'You have thoughts not unlike mine,' said Cadfael glumly.

    

'Well,' said Hugh, shaking off present concerns from his shoulders, 'two things are certain. The first, that whatever the truth