Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

your eyes are young enough to be sharp."
    "I've lost it," said Tutilo. "I had it at Mass, the day before I was locked in here, but where I've left it or dropped it I don't know. I miss it, but I can't think what I've done with it."
    "You had it the day Aldhelm was to come here? The day, the night, rather, you found him?"
    "That was the last I can be clear about, and I may have shaken it out of my scrip or dropped it somewhere among the trees in the dark, that's what I'm afraid of. I was hardly noticing much that night," he said ruefully, "after I found him. What with bolting down the track and across the river into the town, I could have shed it anywhere. It may be down the Severn by now. I like to have it," he said earnestly, "and I rise for Matins and Lauds in the night. I do!"
    "I'll leave you mine," said Cadfael. "Well, best get your sleep, if you're going to rise with the rest of us at midnight. Keep your lamp burning till then, if you like, there's enough oil here." He had checked it in the little pottery vessel with a fingertip. "Goodnight, son!"
    "Don't forget to lock the door," said Tutilo after him, and laughed without a trace of bitterness.
    She was standing in the darkest of the dark, slender and still and erect, pressed against the stones of the cell wall when Cadfael rounded the corner. The faint gleam of Tutilo's lamp through the grill high out of her reach fell from above over her face as no more than a glowworm's eerie spark, conjuring out of deep darkness a spectral mask of a face, oval, elusive, with austere carven features, but the remaining light from the west window of the church, hardly less dim, found the large, smouldering lustre of her eyes, and a few jewelled points of brightness that were embroidered silver threads along the side hems of her bliaut. She was in her finery, she had been singing for Robert Bossu. A lean, motionless, intent presence in the stillness of the night. Daalny, Partholan's queen, a demi-goddess from the western paradise.
    "I heard your voices," she said, her own voice pitched just above a whisper; whispers carry more audibly than soft utterances above the breath. "I could not call to him, someone might have heard. Cadfael, what is to happen to him?"
    "I hope," said Cadfael, "no great harm."
    "In long captivity," she said, "he will stop singing. And then he will die. And the day after tomorrow we ride with the earl for Leicester. I have my orders from R�, tomorrow I must begin packing the instruments for safe carriage, and the next morning we ride. B�zet will be seeing to all the horses, and exercising R�'s to make sure his injury's healed well. And we go. And he remains. At whose mercy?"
    "God's," said Cadfael firmly, "and with the intercession of the saints. One saint, at any rate, for she has just nudged me with the seed of an idea. So go to your bed, and keep your heart up, for nothing is ended yet."
    "And what gain is there for me?" she said. "We might prove ten times over that he did no murder, but still he will be dragged back to Ramsey, and they will have their revenge on him, not so much for being a thief as for making a botch of his thievery. In the earl's party half the way, and far too strong an escort for him to break loose." She lowered her burning eyes to the broad brown hand in which Cadfael held the key, and suddenly she smiled. "I know the right key now," she said.
    "It might be changed over to the wrong nail," said Cadfael mildly.
    "I should know it, even so. There are but two alike in size and design, and I remember well the pattern of the wards on the wrong one. I shall not make that mistake again."
    He was about to urge her to let well alone and trust heaven to do justice, but then he had a sudden vision of heaven's justice as the Church sometimes applied it, in good but dreadful faith, with all the virtuous narrowness and pitilessness of minds blind and deaf to the infinite variety of humankind, its failings, and aspirations, and needs, and forgetful of all the Gospel reminders concerning publicans and sinners. And he thought of songbirds caged, drooping without air to play on the cords of their throats, without heart to sing, and knew that they might very well die. Half humanity was here in this lean dark girl beside him, and that half of humanity had its right to reason, determine and meddle, no less than the male half. After all, they were equally responsible for humankind continuing. There was not an archbishop or an abbot in the world