Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

if any privacy. Even thieves can be robbed, and curious neighbours can find out things that were hidden.
    "They never left Shrewsbury!" said Hugh, staring down at the pile of silver and gold. "Father Herluin, it seems God and the saints have restored you your own."
    "Under whom," said Robert Bossu dryly, "thanks are due also to this girl of yours, R�. She has proved her point concerning theft. Are we not forgetting her? I hope he did her no injury. Where is she now?"
    "She is in the church," said Cadfael, "and asks that you will allow her a little time in private before departing. She has nothing worse than a graze, as concerning the body, she can go and she can ride, but a while of quietness is what her spirit needs."
    "We will wait her convenience," said the earl. "I would like, I confess, Hugh, to see the end of this. If your fellows bring back the thief alive, so much the better, for he has robbed me, in passing, of a good horse. He has much to answer for."
    "More," said Cadfael sombrely, "than mere theft."
    He had moved aside the pile of clothes which had covered B�zet's plunder from sight, and thrust a hand into the depths of the saddlebag, and there was some folded garment still left undisturbed within, put away beneath all. He held it unfolded in his hands, a linen shirt, clean from fresh folds after laundering, and was gazing down at the cuff of one sleeve, turning it about in his fingers with fixed attention. A very self-sufficient man, B�zet, very orderly in his management of his affairs, needing no woman to wash and furbish for him. But not rich enough to be able to discard a shirt, even if there had been much opportunity, shut in here within monastic walls at his master's pleasure, while R� pursued his quest for patronage. He had washed it and folded it deep under everything in his packing, to await its next airing miles distant from here and weeks later. But there are stains not easily washed out. Cadfael extended the cuff beneath Hugh's wondering gaze, and Earl Robert leaned to take up the second sleeve. For about a hand's breadth from the hem they were both thinly spattered with small round stains, no more than a faint but clear pink outline, even fainter pink within. But Cadfael had seen the like before, often enough to know it. So, he thought, had Robert Bossu.
    This is blood," said the earl.
    "It is Aldhelm's blood," said Cadfael. "It rained that night. B�zet would be cloaked, thick black wool swallows blood, and I am sure he was careful. But..."
    But a jagged stone, raised in both hands and smashed down upon the head of a senseless man, however the act is managed, however discreetly accomplished, and with no great haste, no one to interfere, must yet threaten at least the hands and wrists of the murderer with indelible traces. The worst was trapped under the stone, and bled into the grass after, but this faint sprinkling, this fringing shower, had marked flesh and linen. And from linen, unless it can be steeped at once, it is difficult to erase the small shapes that betray.
    "I remember," said R�, dazed and half-incredulous, clean forgetful of himself, "I was your guest that night, Father Abbot, and he was free to his own devices. He said he was bound for the town."
    "It was he who told the girl that Aldhelm was expected," said Cadfael, "and she who warned Tutilo to be safely out of sight. So B�zet knew of the need, if need there was for him. But how could he be sure? It was enough that Aldhelm, required to recollect clearly, might recollect all too much of what he had seen in innocence. And therefore in innocence he is dead. And B�zet was his murderer. And B�zet will never know, and neither shall we, if he murdered for nothing."
    Alan Herbard, Hugh's deputy in office, rode in at the gate an hour before noon.
    The party was just reassembling for departure, after Earl Robert's generous delay for Daalny's sake, and Cadfael, self-appointed custodian of her interests, for good reason, had just been requested, very courteously, to go and call her to join the group, if by this time she felt sufficiently recovered. There had been time, also, for all the rest of them to assimilate, as best they could, the flood of revelations and shocks that bade fair to diminish their numbers and change several lives. Sub-Prior Herluin had lost a novice and his revenge for sorely-felt abuses, but recovered the treasures he thought lost for ever, and his mood, in spite of sins and deaths and violence,