The Potter's Field Part 11

"No," she said, "I did not know. Only now had I begun to fear it. That or some other knowledge no less dreadful to him."

"Dreadful enough to account for much. For why he made up his mind to take the cowl, and not here in Shrewsbury, but far away in Ramsey. What did you make of that, then?" asked Hugh.

"It was not so strange in him," she said, looking into distance and faintly and ruefully smiling. "That was something that could well happen to Sulien, he ran deep, and thought much. And then, there was a bitterness and a pain in the house, and I know he could not choose but feel it and be troubled. I think I was not sorry that he should escape from it and go free, even if it must be into the cloister. I knew of no worse reason. That he had been there, and seen-no, that I did not know."

"And what he saw," said Hugh, after a brief and heavy silence, "was his father, burying the body of Generys."

"Yes," she said. "It must have been so."

"We could find no other possibility," said Hugh, "and I am sorry to have to set it before you. Though I still cannot see what reason there could be, why or how it came about that he killed her."

"Oh, no!" said Donata. "No, not that. He buried her, yes. But he did not kill her. Why should he? I see that Sulien believed it, and would not at any cost have it known to the world. But it was not like that."

"Then who did?" demanded Hugh, confounded. "Who was her murderer?"

"No one," said Donata. "There was no murder."

Chapter Fourteen.

OF THE UNBELIEVING SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED, Hugh's voice asked: "If this was not murder, why the secret burial, why conceal a death for which there could be no blame?"

"I have not said," Donata said patiently, "that there was no blame. I have not said that there was no sin. It is not for me to judge. But murder there was none. I am here to tell you truth. The judgement must be yours."

She spoke as one, and the only one, who could shed light on all that had happened, and the only one who had been kept in ignorance of the need. Her voice remained considerate, authoritative and kind. Very simply and clearly she set out her case, excusing nothing, regretting nothing.

"When Ruald turned away from his wife, she was desolated and despairing. You will not have forgotten, Father, for you must have been in grave doubt concerning his decision. She, when she found she could not hold him, came to appeal to my husband, as overlord and friend to them both, to reason with Ruald and try to persuade him he did terrible wrong. And truly I think he did his best for her, and again and again went to argue her case, and tried also, surely, to comfort and rea.s.sure her, that she should not suffer loss of house and living by reason of Ruald's desertion. My lord was good to his people. But Ruald would not be turned back from the way he had chosen. He left her. She had loved him out of all measure," said Donata dispa.s.sionately, speaking pure truth, "and in the same measure she hated him. And all these days and weeks my lord had contended for her right, but could not win it. He had never before been so often and so long in her company."

A moment she paused, looking from face to face, presenting her own ruin with wide, illusionless eyes.

"You see me, gentlemen. Since that time I may, perhaps, have moved a few short paces nearer the grave, but the change is not so great. I was already what I am now. I had been so for some few years. Three at least, I think, since Eudo had shared my bed, for pity of me, yes, but himself in abstinence to starvation, and without complaint. Such beauty as I ever had was gone, withered away into this aching sh.e.l.l. He could not touch me without causing me pain. And himself worse pain, whether he touched or abstained. And she, you will remember if ever you saw her, she was most beautiful. What all men said, I say, also. Most beautiful, and enraged, and desperate. And famished, like him. I fear I distress you, gentlemen," she said, seeing them all three held in frozen awe at her composure and her merciless candour, delivered without emphasis, even with sympathy. "I hope not. I simply wish to make all things plain. It is necessary."

"There is no need to labour further," said Radulfus. "This is not hard to understand, but very hard to hear as it must be to tell."

"No," she said rea.s.suringly, "I feel no reluctance. Never fret for me. I owe truth to her, as well as to you. But enough, then. He loved her. She loved him. Let us make it brief. They loved, and I knew. No one else. I did not blame them. Neither did I forgive them. He was my lord, I had loved him five-and-twenty years, and there was no remission because I was an empty sh.e.l.l. He was mine, I would not endure to share him.

"And now," she said, "I must tell something that had happened more than a year earlier. At that time I was using the medicines you sent me, Brother Cadfael, to ease my pain when it grew too gross. And I grant you the syrup of poppies does help, for a tune, but after a while the charm fails, the body grows accustomed, or the demon grows stronger within."

"It is true," said Cadfael soberly. "I have seen it lose its hold. And beyond a certain strength treatment cannot go."

"That I understood. Beyond that there is only one cure, and we are forbidden to resort to that. None the less," said Donata inexorably, "I did consider how to die. Mortal sin, Father, I knew it, yet I did consider. Oh, never look aside at Brother Cadfael, I would not have come to him for the means, I knew he would not give them to me if I did. Nor did I ever intend to give my life away easily. But I foresaw a time when the load would become more than even I could bear, and I wished to have some small thing about me, a little vial of deliverance, a promise of peace, perhaps never to use, only to keep as a talisman, the very touch of it consolation to me that at the worst... at the last extreme, there was left to me a way of escape. To know that was to go on enduring. Is that reproach to me, Father?"

Abbot Radulfus stirred abruptly out of a stillness so long sustained that he emerged from it with a sharp indrawn breath, as if himself stricken with a shadowy insight into her suffering.

"I am not sure that I have the right to p.r.o.nounce. You are here, you have withstood that temptation. To overcome the lures of evil is all that can be required of mortals. But you make no mention of those other consolations open to the Christian soul. I know your priest to be a man of grace. Did you not allow him the opportunity to lift some part of your burden from you?"

"Father Eadmer is a good man and a kind," said Donata with a thin, wry smile, "and no doubt my soul has benefited from his prayers. But pain is here in the body, and has a very loud voice. Sometimes I could not hear my own voice say Amen! for the demon howling. Howbeit, rightly or wrongly, I did look about me for other aid."

"Is this to the present purpose?" Hugh asked gently. "For it cannot be pleasant to you, and G.o.d knows it must be tiring you out."

"It is very much to the purpose. You will see. Bear with me, till I end what I have begun. I got my talisman," she said. "I will not tell you from whom. I was still able to go about, then, to wander among the booths at the abbey fair, or in the market. I got what I wanted from a traveller. By now she may herself be dead, for she was old. I have not seen her since, nor ever expected to. But she made for me what I wanted, one draught, contained in so small a vial, my release from pain and from the world. Tightly stoppered, she said it would not lose its power. She told me its properties, for in very small doses it is used against pain when other things fail, but in this strength it would end pain for ever. The herb is hemlock."

"It has been known," said Cadfael bleakly, "to end pain for ever even when the sufferer never meant to surrender life. I do not use it. Its dangers are too great. There is a lotion can be made to use against ulcers and swellings and inflammations, but there are other remedies safer."

"No doubt!" said Donata. "But the safety I sought was of a different kind. I had my charm, and I kept it always about me, and often I set my hand to it when the pain was extreme, but always I withdrew without drawing the stopper. As if the mere having it was b.u.t.tress to my own strength. Bear with me, I am coming to the matter in hand. Last year, when my lord gave himself utterly to the love of Generys, I went to her cottage, at a time in the afternoon when Eudo was elsewhere about his manor. I took with me a flask of a good wine, and two cups that matched, and my vial of hemlock. And I proposed to her a wager."

She paused only to draw breath, and ease slightly the position in which she had been motionless so long. None of her three hearers had any mind to break the thread now. All their presuppositions were already blown clean away in the wind of her chill detachment, for she spoke of pain and pa.s.sion in tones level and quiet, almost indifferent, concerned only with making all plain past shadow of doubt.

"I was never her enemy," she said. "We had known each other many years, I felt for her rage and despair when Ruald abandoned her. This was not in hate or envy or despite. We were two women impossibly shackled together by the cords of our rights in one man, and neither of us could endure the mutilation of sharing him. I set before her a way out of the trap. We would pour two cups of wine, and add to one of them the draught of hemlock. If it was I who died, then she would have full possession of my lord, and, G.o.d knows, my blessing if she could give him happiness, as I had lost the power to do. And if it was she who died, then I swore to her that I would live out my life to the wretched end unsparing, and never again seek alleviation."

"And Generys agreed to such a bargain?" Hugh asked incredulously.

"She was as bitter, bold and resolute as I, and as tormented by having and not having. Yes, she agreed. I think, gladly."

"Yet this was no easy thing to manage fairly."

"With no will to cheat, yes, it was very easy," she said simply. "She went out from the room, and neither watched nor listened, while I filled the cups, evenly but that the one contained hemlock. Then I went out, far down the Potter's Field, while she parted and changed the cups as she thought fit, and set the one on the press and the other on the table, and came and called me hi, and I chose. It was June, the twenty-eighth day of the month, a beautiful midsummer. I remember how the meadow gra.s.ses were coming into flower, I came back to the cottage with my skirts spangled with the silver of their seeds. And we sat down together, there within, and drank our wine, and were at peace. And afterwards, since I knew that the draught brought on a rigor of the whole body, from the extremities inward to the heart, we agreed between us to part, she to remain quiet where she was, I to go back to Longner, that whichever of us G.o.d-dare I say G.o.d, Father, or must I say only chance, or fate?-whichever of us was chosen should die at home. I promise you, Father, I had not forgotten G.o.d, I did not feel that he had stricken me from his book. It was as simple as where you have it written: of two, one shall be taken and the other left. I went home, and I span while I waited. And hour by hour-for it does not hurry-I waited for the numbness in the hands to make me fumble at the wool on the distaff, and still my fingers span and my wrist twisted, and there was no change in my dexterity. And I waited for the cold to seize upon my feet, and climb into my ankles, and there was no chill and no clumsiness, and my breath came without hindrance."

She drew a deep, unburdened sigh, and let her head rest back against the panelling, eased of the main weight of the load she had brought them.

"You had won your wager," said the abbot in a low and grieving voice.

"No," said Donata, "I had lost my wager." And in a moment she added scrupulously: "There is one detail I had forgotten to mention. We kissed, sisterly, when we parted."

She had not done, she was only gathering herself to continue coherently to the end, but the silence lasted some minutes. Hugh got up from his place and poured a cup of wine from the flask on the abbot's table, and went and set it down on the bench beside her, convenient to her hand. "You are very tired. Would you not like to rest a little while? You have done what you came to do. Whatever this may have been, it was not murder."

She looked up at him with the benign indulgence she felt now towards all the young, as though she had lived not forty-five years but a hundred, and seen all manner of tragedies pa.s.s and lapse into oblivion.

"Thank you, but I am the better for having resolved this matter. You need not trouble for me. Let me make an end, and then I will rest." But to accommodate him she put out a hand for the cup, and seeing how even that slight weight made her wrist quiver, Hugh supported it while she drank. The red of the wine gave her grey lips, for a moment, the dew and flush of blood.

"Let me make an end! Eudo came home, I told him what we had done, and that the lot had failed to fall on me. I wanted no concealment, I was willing to bear witness truly, but he would not suffer it. He had lost her, but he would not let me be lost, or his honour, or his sons' honour. He went that night, alone, and buried her. Now I see that Sulien, deep in his own pit of grief, must have followed him to an a.s.signation, and discovered him in a funeral rite. But my lord never knew it. Never a word was said of that, never a sign given. He told me how he found her, lying on her bed as if asleep. When the numbness began she must have lain down there, and let death come to her. Those small things about her that gave her a name and a being, those he brought away with him and kept, not secret from me. There were no more secrets between us two, there was no hate, only a shared grief. Whether he removed them for my sake, looking upon what I had done as a terrible crime, as I grant you a man might, and fearing what should fall on me in consequence, or whether he wanted them for himself, as all he could now keep of her, I never knew.

"It pa.s.sed, as everything pa.s.ses. When she was missed, no one ever thought to look sidelong at us. I do not know where the word began that she was gone of her own will, with a lover, but it went round as gossip does, and men believed it. As for Sulien, he was the first to escape from the house. My elder son had never had ado with Ruald or Generys, beyond a civil word if they pa.s.sed in the fields or crossed by the ferry together. He was busy about the manor, and thinking of marriage, he never felt the pain within the house. But Sulien was another person. I felt his unease, before ever he told us he was set on entering Ramsey. Now I see he had better reason for his trouble than I had thought. But his going weighed yet more heavily on my lord, and the time came when he could not bear ever to go near the Potter's Field, or look upon the place where she had lived and died. He made the gift to Haughmond, to be rid of it, and when that was completed, he went to join King Stephen at Oxford. And what befell him afterwards you know.

"I have not asked the privilege of confession, Father," she said punctiliously, "since I want no more secrecy from those fit to judge me, whether it be the law or the Church. I am here, do as you see fit. I did not cheat her, living, it was a fair wager, and I have not cheated her now she is dead. I have kept my pledge. I take no palliatives now, whatever my state. I pay my forfeit every day of my remaining life, to the end. In spite of what you see, I am strong. The end may still be a long way off."

It was done. She rested in quietness, and in a curious content that showed in the comparative ease of her face. Distantly from across the court the bell from the refectory sounded noon.

The king's officer and the representative of the Church exchanged no more than one long glance by way of consultation. Cadfael observed it, and wondered which of them would speak first, and indeed, to which of these two authorities the right of precedence belonged, in a case so strange. Crime was Hugh's business, sin the abbot's, but what was justice here, where the two were woven together so piteously as to be beyond unravelling?

Generys dead, Eudo dead, who stood to profit from further pursuit? Donata, when she had said that the dead should carry their own sins, had counted herself among them. And infinitely slow as the approach of death had been for her, it must now be very near.

Hugh was the first to speak. "There is nothing here," he said, "that falls within my writ. What was done, whatever its rights or wrongs, was not murder. If it was an offence to put the dead into the ground unblessed, he who did it is already dead himself, and what would it benefit the long's law or the good order of my shire to publish it to his dishonour now? Nor could anyone wish to add to your grief, or cause distress to Eudo's heir, who is innocent of all. I say this case is closed, unsolved, and so let it remain, to my reproach. I am not so infallible that I cannot fail, like any other man, and admit it. But there are claims that must be met. I see no help but we must make it public that Generys is Generys, though how she came to her death will never be known. She has the right to her name, and to have her grave acknowledged for hers. Ruald has the right to know that she is dead, and to mourn her duly. In time people will let the matter sink into the past and be forgotten. But for you there remains Sulien."

"And Pernel," said Donata.

"And Pernel. True, she already knows the half. What will you do about them?"

"Tell them the truth," she said steadily. "How else could they ever rest? They deserve truth, they can endure truth. But not my elder son. Leave him his innocence."

"How will you satisfy him," Hugh wondered practically, "about this visit? Does he even know that you are here?"

"No," she admitted with her wan smile, "he was out and about early. No doubt he will think me mad, but when I return no worse than I set out, it will not be so hard to reconcile him. Jehane does know. She tried to dissuade me, but I would have my way, he cannot blame her. I told her I had it in mind to offer my prayers for help at Saint Winifred's shrine. And that I will make good, Father, with your leave, before I return. If," she said, "I am to return?"

"For my part, yes," said Hugh. "And to that end," he said, rising, "if the lord abbot agrees, I will go and bring your son to you here."

He waited for the abbot's word, and it was long in coming. Cadfael could divine something, at least, of what pa.s.sed in that austere and upright mind. To bargain with life and death is not so far from self-murder, and the despair that might lead to the acceptance of such a wager is in itself mortal sin. But the dead woman haunted the mind with pity and pain, and the living one was there before his eyes, relentlessly stoical in her interminable dying, inexorable in adhering to the penalty she had imposed upon herself when she lost her wager. And one judgement, the last, must be enough, and that was not yet due.

"So be it!" said Radulfus at last. "I can neither condone nor condemn. Justice may already have struck its own balance, but where there is no certainty the mind must turn to the light and not the shadow. You are your own penance, my daughter, if G.o.d requires penance. There is nothing here for me to do, except to pray that all things remaining may work together for grace. There have been wounds enough, at all costs let us cause no more. Let no word be said, then, beyond these few who have the right to know, for their own peace. Yes, Hugh, if you will, go and bring the boy, and the young woman who has shed, it seems, so welcome a light among these grievous shadows. And, madam, when you have rested and eaten here in my house, we will help you into the church, to Saint Winifred's altar."

"And it shall be my care," said Hugh, "to see that you get home safely. You do what is needful for Sulien and Pernel. Father Abbot, I am sure, will do what is needful for Brother Ruald."

"That," said Cadfael, "I will undertake, if I may."

"With my blessing," said Radulfus. "Go, find him after dinner in the frater, and let him know her story ends in peace."

All of which they did before the day was over.

They were standing under the high wall of the graveyard, in the furthest corner where modest lay patrons found a place, and stewards and good servants of the abbey and, under a low mound still settling and greening, the nameless woman orphaned after death and received and given a home by Benedictine compa.s.sion.

Cadfael had gone with Ruald after Vespers, in the soft rain that was hardly more than a drifting dew on the face, chill and silent. The light would not last much longer. Vespers was already at its winter hour, and they were alone here in the shadow of the wall, in the wet gra.s.s, with the earthy smells of fading foliage and autumnal melancholy about them. A melancholy without pain, an indulgence of the spirit after the pa.s.sing of bitterness and distress. And it did not seem strange that Ruald had shown no great surprise at learning that this translated waif was, after all, his wife, had accepted without wonder that Sulien had concocted, out of mistaken concern for an old friend, a false and foolish story to disprove her death. Nor had he rebelled against the probability that he would never know how she had died, or why she had been buried secretly and without rites, before she was brought to this better resting-place. Ruald's vow of obedience, like all his vows, was carried to the ultimate extreme of duty, into total acceptance. Whatever was, was best to him. He did not question.

"What is strange, Cadfael," he said, brooding over the new turf that covered her, "is that now I begin to see her face clearly again. When first I entered here I was like a man in fever, aware only of what I had longed for and gained. I could not recall how she looked, it was as if she and all my life aforetime had vanished out of the world."

"It comes of staring into too intense a light," said Cadfael, dispa.s.sionately, for he himself had never been dazzled. He had done what he had done in his right senses, made his choice, no easy choice, with deliberation, walked to his novitiate on broad bare feet treading solid earth, not been borne to it on clouds of bliss. "A very fine experience in its way," he said, "but bad for the sight. If you stare too long you may go blind."

"But now I see her clearly. Not as I last saw her, not angry or bitter. As she always used to be, all the years we were together. And young," said Ruald, marvelling. "Everything I knew and did, aforetime, comes back with her, I remember the croft, and the kiln, and where every small thing had its place in the house. It was a very pleasant place, looking down from the crest to the river, and beyond."

"It still is," said Cadfael. "We've ploughed it, and brushed back the headland bushes, and you might miss the field flowers, and the moths at midsummer when the meadow gra.s.ses ripen. But there'll be the young green starting now along the furrows, and the birds in the headlands just the same. Yes, a very fair place."

They had turned to walk back through the wet gra.s.s towards the chapter-house, and the dusk was a soft blue-green about them, clinging moist in the half-naked branches of the trees.

"She would never have had a place in this blessed ground," said Ruald, out of the shadow of his cowl, "but that she was found in land belonging to the abbey, and without any other sponsor to take care of her. As Saint Illtud drove his wife out into the night for no offence, as I, for no offence in her, deserted Generys, so in the end G.o.d has brought her back into the care of the Order, and provided her an enviable grave. Father Abbot received and blessed what I misused and misprized."

"It may well be," said Cadfael, "that our justice sees as in a mirror image, left where right should be, evil reflected back as good, good as evil, your angel as her devil. But G.o.d's justice, if it makes no haste, makes no mistakes."

About the Author.

ELLIS PETERS is the nom-de-crime nom-de-crime of English novelist Edith Pargeter, author of scores of books under her own name. She is the recipient of the Silver Dagger Award, conferred by the Crime Writers a.s.sociation in Britain, as well as the coveted Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America. Miss Pargeter is also well known as a translator of poetry and prose from the Czech and has been awarded the Gold Medal and Ribbon of the Czechoslovak Society for Foreign Relations for her services to Czech literature. She pa.s.sed away in 1995, at the age of 82, at home in her beloved Shropshire. of English novelist Edith Pargeter, author of scores of books under her own name. She is the recipient of the Silver Dagger Award, conferred by the Crime Writers a.s.sociation in Britain, as well as the coveted Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America. Miss Pargeter is also well known as a translator of poetry and prose from the Czech and has been awarded the Gold Medal and Ribbon of the Czechoslovak Society for Foreign Relations for her services to Czech literature. She pa.s.sed away in 1995, at the age of 82, at home in her beloved Shropshire.