Free Virgin in the Ice by Ellis Peters Page B

large a dinner he’s eaten half an hour ago, he’ll be hungry before night.” And to Cadfael he said, as they turned together towards the stables: “You, I know, will do whatever you fancy doing, and I’m always glad of your company, if your charges, live and dead, can spare you. But you’ve had some hard riding these last days…”
    “For an ageing man,” said Cadfael.
    “As well I did not say so! I doubt you could outlast me, for all your great burden of years. What of Brother Elyas, though?”
    “He needs no more from me, now, than a visit or two each day, to see that nothing’s turned back for him and gone amiss. His body is recovering well. And as for the part of his mind that’s astray, my being here won’t cure it. It will come back of itself one day, or it will cease to be missed. He’s well looked after. As she was not!” he said sadly.
    “How did you know,” asked Hugh, “that it could not be the child’s sister?”
    “The cropped hair, first. A month now since they left Worcester, long enough to provide her that halo we have seen. Why should the other girl clip her locks? And then, the coloring. Ermina, so Herward said, is almost black of hair and eye, darker brown than her brother. So is not this lady. And they did say, as I remember, the nun was also young, no more than five and twenty or so. No, I was sure he was safe from that worst threat. Thus far!” said Cadfael soberly. “Now we have to find her, and make sure he never shall have to uncover another known face and set a name to it. I have the same obligations as you, and I’m coming with you.”
    “Go get yourself booted and ready, then,” said Hugh, without surprise, “and I’ll saddle you one of my own remounts. I came well prepared for any tangles you might get me into. I know you of old.”
    To Foxwood was a fairly easy ride, being a used highway, but from Foxwood they climbed by even higher ways, and on tracks more broken and steep. The vast flank of Titterstone Clee rose here to a bleak plateau, with the highest ground towering over them on the left hand, in cloud that dropped lower as the afternoon passed its peak. Yves rode close at Hugh’s side, intent and important.
    “We can leave the village away on our right, the holding lies above here. Over this ridge there’s a bowl of fields John has, and a sheep-pen up the hill.”
    Hugh reined in suddenly, and sat with head raised, sniffing the air with stretched nostrils. “Are you getting the same waft I have in my nose? What should a husbandman be burning at this end of the year?”
    The faint but ominous stink hung in the air, stirred by a rising wind. One of the men-at-arms at Beringar’s back said with certainty: “Three or four days old, and snowed over, but I smell timber.”
    Hugh spurred forward up the climbing track, between bushes banked with snow, and up to the crest where the ground declined into the hollow. In the sheltered bowl trees grew, providing a wind-break for byre and barn and house, and partly screening the holding from view. They could see the stone walls of the sheep-pen on the rising ground beyond, but not until they had wound their way through the first belt of trees did John Druel’s tenant-farm reveal itself to their appalled sight. Yves uttered a muted howl of dismay, and reached to clutch at Brother Cadfael’s arm.
    The corner-posts of blackened buildings stood stark out of the drifts of snow, the timbers of roof and barn, what remained of them, jutted in charred ruin where they had fallen. A desolation in which nothing moved, nothing lived, even the near-by trees shrivelled and brown. The Druel homestead was emptied of livestock, stores and people, and burned to the ground.
    They threaded the forlorn wreckage in grim silence, Hugh’s eyes intent on every detail. The iron frost had prevented worse stinks than burning, for in the littered yard they found the hacked bodies of two of the household dogs. Though some two or three fresh falls of