Free Dead Man's Ransom by Ellis Peters Page A

Prestcote is alive and will soon be returning here. Is that truth?”
    “It is,” said Cadfael. “Owain Gwynedd is sending him home in exchange for the Welshman captured in the Long Forest a while since. And why should you be none the better for good news of a decent Christian man?”
    “I had thought justice had been done,” said Maurice loftily, “after all too long a time. But however long, divine justice should not fail in the end. Yet once again it has glanced aside and spared the malefactor.” The glitter of his eyes was grey as steel.
    “You’d best leave divine justice to its own business,” said Cadfael mildly, “for it needs no help from us. And I asked you how you did, my friend, so never put me off with others. How is it with that chest of yours, this wintry weather? Shall I bring you a cordial to warm you?” It was no great labour to distract him, for though he was no complainer as to his health, he was open to the flattery of concerned attention and enjoyed being cosseted. They left him soothed and complacent, and went out to the porch very thoughtful.
    “I knew he had these hooks in him,” said Cadfael when the door was closed between, “but not that he had such a barb from the Prestcote family. What is it he holds against the sheriff?”
    Edmund shrugged, and drew resigned breath. “It was in his father’s time, Maurice was scarcely born! There was a lawsuit over a piece of land and long arguments either side, and it went Prestcote’s way. For all I know, as sound a judgement as ever was made, and Maurice was in his cradle, and Gilbert’s father, good God, was barely a man, but here the poor ancient has dredged it up as a mortal wrong. And it is but one among a dozen he keeps burnished in his memory, and wants blood for them all. Will you believe it, he has never set eyes on the sheriff? Can you hate a man you’ve never seen or spoken to, because his grandsire beat your father at a suit at law? Why should old age lose everything but the all-present evil?”
    A hard question. And yet sometimes it went the opposite way, kept the good, and let all the malice and spite be washed away. And why one old man should be visited by such grace, and another by so heavy a curse, Cadfael could not fathom. Surely a balance must be restored elsewhere.
    “Not everyone, I know,” said Cadfael ruefully, “loves Gilbert Prestcote. Good men can make as devoted enemies as bad men. And his handling of law has not always been light or merciful, though it never was corrupt or cruel.”
    “There’s one here has somewhat better cause than Maurice to bear him a grudge,” said Edmund. “I am sure you know Anion’s history as well as I do. He’s on crutches, as you’ll have seen before you left us on this journey, and getting on well, and we like him to go forth when there’s no frost and the ground’s firm and dry, but he’s still bedded with us, within there. He says nothing, while Maurice says too much, but you’re Welsh, and you know how a Welshman keeps his counsel. And one like Anion, half, Welsh, half, English, how do you read such a one?”
    “As best you can,” agreed Cadfael, “bearing in mind both are humankind.” He knew the man Anion, though he had never been brought close to him, since Anion was a lay servant among the livestock, and had been brought into the infirmary in late autumn from one of the abbey granges, with a broken leg that was slow to knit. He was no novelty in the district about Shrewsbury, offspring of a brief union between a Welsh wool, trader and an English maid-servant. And like many another of his kind, he had kept touch with his kin across the border, where his father had a proper wife, and had given her a legitimate son no long time after Anion was conceived.
    “I do remember now,” said Cadfael, enlightened. “There were two young fellows came to sell their fleeces that time, and drank too deep and got into a brawl, and one of the gate-keepers on the bridge was