Free The Rose Rent by Ellis Peters Page A

and pain, had now lost that tension, and eased into the smoothness of youth and innocence. Only his eyes, half-open, retained the frowning anxiety of a troubled soul. Radulfus stooped and closed them gently, and wiped the mud from the pale cheeks.
    “You take a load from my heart, Cadfael. Surely you are right, he did not take his own life, it was rapt from him cruelly and unjustly, and there must be a price to pay for it. But as for this child here, he is safe enough. I would I had known better how to deal with him, he might still have been living.” He drew the two smooth hands together, and folded them on the bloodied breast.
    “I sleep too well,” said Cadfael wryly, “I never heard when the rain ceased. Did anyone mark the end of it?”
    Niall had drawn a little nearer, waiting patiently in case anything further should be required of him.
    “It was over by about midnight,” he said, “for before we went to our beds, there at Pulley, my sister opened the door and looked out, and said that the sky had cleared and it was bidding to be a fine night. But it was too late to start out then.” He added, putting his own interpretation on the way they turned to look at him, after so long of forgetting his presence: “My sister and her man and the children will tell you I stayed the night over, and left in the dawn. It might be said a family will hold together, however. But I can tell you the names of two or three I said good day to, coming back along the Foregate this morning. They’ll bear me out.”
    The abbot gave him a startled and preoccupied look, and understood. “Such checks and counter-checks are for the sheriff’s men,” he said. “But I make no doubt you’ve told us simple truth. And the rain was over by midnight, you say?”
    “It was, my lord. There’s but three miles between, it would surely be much the same here.”
    “It fits well,” said Cadfael, kneeling over the body. “He must surely have died about six or seven hours ago. And since he came after the rain stopped, when the ground was soft and moist to tread, there should be traces they’ve left after them. Here they’ve stamped the ground raw between them, there’s nothing clear, but by one way or another they walked in here in the night, and one walked out again.”
    He rose from his knees and rubbed his moist palms together. “Hold your places where you stand, and look about you. We may have trampled out something of value ourselves, but at least all of us here but one wear sandals, and so did Eluric. Master Bronzesmith, how did you enter here this morning, when you found him?”
    “Through the house-door,” said Niall, nodding in that direction.
    “And when Brother Eluric came each year to fetch the rose, how did he enter?”
    “Through the wicket from the front yard, as we did now. And was very quiet and modest about it.”
    “Then this night past, coming with no ill intent, though so secretly, surely he would come as he always came. Let us see,” said Cadfael, treading carefully along the grass to the wicket gate in the wall, “if any but sandalled feet came that way.”
    The earth path, watered into mud by the rain, and again dried into a smooth, soft surface, had taken all their entering footprints and held them clear to view, three pairs of flat soles, here and there overlaid one on another. Or were there four pairs? With these common sandals size meant nothing very helpful, but Cadfael thought he could detect, among all those prints entering and none leaving, one which had trodden deeper than the rest, having entered here while the ground was wetter than now, and by lucky chance escaped being trodden out of shape with their morning invasion. There was also a broad, sturdy shoe-sole, recent like the sandals, which Niall claimed for his, and showed as much by fitting his foot to it.
    “Whoever the second was,” said Cadfael, “I fancy he did not come by the front way, as innocent men do. Nor leave by it, either, having