Free Holy Thief by Ellis Peters Page B

and we should not delay. Robert, they will be in Worcester by now, will you
ride after them and hear what account they can give of that day?”
    “With
very good will,” said Robert fervently. “But, Father, if this becomes in all
earnest a matter of theft, ought we not to confide it to the sheriff, and see
if he thinks fit to have a man of his garrison go with me? In the end it may be
as much for the king’s justice as for ours, and as you say, time is precious.”
    “You
are right,” agreed Radulfus. “I will speak with Hugh Beringar. And for the
Longner men, we will send and hear what they have to say.”
    “If
you give me leave,” said Cadfael, “I will undertake that.” He had no wish to
see someone of Prior Robert’s mind descending on Eudo Blount’s decent
household, probing in a manner suggestive of black suspicions of duplicity and
theft.
    “Do
so, Cadfael, if you will. You know the people there better than any of us, they
will speak freely to you. Find her,” said Abbot Radulfus grimly, “we must and
will. Tomorrow Hugh Beringar shall know what has happened, and pursue it as he
sees fit.”
     
    Hugh
came from conference with the abbot half an hour after the end of Prime.
“Well,” he said, plumping himself down on the bench against the timber wall of
Cadfael’s workshop, “I hear you’ve got yourself into a pretty awkward corner
this time. How did you come to lose your seeming saint? And what will you do,
my friend, if someone, somewhere, decides to take the lid off that very pretty
coffin?”
    “Why
should they?” said Cadfael, but none too confidently.
    “Given
human curiosity, of which you should know more than I,” said Hugh, grinning,
“why should they not? Say the thing finds its way where no one knows what it
is, or what it signifies, how better to find out what they have in their hands?
You would be the first to break the seals.”
    “I
was the first,” said Cadfael, unguardedly since here a guard was useless, for
Hugh knew exactly what was in Saint Winifred’s reliquary. “And also, I hope,
the last. Hugh, I doubt if you are taking this with the gravity it deserves.”
    “I
find it difficult,” Hugh owned, “not to be amused. But be sure I’ll preserve
your secrets if I can. I’m interested. All my local troublers of the peace seem
to be frozen in until spring, I can afford to ride to Worcester. Even in
Robert’s company it may be entertaining. And I’ll keep an eye open for your
interests as well as I may. What do you think of this loss? Has someone
conspired to rob you, or is it all a foolish tangle spawned out of the flood?”
    “No,”
said Cadfael positively, and turned from the board on which he was fashioning
troches for queasy stomachs in the infirmary. “No tangle. A clear mind shifted
that reliquary from the altar, and swathed and planted a log of wood from the
undercroft in its place. So that both could be moved away well out of sight and
out of mind, possibly for several days, as indeed both were. The one to make a
clear field for the other to be removed beyond recovery. At least beyond
immediate recovery,” he amended firmly, “for recover her we shall.”
    Hugh
was looking at him, across the glow of the brazier, with a twitch of the lips
and an oblique tilt to the brow that Cadfael remembered from of old, from the
time of their first precarious acquaintance, when neither of them had been
quite sure whether the other was friend or foe, and yet each had been drawn to
the other in a half-grave, half-impish contest to find out.
    “Do
you know,” said Hugh softly, “that you are speaking of that lost reliquary,
some years now you have been speaking of it so, as if it truly contained the
Welsh lady’s bones. “She”, you say, never “it”, or even more truly, “him”. And
you know, none so well, that you left her to her rest there in Gwytherin. Can
she be in two places at once?”
    “Some