Free St. Peter's Fair by Ellis Peters Page B

invited closer, “you loved him
as much as he would let you. As he could let you. Some men have not the gift.”
    “Yes.
But I would have liked to love him more. I would have done anything to please
him. Even now I want to do everything as he would have wished. We shall keep
the booth open as long as the fair lasts, and try to do it as well as he would
have done. All that he had in hand, I want to see done thoroughly.” Her voice
was resolute, almost eager. Master Thomas would certainly have approved the set
of her chin and the spark in her eye. “Aline, shall I not be a trouble to you
by staying here? I—my uncle’s men—there’s one who likes me too well…”
    “So
I had thought,” said Aline. “You’re most welcome here, and we’ll not part with
you until you can be sent back safely to Bristol, and your home. Not that I can
find it altogether blameworthy in the young man to like you, for that matter,”
she added, smiling.
    “No,
but I cannot like him well enough. Besides, my uncle would never have allowed
me to be there on the barge without him. And now I have duties,” said Emma,
rearing her head determinedly and staring the uncertain future defiantly in the
face. “I must see to the ordering of a fine coffin for him, for the journey
home. There will be a master-carpenter, somewhere in the town?”
    “There
is. To the right, halfway up the Wyle, Master Martin Bellecote. A good man, and
a good craftsman. Hislad was among these terrible rioters, as I
hear,” said Aline, and dimpled indulgently at the thought, “but so were half
the promising youth of the town. I’ll come in with you to Martin’s shop.”
    “No,”
said Emma firmly. “It will all be tedious and long at the sheriff’s court, and
you should not tire yourself. And besides, you have to buy your fine wools,
before the best are taken. And Brother Cadfael—was that the name?—will show me
where to find the shop. He will surely know.”
    “There’s
very little to be known about this precinct and the town of Shrewsbury,” agreed
Aline with conviction, “that Brother Cadfael does not know.”
    Cadfael
received the abbot’s dispensation to attend the hearing at the castle, and to
escort the abbey’s bereaved guest, without question. A civic duty could not be evaded,
whether by secular or monastic. Radulfus had already shown himself both an
austere but just disciplinarian and a shrewd and strong-minded business man. He
owed his preferment to the abbacy as much to the king as to the papal legate,
and valued and feared for the order of the realm at least as keenly as for the
state of his own cure. Consequently, he had a use for those few among the
brothers who shared his wide experience of matters outside the cloister.
    “This
death,” he said, closeted with Cadfael alone after Beringar’s departure, “casts
a shadow upon our house and our fair. Such a burden cannot be shifted to other
shoulders. I require of you a full account of what passes at this hearing. It
was of me that the elders of the town asked a relief I could not grant. On me
rests the load of resentment that drove those younger men to foolish measures.
They lacked patience and thought, and they were to blame, but that does not
absolve me. If the man’s death has arisen out of my act, even though I could not
act otherwise, I must know it, for I have to answer for it, as surely as the
man who struck him down.”
    “I
shall bring you all that I myself see and hear, Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.
    “I
require also all that you think, brother. You saw part of what happened
yesterday between the dead man and the living youth. Is it possible that it
could have brought about such adeath as this? Stabbed in the
back? It is not commonly the method of anger.”
    “Not
commonly.” Cadfael had seen many deaths in the open anger of battle, but he
knew also of rages that had bred and festered into killings by stealth, with
the