Read Online Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online

would have held him to be a prime suspect, if he had not been in full view throughout the time when the deed was done.
    Well, time would show. They had forty days in hand.
    High Mass was over when Cadfael had crossed the bridge and made his way back to the gatehouse and the great court. Prior Robert’s shadow, Brother Jerome, was hovering in the cloister to intercept him when he came.
    “The lord abbot asks that you will wait upon him before dinner.” Jerome’s pinched, narrow nose quivered with a suggestion of deprecation and distaste which Cadfael found more offensive than Baldwin Peche’s full-blooded enjoyment of his own mischief. “I trust, Brother, that you mean to let time and law take their course, and not involve our house beyond the legal obligations of sanctuary, in so sordid a matter. It is not for you to take upon yourself the burdens that belong to justice.”
    Jerome, if he had not explicit orders, had received his charge from Prior Robert’s knotted brow and quivering nostril. So low and ragged and miserable a manifestation of humanity as Liliwin, lodged here within the pale, irked Robert like a burr working through his habit and fretting his aristocratic skin. He would have no peace while the alien body remained, he wanted it removed, and the symmetry of his life restored. To be fair, not merely his own life, but the life of this house, which fretted and itched with the infection thus hurled in from the world without. The presence of terror and pain is disruptive indeed.
    “All the abbot wants from me is an account of how my patients fare,” said Cadfael, with unwonted magnanimity towards the narrow preoccupations of creatures so uncongenial to him as Robert and his clerk. For their distress, however strange to him, was still comprehensible. The walls did, indeed, tremble, the sheltered souls did quake. “And I have burdens enough with them, and am hardly looking for any others. Is that lad fed and doctored? That’s all my business with him.”
    “Brother Oswin has taken care of him,” said Jerome.
    “That’s well! Then I’ll go pay my respects to the lord abbot, and get to my dinner, for I missed breakfast, and those up there in the town are too distraught to think of offering a morsel.”
    He wondered, however, as he crossed the court to the abbot’s lodging, how much of what he had gleaned he was about to impart. Salacious gossip can be of no interest to abbatial ears, nor was there much to be said about a tiny plaque of dried blood tethering a couple of flaxen hairs; not, at least, until the vagabond, with every hand against him and his life at stake, had exercised the right to answer for himself.
    Abbot Radulfus received without surprise the news that the entire wedding party was united in insisting on the jongleur’s guilt. He was not, however, quite convinced that Daniel, or any other of those attending could be certain who had, or had not, been in full view throughout.
    “With a hall full of so many people, so much being drunk, and over so many hours of celebration, who can say how any man came and went? Yet so many voices all in one tale cannot be disregarded. Well, we must do our part, and leave the law to deal with the rest. The sergeant tells me his master the sheriff is gone to arbitrate in a dispute between neighbour knights in the east of the shire, but his deputy is due in the town before night.”
    That was good news in Cadfael’s ear. Hugh Beringar would see to it that the search for truth and justice should not go sliding down the easiest way, and erase such minor details as failed to fit the pattern. Meantime, Cadfael had just such a detail to take up with Liliwin, besides restoring him the tools of his juggling trade. After dinner he went to look for him, and found him sitting in the cloister, with borrowed needle and thread, trying to cobble together the rents in his coat. Beneath the bandaged brow he had washed his face scrupulously, it showed pale and thin but