Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field Read Online Free PDF Page A

see.' He stooped to draw the disintegrating brychan again round the body, and his very touch parted threads and sent motes of dust floating into the air. 'We shall need a better shroud if we're to carry her back with us, and a litter if she's to be carried whole and at rest, as we see her. Richard, take my horse and ride back to the lord abbot, tell him simply that we have indeed found a body buried here, and send us litter and decent covering to get her home. No need for more, not yet. What more do we know? Leave any further report until we come.'

    

'I will so!' agreed Brother Richard, so warmly that his relief was plain. His easy-going nature was not made for such discoveries, his preference was for an orderly life in which all things behaved as they should, and spared him too much exertion of body or mind. He made off with alacrity to where Hugh's raw-boned grey stood peacefully cropping the greener turf under the headland, heaved a sturdy foot into the stirrup, and mounted. There was nothing the matter with his horsemanship but recent lack of practice. He was a younger son from a knightly family, and had made the choice between service in arms and service in the cloister at only sixteen. Hugh's horse, intolerant of most riders except his master, condescended to carry this one along the headland and down into the water-meadow without resentment.

    

'Though he may spill him at the ford,' Hugh allowed, watching them recede towards the river, 'if the mood takes him. Well, let's see what's left us to find here.'

    

The sergeant was cutting back deeply into the bank, under the rustling broom brushes. Cadfael turned from the dead to descend with kilted habit into her grave, and cautiously began to shovel out the loose loam and deepen the hollow where she had lain.

    

'Nothing,' he said at last, on his knees upon a floor now packed hard and changing to a paler colour, the subsoil revealing a layer of clay. 'You see this? Lower, by the river, Ruald had two or three spots where he got his clay. Worked out now, they said, at least where they were easy to reach. This has not been disturbed, in longer time than she has lain here. We need go no deeper, there is nothing to find. We'll sift around the sides a while, but I doubt not this is all.'

    

'More than enough,' said Hugh, scouring his soiled hands in the thick, fibrous turf. 'And not enough. All too little to give her an age or a name.'

    

'Or a kinship or a home, living,' Cadfael agreed sombrely, 'or a reason for dying. We can do no more here. I have seen what there is to be seen of how she was laid. What remains to be done can better be done in privacy, with time to spare, and trusted witnesses.'

    

It was an hour more before Brother Winfrid and Brother Urien came striding along the headland with their burden of brychans and litter. Carefully they lifted the slender bundle of bones, folded the rugs round them and covered them decently from sight. Hugh's sergeant was dismissed, back to the garrison at the castle. In silence and on foot the insignificant funeral cortege of the unknown set off for the abbey.

    

'It is a woman,' said Cadfael, reporting in due course to Abbot Radulfus in the privacy of the abbot's parlour. 'We have bestowed her in the mortuary chapel. I doubt if there is anything about her that can ever be recognised by any man, even if her death is recent, which I take to be unlikely. The gown is such as any cottage wife might wear, without ornament, without girdle, once the common black, now drab. She wears no shoes, no jewellery, nothing to give her a name.'

    

'Her face...?' wondered the abbot, but dubiously, expecting nothing.

    

'Father, her face is now the common image. There is nothing left to move a man to say: This is wife, or sister, or any woman ever I knew. Nothing, except, perhaps, that she had a wealth of dark hair. But so have many women. She is of moderate height for a woman. Her age we can but guess,