Brother Cadfael 05: Leper of Saint Giles

betrayed and misused his friend who trusted him, and shamelessly deceived a harried and forsaken girl. That is over. You need trouble no more."
    The man beside him said no word, asked no question, but he listened. Cadfael continued equably: "All will be well with her now. The king will surely approve our abbot as her new guardian. Radulfus is an austere and high-minded man, but also a human and humane one. She has nothing more to fear, not even for a lover none too well endowed with worldly goods. Her wishes, her happiness, will no longer be brushed aside as of no account."
    Within the great cloak Lazarus stirred, and turned his head. The deep voice, forming words with deliberate, halting care, spoke from behind the muffling veil: "You speak only of Domville. What of the second murder?"
    "What second murder?" said Cadfael simply.
    "I saw the torches among the trees, an hour and more ago, when they came for Godfrid Picard. I know he is dead. Is that, too, laid at this other man's door?"
    "Aguilon will be tried for the murder of his uncle," said Cadfael, "where there is proof enough. Why look further? If there are some who mistakenly set Picard's death to his discredit, how is his fate changed? He will not be charged with that. It could not be maintained. Godfrid Picard was not murdered."
    "How do you know?" asked Lazarus, untroubled but willing to be enlightened.
    "There was no snare laid for him, he had all his senses and powers when he was killed, but all his senses and powers were not enough. He was not murdered, he was stopped in the way and challenged to single combat. He had a dagger, his opponent had only his hands. No doubt he thought he had an easy conquest, an armed man against one weaponless, a man in his prime against one seventy years old. He had time to draw, but that was all. The dagger was wrenched away and hurled aside, not turned against him. The hands were enough. He had not considered the weight of a just quarrel."
    "It must, then, have been a very grave quarrel between these two," said Lazarus, after a long silence.
    "The oldest and gravest. The shameful mistreatment of a lady. She is avenged and delivered. Heaven made no mistake."
    The silence fell between them again, but lightly and softly as a girl's veil might float down and settle, or a moth flutter out of the night and alight without a sound. The old man's eyes returned to the steady, measured flow of wisps of cloud eastward in the zenith. There was diffused light of stars behind the veil, while the earth lay in darkness. Behind the coarse veil of faded blue cloth Cadfael thought there was the faintest and most tranquil of smiles.
    "And if you have divined so much from this day's deed," said Lazarus at length, "have not others the same knowledge?"
    "No other has seen what I have seen," said Cadfael simply, "and none will now. The marks will fade. No one wonders. No one questions. And only I know. And only I, and the owner of the hands that did the deed, will ever know that of those hands, the left had but two and a half fingers."
    There was a stir of movement within the mound of dark clothes, and a flash of the ice-clear eyes. Out of the folds of the cloak two hands emerged, and were held to the light of the lamp, the right one whole, long and sinewy, the left lacking index and middle finger and the upper joint of the third, the maimed surfaces showing seamed, whitish and dry.
    "Having divined so much from so little, brother," said the slow, clam voice, "take me with you one step beyond, and divine me his name, for I think you know it."
    "So I think, also," said Brother Cadfael. "His name is Guimar de Massard."
    The night hung motionless over the Foregate and the valley of the Meole, and the woods through which the sheriff and his men had hunted in vain, plotting clearly, for those longsighted eyes, the passage of Picard's bright red cap through the trees, and mapping the way by which, later, he must return. Overhead, in contrast to this terrestrial stillness, the sky flowed steadily away, like one man's floating, fragile life blown across the constant of life itself, to vanish into the unknown.
    "Should I know that name?" asked Lazarus, very still.
    "My lord, I, too, was at the storming of Jerusalem. Twenty years old I was when the city fell. I saw you breach the gate. I was at the fight at Ascalon, when the Fatimids of Egypt came up against us - and for my part, after the killing that was done in Jerusalem, of so many who held by the