She must, Cadfael reckoned, growing used to the play of light and shadow within the room, be within ten years of his own age, but she looked younger. The dark hair that was coiled in heavy braids on either side of her head was barely touched with grey, and the imperious, fine bones of her face had kept their imperishable elegance, though the flesh that covered them was a little shrunken and sapless now, and her body had grown angular and lean as the juices of youth dried up. Her hands, though shapely still, betrayed her with swollen knuckles and seamed veins, and there was a languor upon her pale skin at throat and wrist where once the rounded gloss of youth had been. But for all that, in the oval face, the long, resolute lips, and large eyes in their deep settings Cadfael saw the ashes of great beauty. No, not ashes, embers, still alive and as hot at least as the coals burning in the heart of the brazier.
“Come nearer!” she said. And when Haluin stood before her with the light upon his face, pale and cold light from the window, flushed from the fire: “It is you!” she said. “I wondered. How have you come to this?”
Her voice was low-pitched, full and authoritative, but the first implication of dismay and concern was gone. She looked at him neither compassionately nor coldly, but with a kind of detached indifference, a curiosity of no deep root.
“This is no man’s blame but mine,” said Haluin. “Don’t regard it! I have what I earned. I came by a great fall, but by the grace of God I am alive, who by this time had thought to be dead. And as I have eased my soul to God and my confessor for old sins, so I come to beg forgiveness of you.”
“Was that needful?” she said, marveling. “After so many years, and all this way?”
“Yes, it was needful. I do greatly need to hear you say that you forgive me the wrong I did, and the grief I brought upon you. There can be no rest for me now until the leaf is washed clear of every last stain.”
“And you have told over all the old writing,” said Adelais with some bitterness, “all that was secret and shameful, have you? To your confessor? And how many more? This good brother who bears you company? The whole household at chapter? Could you not bear to be still a sinner unshriven, rather than betray my daughter’s name to the world, and she so long in her grave? I would have gone sinful into purgatory rather!”
“And so would I!” cried Haluin, wrung. “But no, it is not so. Brother Cadfael bears me company because he is the only one who knows, excepting only Abbot Radulfus, who heard my confession. No other will ever know from us. Brother Cadfael was also grossly wronged in what I did, he had a right to give or withhold forgiveness. It was from his store and after his teaching that I stole those medicines I gave to you.”
She turned her gaze upon Cadfael in a long, steady stare, and her face, for once seen clearly, was intent and still. “Well,” she said, again turning away into indifference, “it was very long ago. Who would remember now? And I am not dying yet. What do I know! I shall need a priest myself someday, I could better have answered you then. Well, to put an end to it... Have what you ask! I do forgive you. I would not add to what you suffer. Go back in peace to your cloister. I forgive you as I hope for forgiveness.”
It was said without passion; the brief spurt of anger was already gone. It cost her no effort to absolve him; she did it as neutrally, it seemed, and with as little feeling as she would have handed out food to a beggar. Of gentlewomen of her nobility alms could properly be asked, and granting was a form of largesse, the due fulfillment of a rite of lordship. But what she gave lightly came as relieving grace to Haluin. The braced tension went out of his leaning shoulders and stiffly clenched hands. He bent his head humbly before her, and uttered his thanks in a low and halting voice, like a man momentarily dazed.
“Madam, your mercy lifts a load from me, and from my heart I am grateful.”
“Go back to the life you have chosen and the duties you have undertaken,” she said, again seating herself, though she did not yet reach for her needle. “Think no more of what happened long ago. You say you have a life spared. Use it as best you can, and so will I mine.”
It was a dismissal, and as such Haluin accepted it. He made her a deep reverence, and turned carefully upon his crutches, and Cadfael reached a hand to steady him in the movement. She had not so much as bidden them be seated, perhaps too shaken by so sudden and startling a visit, but as they reached the doorway she called after them suddenly:
“Stay if you will, take rest and meat in my house. My servants will provide you everything you need.”
“I thank you,” said Haluin, “but our leave of absence enjoins a return as soon as my pilgrimage here is done.”
“God hasten your way home, then,” said Adelais de Clary, and with a steady hand took up her needle again.
*
The church lay a short distance from the manor, where two tracks crossed, and the huddle of village house-plots gathered close about the churchyard wall.
“The tomb is within,” said Haluin, as they entered at the gate. “It was never opened when I was here, but Bertrand’s father is buried here, and surely it must have been opened for Bertrade. She died here. I am sorry, Cadfael, that I refused hospitality also for you. I had not thought in time. I shall need no bed tonight.”
“You said no word of that to the lady,” Cadfael observed.
“No. I hardly know why. When I saw her again my heart misgave me that I did ill to bring before her again that old pain, that the very sight of me was an offense to her. Yet she did forgive. I am the better for that, and she surely none the worse. But you could have slept easy tonight. No need for two to watch.”
“I’m better fitted for a night on my knees than you,” said Cadfael. “And I am not sure the welcome there would have been very warm. She wished us gone. No, it’s very well as it is. Most likely she thinks we’re on the homeward way already, off her land and out of her life.”
Haluin halted for a second with his hand on the heavy iron ring latch of the church door, his face in shadow. The door swung open, creaking, and he gripped his crutches to ease himself down the two wide, shallow steps into the nave. It was dim and stonily chilly within. Cadfael waited a moment on the steps till his eyes grew accustomed to the changed light, but Haluin set off at once up the nave towards the altar. Nothing here was greatly changed in eighteen years, and nothing had been forgotten. Even the rough edges of the floor tiles were known to him. He turned aside towards the right-hand wall, his crutches ringing hollowly, and Cadfael, following, found him standing beside a stone table-tomb fitted between the pillars. The carved image recumbent there was in crude chain mail, and had one leg crossed over the other, and a hand on his sword hilt. Another Crusader, surely the father of Bertrand, who in his turn had followed him to the Holy Land. This one, Cadfael calculated, might well have been with Robert of Normandy’s army in my time, at the taking of Jerusalem. Clearly the de Clary men were proud of their warfare in the east.
A man came through from the sacristy, and seeing two unmistakable Benedictine habits, turned amicably to come towards them. A man of middle age, in a rusty black cassock, advancing upon them with a mildly inquiring expression and a welcoming smile, Haluin heard his steps, soft as they were, and swung about gladly to greet a remembered neighbor, only to recoil on the instant at seeing a stranger.
“Good day, Brothers! God be with you!” said the priest of Hales. “To travelers of your cloth my house is always open, like this house of God. Have you come far?”
“From Shrewsbury,” said Haluin, strongly recovering himself. “Forgive me, Father, if I was taken aback. I had expected to see Father Wulfnoth. Foolish of me, indeed, for I have not been here for many years, and he was growing grey when I knew him, but to me in youth it seemed he would be here forever. Now I dare hardly ask!”
“Father Wulfnoth is gone to his rest,” said the priest, “seven years ago now it must be. Ten years back I came here, after he was brought to his bed by a seizure, and three years I looked after him until he died. I was newly priest then, I learned much from Wulfnoth, his mind was clear and bright if the flesh had failed him.” His good-natured round face offered sympathetic curiosity. “You know this church and this manor, then? Were you born in Hales?”
“No, not that. But for some years I served with the lady Adelais at the manor. Church and village I knew well, before I took the cowl at Shrewsbury. Now,” said Haluin earnestly, observing how brightly he was studied, and feeling the need to account for his return, “I have good need to give thanks for escaping alive from a mishap that might have caused my death, and I have taken thought to discharge, while I may, every debt I have on my conscience. Of which number, one brings me here to this tomb. There was a lady of the de Clary family whom I reverenced, and she died untimely. I should like to spend the night here at her burial place, in prayers for her. It was long before your time, eighteen years ago now. It will not disturb you if I spend the night here within?”
“Why, as to that, you’d be welcome,” said the priest heartily, “and I could light a cresset for you. It gives some help against the cold. But surely, Brother, you’re under some mistake. True, what you say puts this before my time, but Father Wulfnoth told me much concerning the church and the manor, he’d been in the service of the lords of Hales all his life. It was they helped him to his studies and set him up here as priest. There has been no burial here in this tomb since the old lord died, this one who’s carved here on the stone. And that was more than thirty years back. It’s his grandson rules now. A lady of the family, you say? And died young?”
“A kinswoman,” said Haluin, low-voiced and shaken, his eyes lowered to the stone which had not been raised for thirty years. “She died here at Hales. I had thought she must be buried here.” He would not name her, or betray more than he must of himself and what moved him, even to this kindly man. And Cadfael stood back from them, watched, and held his peace.
“And only eighteen years ago? Then be certain. Brother, she is not here. If you knew Father Wulfnoth, you know you can rely upon what he told me. And I know his wits were sharp until the day he died.”
“I do believe it, “said Haluin, quivering with the chill of disappointment. “He would not be mistaken. So—she is not here!”
“But this is not the chief seat of the de Clary honor,” the priest pointed out gently, “for that’s Elford, in Staffordshire. The present lord, Audemar, took his father there for burial; the family has a great vault there. If there are any close kin dead these last years, that’s where they’ll be. No doubt the lady you speak of was also taken there to lie among her kinsfolk.”
Haluin seized upon the hope hungrily. “Yes... yes, it could well be so, it must be so. There I shall find her.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said the priest. “But it’s a long way to go afoot.” He had sensed an urgency that was very unlikely to listen to reason, but he did his best to temper it. “You’d be well advised to go mounted, if you must go now, or put it off for longer days and better weather. At least come inside, to my house, and take meat with me, and rest overnight.”
But that Haluin would not do, so much was already clear to Brother Cadfael. Not while there was still an hour or more of daylight left at the windows, and he had still the strength to go a mile further. He excused himself with slightly guilty thanks, and took a restrained leave of the good man, who watched them in wondering speculation until they had climbed the steps to the porch, and closed the door after them.
*
“No!” said Cadfael firmly, as soon as they were clear of the churchyard, and passing along the track between the village houses to reach the highroad. “That you cannot do!”
“I can, I must!” Brother Haluin responded with no less determination. “Why should I not?”
“Because, in the first place, you do not know how far it is to Etford. As far again as we have come, and half as far after that. And you know very well how hard you have pushed yourself already. And in the second place, because you were given leave to attempt this journey in the belief that it would end here, and we two return from here. And so we should. No, never shake your head at me, you know very well Father Abbot never envisaged more than that, and would never have given you leave for more. We should turn back here.”
“How can I?” Haluin’s voice was implacably reasonable, even tranquil. His way was perfectly clear to him, and he was patient with dissent. “If I turn back, I am forsworn. I have not yet done what I vowed to do, I should go back self-condemned and contemptible. Father Abbot would not wish that, however little either he or I expected so long a penance. He gave me leave until I had accomplished what I swore to do. If he were here to be asked, he would tell me to go on. I said I would not rest until I had gone on foot to the tomb where Bertrade lies buried, and there passed a night in prayer and vigil, and that I have not done.”
“Through no fault of yours,” said Cadfael strenuously.
“Does that excuse me? It is a just judgment on me that I must go double the way. If I fail of this, I said, may I live forsworn and die unforgiven! On the blessed relics of Saint Winifred, who has been so good to us all, I swore it. How can I turn back? I would rather die on the road, at least still faithfully trying to redeem my vow, than abandon my faith and honor, and go back shamed.”
And who was that speaking, Cadfael wondered, the dutiful monk, or the son of a good Norman house, from a line at least as old as King William’s when he came reaching for the crown of England, and without the irregularity of bastardy, at that. No doubt but pride is a sin, and unbecoming a Benedictine brother, but not so easily shed with the spurs and title of nobility.
Haluin, too, had caught the fleeting implication of arrogance, and flushed at the recognition, but would not draw back from it. He halted abruptly, swaying on his crutches, and detached a hand in haste to take Cadfael by the wrist. “Don’t chide me! Well I know you could, and your face shows me I deserve it, but spare to condemn. I can do no other. Oh, Cadfael, I do know every argument you could justly use against me. I have thought of them, I think of them still, but still I am bound. Bound by vows I will not, dare not break. Though my abbot judge me rebellious and disobedient, though my abbey cast me out, that I must bear. But to take back what I have pledged to Bertrade that I will not bear.”
The flush of blood mantling in his pale cheeks became him, warmed away the faded look of emaciation from illness, and even stripped some years from him. In stillness he stood upright, stretching his bent back upward between the braced crutches. No persuasion was going to move him. As well accept it.
“But you, Cadfael,” he said, gripping the wrist he held, “you have made no such vow, you are not bound. No need for you to go further, you have done all that was expected of you. Go back now, and speak for me to the lord abbot.”
“Son,” said Cadfael, between sympathy and exasperation, “I am fettered as fast as you, and you should know it. My orders are to go with you in case you founder, and to take care of you if you do. You are on your own business, I am on the abbot’s. If I cannot take you back with me I cannot go back.”
“But your work,” protested Haluin, dismayed but unwavering. “Mine can well wait, but you’ll be missed. How will they manage without you for so long?”
“As best they can. There’s no man living who cannot be done without,” said Cadfael sturdily, “and just as well, since there’s a term to life for every man. No, say no more. If your mind’s made up, so is mine. Where you go, I go. And since we have barely an hour of daylight left to us, and I fancy you have no wish to seek a bed here in Hales, we had better move gently on, and look for a shelter along the way.”
*
Adelais de Clary rose in the morning and went to Mass, as was her regular habit. She was meticulous in her religious observances and in almsgiving, keeping up the old custom of her husband’s household. And if her charity seemed sometimes a little cold and distant, at least it was constant and reliable. Whenever the parish priest had a special case in need of relief, he brought it to her for remedy.
He walked with her to the gate after the office, dutiful in attendance. “I had two Benedictines come visiting yesterday, “he said as she was drawing her cloak about her against a freshening March wind. “Two brothers from Shrewsbury.”
“Indeed!” said Adelais. “What did they want with you?”
“The one of them was crippled, and went on crutches. He said he was once in your service, before he took the cowl. He remembered Father Wulfnoth. I thought they would have come to pay their respects to you. Did they not?”
She did not answer that, but only observed idly, gazing into distance as though only half her mind was on what was said, “I remember, I did have a clerk once who entered the monastery at Shrewsbury. What was his business here at the church?”
“He said he had been spared by death, and was about making up all his accounts, to be better prepared. I found them beside the tomb of your lord’s father. They were in some error that a woman of your house was buried there, eighteen years ago. The lame one had it in mind to spend a night’s vigil there in prayers for her.”
“A strange mistake,” said Adelais with the same tolerant disinterest. “No doubt you undeceived him?”
“I told him it was not so. I was not here then, of course, but I knew from Father Wulfnoth that the tomb had not been opened for many years, and what the young brother supposed could not be true. I told him that all of your house now are buried at Elford, where the head of the manor lies.”
“A long, hard journey that would be, for a lame man afoot,” said Adelais with easy sympathy. “I hope he did not intend to continue his travels so far?”
“I think, madam, he did. For they declined to rest and eat with me, and sleep the night over, but set off again at once. ‘There I shall find her,’ the young one said. Yes, I am sure they will have turned eastward when they reached the highroad. A long, hard journey, indeed, but his will was good to perform it.”
His relationship with his patroness was a comfortable and easy one, and he did not hesitate to ask directly, “Will he indeed find the gentlewoman he’s seeking at Elford?”
“He well may,” said Adelais, pacing evenly and serenely beside him. “Eighteen years is a long time, and I cannot enter into his mind. I was younger then, I kept a bigger household. There were cousins, some left without fortune. My lord kept a father’s hand on all of his blood. In his absence and as his regent, so did I.”
They had reached the churchyard gate, and halted there. The morning was soft and green, but very still, and the cloud cover hung heavy and low.
“There will be more snow yet,” said the priest, “if it does not turn to rain.” And he went on inconsequently: “Eighteen years! It may be that this monk in his time with you was drawn to one of these young cousins, after the way of the young, and her early death was greater grief to him than ever he ventured to let you know.”
“It may be so,” said Adelais distantly, and drew up the hood of her cloak against a few infinitely fine spears of sleet that drifted on the still air and stung her cheek. “Good day, Father!”
“I will pray,” said the priest after her, “that his pilgrimage to her grave may bring comfort and benefit to him living, and to the lady dead.”
“Do so, Father,” said Adelais without turning her head. “And do not fail to add a prayer for me and all the women of my house, that time may lie lightly on us when our day comes.”
*
Cadfael lay awake in the hayloft of the forester’s holding in the royal forest of Chenet, listening to the measured breathing of his companion, too constant and too tense for sleep. It was the second night since they had left Hales. The first they had spent with a solitary cottar and his wife a mile or so beyond the hamlet of Weston, and the day between had been long, and this second-shelter in the early reaches of the forest came very warmly and gratefully. They had gone early to their beds in the loft, for Haluin, at whose insistence they had continued so far into the evening, was close to exhaustion. Sleep, Cadfael noted, came to him readily and peacefully, a restoring mercy to a soul very troubled and wrung when awake. There are many ways by which God tempers the burden. Haluin rose every morning refreshed and resolute.
It was not yet light, there might still be an hour to dawn. There was no movement, no rustling of the dry hay from the corner where Haluin lay, but Cadfael knew he was awake now, and the stillness was good, for it meant that he lay in the languor of ease of body, wherever the wakeful mind within might have strayed.
“Cadfael?” said a still, remote voice out of the darkness. “Are you awake?”
“I am,” he said as softly.
“You have never asked me anything. Of the thing I did. Of her...”
“There is no need,” said Cadfael. “What you wish to tell will be told without asking.”
“I was never free to speak of her,” said Haluin, “until now. And now only to you, who know.” There was a silence. He bled words slowly and arduously, as the shy and solitary do. After a while he resumed softly; “She was not beautiful, as her mother was. She had not that dark radiance, but something more kindly. There was nothing dark or secret in her, but everything open and sunlit, like a flower. She was not afraid of anything, not then. She trusted everyone. She had never been betrayed—not then. Only once, and she died of it.”
Another and longer silence, and this time the hay stirred briefly, like a sigh. Then he asked almost timidly: “Cadfael, you were half your life in the world—did you ever love a woman?”
“Yes,” said Cadfael, “I have loved.”
“Then you know how it was with us. For we did love, she and I. It hurts most of all,” said Brother Haluin, looking back in resigned and wondering pain, “when you are young. There is nowhere to hide from it, no shield you can raise between. To see her every day... and to know that it was with her as it was with me...”
Even if he had put it from him all these years, and tried to turn hands and mind and spirit to the service he had undertaken, of his own will, in his extremity, he had forgotten nothing; it was there within him ready to quicken at a breath, like a sleeping fire when a door is opened. Now at least it could escape into air, into the world of other men, where it could touch other men’s sufferings and receive and give compassion. From Cadfael there were no words needed, only the simple acknowledgment of companionship, the assurance of a listening ear.
Haluin fell asleep with a last lingering word on his lips, murmured almost inaudibly after lengthening silences. It might have been her name, Bertrade, ‘buried.’ No matter! What mattered was that he had uttered it on the edge of sleep, and now would blessedly sleep again after all his harsh labour along the way, perhaps long past the coming of the light. So much the better! One day more spent on this pilgrimage might grieve his impatient spirit, but it would certainly benefit his harshly driven body.
Cadfael arose very quietly, and left his companion deeply asleep and virtually a prisoner in the loft, since he would need help to get to his feet and descend the ladder. With the trapdoor left open, a listener below would hear when the sleeper stirred, but by the look of his relaxed body and the thin face smoothed of its tensions he would sleep for some time.
Cadfael went out into the clear, sharp morning, to sniff the still air, redolent of the lingering winter scents of forestland still half asleep. From the forester’s small assart among the trees it was possible to see the cleared grey of the track in broken glimpses between the old trunks, for the growth was close enough to keep the ground almost clear of underbrush. A handcart trundled along the road, laden with kindling from the fallen deadwood of the autumn, and the chattering flight of disturbed birds accompanied it in a shimmer of fluttered branches and drifting leaves. The forester was already up and about his morning tasks, his cow lumbering in to be milked, his dog weaving busily about his heels. A dry day, the sky overcast but lofty, the light good. A fine day for the road. By night they could be in Chenet itself, and the manor, in the king’s holding, would take them in. Tomorrow to Lichfield, and there Cadfael was determined they should halt for another long night’s rest, however ardently Haluin might argue for pressing on the remaining few miles to Elford. After a proper sleep in Lichfield Haluin should be in better condition to endure the next night’s vigil pledged in Bertrade’s memory, and face the beginning of the return journey, during which, God be praised, there need be no haste at all, and no cause to drive himself to the limits of endurance.
Sounds came muffled and soft along the beaten earth of the track, but Cadfael caught rather the vibration of hooves than the impact. Horses coming briskly from the west, two horses, for their gaits quivered in counterpoint, coming at a brisk trot, fresh from a night’s rest and ready for the day. Travelers heading, perhaps, for Lichfield, after spending the night at the manor of Stretton, two miles back along the road. Cadfael stood to watch them pass.
Two men in dun-colored gear, leather-coated, easy in the saddle, their seats and the handling of their mounts so strongly alike that either they had learned from childhood together or the one had taught the other. And indeed, the one was double the bulk of the other and clearly a generation the elder, and though they were too distant and too briefly seen to have features, the whole shape of them indicated that they were kin. Two privileged grooms to some noble house, each with a woman pillion behind him. Women warmly cloaked for traveling look all much alike, and yet Cadfael stared after the first of these with roused attention, and kept his eyes on her until the horses and their riders had vanished along the road, and the soft drumming of hooves faded into distance.
She was still within his eyelids as he turned back into the hay hut, pricking uneasily at his memory, urging, against all his dismissal of the possibility as folly, that he had seen her before, and further, that if he would but admit it he knew very well where.
But whether that was true or not, and whatever it augured if it was, there was nothing he could do about it. He shrugged it into the back of his mind, and went in, to listen for the moment when Haluin should awake and have need of him.
*
They came through groves of trees into an expanse of level meadows, a little bleached and grey as yet in the cold air, but fertile and well cultivated, a rich little island in a shire otherwise somewhat derelict still after the harsh pacification of fifty years back. There before them lay the sleek curves of the River Tame, the steep-pitched roof of a mill, and the close cluster of the houses of Elford, beyond the water.
In the warm and welcoming hospitality of the clerics of Lichfield they had spent a restful night, and received full directions as to the best road to Elford, and with the first light of dawn they had set off on the last four miles or so of this penitential journey. And here before them lay the goal of Haluin’s pilgrimage, almost within reach, only an expanse of peaceful fields and a wooden footbridge between him and his absolution. A fortunate place, prosperous where much was impoverished, with not one mill by the waterside, but two, for they could see the second one upstream, with ample meadowland, and rich soil where the arable fields showed. A place that might well promise blessing and peace of mind after labour and pain.
The pale thread of the path led them forward, and the roofs of Elford rose before them, circled with trees and bushes still naked and dark at this distant view, not yet so far advanced in bud as to show the first faint, elusive smoke of green. They crossed the bridge, the uneven planks causing Haluin to watch carefully how he placed his crutches, and came into the track between the houses. A neat village, with housewives and husbandmen going cheerfully and confidently about their daily business, alert to strangers but civil and welcoming to the Benedictine habit. They exchanged greetings along the way, and Haluin, cheered and vindicated at the successful completion of his journey, began to flush and brighten with pleasure at being offered this spontaneous omen of acceptance and release.
No need to ask how to reach the church, they had seen its low tower before they crossed the bridge. It had been built since the Normans came, sturdy in grey stone, with spacious churchyard very well stockaded for sanctuary at need, and full of old and handsome trees. They entered under the round-arched portico, and came into the familiar cool, echoing gloom of all stone-built churches, smelling faintly of dust, and wax candles, and strongly and reassuringly of home, the chosen abiding-place.
Haluin had halted in the tiled silence of the nave to get his bearings. Here there was no Lady Chapel to accommodate a patron’s tomb between the altars. The lords of Elford must lie aside, built into the stones of the walls they had raised. The red eye of light from the altar lamp showed them where the tomb lay, a great table slab filling a niche in the right-hand wall. Some dead de Clary, perhaps the first who came over with King William, and got his reward later, showed as a sleeping figure in relief on the sealing stone. Haluin had started forward towards it, only to check and draw back after the first echoing step, for there was a woman on her knees beside the tomb.
They saw her only as a shadowy figure, for the cloak she wore was dark grey like the stone in this dim light, and they knew her for a woman and not a man because the hood of the cloak was thrown back from her head, uncovering a white linen coif and a gauze veil over it. They would have retired into the porch to let her complete her prayers in peace, but she had heard the impact of the crutches on the tiled floor, and turned her head sharply to look towards them. In a single graceful, abrupt movement she rose to her feet, and coming towards them, stepped into the light from a window, and showed them the proud, aging, beautiful face of Adelais de Clary.