In the light of early morning Cadfael put his few possessions together, and went to present himself before the marshall. In a military establishment lately in dispute, it was well to give due notice of his departure, and to be able to quote the castellan’s authority in case any should question.
‘My lord, now that the way is open, I am bound to set off back to my abbey. I have here a horse, the grooms will bear witness to my right in him, though he belongs to the stables of Shrewsbury castle. Have I your leave to depart?’
‘Freely,’ said the marshall. ‘And Godspeed along the way.’
Armed with that permission, Cadfael paid his last visit to the chapel of La Musarderie. He had come a long way from the place where he longed to be, and there was no certainty he would live to enter there again, since no man can know the day or the hour when his life shall be required of him. And even if he reached it within his life, he might not be received. The thread of belonging, once stretched to breaking point, may not be easily joined again. Cadfael made his petition in humility, if not quite in resignation, and remained on his knees a while with closed eyes, remembering things done well and things done less well, but remembering with the greatest gratitude and content the image of his son in the guise of a rustic youth, as once before, nursing his enemy in his lap in the miller’s cart. Blessed paradox, for they were not enemies. They had done their worst to become so, and could not maintain it. Better not to question the unquestionable.
He was rising from his knees, a little stiffly from the chill of the air and the hardness of the flagstones, when a light step sounded on the threshold, and the door was pushed a little wider open. The presence of women in the castle had already made some changes in the furnishings of the chapel, by the provision of an embroidered altar-cloth, and the addition of a green-cushioned prie-dieu for the empress’s use. Now her gentlewoman came in with a heavy silver candlestick in either hand, and was crossing to the altar to install them when she saw Cadfael. She gave him a gentle inclination of her head, and smiled. Her hair was covered with a gauze net that cast a shimmer of silver over a coronal already immaculate in its own silver.
‘Good morning, brother,’ said Jovetta de Montors, and would have passed on, but halted instead, and looked more closely. ‘I have seen you before, brother, have I not? You were at the meeting in Coventry.’
‘I was, madam,’ said Cadfael.
‘I remember,’ she said, and sighed. ‘A pity nothing came of it. Was it some business consequent upon that meeting that has brought you so far from home? For I believe I heard you were of the abbey of Shrewsbury.’
‘In a sense,’ said Cadfael, ‘yes, it was.’
‘And have you sped?’ She had moved to the altar, and set her candlesticks one at either end, and was stooping to find candles for them in a coffer beside the wall, and a sulphur spill to light them from the small constant lamp that glowed red before the central cross.
‘In part,’ he said, ‘yes, I have sped.’
‘Only in part?’
‘There was another matter, not solved, no, but of less importance now than we thought it then. You will remember the young man who was accused of murder, there in Coventry?’
He drew nearer to her, and she turned towards him a clear, pale face, and large, direct eyes of a deep blue. ‘Yes, I remember. He is cleared of that suspicion now. I talked with him when he came to Gloucester, and he told us that Philip FitzRobert was satisfied he was not the man, and had set him free. I was glad. I thought all was over when the empress brought him off safely, and I never knew until we were in Gloucester that Philip had seized him on the road. Then, days later, he came to raise the alarm over this castle. I knew,’ she said, ‘that there was no blame in him.’
She set the candles in their sockets, and the candlesticks upon the altar, stepping back a little to match the distances, with her head tilted. The sulphur match sputtered in the little red flame, and burned up steadily, casting a bright light over her thin, veined left hand. Carefully she lit her candles, and stood watching the flames grow tall, with the match still in her hand. On the middle finger she wore a ring, deeply cut in intaglio. Small though the jet stone was, the incised design took the light brilliantly, in fine detail. The little salamander in its nest of stylized flames faced the opposite way, but was unmistakable once its positive complement had been seen.
Cadfael said never a word, but she was suddenly quite still, making no move to put the ring out of the light that burnished and irradiated it in every line. Then she turned to him, and her glance followed his, and again returned to his face.
‘I knew,’ she said again, ‘there was no blame in him. I was in no doubt at all. Neither, I think, were you. But I had cause. What was it made you so sure, even then?’
He repeated, rehearsing them now with care, all the reasons why Brien de Soulis must have died at the hands of someone he knew and trusted, someone who could approach him closely without being in any way a suspect, as Yves Hugonin certainly could not, after his open hostility. Someone who could not possibly be a threat to him, a man wholly in his confidence.
‘Or a woman,’ said Jovetta de Montors.
She said it quite gently and reasonably, as one propounding an obvious possibility, but without pressing it.
And he had never even thought of it. In that almost entirely masculine assembly, with only three women present, and all of them under the empress’s canopy of inviolability, it had never entered his mind. True, the young one had certainly been willing to play a risky game with de Soulis, but with no intention of letting it go too far. Cadfael doubted if she would ever have made an assignation; and yet....
‘Oh, no,’ said Jovetta de Montors, ‘not Isabeau. She knows nothing. All she did was half promise him – enough to make it worth his while putting it to the test. She never intended meeting him. But there is not so much difference between an old woman and a young one, in twilight and a hooded cloak. I think,’ she said with sympathy, and smiled at him, ‘I am not telling you anything you do not know. But I would not have let the young man come to harm.’
‘I am learning this,’ said Cadfael, ‘only now, believe me. Only now, and by this seal of yours. The same seal that was set to the surrender of Faringdon, in the name of Geoffrey FitzClare. Who was already dead. And now de Soulis, who set it there, who killed him to set it there, is also dead, and Geoffrey FitzClare is avenged.’ And he thought, why stir the ashes back into life now?
‘You do not ask me,’ she said, ‘what Geoffrey FitzClare was to me?’
Cadfael was silent.
‘He was my son,’ she said. ‘My one sole child, outside a childless marriage, and lost to me as soon as born. It was long ago, after the old king had conquered and settled Normandy, until King Louis came to the French throne, and started the struggle all over again. King Henry spent two years and more over there defending his conquest, and Warrenne’s forces were with him. My husband was Warrenne’s man. Two years away! Love asks no leave, and I was lonely, and Richard de Clare was kind. When my time came, I was well served and secret, and Richard did well by his own. Aubrey never knew, nor did any other. Richard acknowledged my boy for his, and took him into his own family. But Richard was not living to do right by his son when most he was needed. It was left to me to take his place.’
Her voice was calm, making neither boast nor defence of what she had done. And when she saw Cadfael’s gaze still bent on the salamander in its restoring bath of fire, she smiled.
‘That was all he ever had of me. It came from my father’s forebears, but it had fallen almost into disuse. Few people would know it. I asked Richard to give it to him for his own device, and it was done. He did us both credit. His brother Earl Gilbert always thought well of him. Even though they took opposing sides in this sad dispute, they were good friends. The Clares have buried Geoffrey as one of their own, and valued. They do not know what I know of how he died. What you, I think, also know.’
‘Yes,’ said Cadfael, and looked her in the eyes, ‘I do know.’
‘Then there is no need to explain anything or excuse anything,’ she said simply, and turned to set one candle straighter in its sconce, and carry away with her tidily the extinguished sulphur match. ‘But if ever any man casts up that man’s death against the boy, you may speak out.’
‘You said,’ Cadfael reminded her, ‘that no one else ever knew. Not even your son?’
She looked back for one moment on her way out of the chapel, and confronted him with the deep, drowning blue serenity of her eyes, and smiled. ‘He knows now,’ she said.
*
In the chapel of La Musarderie those two parted, who would surely never meet again.
*
Cadfael went out to the stable, and found a somewhat disconsolate Yves already saddling the chestnut roan, and insisting on coming out with his departing friend as far as the ford of the river. No need to fret over Yves, the darkest shadow had withdrawn from him, there remained only the mild disappointment of not being able to take Cadfael home with him, and the shock of disillusionment which would make him wary of the empress’s favours for some time, but not divert his fierce loyalty from her cause. Not for this gallant simplicity the bruising complexities that trouble most human creatures. He walked beside the roan down the causeway and into the woodland that screened the ford, and talked of Ermina, and Olivier, and the child that was coming and minute by minute his mood brightened, thinking of the reunion still to come.
‘He may be there already, even before I can get leave to go to her. And he really is well? He’s come to no harm?’
‘You’ll find no change in him,’ Cadfael promised heartily. ‘He is as he always has been, and he’ll look for no change in you, either. Between the lot of us,’ he said, comforting himself rather than the boy, ‘perhaps we have not done so badly, after all.’
But it was a long, long journey home.
At the ford they parted. Yves reached up, inclining a smooth cheek, and Cadfael stooped to kiss him. ‘Go back now, and don’t watch me go. There’ll be another time.’
*
Cadfael crossed the ford, climbed the green track up through the woods on the other side, and rode eastward through the village of Winstone towards the great highroad. But when he reached it he did not turn left towards Tewkesbury and the roads that led homeward, but right, towards Cirencester. He had one more small duty to perform; or perhaps he was simply clinging by the sleeve of hope to the conviction that out of his apostasy something good might emerge, beyond all reasonable expectation, to offer as justification for default.
All along the great road high on the Cotswold plateau he rode through intermittent showers of sleet, under a low, leaden sky, hardly conducive to cheerful thoughts. The colours of winter, bleached and faded and soiled, were setting in like a wash of grey mist over the landscape. There was small joy in travelling, and few fellow-creatures to greet along the way. Men and sheep alike preferred the shelter of cottage and fold.
It was late afternoon when he reached Cirencester, a town he did not know, except by reputation as a very old city, where the Romans had left their fabled traces, and a very sturdy and astute wool trade had continued independent and prosperous ever since. He had to stop and ask his way to the Augustinian abbey, but there was no mistaking it when he found it, and no doubt of its flourishing condition. The old King Henry had refounded it upon the remnant of an older house of secular canons, very poorly endowed and quietly mouldering, but the Augustinians had made a success of it, and the fine gatehouse, spacious court and splendid church spoke for their zeal and efficiency. This revived house was barely thirty years old, but bade fair to be the foremost of its order in the kingdom.
Cadfael dismounted at the gate and led his horse within, to the porter’s lodge. This ordered calm came kindly on his spirit, after the uncontrollable chances of siege and the bleak loneliness of the roads. Here all things were ordained and regulated, here everyone had a purpose and a rule, and was in no doubt of his value, and every hour and every thing had a function, essential to the functioning of the whole. So it was at home, where his heart drew him.
‘I am a brother of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury,’ said Cadfael humbly, ‘and have been in these parts by reason of the fighting at Greenhamsted, where I was lodged when the castle fell under siege. May I speak with the infirmarer?’
The porter was a smooth, round elder with a cool, aloof eye, none too ready to welcome a Benedictine on first sight. He asked briskly: ‘Are you seeking lodging overnight, brother?’
‘No,’ said Cadfael. ‘My errand here can be short, I am on my way home to my abbey. You need make no provision for me. But I sent here, in the guardianship of another, Philip FitzRobert, badly wounded at Greenhamsted, and in danger of his life. I should be glad of a word with the infirmarer as to how he does. Or,’ he said, suddenly shaken, ‘whether he still lives. I tended him there, I need to know.’
The name of Philip FitzRobert had opened wide the reserved, chill grey eyes that had not warmed at mention of the Benedictine Order or the abbey of Shrewsbury. Whether he was loved here or hated, or simply suffered as an unavoidable complication, his father’s hand was over him, and could open closed and guarded doors. Small blame to the house that it kept a steely watch on its boundaries.
‘I will call Brother Infirmarer,’ said the porter, and went to set about it within.
The infirmarer came bustling, a brisk, amiable man not much past thirty. He looked Cadfael up and down in one rapid glance, and nodded informed approval. ‘He said you might come. The young man described you well, brother, I should have known you among many. You are welcome here. He told us of the fate of La Musarderie, and what was threatened against this guest of ours.’
‘So they reached here in time,’ said Cadfael, and heaved a great sigh.
‘In good time. A miller’s cart brought them, but no miller drove it the last miles. A working man must see to his business and his family,’ said the infirmarer, ‘all the more if he has just risked more, perhaps, than was due from him. It seems there were no unseemly alarms. At any rate, the cart was returned, and all was quiet then.’
‘I trust it may remain so,’ said Cadfael fervently. ‘He is a good man.’
‘Thanks be to God, brother,’ said the infirmarer cheerfully, ‘there are still, as there always have been and always will be, more good men than evil in this world, and their cause will prevail.’
‘And Philip? He is alive?’ He asked it with more constriction about his heart than he had expected, and held his breath.
‘Alive and in his senses. Even mending, though that may be a slow recovery. But yes, he will live, he will be a whole man again. Come and see!’
*
Outside the partly drawn curtain that closed off one side cell from the infirmary ward sat a young canon of the order, very grave and dutiful, reading in a large book which lay open on his lap-desk. A hefty young man of mild countenance but impressive physique, whose head reared and whose eyes turned alertly at the sound of footsteps approaching. Beholding the infirmarer, with a second habited brother beside him, he immediately lowered his gaze again to his reading, his face impassive. Cadfael approved. The Augustinians were prepared to protect both their privileges and their patients.
‘A mere precaution,’ said the infirmarer tranquilly. ‘Perhaps no longer necessary, but better to be certain.’
‘I doubt there’ll be any pursuit now,’ said Cadfael.
‘Nevertheless...’ The infirmarer shrugged, and laid a hand to the curtain to draw it back. ‘Safe rather than sorry! Go in, brother. He is fully in his wits, he will know you.’
Cadfael entered the cell, and the folds of the curtain swung closed behind him. The single bed in the narrow room had been raised, to make attendance on the patient in his helplessness easier. Philip lay propped with pillows, turned a little sidewise, sparing his broken ribs as they mended. His face, if paler and more drawn than in health, had a total and admirable serenity, eased of all tensions. Above the bandages that swathed his head wound, the black hair coiled and curved on his pillows as he turned his head to see who had entered. His eyes in their bluish hollows showed no surprise.
‘Brother Cadfael!’ His voice was quite strong and clear. ‘Yes, almost I expected you. But you had a dearer duty. Why are you not some miles on your way home? Was I worth the delay?’
To that Cadfael made no direct reply. He drew near the bed, and looked down with the glow of gratitude and content warming him. ‘Now that I see you man alive, I will make for home fast enough. They tell me you will mend as good as new.’
‘As good,’ agreed Philip with a wry smile. ‘No better! Father and son alike, you may have wasted your pains. Oh, never fear, I have no objection to being snatched out of a halter, even against my will. I shall not cry out against you, as he did: “He has cheated me!” Sit by me, brother, now you are here. Some moments only. You see I shall do well enough, and your needs are elsewhere.’
Cadfael sat down on the stool beside the bed. It brought their faces close, eye to eye in intent and searching study. ‘I see,’ said Cadfael, ‘that you know who brought you here.’
‘Once, just once and briefly, I opened my eyes on his face. In the cart, on the highroad. I was back in the dark before a word could be said, it may be he never knew. But yes, I know. Like father, like son. Well, you have taken seisin of my life between you. Now tell me what I am to do with it.’
‘It is still yours,’ said Cadfael. ‘Spend it as you see fit. I think you have as firm a grasp of it as most men.’
‘Ah, but this is not the life I had formerly. I consented to a death, you remember? What I have now is your gift, whether you like it or not, my friend. I have had time, these last days,’ said Philip quite gently, ‘to recall all that happened before I died. It was a hopeless cast,’ he said with deliberation, ‘to believe that turning from one nullity to the other could solve anything. Now that I have fought upon either side to no good end, I acknowledge my error. There is no salvation in either empress or king. So what have you in mind for me now, Brother Cadfael? Or what has Olivier de Bretagne in mind for me?’
‘Or God, perhaps,’ said Cadfael.
‘God, certainly! But he has his messengers among us, no doubt there will be omens for me to read.’ His smile was without irony. ‘I have exhausted my hopes of either side, here among princes. Where is there now for me to go?’ He was not looking for an answer, not yet. Rising from this bed would be like birth to him; it would be time then to discover what to do with the gift. ‘Now, since there are other men in the world besides ourselves, tell me how things went, brother, after you had disposed of me.’
And Cadfael composed himself comfortably on his stool, and told him how his garrison had fared, permitted to march out with their honour and their freedom, if not with their arms, and to take their wounded with them. Philip had bought back the lives of most of his men, even if the price, after all, had never been required of him. It had been offered in good faith.
Neither of them heard the flurry of hooves in the great court, or the ringing of harness, or rapid footsteps on the cobbles; the chamber was too deep within the enfolding walls for any forewarning to reach them. Not until the corridor without echoed hollowly to the tread of boots did Cadfael rear erect and break off in mid-sentence, momentarily alarmed. But no, the guardian outside the curtained doorway had not stirred. His view was clear to the end of the passage, and what he saw bearing down upon them gave him no disquiet. He simply rose to his feet and drew aside to give place to those who were approaching.
The curtain was abruptly swept back before the vigorous hand and glowing face of Olivier, Olivier with a shining, heraldic lustre upon him, that burned in silence and halted him on the threshold, his breath held in half elation and half dread at the bold thing he had undertaken. His eyes met Philip’s, and clung in a hopeful stare, and a tentative smile curved his long mouth. He stepped aside, not entering the room, and drew the curtain fully back, and Philip looked beyond him.
For a moment it hung in the balance between triumph and repudiation, and then, though Philip lay still and silent, giving no sign, Olivier knew that he had not laboured in vain.
Cadfael rose and stepped back into the corner of the room as Robert, earl of Gloucester, came in. A quiet man always, squarely built, schooled to patience, even at this pass his face was composed and inexpressive as he approached the bed and looked down at his younger son. The capuchon hung in folds on his shoulders, and the dusting of grey in his thick brown hair and the twin streaks of silver in his short beard caught the remaining light in the room with a moist sheen of rain. He loosed the clasp of his cloak and shrugged it off, and drawing the stool closer to the bed, sat down as simply as if he had just come home to his own house, with no tensions or grievances to threaten his welcome.
‘Sir,’ said Philip, with deliberate formality, his voice thin and distant, ‘your son and servant!’
The earl stooped, and kissed his son’s cheek; nothing to disturb even the most fragile of calms, the simple kiss due between sire and son on greeting. And Cadfael, slipping silently past, walked out into the corridor and into his own son’s exultant arms.
*
So now everything that had to be done here was completed. No man, nor even the empress, would dare touch what Robert of Gloucester had blessed. They drew each other away, content, into the court, and Cadfael reclaimed his horse from the stable, for in spite of the approaching dusk he felt himself bound to ride back some way before full darkness came, and find a simple lodging somewhere among the sheepfolds for the night hours.
‘And I will ride with you,’ said Olivier, ‘for our ways are the same as far as Gloucester. We’ll share the straw together in someone’s loft. Or if we reach Winstone the miller will house us.’
‘I had thought,’ said Cadfael, marvelling, ‘that you were already in Gloucester with Ermina, as indeed you should be this moment.’
‘Oh, I did go to her – how could I not? I kissed her,’ said Olivier, ‘and she saw for herself I had come to no harm from any man, so she let me go where I was bound. I rode to find Robert at Hereford. And he came with me, as I knew he would come. Blood is blood, and there is no blood closer than theirs. And now it is done, and I can go home.’
*
Two days they rode together, and two nights they slept close, rolled in their cloaks, the first night in a shepherd’s hut near Bagendon, the second in the hospitable mill at Cowley; and the third day, early, they entered Gloucester. And in Gloucester they parted.
Yves would have reasoned and pleaded the good sense of resting here overnight and spending some precious hours with people who loved him. Olivier only looked at him, and awaited his judgement with resignation.
‘No,’ said Cadfael, shaking his head ruefully, ‘for you home is here, yes, but not for me. I am already grossly in default. I dare not pile worse on bad. Do not ask me.’
And Olivier did not ask. Instead, he rode with Cadfael to the northern edge of the city, where the road set off north-west for distant Leominster. There was a good half of the day left, and a placid grey sky with hardly a breath of wind. There could be a few miles gained before night.
‘God forbid I should stand between you and what you need for your heart’s comfort,’ said Olivier, ‘even if it tears mine to refrain. Only go safely, and fear nothing for me, ever. There will be a time. If you do not come to me, I shall come to you.’
‘If God please!’ said Cadfael, and took his son’s face between his hands, and kissed him. As how could God not be pleased by such as Olivier? If, indeed, there were any more such to be found in this world.
They had dismounted to take their brief farewells. Olivier held the stirrup for Cadfael to remount, and clung for a moment to the bridle. ‘Bless me to God, and go with God!’
Cadfael leaned down and marked a cross on the broad, smooth forehead. ‘Send me word,’ he said, ‘when my grandson is born.’