“You can do Gwytherin and me a good service, if you will,” said Brother Cadfael, and confided to his ear the work he had in mind to pass on to Griffith ap Rhys.
“So that’s the way it is!” said Peredur, forgetting altogether about his own unforgivable sins. His eyes opened wide. He whistled softly. “And that’s the way you want it left?”
“That’s the way it is, and that’s the way I want it left. Who loses? And everyone gains. We, you, Rhisiart, Saint Winifred—Saint Winifred most of all. And Sioned and Engelard, of course,” said Cadfael firmly, probing the penitent to the heart.
“Yes… I’m glad for them!” said Peredur, a shade too vehemently. His head was bent, and his eyelids lowered. He was not yet as glad as all that, but he was trying. The will was there. “Given a year or two longer, nobody’s going to remember about the deer Engelard took. In the end he’ll be able to go back and forth to Cheshire if he pleases, and he’ll have lands when his father dies. And once he’s no longer reckoned outlaw and felon he’ll have no more troubles. I’ll get your word to Griffith ap Rhys this very day. He’s over the river at his cousin David’s but Father Huw will give me indulgence if it’s to go voluntarily to the law.” He smiled wryly. “Very apt that I should be your man! I can unload my own sins at the same time, while I’m confiding to him what everyone must know but no one must say aloud.”
“Good!” said Brother Cadfael, contented. “The bailiff will do the rest. A word to the prince, and that’s the whole business settled.”
They had come to the place where the most direct path from Rhisiart’s holding joined with their road. And there came half the household from above, Padrig the bard nursing his little portable harp, perhaps bound for some other house after this leavetaking. Cai the ploughman still with an impressive bandage round his quite intact head, an artistic lurch to his gait, and a shameless gleam in his one exposed eye. No Sioned, no Engelard, no Annest, no John. Brother Cadfael, though he himself had given the orders, felt a sudden grievous deprivation.
Now they were approaching the little clearing, the woodlands fell back from them on either side, the narrow field of wild grass opened, and then the stone-built wall, green from head to foot, of the old graveyard. Small, shrunken, black, a huddled shape too tall for its base, the chapel of Saint Winifred loomed, and at its eastern end the raw, dark oblong of Rhisiart’s grave scarred the lush spring green of the grass.
Prior Robert halted at the gate, and turned to face the following multitude with a benign and almost affectionate countenance, and through Cadfael addressed them thus:
“Father Huw, and good people of Gwytherin, we came here with every good intent, led, as we believed and still believe, by divine guidance, desiring to honour Saint Winifred as she had instructed us, not at all to deprive you of a treasure, rather to allow its beams to shine upon many more people as well as you. That our mission should have brought grief to any is great grief to us. That we are now of one mind, and you are willing to let us take the saint’s relics away with us to a wider glory, is relief and joy. Now you are assured that we meant no evil, but only good, and that what we are doing is done reverently.”
A murmur began at one end of the crescent of watchers, and rolled gently round to the other extreme, a murmur of acquiescence, almost of complacency.
“And you do not grudge us the possession of this precious thing we are taking with us? You do believe that we are doing justly, that we take only what had been committed to us?”
He could not have chosen his words better, thought Brother Cadfael, astonished and gratified, if he had known everything—or if I had written this address for him. Now if there comes an equally well-worded answer, I’ll believe in a miracle of my own.
The crowd heaved, and gave forth the sturdy form of Bened, as solid and respectable and fit to be spokesman for his parish as any man in Gwytherin, barring, perhaps, Father Huw, who here stood in the equivocal position of having a foot in both camps, and therefore wisely kept silence.
“Father Prior,” said Bened gruffly, “there’s not a man among us now grudges you the relics within there on the altar. We do believe they are yours to take, and you take them with our consent home to Shrewsbury, where by all the omens they rightly belong.”
It was altogether too good. It might bring a blush of pleasure, even mingled with a trace of shame, to Prior Robert’s cheek, but it caused Cadfael to run a long, considering glance round all those serene, secretive, smiling faces, all those wide, honest, opaque eyes. Nobody fidgeted, nobody muttered, nobody, even at the back, sniggered. Cai gazed with simple admiration from his one visible eye. Padrig beamed benevolent bardic satisfaction upon this total reconciliation.
They knew already! Whether through some discreet whisper started on its rounds by Sioned, or by some earth-rooted intuition of their own, the people of Gwytherin knew, in essence if not in detail, everything there was to be known. And not a word aloud, not a word out of place, until the strangers were gone.
“Come, then,” said Prior Robert, deeply gratified, “let us release Brother Columbanus from his vigil, and take Saint Winifred on the first stage of her journey home.” And he turned, very tall, very regal, very silvery-fine, and paced majestically to the door of the chapel, with most of Gwytherin crowding into the graveyard after him. With a long, white, aristocratic hand he thrust the door wide and stood in the doorway.
“Brother Columbanus, we are here. Your watch is over.”
He took just two paces into the interior, his eyes finding it dim after the brilliance outside, in spite of the clear light pouring in through the small east window. Then the dark-brown, wood-scented walls came clear to him, and every detail of the scene within emerged from dimness into comparative light, and then into a light so acute and blinding that he halted where he stood, awed and marvelling.
There was a heavy, haunting sweetness that filled all the air within, and the opening of the door had let in a small morning wind that stirred it in great waves of fragrance. Both candles burned steadily upon the altar, the small oil-lamp between them. The prie-dieu stood centrally before the bier, but there was no one kneeling there. Over altar and reliquary a snowdrift of white petals lay, as though a miraculous wind had carried them in its arms across two fields from the hawthorn hedge, without spilling one flower on the way, and breathed them in here through the altar window. The snowy sweetness carried as far as the prie-dieu, and sprinkled both it and the crumpled, empty garments that lay discarded there.
“Columbanus! What is this? He is not here!”
Brother Richard came to the prior’s left shoulder, Brother Jerome to the right, Bened and Cadwallon and Cai and others crowded in after them and flowed round on either side to line the dark walls and stare at the marvel, nostrils widening to the drowning sweetness. No one ventured to advance beyond where the prior stood, until he himself went slowly forward, and leaned to look more closely at all that was left of Brother Columbanus.
The black Benedictine habit lay where he had been kneeling, skirts spread behind, body fallen together in folds, sleeves spread like wings on either side, bent at the elbow as though the arms that had left them had still ended in hands pressed together in prayer. Within the cowl an edge of white showed.
“Look!” whispered Brother Richard in awe. “His shirt is still within the habit, and look!—his sandals!” They were under the hem of the habit, neatly together, soles upturned, as the feet had left them. And on the book-rest of the prie-dieu, laid where his prayerful hands had rested, was a single knot of flowering may.
“Father Prior, all his clothes are here, shirt and drawers and all, one within another as he would wear them. As though—as though he had been lifted out of them and left them lying, as a snake discards its old skin and emerges bright in a new…”
“This is most marvellous,” said Prior Robert. “How shall we understand it, and not sin?”
“Father, may we take up these garments? If there is trace or mark on them….”
There was none, Brother Cadfael was certain of that. Columbanus had not bled, his habit was not torn, nor even soiled. He had fallen only in thick spring grass, bursting irresistibly through the dead grass of last autumn.