“Now,” said Cadfael, “you can at least see to take what you came for.” And he sat down and settled himself solidly on a corner of the feeding-rack.
Meurig came towards him with long, deliberate strides through the straw-dust and chaff of the floor. His face was fixed and grey, his eyes sunken deep into his head and burning with frenzy and pain. So close that their knees touched, he advanced the knife slowly until the point pricked Cadfael’s throat; along eight inches of steel they eyed each other steadily.
“Are you not afraid of death?” asked Meurig, barely above a whisper.
“I’ve brushed elbows with him before. We respect each other. In any case there’s no evading him for ever, we all come to it, Meurig. Gervase Bonel… you… I. We have to die, every one of us, soon or late. But we do not have to kill. You and I both made a choice, you only a week or so ago, I when I lived by the sword. Here am I, as you willed it. Now take what you want of me.”
He did not take his eyes from Meurig’s eyes, but he saw at the edge of vision the tightening of the strong brown fingers and the bracing of the muscles in the wrist to strike home. But there was no other movement. All Meurig’s body seemed suddenly to writhe in an anguished attempt to thrust, and still he could not. He wrenched himself backward, and a muted animal moan came from his throat. He cast the knife out of his hand to whine and stick quivering in the beaten earth of the floor, and flung up both arms to clasp his head, as though all his strength of body and will could not contain or suppress the pain that filled him to overflowing. Then his knees gave under him, and he was crouched in a heap at Cadfael’s feet, his face buried in his arms against the hay-rack. Round yellow eyes, above placidly chewing muzzles, looked on in detached surprise at the strangeness of men.
Broken sounds came from Meurig’s buried mouth, muffled and sick with despair “Oh, God, that I could so face my death… for I owe it, I owe it, and dare not pay! If I were clean… if I were only clean again…”And in a great groan he said: “Oh, Mallilie…”
“Yes,” said Cadfael softly. “A very fair place. Yet there is a world outside it.”
“Not for me, not for me… I am forfeit. Give me up! Help me… help me to be fit to die…” He raised himself suddenly, and looked up at Cadfael, clutching with one hand at the skirts of his habit. “Brother, those things you said of me… never meant to be a murderer, you said…”
“Have I not proved it?” said Cadfael. “I live, and it was not fear that stayed your hand.”
“Mere chance that led me, you said, and that because of an act of simple kindness… Great pity it is, you said! Pity… Did you mean all those things, brother? Is there pity?”
“I meant them,” said Cadfael, “every word. Pity, indeed, that ever you went so far aside from your own nature, and poisoned yourself as surely as you poisoned your father. Tell me, Meurig, In these last days you have not been back to your grandfather’s house, or had any word from him?”
“No,” said Meurig, very low, and shuddered at the thought of the upright old man now utterly bereft.
“Then you do not know that Edwin was fetched away from there by the sheriff’s men, and is now in prison in Shrewsbury.”
No, he had not known. He looked up aghast, seeing the implication, and shook with the fervour of his denial: “No, that I swear I did not do. I was tempted… I could not prevent that they cast the blame on him, but I did not betray him… I sent him here, I would have seen that he got clear… I know it was not enough, but oh, this at least don’t lay to my charge! God knows I liked the boy well.”
“I also know it,” said Cadfael, “and know it was not you who sent them to take him. No one wittingly betrayed him. None the less, he was taken. Tomorrow will see him free again. Take that for one thing set right, where many are past righting.”
Meurig laid his clasped hands, white-knuckled with tension, on Cadfael’s knees, and lifted a tormented face into the soft light of the lantern. “Brother, you have been conscience to other men in your time, for God’s sake do as much by me, for I am sick, I am maimed, I am not my own. You said… great pity! Hear me all my evil!”
“Child,” said Cadfael, shaken, and laid his own hand over the stony fists that felt chill as ice, “I am not a priest, I cannot give absolution, I cannot appoint penance…”
“Ah, but you can, you can, none but you, who found out the worst of me! Hear me my confession, and I shall be better prepared, and then deliver me to my penalty, and I will not complain.”
“Speak, then, if it gives you ease,” said Cadfael heavily, and kept his hand closed over Meurig’s as the story spilled out in broken gouts of words, like blood from a wound: how he had gone to the infirmary with no ill thought, to pleasure an old man, and learned by pure chance of the properties of the oil he was using for its true purpose, and how it could be put to a very different use. Only then had the seed been planted in his mind. He had a few weeks, perhaps, of grace before Mallilie was lost to him forever, and here was a means of preventing the loss.
“And it grew in me, the thought that it would not be a hard thing to do… and the second time I went there I took the vial with me, and filled it. But it was still only a mad dream… Yet I carried it with me, that last day, and I told myself it would be easy to put in his mead, or mull wine for him… I might never have done it, only willed it, though that is sin enough. But when I came to the house, they were all in the inner room together, and I heard Aldith saying how the prior had sent a dish from his own table, a dainty to please my father. It was there simmering on the hob, a spoon in it… The thing was done almost before I knew I meant to do it… And then I heard Aelfric and Aldith coming back from the table, and I had no time for more than to step quickly outside the door again, as if I had just opened it, and I was scraping my shoes clean to come in when they came into the kitchen… What could they think but that I had only just come? A score of times in the next hour, God knows how wildly, I wished it undone, but such things cannot be undone, and I am damned… What could I do but go forward, when there was no going back?”
What, indeed, short of what he was doing now, and this had been forced on him. Yet it was not to kill that he had flown like a homing bird to this meeting, whatever he himself had believed.
“So I went on. I fought for the fruit of my sin, for Mallilie, as best I could. I never truly hated my father, but Mallilie I truly loved, and it was mine, mine… if only I could have come by it cleanly! But there is justice, and I have lost, and I make no complaint. Now deliver me up, and let me pay for his death with mine, as is due. I will go with you willingly, if you will wish me peace.”
He laid his head on Cadfael’s steadying hand with a great sigh, and fell silent; and after a long moment Cadfael laid his other hand on the thick dark hair, and held him so. Priest he might not be, and absolution he could not give, yet here he was in the awful situation of being both judge and confessor. Poison is the meanest of killings, the steel he could respect. And yet… Was not Meurig also a man gravely wronged? Nature had meant him to be amiable, kindly, unembittered, circumstances had so deformed him that he turned against his nature once, and fatally, and he was all too well aware of his mortal sickness. Surely one death was enough, what profit in a second? God knew other ways of balancing the scale.
“You asked your penance of me,” said Cadfael at last. “Do you still ask it? And will you bear it and keep faith, no matter how terrible it may be?”