‘Do you know you’ve grown almost handsome? I’m sorry about your broken head,’ she said, lifting a hand to touch the healed wound, ‘but this will go, you’ll bear no mark. Someone did good work closing that cut. You may surely kiss me, you are not a monk yet.’
Meriet’s lips, still and chill against her cheek, suddenly stirred and quivered, closing in helpless passion. Not for her as a woman, not yet, simply as a warmth, a kindness, someone coming with open arms and no questions or reproaches. He embraced her inexpertly, wavering between impetuosity and shyness of this transformed being, and quaked at the contact.
‘You’re still lame,’ she said solicitously. ‘Come and sit down with me. I won’t stay too long, to tire you, but I couldn’t be so near without coming to see you again. Tell me about this place,’ she ordered, drawing him down to the bed beside her. ‘There are children here, too, I heard their voices. Quite young children.’
Spellbound, he began to tell her in stumbling, broken phrases about Brother Mark, small and fragile and indestructible, who had the signature of God upon him and longed to become a priest. It was not hard to talk about his friend, and the unfortunates who were yet fortunate in falling into such hands. Never a word about himself or her, while they sat shoulder to shoulder, turned inwards towards each other, and their eyes ceaselessly measured and noted the changes wrought by this season of trial. He forgot that he was a man self-condemned, with only a brief but strangely tranquil life before him, and she a young heiress with a manor double the value of Aspley, and grown suddenly beautiful. They sat immured from time and unthreatened by the world; and Cadfael slipped away satisfied, and went to snatch a word with Brother Mark, while there was time. She had her finger on the pulse of the hours, she would not stay too long. The art was to astonish, to warm, to quicken an absurd but utterly credible hope, and then to depart.
When she thought fit to go, Meriet brought her from the barn by the hand. They had both a high colour and bright eyes, and by the way they moved together they had broken free from the first awe, and had been arguing as of old; and that was good. He stooped his cheek to be kissed when they separated, and she kissed him briskly, gave him a cheek in exchange, said he was a stubborn wretch as he always had been, and yet left him exalted almost into content, and herself went away cautiously encouraged.
‘I have as good as promised him I will send my horse to fetch him in good time tomorrow morning,’ she said, when they were reaching the first scattered houses of the Foregate.
‘I have as good as promised Mark the same,’ said Cadfael. ‘But he had best come cloaked and quietly. God, he knows if I have any good reason for it, but my thumbs prick and I want him there, but unknown to those closest to him in blood.’
‘We are troubling too much,’ said the girl buoyantly, exalted by her own success. ‘I told you long ago, he is mine, and no one else will have him. If it is needful that Peter Clemence’s slayer must be taken, to give Meriet to me, then why fret, for he will be taken.’
‘Girl,’ said Cadfael, breathing in deeply, ‘you terrify me like an act of God. And I do believe you will pull down the thunderbolt.’
In the warmth and soft light in their small chamber in the guesthall after supper, the two girls who shared a bed sat brooding over their plans for the morrow. They were not sleepy, they had far too much on their minds to wish for sleep. Roswitha’s maid-servant, who attended them both, had gone to her bed an hour ago; she was a raw country girl, not entrusted with the choice of jewels, ornaments and perfumes for a marriage. It would be Isouda who would dress her friend’s hair, help her into her gown, and escort her from guest-hall to church and back again, withdrawing the cloak from her shoulders at the church door, in this December cold, restoring it when she left on her lord’s arm, a new-made wife.
Roswitha had spread out her wedding gown on the bed, to brood over its every fold, consider the set of the sleeves and the fit of the bodice, and wonder whether it would not be the better still for a closer clasp to the gilded girdle.
Isouda roamed the room restlessly, replying carelessly to Roswitha’s dreaming comments and questions. They had the wooden chests of their possessions, leather-covered, stacked against one wall, and the small things they had taken out were spread at large on every surface; bed, shelf and chest. The little box that held Roswitha’s jewels stood upon the press beside the guttering lamp. Isouda delved a hand idly into it, plucking out one piece after another. She had no great interest in such adornments.
‘Would you wear the yellow mountain stones?’ asked Roswitha, ‘to match with this gold thread in the girdle?’
Isouda held the amber pebbles to the light and let them run smoothly through her fingers. ‘They would suit well. But let me see what else you have here. You’ve never shown me the half of these.’ She was fingering them curiously when she caught the buried gleam of coloured enamels, and unearthed from the very bottom of the box a large brooch of the ancient ring-and-pin kind, the ring with its broad, flattened terminals intricately ornamented with filigree shapes of gold framing the enamels, sinuous animals that became twining leaves if viewed a second time, and twisted back into serpents as she gazed. The pin was of silver, with a diamond-shaped head engraved with a formal flower in enamels, and the point projected the length of her little finger beyond the ring, which filled her palm. A princely thing, made to fasten the thick folds of a man’s cloak. She had begun to say: ‘I’ve never seen this…’ before she had it out and saw it clearly. She broke off then, and the sudden silence caused Roswitha to look up. She rose quickly, and came to plunge her own hand into the box and thrust the brooch to the bottom again, out of sight.
‘Oh, not that!’ she said with a grimace. ‘It’s too heavy, and so old-fashioned. Put them all back, I shall need only the yellow necklace, and the silver hair-combs.’ She closed the lid firmly, and drew Isouda back to the bed, where the gown lay carefully outspread. ‘See here, there are a few frayed stitches in the embroidery, could you catch them up for me? You are a better needlewoman than I.’
With a placid face and steady hand Isouda sat down and did as she was asked, and refrained from casting another glance at the box that held the brooch. But when the hour of Compline came, she snapped off her thread at the final stitch, laid her work aside, and announced that she was going to attend the office. Roswitha, already languidly undressing for bed, made no move to dissuade, and certainly none to join her.
Brother Cadfael left the church after Compline by the south porch, intending only to pay a brief visit to his workshop to see that the brazier, which Brother Oswin had been using earlier, was safely out, everything securely stoppered, and the door properly closed to conserve what warmth remained. The night was starry and sharp with frost, and he needed no other light to see his way by such familiar paths. But he had got no further than the archway into the court when he was plucked urgently by the sleeve, and a breathless voice whispered in his ear: ‘Brother Cadfael, I must talk to you!’
‘Isouda! What is it? Something has happened?’ He drew her back into one of the carrels of the scriptorium; no one else would be stirring there now, and in the darkness the two of them were invisible, drawn back into the most sheltered corner. Her face at his shoulder was intent, a pale oval afloat above the darkness of her cloak.
‘Happened, indeed! You said I might pull down the thunderbolt. I have found something,’ she said, rapid and low in his ear, ‘in Roswitha’s jewel box. Hidden at the bottom. A great ring-brooch, very old and fine, in gold and silver and enamels, the kind men made long before ever the Normans came. As big as the palm of my hand, with a long pin. When she saw what I had, she came and thrust it back into the box and closed the lid, saying that was too heavy and old-fashioned to wear. So I let it pass, and never said word of what I knew. I doubt if she understands what it is, or how whoever gave it to her came by it, though I think he must have warned her not to wear or show it, not yet… Why else should she be so quick to put it out of my sight? Or else simply she doesn’t like it—I suppose it might be no more than that. But I know what it is and where it came from, and so will you when I tell you…’ She had run out of breath in her haste, and panted soft warmth against his cheek, leaning close. ‘I have seen it before, as she may not have done. It was I who took the cloak from him and carried it within, to the chamber we made ready for him. Fremund brought in his saddle-bags, the cloak I carried… and this brooch was pinned in the collar.’