‘I thought I might find you here,’ said Brother Cadfael, and took the little bellows and blew the brazier into rosy life, for it was none too warm within there. He closed and barred the door to keep out even the draught that found its way through the chinks. ‘I doubt if you’ll have eaten,’ he said, feeling along the shelf behind the door. ‘There are oat cakes here and some apples, and I think I have a morsel of cheese. You’ll be the better for a bite. And I have a wine that will do you no harm either.’
And behold, the boy was hungry! So simple it was. He was not long turned nineteen, and physically hearty, and he had eaten nothing since dawn. He began listlessly, docile to persuasion, and at the first bite he was alive again and ravenous, his eyes brightening, the glow of the blown brazier gilding and softening hollow cheeks. The wine, as Cadfael had predicted, did him no harm at all. Blood flowed through him again, with new warmth and urgency.
He said not one word of brother, father or lost love. It was still too early. He had heard himself falsely accused by one of them, falsely suspected by another, and what by the third? Left to pursue his devoted and foolish self-sacrifice, without a word to absolve him. He had a great load of bitterness still to shake from his heart. But praise God, he came to life for food and ate like a starved schoolboy. Brother Cadfael was greatly encouraged.
In the mortuary chapel, where Peter Clemence lay in his sealed coffin on his draped bier, Leoric Aspley had chosen to make his confession, and entreated Abbot Radulfus to be the priest to hear it. On his knees on the flagstones, by his own choice, he set forth the story as he had known it, the fearful discovery of his younger son labouring to drag a dead man into cover and hide him from all eyes, Meriet’s tacit acceptance of the guilt, and his own reluctance to deliver up his son to death, or let him go free.
‘I promised him I would deal with his dead man, even at the peril of my soul, and he should live, but in perpetual penance out of the world. And to that he agreed and embraced his penalty, as I now know or fear that I now know, for love of his brother, whom he had better reason for believing a murderer than ever I had for crediting the same guilt to Meriet. I am afraid, father, that he accepted his fate as much for my sake as for his brother’s, having cause, to my shame, to believe—no, to know!—that I built all on Nigel and all too little upon him, and could live on after writing him out of my life, though the loss of Nigel would be my death. As now he is lost indeed, but I can and I will live. Therefore my grievous sin against my son Meriet is not only this doubt of him, this easy credence of his crime and his banishment into the cloister, but stretches back to his birth in lifelong misprizing.
‘And as to my sin against you, father, and against this house, that also I confess and repent, for so to dispose of a suspect murderer and so to enforce a young man without a true vocation, was vile towards him and towards this house. Take that also into account, for I would be free of all my debts.
‘And as to my sin against Peter Clemence, my guest and my kinsman, in denying him Christian burial to protect the good name of my own house, I am glad now that the hand of God made use of my own abused son to uncover and undo the evil I have done. Whatever penance you decree for me in that matter, I shall add to it an endowment to provide Masses for his soul as long as my own life continues…’
As proud and rigid in confessing faults as in correcting them in his son, he unwound the tale to the end, and to the end Radulfus listened patiently and gravely, decreed measured terms by way of amends, and gave absolution.
Leoric arose stiffly from his knees, and went out in unaccustomed humility and dread, to look for the one son he had left.
The rapping at the closed and barred door of Cadfael’s workshop came when the wine, one of Cadfael’s three-year-old brews, had begun to warm Meriet into a hesitant reconciliation with life, blurring the sharp memories of betrayal. Cadfael opened the door, and into the mellow ring of light from the brazier stepped Isouda in her grown-up wedding finery, crimson and rose and ivory, a silver fillet round her hair, her face solemn and important. There was a taller shape behind her in the doorway, shadowy against the winter dusk.
‘I thought we might find you here,’ she said, and the light gilded her faint, secure smile. ‘I am a herald. You have been sought everywhere. Your father begs you to admit him to speech with you.’
Meriet had stiffened where he sat, knowing who stood behind her. ‘That is not the way I was ever summoned to my father’s presence,’ he said, with a fading spurt of malice and pain. ‘In his house things were not conducted so.’
‘Very well then,’ said Isouda, undisturbed. ‘Your father orders you to admit him here, or I do in his behalf, and you had better be sharp and respectful about it.’ And she stood aside, eyes imperiously beckoning Brother Cadfael and Brother Mark, as Leoric came into the hut, his tall head brushing the dangling bunches of dried herbs swinging from the beams.
Meriet rose from the bench and made a slow, hostile but punctilious reverence, his back stiff as pride itself, his eyes burning. But his voice was quiet and secure as he said: ‘Be pleased to come in. Will you sit, sir?’
Cadfael and Mark drew away one on either side, and followed Isouda into the chill of the dusk. Behind them they heard Leoric say, very quietly and humbly: ‘You will not now refuse me the kiss?’
There was a brief and perilous silence; then Meriet said hoarsely: ‘Father…’ and Cadfael closed the door.
In the high and broken heathland to the south-west of the town of Stafford, about this same hour, Nigel Aspley rode headlong into a deep copse, over thick, tussocky turf, and all but rode over his friend, neighbour and fellow-conspirator, Janyn Linde, cursing and sweating over a horse that went deadly lame upon a hind foot after treading askew and falling in the rough ground. Nigel cried recognition with relief, for he had small appetite for venturesome enterprises alone, and lighted down to look what the damage might be. But Isouda’s horse limped to the point of foundering, and manifestly could go no further.
‘You?’ cried Janyn. ‘You broke through, then? God curse this damned brute, he’s thrown me and crippled himself.’ He clutched at his friend’s arm. ‘What have you done with my sister? Left her to answer for all? She’ll run mad!’
‘She’s well enough and safe enough, we’ll send for her as soon as we may… You to cry out on me!’ flared Nigel, turning on him hotly. ‘You made your escape in good time, and left the pair of us in mire to the brows. Who sank us in this bog in the first place? Did II bid you kill the man? All I asked was that you send a rider ahead to give warning, have them put everything out of sight quickly before he came. They could have done it! How could I send? The man was lodged there in our house, I had no one to send who would not be missed… But you—you had to shoot him down…’
‘I had the hardihood to make all certain, where you would have flinched,’ spat Janyn, curling a contemptuous lip. ‘A rider would have got there too late. I made sure the bishop’s lackey should never get there.’
‘And left him lying! Lying in the open ride!’
‘For you to be fool enough to run there as soon as I told you!’ Janyn hissed derisive scorn at such weakness of will and nerve. ‘If you’d let him lie, who was ever to know who struck him down? But you must take fright, and rush to try and hide him, who was far better not hidden. And fetch your poor idiot brother down on you, and your father after him! That ever I broached such high business to such a broken reed!’
‘Or I ever listened to such a plausible tempter!’ fretted Nigel wretchedly. ‘Now here we are helpless. This creature cannot go—you see it! And the town above a mile distant, and night coming…’
‘And I had a head start,’ raged Janyn, stamping the thick, blanched grass, ‘and fortune ahead of me, and the beast had to founder! And you’ll be off to pick up the prizes due to both of us—you who crumple at the first threat! God’s curse on the day!’