‘I was with Robert of Normandy’s company, and a mongrel lot we were, Britons, Normans, Flemings, Scots, Bretons—name them, they were there! After the city was settled and Baldwin crowned, the most of us went home, over a matter of two or three years, but I had taken to the sea by then, and I stayed. There were pirates ranged those coasts, we had always work to do.’
The young thing beside him had not missed a word of what had been said, he quivered like an untrained but thoroughbred hound hearing the horn, though he said nothing.
‘And in the end I came home, because it was home and I felt the need of it,’ said Cadfael. ‘I served here and there as a free man-at-arms for a while and then I was ripe, and it was time. But I had had my way through the world.’
‘And now, what do you do here?’ wondered Meriet.
‘I grow herbs, and dry them, and make remedies for all the ills that visit us. I physic a great many souls besides those of us within.’
‘And that satisfies you?’ It was a muted cry of protest; it would not have satisfied him.
‘To heal men, after years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does what he must do,’ said Cadfael carefully, ‘whether the duty he has taken on himself is to fight, or to salvage poor souls from the fighting, to kill, to die or to heal. There are many will claim to tell you what is due from you, but only one who can shear through the many, and reach the truth. And that is you, by what light falls for you to show the way. Do you know what is hardest for me here of all I have vowed? Obedience. And I am old.’
And have had my fling, and a wild one, was implied. And what am I trying to do now, he wondered, to warn him off pledging too soon what he cannot give, what he has not got to give?
‘It is true!’ said Meriet abruptly. ‘Every man must do what is laid on him to do and not question. If that is obedience?’ And suddenly he turned upon Brother Cadfael a countenance altogether young, devout and exalted, as though he had just kissed, as once Cadfael had, the crossed hilt of his own poniard, and pledged his life’s blood to some cause as holy to him as the deliverance of the city of God.
Cadfael had Meriet on his mind the rest of that day, and after Vespers he confided to Brother Paul the uneasiness he felt in recalling the day’s disaster; for Paul had been left behind with the children, and the reports that had reached him had been concerned solely with Brother Wolstan’s fall and injuries, not with the unaccountable horror they had aroused in Meriet.
‘Not that there’s anything strange in shying at the sight of a man lying in his blood, they were all shaken by it. But he—what he felt was surely extreme.’
Brother Paul shook his head doubtfully over his difficult charge. ‘Everything he feels is extreme. I don’t find in him the calm and the certainty that should go with a true vocation. Oh, he is duty itself, whatever I ask of him he does, whatever task I set him he performs, he’s greedy to go faster than I lead him. I never had a more diligent student. But the others don’t like him, Cadfael. He shuns them. Those who have tried to approach him say he turns from them, and is rough and short in making his escape. He’d rather go solitary. I tell you, Cadfael, I never knew a postulant pursue his novitiate with so much passion, and so little joy. Have you once seen him smile since he entered here?”
Yes, once, thought Cadfael; this afternoon before Wolstan fell, when he was picking apples in the orchard, the first time he’s left the enclave since his father brought him in.
‘Do you think it would be well to bring him to chapter?’ he wondered dubiously.
‘I did better than that, or so I hoped. With such a nature, I would not seem to be complaining where I have no just cause for complaint. I spoke to Father Abbot about him. “Send him to me,” says Radulfus, “and reassure him,” he says, “that I am here to be open to any who need me, the youngest boy as surely as any of my obedientiaries, and he may approach me as his own father, without fear.” And send him I did, and told him he could open his thoughts with every confidence. And what came of it? “Yes, Father, no, Father, I will, Father!” and never a word blurted out from the heart. The only thing that opens his lips freely is the mention that he might be mistaken in coming here, and should consider again. That brings him to his knees fast enough. He begs to have his probation shortened, to be allowed to take his vows soon. Father Abbot read him a lecture on humility and the right use of the year’s novitiate, and he took it to heart, or seemed to, and promised patience. But still he presses. Books he swallows faster than I can feed them to him, he’s bent on hurrying to his vows at all costs. The slower ones resent him. Those who can keep pace with him, having the start of him by two months or more, say he scorns them. That he avoids I’ve seen for myself. I won’t deny I’m troubled for him.’
So was Cadfael, though he did not say how deeply.
‘I couldn’t but wonder…’ went on Paul thoughtfully. ‘Tell him he may come to me as to his father, without fear, says the abbot. What sort of reassurance should that be to a young fellow new from home? Did you see them, Cadfael, when they came? The pair of them together?’
‘I did,’ said Cadfael cautiously, ‘though only for moments as they lighted down and shook off the rain, and went within.’
‘When did you need more than moments?’ said Brother Paul. ‘As to his own father, indeed! I was present throughout, I saw them part. Without a tear, with few words and hard, his sire went hence and left him to me. Many, I know, have done so before, fearing the parting as much as their young could fear it, perhaps more.’ Brother Paul had never engendered, christened, nursed, tended young of his own, and yet there had been some quality in him that the old Abbot Heribert, no subtle nor very wise man, had rightly detected, and confided to him the boys and the novices in a trust he had never betrayed. ‘But I never saw one go without the kiss,’ said Paul. ‘Never before. As Aspley did.’
In the darkness of the long dortoir, almost two hours past Compline, the only light was the small lamp left burning at the head of the night stairs into the church, and the only sound the occasional sigh of a sleeper turning, or the uneasy shifting of a wakeful brother. At the head of the great room Prior Robert had his cell, commanding the whole length of the open corridor between the two rows of cells. There had been times when some of the younger brothers, not yet purged of the old Adam, had been glad of the fact that the prior was a heavy sleeper. Sometimes Cadfael himself had been known to slip out by way of the night stairs, for reasons he considered good enough. His first encounters with Hugh Beringar, before that young man won his Aline or achieved his office, had been by night, and without leave. And never regretted! What Cadfael did not regret, he found grave difficulty in remembering to confess. Hugh had been a puzzle to him then, an ambiguous young man who might be either friend or enemy. Proof upon proof since then sealed him friend, the closest and dearest.
In the silence of this night after the apple-gathering, Cadfael lay awake and thought seriously, not about Hugh Beringar, but about Brother Meriet, who had recoiled with desperate revulsion from the image of a stabbed man lying dead in the grass. An illusion! The injured novice lay sleeping in his bed now, no more than three or four cells from Meriet, uneasily, perhaps, with his ribs swathed and sore, but there was not a sound from where he lay, he must be fathoms deep. Did Meriet sleep half as well? And where had he seen, or why had he so vividly imagined, a dead man in his blood?
The quiet, with more than an hour still to pass before midnight, was absolute. Even the restless sleepers had subsided into peace. The boys, by the abbot’s orders separated from their elders, slept in a small room at the end of the dortoir, and Brother Paul occupied the cell that shielded their private place. Abbot Radulfus knew and understood the unforseen dangers that lurked in ambush for celibate souls, however innocent.