De Perronet dismounted from his flecked roan horse before the door of the hall, and Cenred came striding down the steps to meet him and embrace him, and lead him by the hand up to the doorway, where the lady Emma waited to welcome him as warmly. Helisende, Cadfael noted, did not appear. At supper at the high table she would have no choice but to attend, but at this stage it was fitting that the honors of the house should rest with her brother and his wife, the guardians of her person and the disposers of her marriage. Host, hostess, and guest vanished within the great hall. Cenred’s servants and de Perronet’s grooms unloaded baggage and stabled horses, and went about the business so practically that within a matter of minutes the courtyard was empty.
So that was the bridegroom! Cadfael stood considering what he had seen, and so far could find no fault in it except that it was, as Edgytha had said, a second-best. And a second-best was all that boy would gain. A young man of perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six, already accustomed to authority and responsibility by his bearing, and well capable of handling them. His men, these favored ones at least, were easy with him. He knew his business as they knew theirs, and there was an air of mutual respect between them. Moreover, he was a good-looking young man, tall and shapely, of open, amiable countenance, and, by the look of him, in the happiest possible humor on the eve of his marriage. Cenred had done his best for his young sister, and his best promised to turn out very well. A pity it could not have been what her heart desired.
“But what else could he have done?” said Haluin, betraying in few words the depth of his own dismay and doubt.
Chapter Eight
In the late afternoon Cenred sent his steward to ask the two Benedictine brothers if they felt able to join his household at supper in hall, or if Father Haluin preferred to continue his rest in retirement, and be waited on in his own chamber. Haluin, who had withdrawn into a dark, inward meditation, would certainly rather have remained apart, but felt it discourteous to absent himself any longer, and made the effort to emerge from his anxious silence, and do honor to the company at the high table. They had given him a place close to the bridal pair, by virtue of his office as the priest who was to marry them. Cadfael, seated a little apart, had them all in view. And below, in the body of the hall, the whole household assembled in its due ranks, under the glow of the torches.
It occurred to Cadfael, watching Haluin’s grave face, that this would be the first time his friend had ever been called upon to be go-between for God. It was true that the young brothers were being encouraged to aim at orders, more now than ever in the past, but many of them would be, as Haluin was, priests without pastoral cares, who in a long life would probably never christen, never marry, never bury, never ordain others to follow them in the same sheltered paths. It is a terrible responsibility, thought Cadfael, who had never aspired to ordination, to have the grace of God committed to a man’s hands, to be privileged and burdened to play a part in other people’s lives, to promise them salvation in baptism, to lock their lives together in matrimony, to hold the key to purgatory at their departing. If I have meddled, he thought devoutly, and God knows I have, when need was and there was no better man to attempt it, at least I have meddled only as a fellow sinner, tramping the same road, not as a viscount of heaven, stooping to raise up. Now Haiuin faces this same terrible demand, and no wonder if he is afraid.
He looked along the array of faces which Haiuin, being so close beside them, could see only as overlapping profiles, each briefly seen as the ripple of movement flowed along the high table, and lit deceptively by the falling glow of the torches. Cenred’s broad, open, blunt-featured countenance a little drawn and taut with strain, but resolutely jovial, his wife presiding over the table with determined amiability and a somewhat anxious smile, de Perronet in happy innocence, shining with evident pleasure at having Helisende seated beside him and all but his already. And the girl, pale and quiet and resolutely gracious at his side, doing her gallant best to respond to his brightness, since this grief was no fault of his, and she had acknowledged that he deserved better. Seeing them thus together, there was no question of the man’s attachment, and if he missed the like radiance in her, perhaps he accepted that as the common ground on which marriages begin, and was ready and willing to be patient until the bud came to flower.
This was the first time Haiuin had seen the girl since she had startled him to his feet here in the hall, and brought him down in that crashing fall, half dazed as he already was by the stinging wind and the blinding snow. And this stiff young figure in her best, gilded by the torchlight, might have been a stranger, never before seen. He looked at her, when chance brought her profile into clear view, with doubt and bewilderment, burdened by a responsibility new to him, and heavy to bear.
It was late when the women withdrew from the high table, leaving the men to their wine, though they would not sit here in the hall much longer. Haluin looked round to catch Cadfael’s eye, agreeing in a glance that it was time for them to leave host and guest together, and Haluin was already reaching for his crutches and bracing himself for the effort of rising when Emma came in again from the solar with a flustered step and an anxious face, a young maidservant at her heels.
“Cenred, here’s something strange happened! Edgytha is gone out and has not returned, and now it’s beginning to snow again, and where should she be going, thus in the night? I sent for her to attend me to bed, as always, and she’s nowhere to be found, and now Madlyn here says that she went out hours ago, as soon as it was dusk.”
Cenred was slow to turn his mind from his hospitable duty towards his guest to an apparently small domestic problem, surely the women’s business rather than his.
“Why, Edgytha may surely go out if she so chooses,” he said good-humoredly,” and will come back when she chooses no less. She’s a free woman, knows her own mind, and can be trusted to mind her duties. If she’s once missing when she’s called for, that’s no great matter. Why should you worry over it?”
“But when does she ever do so without saying? Never! And now it’s snowing again, and she’s been gone four hours or more, if Madlyn says true. How if she’s come to harm? She would not stay away so long of her own will. And you know how I value her. I would not for the world that any harm should come to her.”
“No more would I,” said Cenred warmly, “nor to any of my people. If she’s gone astray we’ll look for her. But no need to fret before we know of any mishap. Here, girl, speak up, what is it you know of the matter? You say she went out some hours ago?”
“Sir, so she did!” Madlyn came forward willingly, wide-eyed with half-pleasurable excitement. “It was after we’d made all ready. I was coming in from the dairy, and I saw her come forth from the kitchen with her cloak about her, and I said to her that this was like to be a busy night, and she’d be missed, and she said she would be back before she was called for. It was just beginning to get dark then. I never thought she’d be gone so long.”
“And did you not ask her where she was going?” demanded Cenred.
“I did,” said the girl, “though it was little enough she was ever likely to tell about her own business, and I should have known she’d make a sour answer if she made any at all. But there’s no sense to be made of it. She said she was going to find a cat,” said Madlyn in baffled innocence, “to put among the pigeons.”
If it meant nothing to her, it had meaning for Cenred and for his wife, who plainly heard it now for the first time. Emma’s startled gaze flew to her husband’s face as he came abruptly to.his feet. The look they exchanged Cadfael could read as if he had the words ringing in his ears. He had been given clues enough to make the reading easy. Edgytha was nurse to them both, indulged them, loved them like her own, resents even their separation, whatever the church and the ties of blood may say, and much more this marriage that makes the separation final. She is gone to enlist help to prevent what she deplores, even at this last moment. She is gone to tell Roscelin what is being done behind his back. She is gone to Elford.