He had become eloquent by reason of his own deep disquiet and distress, a good man concerned for the best interests of all his household. He had not remarked, as Cadfael did, the gradual blanching of Haluin’s thin face, the tight and painful set of his lips, or the way his linked hands gripped together in the lap of his habit until the bones shone white through the flesh. The words Cenred had not deliberately chosen to pierce or move had their own inspired force to reopen the old wound he had come all this way to try and heal. The lines of a remembered face, surely somewhat dimmed in eighteen years, were burning into vivid life again for him. And wounds that have not ceased to fester within cannot heal until they have again broken out and been cleansed, by fire if need be.
“And you need not fear, and neither need I,” said Cenred, “that she will not be cherished and held in high regard with de Perronet. Two years back he asked for her, and for all she would have none of him or any suitor then, he has waited his time.”
“Your lady is in agreement in this matter?” asked Cadfael.
“We have all three talked of it together. And we are agreed. Will you do it? I felt it a kind of blessing on what we intend,” said Cenred simply, “when a priest came to my door unsummoned on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming. Stay over tomorrow, Brother-Father!-and marry them.”
Haluin unlocked his contorted hands slowly, and drew breath like a man awaking in pain. In low voice he said, “I will stay. And I will marry them.”
“I trust I have done right,” said Haluin when they were back in their own quarters. But it did not seem that he was asking to be confirmed in his decision, rather setting it squarely before his own eyes as a responsibility he had no intention of hedging or sharing. “I know only too well,” he said, “the perils of proximity, and their case is more desperate than ever was mine. Cadfael, I feel myself listening to echoes I thought had died out long ago. It is all for a purpose. Nothing is without purpose. How if I fell only to show me how far I was already fallen, and force me to make the assay to rise afresh? How if I came to life again as a cripple, to make me undertake those journeys of body and spirit that I dreaded when I was strong and whole? How if God put it into my mind to go on pilgrimage in order to become some other needy soul’s miracle? Were we led to this place?”
“Driven, rather,” said Cadfael practically, remembering the blinding snow, and the small beckoning spark of the torch in the drifting dark.
“It’s true, to arrive on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming is very apt timing. I can but go with the burden of the day,” said Haluin, “and hope to be led aright. These second marriages in old age, Cadfael, have sorry tangles to answer for. How can two babes playing together in the rushes of the floor know that they are aunt and nephew, and fruit forbidden? A pity that love should be spent to no end.”
“I am not sure,” said Cadfael, “that love is ever spent for no end. Well, at least now you can be still and rest for a day or so, and all the better for it. That, at any rate, comes timely.”
And that was plainly the best use Haluin could make of this halt on the way home, since he had already tried himself very near the end of his endurance. Cadfael left him in peace, and went out to take a daylight look at this manor of Vivers. A cloudy day with a fitful wind, the air free of frost, and occasional fine drifts of rain in the air, but none that lasted long.
He walked the width of the enclave to the gate, to see the-full extent of the house. There were windows in the steep roof above the solar, probably two retiring rooms were available there. Haluin and companion had been accommodated considerately on the living floor. No doubt one of those upper chambers was being prepared at this moment for the expected bridegroom. The daily bustle about the courtyard seemed everywhere to be in hand without haste or confusion; things were well ordered here.
Beyond the pale of the stockade the soft, undulating landscape extended in field and copse and sparsely treed upland, all the greens still bleached and dried with winter, but the black branches showed here and there the first nodules of the leaf buds of spring. Faint frills of snow outlined all the hollows and sheltered places, but a gleam of sun was breaking through the low cloud, and by noon all the remnant of last night’s fall would be gone.
Cadfael looked into the stables and the mews, and found both well supplied and proudly kept by servitors ready and willing to show them off to an interested visitor. In. a separate stall in the kennels a hound bitch lay curled in clean straw with her six pups around her, perhaps five weeks old. He could not resist going into the dim shed to take up one of the young ones, and the dam was complacent, and welcomed admiration of her brood. The soft warmth of the small body in his arms had a smell like new bread. He was just stooping to lay the pup back among its siblings when a clear, cool voice behind him said:
“Are you the priest who is to marry me?”
And there she was in the doorway, again a shadowy form against the light, so composed, so assured that she might easily be taken for a mature and stately woman of thirty, though the fresh, light voice belonged to her proper age.
The girl Helisende Vivers, not yet decked out to receive her bridegroom, but in a plain housewifely gown of dark blue wool, and with a gently steaming pail of meat and meal for the hounds in one hand.
“Are you the priest who is to marry me?”
“No,” said Cadfael, slowly straightening up from the wriggling litter and the crooning bitch. “That is Brother Haluin. I never studied for orders. I know myself better.”
“It’s the lame man, then,” she said with detached sympathy. “I am sorry he suffers such hardship. I hope they have made him comfortable, here in our house. You do know about my marriage-that Jean comes here today?”
“Your brother has told us,” said Cadfael, watching the features of her oval face emerge softly from shadow, every plaintive, ingenuous line testifying to her youth. “But there are things he could not tell us,” he said, watching her intently, “except by hearsay. Only you can tell us whether this match has your consent, freely given, or no.”
Her brief silence at that did not suggest hesitation so much as a grave consideration of the man who raised the question. Her large eyes, dauntlessly honest, embraced and penetrated, quite unafraid of being penetrated in return. If she had judged him so alien to her needs and predicament as to be unacceptable, she would have closed the encounter there and then, civilly but without satisfying what would then have been there intrusive curiosity. But she did not.
“If we do anything freely, once we are grown,” she said, “then yes, this I do freely. There are rules that must be kept. There are others in the world with us who have rights and needs, and we are all bound. You may tell Brother Haluin-Father Haluin I must call him-that he need have no qualms for me. I know what I am doing. No one is forcing my hand.”
“I will tell him so,” said Cadfael. “But I think you do it for others, not for yourself.”
“Then say to him that I choose-freely-to do it for others.”
“And what of Jean de Perronet?” said Cadfael.
For one instant her firm, full lips shook. It was the one thing that still disrupted her resolute composure, that she was not being fair to the man who was to be her husband. Cenred would certainly not have told him that he was getting only a sad remainder after the heart was gone. Nor could she tell him so. The secret belonged only to the family. The only hope for this hapless pair was that love might come with time, a kind of love, better, perhaps, than many marriages ever achieve, but still far short of the crown.
“I will try,” she said steadily, “to give him all that he is asking, all that he wants and expects. He deserves well, he shall have the best I can do.”
There was no point in saying to her that it might not be enough, she already knew that, and was uneasy about a degree of deception she could not evade. It might even be that what had already been said here in the dimness of the kennels had reopened a deep abyss of doubt which she had almost succeeded in sealing over. Better let well alone, where there was no possibility of rendering the load she carried any lighter.