She passed by silently, so that he should not hear, and turn upon her the too radiant, too exultant blue eyes. The dark eyes that she remembered, deeply and delicately set beneath arched black brows, had never looked so, never for her. Always dutiful, always wary, often lowered in her presence.
Adelais went out into the chill of the evening, and turned towards her own apartments. Well, it was over. The fire was ashes. She would never see him again.
“Yes, I have seen her,” said Brother Haluin. “Yes, I have spoken with her. I have touched her hand, it is warm flesh, woman’s flesh, no illusion. The portress brought me into her presence all unprepared, I could neither speak nor move. She had been so long dead to me. Even that glimpse I had of her in the garth among the birds… Afterward, when you were gone, I could not be sure I had not dreamed it. But to touch her, to have her call me by my name… And she was glad…
“Her case was not as mine, though God knows I would not say her burden has been any lighter. But she knew I was man alive, she knew where I was, and what I was, and for her there was no guilt, she had done no wrong but in loving me. And she could speak. Such words she offered me, Cadfael! ‘Here is one,’ she said, ‘who has already embraced you, with good right. Now with good right embrace her. She is your daughter. Can you conceive such a miracle? Giving the child to me by the hand, she said it. Helisende, my daughter-not dead! Alive and young and kind and fresh as a flower. And I thought I had destroyed her, destroyed them both! Of her own sweet will the child kissed me. Even if it was only from pity-it must have been pity, how could she love one she never knew?-but even if it was only from pity, it was a gift beyond gold.
“And she will be happy. She can love as it best pleases her, and marry where her heart is. Once she called me, ‘Father,’ but I think it was as a priest, as first she knew me. Even so it was good to hear and will be sweet to remember.
“This hour we three have had together repays all the eighteen years, even though there was so little said between us. The heart could hold no more. She is gone to her duties now, Bertrade. So must I to mine, soon… very soon… tomorrow…”
Cadfael had sat silent through the long, stumbling, eloquent monologue of his friend’s revelation, broken by long pauses in which Haluin was rapt away again into a trance of wonder. Not one word of the abominable thing that had been done to him, wantonly, cruelly, that was washed clean away out of the mind by the joy of its undoing, without a lingering thought of blame or forgiveness. And that was the last and most ironic judgment on Adelais de Clary.
“Shall we go to Vespers?” said Cadfael. “The bell has gone, they’ll all be in their places by now, we can creep in unnoticed.”
From their chosen dim corner in the church Cadfael scanned the young, clear faces of the sisters, and lingered long upon Sister Benedicta, who had once been Bertrade de Clary. Beside him Haluin’s low, happy voice intoned the responses and prayers, but what Cadfael was hearing in his own mind was the same voice bleeding words slowly and haltingly, in the darkness of the forester’s hayloft, before dawn. There in her stall, serene, fulfilled, and content, stood the woman he had tried to describe. “She was not beautiful, as her mother was. She had not that dark radiance, but something more kindly. There was nothing dark or secret in her, but everything open and sunlit, like a flower. She was not afraid of anything-not then. She trusted everyone. She had never been betrayed-not then. Only once, and she died of it.”
But no, she had not died. And certainly at this moment, devout and dutiful, there was nothing dark or secret in her. The oval face shone serene, as she celebrated with joy the mercy of God, after years. Without any lingering regret; her contentment was without blemish. The vocation she had undertaken unblessed, and labored at against the grain, perhaps, all these years, surely reached its true wholeness only now, in the revelation of grace. She would not have turned back now even for that first love. There was no need. There are seasons of love. Theirs had passed beyond the storms of spring and the heat of summer into the golden calm of the first autumn days, before the leaves begin to fall. Bertrade de Clary looked as Brother Haluin looked, confirmed and invulnerable in the peace of the spirit. Henceforth presence was unnecessary, and passion irrelevant. They were eased of the past, and both of them had work to do for the future, all the more eagerly and thoroughly for knowing, each of them, that the other lived and labored in the same vineyard.
In the morning, after Prime, their farewells made, they set out on the long journey home.
The sisters were in chapter when Cadfael and Haluin took scrip and crutches and went out from the guest hall, but the girl Helisende went with them to the gate. It seemed to Cadfael that all these faces about him had been washed clear of every shadow and every doubt; they had all of them that stunned brightness, astonished by the good that had befallen them. Now it could be seen more clearly how like were father and daughter, so many of the marks of the years having been smoothed from Haluin’s face.
Helisende embraced him without words at parting, fervent but shy. However they had spent the previous day, whatever confidences had been exchanged, she could not so quickly know him of her own knowledge, only through her mother’s eyes, but she knew of him that he was gentle and of pleasing person and address, and that his eruption into her life had freed her from a nightmare of guilt and loss, and she would always remember and think of him so, with pleasure and gratitude not so far distant from love. Profit enough, even if he never saw her again.
“God keep you, Father!” said Helisende.
It was the first and the last time that she gave him that title not as a priest but as a man, but it was a gift that would last him a lifetime.
They halted for the night at Hargedon, where the canons of Hampton had a grange, in a countryside slowly being recovered out of the waste that had followed the Norman settlement. Only now, after sixty years, was ploughland being resurrected out of the scrub, and an occasional hamlet being raised where tracks crossed, or rivers provided water for a mill. The comparative security offered by the presence of the canons’ steward and servants had drawn others to settle close by, and there were now assarts being hewn out of the neglected woods by enterprising younger sons. But still it was sparsely populated territory, level, lonely, and in the evening light melancholy. Yet with every labored step taken westward across this mournful plain Brother Haluin’s brightness increased, his pace quickened, and his color flushed into eagerness.
From the narrow unshuttered window in the loft he looked out westward into a night full of stars. Nearer to Shrewsbury, where the hills began to heave their fleeces towards the mountains of Wales, earth and sky balanced in harmony, but here the vault above looked immense, and the earth of men suppressed and shadowy. The brilliance of the stars, the blackness of the space between, spoke of a touch of frost in the air, but promised a fine day for the morrow.
“And you never feel,” said Cadfael quietly, “any desire to look back over your shoulder?”
“No,” said Haluin tranquilly. “No need. There behind me all is well. All is very well. There is nothing now for me to do there, everything where I am bound. We are sister and brother now. We ask nothing more, we want nothing more. Now I can bring a whole heart to God. I’m glad beyond measure that he cast me down, to raise me renewed to his service.”
There was a long, untroubled silence, while he continued to stare out into the clear night with a kind of bright hunger in his face. “I left a leaf half finished when we set out for Hales,” he said meditatively. “I thought to be back to complete it long before this. I hope Anselm has not given it to someone else. It was a capital N for the Nunc Dimittis, still wanting half of the colors.”
“It will be waiting for you,” Cadfael assured him.
“Aelfric is good, but he doesn’t know my intent, he might overdo the gold.” His voice was soft and practical and young.