The night passed slowly, with no perceptible change in Brother Haluin’s unrelenting stillness. It was towards dawn when at last Rhun said softly, “Look, he is stirring!”
The faintest quiver had passed over the livid face, the dark brows drew together, the eyelids tightened with the first distant awareness of pain, the lips lengthened in a brief grimace of stress and alarm. They waited for what seemed a long while, unable to do more than wipe the moist forehead, and the trickle of spittle that oozed from the corner of the drawn mouth.
In the first dim, reflected snowlight before dawn Brother Haluin opened his eyes, onyx black in their blue hollows, and moved his lips to emit a hair-fine thread of a voice that Rhun had to stoop his young, sharp ear to catch and interpret.
“Confession…” said the whisper from the threshold between life and death, and for a while that was all.
“Go and bring Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.
Rhun departed silently and swiftly. Haluin lay gathering his senses, and by the growing clarity and sharpening focus of his eyes he knew where he was and who sat beside him, and was mustering what life and wit remained to him for a purpose. Cadfael saw the quickening of pain in the strained whiteness of mouth and jaw, and made to trickle a little of the draught of poppies between his patient’s lips, but Haluin kept them tightly clenched and turned his head away. He wanted nothing to dull or hamper his senses, not yet, not until he had got out of him what he had to say.
“Father Abbot is coming,” said Cadfael, close to the pillow. “Wait, and speak but once.”
Abbot Radulfus was at the door by then, stooping under the low lintel. He took the stool Rhun had vacated, and leaned down to the injured man. Rhun had remained without, ready to run errands if he should be needed, and had drawn the door closed between. Cadfael rose to withdraw likewise, and suddenly yellow sparks of anxiety flared in Haluin’s hollow eyes, and a brief convulsion went through his body and fetched a moan of pain, as though he had willed to lift a hand to arrest Cadfael’s going, but could not do it. The abbot leaned closer, to be seen as well as heard.
“I am here, my son. I am listening. What is it troubles you?”
Haluin drew in breath, hoarding it to have a voice to speak with. “I have sins…” he said, “… never told.” The words came slowly and with much labor, but clearly. “One against Cadfael… Long past… never confessed…”
The abbot looked up at Cadfael across the bed. “Stay! He wishes it.” And to Haluin, touching the lax hand that was too weak to be lifted: “Speak as you can, we shall be listening. Spare many words, we can read between.”
“My vows,” said the thread-fine voice remotely. “Impure… not out of devotion… Despair!”
“Many have entered for wrong reasons,” said the abbot, “and remained for the right ones. Certainly in the four years of my abbacy here I have found no fault in your true service. On this head have no fear. God may have brought you into the cloister roundabout for his own good reasons.”
“I served de Clary at Hales,” said the thin voice. “Better, his lady-he being in the Holy Land then. His daughter…” A long silence while doggedly and patiently he renewed his endurance to deliver more and worse. “I loved her… and was loved. But the mother… my suit was not welcome. What was forbidden us we took…”
Another and longer silence. The blue, sunken lids were lowered for a moment over the burning eyes. “We lay together,” he said clearly. “That sin I did confess, but never named her. The lady cast me out. Out of despair I came here… at least to do no more harm. And the worst harm yet to come!”
The abbot closed his hand firmly on the nerveless hand at Haluin’s side, to hold him fast by the grip, for the face on the pillow had sunk into a mask of clay, and a long shudder passed through the bruised and broken body, and left it tensed and chill to the touch.
“Rest!” said Radulfus, close to the sufferer’s ear. “Take ease! God hears even what is not said.”
It seemed to Cadfael, watching, that Haluin’s hand responded, however feeble its hold. He brought the drink of wine and herbs with which he had been moistening the patient’s mouth while he lay senseless, and trickled a few drops between the pained lips, and for the first time the offering was accepted, and the strings of the lean throat made the effort to swallow. His time was not yet. Whatever more he might have to heave off his heart, there was yet time for it. They fed him sips of wine, and watched the clay of his features again cohere into flesh, however pale and feeble. This time, when he came back to them, it was very faintly and with eyes still closed.
“Father…?” questioned the remote voice fearfully.
“I am here. I will not leave you.”
“Her mother came… I did not know till then Bertrade was with child! The lady was in terror of her lord’s anger when he came home. I served then with Brother Cadfael, I had learned… I knew the herbs… I stole and gave her… hyssop, fleur-de-lis… Cadfael knows better uses for them!”
Yes, better by far! But what could help a badly congested chest and a killing cough, in small doses, or fight off the jaundice that turned a man yellow, could also put an end to the carrying of a child, in an obscene misuse abhorrent to the Church and perilous even to the woman it was meant to deliver. From fear of an angry father, fear of shame before the world, fear of marriage prospects ruined and family feuds inflamed. Had the girl’s mother entreated him, or had he persuaded her? Years of remorse and self-punishment had not exorcised the horror that still wrung his flesh and contorted his visage.
“They died,” he said, harsh and loud with pain. “My love and the child, both. Her mother sent me word-dead and buried. A fever, they gave it out. Dead of a fever-nothing more to fear. My sin, my most grievous sin… God knows I am sorry!”
“Where true penitence is,” said Abbot Radulfus, “God does surely know. Well, this grief is told. Have you done, or is there more yet to tell?”
“I have done,” said Brother Haluin. “But to beg pardon. I ask it of God-and of Cadfael, that I abused his trust and his art. And of the lady of Hales, for the great grief I brought upon her.” Now that it was out he had better control of voice and words, the crippling tension was gone from his tongue, and weak though his utterance was, it was lucid and resigned. “I would die cleansed and forgiven,” he said.
“Brother Cadfael will speak on his own behalf,” said the abbot. “For God, I will speak as He give me grace.”
“I forgive freely,” said Cadfael, choosing words with more than his accustomed care, “whatever offense was done against my craft under great stress of mind. And that the means and the knowledge were there to tempt you, and I not there to dissuade, this I take to myself as much as ever I can charge them to you. I wish you peace!”
What Abbot Radulfus had to say upon God’s behalf took longer. There were some among the brothers, Cadfael thought, who would have been startled and incredulous if they could have heard, at finding their abbot’s formidable austerity could also hold so much measured and authoritative tenderness. A lightened conscience and a clean death were what Haluin desired. It was too late to exact penance from a dying man, and deathbed comfort cannot be priced, only given freely.
“A broken and a contrite heart,” said Radulfus, “is the only sacrifice required of you, and will not be despised.” And he gave absolution and the solemn blessing, and so left the sickroom, beckoning Cadfael with him. On Haluin’s face the ease of gratitude had darkened again into the indifference of exhaustion, and the fires were dead in eyes dulled and half closed between swoon and sleep.
In the outer room Rhun was waiting patiently, drawn somewhat aside to avoid hearing, even unwittingly, any word of that confession.
“Go in and sit with him,” said the abbot. “He may sleep now, there will be no ill dreams. If there should be any change in him, fetch Brother Edmund. And if Brother Cadfael should be needed, send to my lodging for him.”
In the paneled parlor in the abbot’s lodge they sat together, the only two people who would ever hear of the offense with which Haluin charged himself, or have the right in private to speak of his confession.