“Strange,” said Elyas suddenly, his voice low and creaky with disuse. “I feel that I should know you. Yet you are not a brother of the house.”
“You have known me,” said Yves, eager and hopeful. “For a short time we were together, do you remember? We came from Cleobury together, as far as Foxwood. My name is Yves Hugonin.”
No, the name meant nothing. Only the face, it seemed touched some chord in his disrupted memory. “There was snow threatening,” he said. “I had a reliquary to deliver here, they tell me 1 brought it safely. They tell me! All I know is what they tell me.”
“But you will remember,” said Yves earnestly. “It will come clear to you again. You may trust what they tell you, no one would deceive you. Shall I tell you more things? True things, that I know?”
The wondering, doubting face watched him, and made no motion of rejection. Yves leaned close, and began to talk solemnly and eagerly about what was past.
“You were coming from Pershore, but roundabout, to avoid the trouble in Worcester. And we had run from Worcester, and wanted to reach Shrewsbury. At Cleobury we were all lodged overnight, and you would have had us come here to Bromfield with you, as the nearest place of safety, and I wanted to go with you, but my sister would not, she would go on over the hills. We parted at Foxwood.” The face on the pillow was not responsive, but seemed to wait with a faint, patient hope. The wind shook the stout shutter covering the window, and filtered infinitely tiny particles of snow into the room, to vanish instantly. The candle flickered. The whine of the gale outside was a piercingly desolate sound.
“But you are here,” said Elyas abruptly, “far from Shrewsbury still. And alone! How is that, that you should be alone?”
“We were separated.” Yves was not quite easy, but if the sick man was beginning to ask questions thus intelligently, the threads of his torn recollections might knit again and present him a whole picture. Better to know both the bad and the good, since there was no guilt in it for him, he was the blameless victim, and surely knowledge should be healing. “Some kind country people sheltered me, and Brother Cadfael brought me here. But my sister . . . We are seeking her. She left us of her own will!” He could not resist that cry, but would not accuse her further. “I am sure we shall find her safe and well,” he said manfully.
“But there was a third,” said Brother Elyas, so softly, so inwardly, that it seemed he spoke to himself. “There was a nun . . .” And now he was not looking at Yves, but staring great-eyed into the vault above him, and his mouth worked agitatedly.
“Sister Hilaria,” said Yves, quivering in response.
“A nun of our order . . .” Elyas set both hands to the sides of his bed, and sat up strongly. Something had kindled in the deeps of his haunted eyes, a yellow, crazed light too vivid to be merely a reflection from the candle’s flame. “Sister Hilaria . . .” he said, and now at last he had found a name that meant something to him, but something so terrible that Yves reached both hands to take him by the shoulders, and urge him to lie down again.
“You mustn’t fret—she is not lost, she is here, most reverently tended and coffined. It is forbidden to wish her back, she is with God.” Surely they must have told him, but maybe he had not understood. Death could not be hidden away. He would grieve, naturally, but that is permitted. But you may not begrudge it that she has left us, Brother Cadfael had said.
Brother Elyas uttered a dreadful, anguished sound, yet so quiet that the howl of the wind at the shutter almost drowned it. He clenched both hands into large, bony fists, and struck them against his breast.
“Dead! Dead? In her youth, in her beauty—trusting me! Dead! Oh, stones of this house, fall and cover me, unhappy! Bury me out of the sight of men . . .”
Barely half of it was clear, the words crowded so thick on his tongue, choking him, and Yves in his alarm and dismay was hardly capable of listening, he cared only to allay this storm he had innocently provoked. He stretched an arm across Elyas’ breast, and tried to soothe him back to his pillow, his young, whole strength pitted against this demented vigor.
“Oh, hush, hush, you mustn’t vex yourself so. Lie down, you’re too weak to rise . . . Oh, don’t, you frighten me! Lie down!”
Brother Elyas sat rigidly upright, staring through the wall, gripping both hands against his heart, whispering what might have been prayers, or self-reproaches, or feverish, garbled recollections of times past. Against that private obsession all the force Yves could exert had no influence. Elyas was no longer even aware of him. If he spoke to any, it was to God, or to some creature invisible.
Yves turned and fled for help, closing the door behind him. Through the infirmary he ran full tilt, and out into the piled, whirling, howling snow of the court, across to the cloister and the warming-room, where surely they would be at this hour. He fell once, and plucked himself shivering out of a drift, halting to clear his eyes. The whole night was a rain of goosefeathers, but cold, cold, and the wind that flung them in his face cut like a knife. He stumbled and slithered to the door of the church, and there halted, hearing the chanting within. It was later than he had thought. Compline had already begun.
He had been too well schooled in the courtesies and proper observancies, he could not for any cause burst in upon the officer and bawl for help. He hung still for a few moments to get his breath and snake the snow from his hair and lashes. Compline was not long, surely he could go back and battle with his disordered charge until the office was over. Then there would be help in plenty. He had only to keep Brother Elyas quiet for a quarter of an hour.
He turned, half-blinded as soon as he left cover, and battled his way back through the drifts, laboring hard with his short, sturdy legs, and lowering his head like a little fighting bull against the wind.
The outer door of the infirmary stood open wide, but he was all too afraid that he had left it so in his haste. He blundered along the passage within, fending himself off from the walls with both hands as he shook off the snow that clung to his face. The door of the sickroom was also wide open. That brought him up with a jolt that jarred him to the heels.
The room was empty, the coverings of the bed hung low to the floor. Brother Elyas’ sandals, laid neatly side by side under the head of the bed, were gone. And so was Brother Elyas, just as he had risen from his sick-bed, clothed, habited but without cloak or covering, out into the night of the ninth of December, into such a blizzard as had raged the night he came by his all but mortal injuries, and Sister Hilaria by her death. The only name that had reached him in his solitary place.
Yves charged back along the passage to the doorway, and out into the storm. And there were tracks, though he had not seen them when he entered, because he had not expected them to be there, nor would they last long. They were filling fast, but they showed, large feet tramping down the steps and across the court, not towards the church, no—straight for the gatehouse. And Brother Porter had leave to attend Compline.
They were still chanting in the church, and Elyas could not have got far. Yves ran to grab his cloak from the porch of the guest-hall, and bolted like a startled hare, in convulsive leaps, towards the gatehouse. The tracks were filling fast, they lingered only as shallowing pits in the whiteness, picked out by the shadows cast from the few burning torches. But they reached and quitted the gate. The world without was nothing but a boiling whiteness, and the depth of the fall made walking hard labor for his short legs, but he plodded on relentlessly. The tracks turned right. So did Yves.
Some way along the road, wading blindly, with no sense of direction left to him in a snowfall that looked the same wherever he turned his face, but where the ground below him was still dimpled faintly with the furrows and pits of passage, he glimpsed in a momentary emptiness cleared by the gale’s caprice, a black shadow flitting before him. He fixed his eyes upon it, and plunged determinedly after.