by Ellis Peters
When he rose, the first faint pre-dawn softening of the darkness had grown into a pallid, pearly hint of light, drawing in the tall shapes of the nave windows clearly, and conjuring pillar and vault and altar out of the gloom. Cadfael passed down the nave to the west door, which was never fastened but in time of war or danger, and went out to the steps to look along the Foregate towards the bridge and the town.
They were coming. An hour and more yet to Prime, and only the first dim light by which to ride out, but he could already hear the hooves, crisp and rapid and faintly hollow on the bridge. He heard the change in their tread as they emerged upon the solid ground of the Foregate, and saw as it were an agitation of the darkness, movement without form, even before faint glints of lambent light on steel gave shape to their harness and brought them human out of the obscurity. No panoply, only the lance-pennants, two slung trumpets for very practical use, and the workmanlike light arms in which they rode. Thirty lances and five mounted archers. The remainder of the archers had gone ahead with the supplies. Hugh had done well by King Stephen, they made a very presentable company and numbered, probably, more than had been demanded.
Cadfael watched them pass, Hugh at the head on his favourite raw-boned grey. There were faces he knew among them, seasoned soldiers of the garrison, sons of merchant families from the town, expert archers from practice at the butts under the castle wall, young squires from the manors of the shire. In normal times the common service due from a crown manor would have been perhaps one esquire and his harness, and a barded horse, for forty days’ service against the Welsh near Oswestry. Emergencies such as the present anarchy in East Anglia upset all normalities, but some length of service must have been stipulated even now. Cadfael had not asked for how many days these men might be at risk. There went Nigel Apsley among the lances, well-mounted and comely. That lad had made one tentative assay into treason, Cadfael remembered, only three years back, and no doubt was intent upon putting that memory well behind him by diligent service now. Well, if Hugh saw fit to make use of him, he had probably learned his lesson well, and was not likely to stray again. And he was a good man of his hands, athletic and strong, worth his place.
They passed, the drumming of their hooves dull on the packed, dry soil of the roadway, and the sound ebbed into distance along the wall of the enclave. Cadfael watched them until they almost faded from sight in the gloom, and then at the turn of the highway vanished altogether round the high precinct wall. The light came grudgingly, for the sky hung low in heavy cloud. This was going to be a dark and overcast day, possibly later a day of rain. Rain was the last thing King Stephen would want in the Fens, to reduce all land approaches and complicate all marshland paths. It costs much money to keep an army in the field, and though the king summoned numbers of men to give duty service this time, he would still be paying a large company of Flemish mercenaries, feared and hated by the civilian population, and disliked even by the English who fought alongside them. Both rivals in the unending dispute for the crown made use of Flemings. To them the right side was the side that paid them, and could as easily change to the opposing party if they offered more; yet Cadfael in his time had known many mercenaries who held fast faithfully to their bargains, once struck, while barons and earls like de Mandeville changed direction as nimbly as weathercocks for their own advantage.
They were gone, Hugh’s compact and competent little company, even the last fading quiver and reverberation of earth under them stilled. Cadfael turned and went back through the great west door into the church.
There was another figure moving softly round the parish altar, a silent shadow in the dimness still lit only by the constant lamps. Cadfael followed him into the choir, and watched him light a twisted straw taper at the small red glow, and kindle the altar candles ready for Prime. It was a duty that was undertaken in a rota, and Cadfael had no idea at this moment whose turn this day might be, until he had advanced almost within touch of the man standing quietly, with head raised, gazing at the altar. An erect figure, lean but sinewy and strong, with big, shapely hands folded at his waist, and deepset eyes wide and fixed in a rapt dream. Brother Ruald heard the steady steps drawing near to him, but felt no need to turn his head or in any other way acknowledge a second presence. Sometimes he seemed almost unaware that there were others sharing this chosen life and this place of refuge with him. Only when Cadfael stood close beside him, sleeve to sleeve, and the movement made the candles flicker briefly, did Ruald look round with a sharp sigh, disturbed out of his dream.
“You are early up, Brother,” he said mildly. “Could you not sleep?”
“I rose to see the sheriff and his company set out,” said Cadfael.
“They are gone already?” Ruald drew breath wonderingly, contemplating a life and a discipline utterly alien to his former or his present commitment. Half the life he could expect had been spent as a humble craftsman, for some obscure reason the least regarded among craftsmen, though why honest potters should be accorded such low status was a mystery to Cadfael. Now all the life yet remaining to him would be spent here in the devoted service of God. He had never so much as shot at the butts for sport, as the young bloods of Shrewsbury’s merchant families regularly did, or done combat with singlesticks or blunt swords at the common exercise-ground. “Father Abbot will have prayers said daily for their safe and early return,” he said. “And so will Father Boniface at the parish services.” He said it as one offering reassurance and comfort to a soul gravely concerned, but by something which touched him not at all. A narrow life his had been, Cadfael reflected, and looked back with gratitude at the width and depth of his own. And suddenly it began to seem to him as though all the passion there had been even in this man’s marriage, all the blood that had burned in its veins, must have come from the woman.
“It is to be hoped,” he said shortly, “that they come back as many as they have set out today.”
“So it is,” agreed Ruald meekly, “yet they who take the sword, so it’s written, will perish by the sword.”
“You will not find a good honest swordsman quarrelling with that,” said Cadfael. “There are far worse ways.”
“That may well be true,” said Ruald very seriously. “I do know that I have things to repent, things for which to do penance, fully as dreadful as the shedding of blood. Even in seeking to do what God required of me, did not I kill? Even if she is still living, there in the east, I took as it were the breath of life from her. I did not know it then. I could not even see her face clearly, to understand how I tore her. And here am I, unsure now whether I did well at all in following what I thought was a sacred beckoning, or whether I should not have forgone even this, for her sake. It may be God was putting me to the test. Tell me, Cadfael, you have lived in the world, travelled the world, known the extremes to which men can be driven, for good or ill. Do you think there was ever any man ready to forgo even heaven, to stay with another soul who loved him, in purgatory?”
To Cadfael, standing close beside him, this lean and limited man seemed to have grown taller and more substantial; or it might have been simply the growing strength and clarity of the light now gleaming in at every window, paling the candles on the altar. Certainly the mild and modest voice had never been so eloquent.
“Surely the range is so wide,” he said with slow and careful deliberation, “that even that is possible. Yet I doubt if such a marvel was demanded of you.”
“In three days more,” said Ruald more gently, watching the flames he had lit burn tall and steady and golden, “it will be Saint Illtud’s day. You are Welsh, you will know what is told of him. He had a wife, a noble lady, willing to live simply with him in a reed hut by the River Nadafan. An angel told him to leave his wife, and he rose up early in the morning, and drove her out into the world alone, thrusting her off, so we are told, very roughly, and went to receive the tonsure of a monk from Saint Dyfrig. I was not rough, yet that is my own case, for so I parted from Generys. Cadfael, what I would ask is, was that an angel who commande
d it, or a devil?”
“You are posing a question,” said Cadfael, “to which only God can know the answer, and with that we must be content. Certainly others before you have received the same call that came to you, and obeyed it. The great earl who founded this house and sleeps there between the altars, he, too, left his lady and put on the habit before he died.” Only three days before he died, actually, and with his wife’s consent, but no need at this moment to say any word of that.
Never before had Ruald opened up the sealed places within him where his wife was hidden, even from his own sight, first by the intensity of his desire for holiness, then by the human fallibility of memory and feeling which had made it hard even to recall the lines of her face. Conversion had fallen on him like a stunning blow that had numbed all sensation, and now in due time he was coming back to life, remembrance filling his being with sharp and biting pain. Perhaps he never could have wrenched his heart open and spoken about her, except in this timeless and impersonal solitude, with no witness but one.
For he spoke as if to himself, clearly and simply, rather recalling than recounting. “I had no intent to hurt her—Generys… I could not choose but go, yet there are ways and ways of taking leave. I was not wise. I had no skills, I did not do it well. And I had taken her from her own people, and she content all these years with little reward but the man I am, and wanting nothing more. I can never have given her a tenth part, not a mere tithe, of all that she gave me.”
Cadfael was motionless, listening, as the quiet voice continued its threnody. “Dark, she was, very dark, very beautiful. Everyone would call her so, but now I see that none ever knew how beautiful, for to the world outside it was as if she went vetted, and only I ever saw her uncover her face. Or perhaps, to children—to them she might show herself unconcealed. We never had children, we were not so blessed. That made her tender and loving to those her neighbours bore. She is not yet past all hope of bearing children of her own. Who knows but with another man, she might yet conceive.”
“And you would be glad for her?” said Cadfael, so softly as not to break this thread.
“I would be glad. I would be wholly glad. Why should she continue barren, because I am fulfilled? Or bound, where I am free? I never thought of that when the longing came on me.”
“And do you believe she told you truth, the last time, saying that she had a lover?”
“Yes,” said Ruald, simply and without hesitation, “I do believe. Not that she might not lie to me then, for I was crass and did her bitter offence, as now I understand, even by visiting her then I offended. I believe because of the ring. You remember it? The ring that Sulien brought back with him when he came from Ramsey.”
“I remember it,” said Cadfael.
The dormitory bell was just ringing to rouse the brothers for Prime. In some remote corner of their consciousness it sounded very faintly and distantly, and neither of them heeded it.
“It never left her finger, from the time I put it there. I would not have thought it could be eased over her knuckle, after so long. The first time that I visited her with Brother Paul I know she was wearing it as she always did. But the second time… I had forgotten, but now I understand. It was not on her finger when I saw her the last time. She had stripped her marriage to me from her finger with the ring, and given it to someone else, as she stripped me from her life, and offered it to him. Yes, I believe Generys had a lover. One worth the loving, she said. With all my heart I hope he has proved so to her.”
Chapter 10
THROUGHOUT THE CEREMONIES and services and readings of Saint Winifred’s day a morsel of Cadfael’s mind, persistent and unrepentant, occupied itself, much against his will, with matters which had nothing to do with the genuine adoration he had for his own special saint, whom he thought of always as she had been when her first brief life was so brutally ended: a girl of about seventeen, fresh, beautiful and radiant, brimming over with kindness and sweetness as the waters of her well brimmed always sparkling and pure, defying frost, radiating health of body and soul. He would have liked his mind to be wholly filled with her all this day, but obstinately it turned to Ruald’s ring, and the pale circle on the finger from which Generys had ripped it, abandoning him as he had abandoned her.
It became ever more clear that there had indeed been another man. With him she had departed, to settle, it seemed in Peterborough, or somewhere in that region, perhaps a place even more exposed to the atrocities of de Mandeville’s barbarians. And when the reign of murder and terror began, she and her man had taken up their new, shallow roots, turned what valuables they had into money, and removed further from the threat, leaving the ring for young Sulien to find, and bring home with him for Ruald’s deliverance. That, at least, was surely what Ruald believed. Every word he had spoken before the altar that morning bore the stamp of sincerity. So now much depended on the matter of forty miles or so between Cambridge and Peterborough. Not such a short distance, after all, but if all went well with the king’s business, and he thought fit soon to dispense with a force that could be better employed keeping an eye on the Earl of Chester, a passage by way of Peterborough would not greatly lengthen the way home.
And if the answer was yes, confirming every word of Sulien’s story, then Generys was indeed still living, and not abandoned to loneliness, and the dead woman of the Potter’s Field was still left adrift and without a name. But in that case, why should Sulien have stirred himself so resolutely to prove Britric, who was nothing to him, as innocent as Ruald? How could he have known, and why should he even have conceived the possibility, that the pedlar was innocent? Or that the woman Gunnild was alive, or even might be alive?
And if the answer was no, and Sulien had never spent the night with the silversmith in Peterborough, never begged the ring of him, but made up his story in defence of Ruald out of whole cloth, and backed it with a ring he had had in his possession all along, then surely he had been weaving a rope for his own neck while he was so busy unpicking someone else’s bonds.
But as yet there was no answer, and no way of hastening it, and Cadfael did his best to pay proper attention to the office, but Saint Winifred’s feast passed in distracted thought. In the days that followed he went about his work in the herbarium conscientiously but without his usual hearty concentration, and was taciturn and slightly absent-minded with Brother Winfrid, whose placidity of temperament and boyish appetite for work fortunately enabled him to ride serenely through other men’s changes of mood without losing his own equilibrium.
Now that Cadfael came to consider the early part of the November calendar, it seemed to be populated chiefly by Welsh saints. Ruald had reminded him that the sixth day was dedicated to Saint Illtud, who had obeyed his dictatorial angel with such alacrity, and so little consideration for his wife’s feelings in the matter. No great devotion was paid to him in English houses, perhaps, but Saint Tysilio, whose day came on the eighth, had a rather special significance here on the borders of Powys, and his influence spilled over the frontier into the neighbouring shires. For the centre of his ministry was the chief church of Powys at Meifod, no great way into Wales, and the saint was reputed to have had military virtues as well as sacred, and to have fought on the Christian side at the battle of Maserfield, by Oswestry, where the royal saint, Oswald, was captured and martyred by the pagans. So a measure of respect was paid to his feast day, and the Welsh of the town and the Foregate came to Mass that morning in considerable numbers. But for all that, Cadfael had hardly expected the attendance of one worshipper from further afield.
She rode in at the gatehouse, pillion behind an elderly groom, in good time before Mass, and was lifted down respectfully to the cobbles of the court by the younger groom who followed on a second stout horse, with the maid Gunnild perched behind him. Both women stood shaking out their skirts for a moment before they crossed demurely to the church, the lady before, the maid attentive and dutiful a pace behind her, while the grooms spoke a word or two to the porter, and then led awa
y the horses to the stable yard. The perfect picture of a young woman conforming to every social sanction imposing rules upon her bearing and movements, with her maid for guardian and companion, and her grooms for escort. Pernel was ensuring that this venture out of her usual ambience should be too correct in every detail to attract comment. She might be the eldest of the brood at Withington, but she was still very young, and it was imperative to temper her natural directness and boldness with caution. It had to be admitted that she did it with considerable style and grace, and had an admirable abettor in the experienced Gunnild. They crossed the great court with hands folded and eyes cast down modestly, and vanished into the church by the south door without once risking meeting the gaze of any of these celibates who moved about court and cloister round them.
Now if she has in mind what I think she has, Cadfael reflected, watching them go, she will have need of all Gunnild’s worldly wisdom to abet her own good sense and resolution. And I do believe the woman is devoted to her, and will make a formidable protective dragon if ever there’s need.
He caught a brief glimpse of her again as he entered the church with the brothers, and passed through to his place in the choir. The nave was well filled with lay worshippers, some standing beside the parish altar, where they could see through to the high altar within, some grouped around the stout round pillars that held up the vault. Pernel was kneeling where the light, by chance, fell on her face through the opening from the lighted choir. Her eyes were closed, but her lips still. Her prayers were not in words. She looked very grave, thus austerely attired for church, her soft brown hair hidden within a white wimple, and the hood of her cloak drawn over all, for it was none too warm in the church. She looked like some very young novice nun, her round face more childlike than ever, but the set of her lips had a mature and formidable firmness. Close at her back Gunnild kneeled, and her eyes, though half veiled by long lashes, were open and bright, and possessively steady upon her lady. Woe betide anyone who attempted affront to Pernel Otmere while her maid was by!
