Brother Cadfael's Penance bc-19

by Ellis Peters

  He was creeping warily along the narrow, stone-flagged passage when the chaplain emerged suddenly from a door ahead, and came towards him, with a small oil flask in his hand, fresh from feeding and trimming the altar lamp. There was no time to evade, and to have attempted it would have penetrated even the tired old man’s preoccupation. Yves drew to the wall respectfully to let him pass, and made him a deep reverence as he went by. Shortsighted eyes went over him gently, and a resigned but tranquil voice blessed him. He was left trembling, almost shamed, but he took it for a good omen. The old man had even shown him where the chapel was to be found, and pointed him to the altar. He went there humbly and gratefully, and kneeled to give thanks for a dozen undeserved mercies that had brought him thus far. He forgot even to be careful, to be ready to take alarm at a sound, to regard his own life or take thought for how he should ever find his way out again. He was where he had set out to be. And Cadfael would not fail him.

  The chapel was lofty, cramped and stonily cold, but its austerity had been tempered a little by draping the walls with thick woollen hangings, and curtaining the inner side of the door. In the dim light of the corner behind the door, where the folds of curtain and wall hanging met amply, a man could stand concealed. Only if someone entering closed the door fully behind him would the alien presence risk detection. Yves took his stand there, shook the folds into order to cover him, and settled down to wait.

  In the several days that he had been a guest in La Musarderie Cadfael had awakened and risen at midnight largely from habit, but also from the need to cling at least to the memory of his vocation, and of the place where his heart belonged. If he did not live to see it again, it mattered all the more that while he lived that link should not be broken. It was also a solemn part of his consolation in keeping the monastic observances that he could do it in solitude. The chaplain observed every part of the daily worship due from a secular priest, but did not keep the Benedictine hours. Only once, on that one occasion when Philip had also had a word to say to God, had Cadfael had to share the chapel at Matins with anyone.

  On this night he came a little early, without the necessity of waking from sleep. There would be little sleep for most of the garrison of La Musarderie. He said the office, and continued on his knees in sombre thought rather than private prayer. All the prayers he could make for Olivier had already been uttered and heard, and repeated in the mind over and over, reminders to God. And all that he might have pleaded for himself was seen to be irrelevant in this hour, when the day is put away, with all its unresolved anxieties, and the morrow’s troubles are not yet, and need not be anticipated.

  When he rose from his knees and turned towards the door, he saw the folds of the curtain behind it quiver. A hand emerged at the edge, putting the heavy cloth aside. Cadfael made no sound and no movement, as Yves stepped forth before his eyes, soiled and dishevelled from his climb, with urgent gesture and dilated eyes enjoining caution and silence. For a moment they both hung still, staring at each other. Then Cadfael flattened a hand against Yves’ breast, pressing him back gently into hiding, and himself leaned out from the doorway to look both ways along the stone corridor. Philip’s own chamber was close, but it was questionable whether he would be in it this night. Here nothing stirred, and Cadfael’s narrow cell was not ten yards distant. He reached back to grip Yves’ wrist, and pluck him hastily along the passage into sanctuary there, and close the door against the world. For a moment they embraced and stood tense, listening, but all was still.

  “Keep your voice low,” said Cadfael then, “and we are safe enough. The chaplain sleeps nearby.” The walls, even these interior walls, were very thick. “Now, what are you doing here? And how did you get in?” He was still gripping the boy’s wrist, so tightly as to bruise. He eased his grip, and sat his unexpected visitor down on the bed, holding him by both shoulders, as if to touch was to hold inviolable. “This was madness! What can you do here? And I was glad to know that you were out of it, whatever comes.”

  “I climbed up by the vine,” said Yves, whispering. “And I must go back the same way, unless you know of a better.” He was shivering a little in reaction; Cadfael felt him vibrating between his hands like a bowstring gradually stilling after the shot. “No great feat, if the guard can be distracted while I reach the gallery. But let that wait. Cadfael, I had to get word in here to you somehow. He must be told what she intends…”

  “He?” said Cadfael sharply. “Philip?”

  “Philip, who else? He has to know what he may have to deal with. She, the empress, she has half a dozen of her barons with her, they were all gathered in Gloucester, and all their levies with them. Salisbury, Redvers of Devon, FitzRoy, Bohun, the king of Scots and all, the greatest army she has had to hand for a year or more. And she means to use everything against this place. It may cost her high, but she will have it, and quickly, before Gloucester can get word what’s in the wind.”

  “Gloucester?” said Cadfael incredulously. “But she needs him, she can do nothing without him. All the more as this is his son, revolted or not.”

  “No!” said Yves vehemently. “For that very reason she wants him left ignorant in Hereford until all’s over. Cadfael, she means to hang Philip and be done with him. She has sworn it, and she’ll do it. By the time Robert knows of it, there’ll be nothing for him but a body to bury.”

  “She would not dare!” said Cadfael on a hissing breath.

  “She will dare. I saw her, I heard her! She is hellbent on killing, and this is her chance. Her teeth are in his throat already, I doubt if Robert himself could break her death-grip, but she has no mind to give him the opportunity. It will all be over before ever he knows of it.”

  “She is mad!” said Cadfael. He dropped his hands from the boy’s shoulders, and sat staring down the long procession of excesses and atrocities that would follow that death: every remaining loyalty torn apart, every kinship disrupted, the last shreds of hope for conciliation and sanity ripped loose to the winds. “He would abandon her. He might even turn his hand against her.” And that, indeed, might have ended it, and brought about by force the settlement they could not achieve by agreement. But no, he would not be able to bring himself to touch her, he would only withdraw from the field with his bereavement and grief, and let others bring her down. A longer business, and a longer and more profound agony for the country fought over, back and forth to the last despair.

  “I know it,” said Yves. “She is destroying her own cause, and damning to this continued chaos every man of us, on either side, and God knows, all the poor souls who want nothing but to sow and reap their fields and go about their buying and selling, and raising their children in peace. I tried to tell her so, to her face, and she flayed me for it. She listens to no one. So I had to come.”

  And not only to try and avert a disastrous policy, Cadfael thought, but also because that imminent death was an offence to him, and must be prevented solely as the barbaric act it was. Yves did not want Philip FitzRobert dead. He had come back in arms for Olivier, certainly, and he would stand by that to his last breath, but he would not connive at his liege lady’s ferocious revenge.

  “To me,” said Cadfael. “You come to me. So what is it you want of me, now you are here?”

  “Warn him,” said Yves simply. “Tell him what she has in mind for him, make him believe it, for she’ll never relent. At least let him know the whole truth, before he has to deal with her demands. She would rather keep the castle and occupy it intact than raze it, but she’ll raze it if she must. It may be he can make a deal that will keep him man alive, if he gives up La Musarderie.” But even the boy did not really believe in that ever happening, and Cadfael knew it never would. “At least tell him the truth. Then it is his decision.”

  “I will see to it,” said Cadfael very gravely, “that he is in no doubt what is at stake.”

  “He will believe you,” said Yves, sounding curiously content. And he stretched and sighed, leaning his head back against the wall. “N
ow I had better be thinking how best to get out of here.”

  They were quite used to Cadfael by that time, he was accepted in La Musarderie as harmless, tolerated by the castellan, and respectably what his habit represented him as being. He mixed freely, went about the castle as he pleased, and talked with whom he pleased. It stood Yves in good stead in the matter of getting out by the same route by which he had entered.

  The best way to escape notice, said Cadfael, was to go about as one having every right and a legitimate reason for going wherever he was seen to be going, with nothing furtive about him. Risky by daylight, of course, even among a large garrison of reasonably similar young men, but perfectly valid now in darkness, crossing wards even less illuminated than normally, to avoid affording even estimates of provision for defence to the assembled enemy.

  Yves crossed the ward to the foot of the staircase up to the guardwalk by Cadfael’s side, quite casually and slowly, obeying orders trustfully, and melted into the dark corner to flatten himself against the wall, while Cadfael climbed the steps to lean into an embrasure between the merlons of the wall and peer out towards the scattered sparkle of fires, out there among the trees. The watchman, reaching this end of his patrol, lingered to lean beside him and share his speculations for a moment, and when he resumed his march back to the distant tower, Cadfael went with him. Yves, listening below, heard their two low voices recede gradually. As soon as he felt they should be sufficiently distant, he crept hastily up the steps and flung himself through the embrasure, to flatten himself on the floor of the brattice under a merlon. He was at the end of the gallery, the gnarled black branches and twisted tendrils of the vine leaned inward over him, but he did not dare to rise and haul himself in among them until the guard had made one more turn, and again departed, leaving Cadfael to descend to the ward and seek his bed for what remained of the night.

  Above Yves’ head the familiar voice said very softly: “He’s away. Go now!”

  Yves rose and heaved himself over the parapet and into the sinewy coils of the vine, and began to let himself down cautiously towards the ground far below. And Cadfael, when the boy had vanished, and the first shaking and rustling of the branches had subsided, descended the steps to the ward, and went to look for Philip.

  Philip had made the rounds of his defences alone, and found them as complete as he had the means to make them. This assault came early, young Hugonin must have been uncommonly persuasive, and the empress unusually well provided with men and arms, or he would have had more time to prepare. No matter, it would be decided the sooner.

  He was on the walk above the gate when Cadfael found him, looking down upon the open causeway by which, in the early morning, the first challenger would approach under flag of truce.

  “You, brother?” he said, turning a mildly surprised face. “I thought you would have been sleeping hours ago.”

  “This is no night for sleeping,” said Cadfael, “until all’s done that needs to be done. And there is yet something needed, and I am here to see it done. My lord Philip, I have to tell you, and take it in earnest, for so it is, that the empress’s mind against you is deadly. Yves Hugonin has brought all this host down upon you to deliver his friend and kinsman. But not she! She is here, not even to take a castle, though she must do that first. She is here to take a man. And when she has you, she means to hang you.”

  There was a silence. Philip stood gazing eastward, where the first grey blanching of the day would come, before dawn. At length he said quietly: “Her mind I never doubted. Tell me, if you know so much, brother, is that also my father’s mind towards me?”

  “Your father,” said Cadfael, “is not here in arms. He does not know her army has moved, and she will take good care he does not find out, not until all is over. Your father is in Hereford with Earl Roger. For once she has moved without him. For good reason. She sees her chief enemy within her grasp. She is here to destroy you. And since she goes to such pains to keep this from him,” said Cadfael, his voice detached and mild, “it would seem that she, at any rate, is by no means certain of his mind towards you.”

  A second silence fell between them. Then Philip said, without turning his head: “I knew her well enough to be out of reach now of surprise. I looked for nothing better, should it ever come to this. I made her of none account when I turned to the king, that is true, though less true, or only partial truth, that I turned against her. She was of none effect, that was the heart of it. And here, if not in Normandy, Stephen was and is in the ascendant. If he can win, as she could not, and put an end to this chaos and waste, let as many coats turn as may be needed to bring it about. Any end that will let men live, and till their fields, and ride the roads and ply their trades in safety, is to be desired above any monarch’s right and triumph. My father,” he said, “determined the way I went. As lief Stephen as Maud, to me, if he can enforce order. But I understand her rage. I grant her every fibre of her grudge against me. She has a right to hate me, and I’ll abide her hate.”

  It was the first time he had spoken thus freely, temperately, without regret or penitence.

  “If you have believed me,” said Cadfael, “that she means your shameful death, that is my mission done. If you know the whole truth, you can dispose yourself to meet it. She has an eye to gain, as well as to revenge. If you choose, you could bargain.”

  “There are things I will not trade,” said Philip, and turned his head, and smiled.

  “Then hear me yet a moment,” said Cadfael. “You have spoken of the empress. Now speak to me of Olivier.”

  The dark head turned sharply away again. Philip stood mute, staring eastward, where there was nothing to see, unless his own mind peopled the darkness.

  “Then I will speak of him,” said Cadfael. “I know my son. He is of a simpler mode than you, you asked too much of him. I think you had shared many dangerous moments with him, that you had come to rely on each other and value each other. And when you changed course, and he could not go with you, the severance was doubly bitter, for each of you felt that the other had failed him. All he saw was treason, and what you saw was a failure of understanding that was equally a betrayal.”

  “It is your story, brother,” said Philip with recovered serenity, “not mine.”

  “There is as sharp a point to it as to a dagger,” said Cadfael. “You do not grudge the empress her resentment. Why can you not extend the same justice to my son?”

  He got no answer from Philip, but he needed none; he already knew. Olivier had been dearly loved. The empress never had.

  Chapter Twelve.

  THE EXPECTED embassage came with the dawn, and it was the marshall who brought it. The party appeared out of the woods, taking to the open causeway to be seen as soon as they left cover: a knight with a white pennant before, then FitzGilbert with three attendant officers at his back, not in mail or showing weapons, to indicate clearly that at this moment they intended no threat and expected none. Philip, roused from his brief sleep as soon as they were sighted, came out to the guardwalk over the gate, between the two towers, to receive them.

  Cadfael, below in the ward, listened to the exchange from the doorway of the hall. The stillness within the walls was like the hush before storm, as every man halted and froze to hear the more clearly; not from fear, rather with a piercing tremor of excitement, many times experienced and by now customary and almost welcome.

  “FitzRobert,” called the marshall, halted some yards from the closed gates, the better to look up at the man he challenged, “open your gates to her Grace the empress, and receive her envoy.”

  “Do your errand from there,” said Philip. “I hear you very well.”

  “Then I give you to know,” said FitzGilbert forcefully, “that this castle of yours is surrounded, and strongly. No relief can get in to your aid, and no man of you can get out unless by agreement with her Grace. Make no mistake, you are in no case to withstand the assault we can make upon you, can and will, if you are obdurate.”

  “
Make your offer,” said Philip, unmoved. “I have work to do, if you have none.”

  FitzGilbert was too old a hand at the manoeuvrings of civil war to be shaken or diverted by whatever tone was used to him. “Very well,” he said. “Your liege lady the empress summons you to surrender this castle forthwith, or she will take it by storm. Give it up intact, or fall with it.”

  “And on what conditions?” said Philip shortly. “Name the terms.”

  “Unconditional surrender! You must submit yourself and all you hold here to her Grace’s will.”

  “I would not hand over a dog that had once barked at her to her Grace’s will,” said Philip. “On reasonable terms I might consider. But even then, John, I should require your warranty to back hers.”

  “There’ll be no bargaining,” said the marshall flatly. “Surrender or pay the price.”

  “Tell the empress,” said Philip, “that her own costs may come high. We are not to be bought cheaply.”

  The marshall shrugged largely, and wheeled his horse to descend the slope. “Never say you were not warned!” he called back over his shoulder, and cantered towards the trees with his herald before him and his officers at his back.

  After that they had not long to wait. The assault began with a volley of arrows from all the fringes of cover round the castle. For a good bowman the walls were within range, and whoever showed himself unwisely in an embrasure was a fair mark; but it seemed to Cadfael, himself up on the south-western tower, which came nearest to the village on the crest, that the attackers were being lavish of shafts partly to intimidate, having no fear of being left short of arrows. The defenders were more chary of waste, and shot only when they detected a possible target unwarily breaking cover. If they ran down their stock of shafts there was no way of replenishing it. They were reserving the espringales, and the darts and javelins they shot, to repel a massed attack. Against a company they could scarcely fail to find targets, but against one man on the move their bolts would be wasted, and waste was something they could not afford. The squat engines, like large crossbows, were braced in the embrasures, four of them on this south-westerly side, from which attack in numbers was most likely, two more disposed east and west.