The Devil's Novice

by Ellis Peters

Leoric stood speechless some minutes, his tall body palsied and shaken as though he struggled with his own demon, before he sat down abruptly beside his son on the creaking pallet, and clamped a hand over Meriet’s hand; and though his face was still marble-hard, and the very gesture of his hand like a blow, and his voice when he finally found words still severe and harsh, Cadfael nevertheless withdrew from them quietly, and drew the door to after him. He went aside and sat in the porch, not so far away that he could not hear the tones of the two voices within, though not their words, and so placed that he could watch the doorway. He did not think he would be needed any more, though at times the father’s voice rose in helpless rage, and once or twice Meriet’s rang with a clear and obstinate asperity. That did not matter, they would have been lost without the sparks they struck from each other.

  After this, thought Cadfael, let him put on indifference as icily as he will, I shall know better.

  He went back when he judged it was time, for he had much to say to Leoric for his own part before the hour of the abbot’s dinner. Their rapid and high-toned exchanges ceased as he entered, what few words they still had to say came quietly and lamely.

  “Be my messenger to Nigel and to Roswitha. Say that I pray their happiness always. I should have liked to be there to see them wed,” said Meriet steadily, “but that I cannot expect now.”

  Leoric looked down at him and asked awkwardly: “You are cared for here? Body and soul?”

  Meriet’s exhausted face smiled, a pale smile but warm and sweet. “As well as ever in my life. I am very well-friended, here among my peers. Brother Cadfael knows!”

  And this time, at parting, it fell out not quite as once before. Cadfael had wondered. Leoric turned to go, turned back, wrestled with his unbending pride a moment, and then stopped almost clumsily and very briefly, and bestowed on Meriet’s lifted cheek a kiss that still resembled a blow. Fierce blood mantled at the smitten cheekbone as Leoric straightened up, turned, and strode from the barn.

  He crossed towards the gate mute and stiff, his eyes looking inwards rather than out, so that he struck shoulder and hip against the gatepost, and hardly noticed the shock.

  “Wait!” said Cadfael. “Come here with me into the church, and say whatever you have to say, and so will I. We still have time.”

  In the little single-aisled church of the hospice, under its squat tower, it was dim and chill, and very silent. Leoric knotted veined hands and wrung them, and turned in formidable quiet anger upon his guide. “Was this well done, brother? Falsely you brought me here! You told me my son was mortally ill.”

  “So he is,” said Cadfael. “Have you not his own word for it how close he feels his death? So are you, so are we all. The disease of mortality is in us from the womb, from the day of our birth we are on the way to our death. What matters is how we conduct the journey. You heard him. He has confessed to the murder of Peter Clemence. Why have you not been told that, without having to hear it from Meriet? Because there was no one to tell you else but Brother Mark, or Hugh Beringar, or myself, for no one else knows. Meriet believes himself to be watched as a committed felon, that barn his prison. Now, I tell you, Aspley, that it is not so. There is not one of us three who have heard his avowal, but is heart-sure he is lying. You are the fourth, his father, and the only one to believe in his guilt.”

  Leoric was shaking his head violently and wretchedly. “I wish it were so, but I know better. Why do you say he is lying? What proof can you have for your trust, compared with that I have for my certainty?”

  “I will give you one proof for my trust,” said Cadfael, “in exchange for all your proofs of your certainty. As soon as he heard there was another man accused, Meriet made his confession of guilt to the law, which can destroy his body. But resolutely he refused then and refuses still to repeat that confession to a priest, and ask penance and absolution for a sin he has not committed. That is why I believe him guiltless. Now show me, if you can, as strong a reason why you should believe him guilty.”

  The lofty, tormented grey head continued its anguished motions of rejection. “I wish to God you were right and I wrong, but I know what I saw and what I heard. I never can forget it. Now that I must tell it openly, since there’s an innocent man at stake, and Meriet to his honour has cleansed his breast, why should I not tell it first to you? My guest was gone on his way safely, it was a day like any other day. I went out for exercise with hawk and hounds, and three besides, my chaplain and huntsman, and a groom, honest men all, they will bear me out. There’s thick woodland three miles north from us, a wide belt of it. It was the hounds picked up Meriet’s voice, no more than a distant call to me until we got nearer and I knew him. He was calling Barbary and whistling for him—the horse that Clemence rode. It may have been the whistle the hounds caught first, and went eager but silent to find Meriet. By the time we came on him he had the horse tethered—you’ll have heard he has a gift. When we burst in on him, he had the dead man under the arms, and was dragging him deep into a covert off the path. An arrow in Peter’s breast, and bow and quiver on Meriet’s shoulder. Do you want more? When I cried out on him, what had he done?—he never said word to deny. When I ordered him to return with us, and laid him under lock and key until I could consider such a shame and horror, and know my way, he never said nay to it, but submitted to all. When I told him I would keep him man alive and cover up his mortal sin, but on conditions, he accepted life and withdrawal. I do believe, as much for our name’s sake as for his own life, but he chose.”

  “He did choose, he did far more than accept,” said Cadfael, “for he told Isouda what he told us all, later, that he came to us of his own will, at his own desire. Never has he said that he was forced. But go on, tell me your own part.”

  “I did what I had promised him, I had the horse led far to the north, by the way Clemence should have ridden, and there turned loose in the mosses, where it might be thought his rider had foundered. And the body we took secretly, with all that was his, and my chaplain read the rites over him with all reverence, before we laid him within a new stack on the charcoal-burner’s old hearth, and fired it. It was ill-done and against my conscience, but I did it. Now I will answer for it. I shall not be sorry to pay whatever is due.”

  “Your son has taken care,” said Cadfael hardly, “to claim to himself, along with the death, all that you have done to conceal it. But he will not confess lies to his confessor, as mortal a sin as hiding truth.”

  “But why?” demanded Leoric wildly. “Why should he so yield and accept all, if he had an answer for me? Why?”

  “Because the answer he had for you would have been too hard for you to bear, and unbearable also to him. For love, surely,” said Brother Cadfael. “I doubt if he has had his proper fill of love all his life, but those who most hunger for it do most and best deliver it.”

  “I have loved him,” protested Leoric, raging and writhing, “though he has been always so troublous a soul, for ever going contrary.”

  “Going contrary is one way of getting your notice,” said Cadfael ruefully, “when obedience and virtue go unregarded. But let that be. You want instances. This spot where you came upon him, it was hardly more than three miles from your manor—what, forty minutes” ride? And the hour when you came there was well on in the afternoon. How many hours had Clemence lain there dead? And suddenly there is Meriet toiling to hide the dead body, and whistling up the straying horse left riderless. Even if he had run in terror, and wandered the woods fevered over his deed, would he not have dealt with the horse before he fled? Either lashed him away to ride wild, or caught and ridden him far off. What was he doing there calling and tethering the horse, and hiding the body, all those hours after the man must have died? Did you never think of that?”

  “I thought,” said Leoric, speaking slowly now, wide-eyed, urgent upon Cadfael’s face, “as you have said, that he had run in terror from what he had done, and come back, late in the day, to hide it from all eyes.”

  “So he has sa
id now, but it cost him a great heave of the heart and mind to fetch that excuse up out of the well.”

  “Then what,” whispered Leoric, shaking now with mingled hope and bewilderment, and very afraid to trust, “what has moved him to accept so dreadful a wrong? How could he do such an injury to me and to himself?”

  “For fear, perhaps, of doing you a greater. And for love of someone he had cause to doubt, as you found cause to doubt him. Meriet has a great store of love to give,” said Brother Cadfael gravely, “and you would not allow him to give much of it to you. He has given it elsewhere, where it was not repelled, however it may have been undervalued. Have I to say to you again, that you have two sons?”

  “No!” cried Leoric in a muted howl of protest and outrage, towering taller in his anger, head and shoulders above Cadfael’s square, solid form. “That I will not hear! You presume! It is impossible!”

  “Impossible for your heir and darling, yet instantly believable in his brother? In this world all men are fallible, and all things are possible.”

  “But I tell you I saw him hiding his dead man, and sweating over it. If he had happened on him innocently by chance he would not have had cause to conceal the death, he would have come crying it aloud.”

  “Not if he happened innocently on someone dear to him as brother or friend stooped over the same horrid task. You believe what you saw, why should not Meriet also believe what he saw? You put your own soul in peril to cover up what you believed he had done, why should not he do as much for another? You promised silence and concealment at a price—and that protection offered to him was just as surely protection for another—only the price was still to be exacted from Meriet. And Meriet did not grudge it. Of his own will he paid it—that was no mere consent to your terms, he wished it and tried to be glad of it, because it bought free someone he loved. Do you know of any other creature breathing that he loves as he loves his brother?”

  “This is madness!” said Leoric, breathing hard like a man who has run himself half to death. “Nigel was the whole day with the Lindes, Roswitha will tell you, Janyn will tell you. He had a falling-out to make up with the girl, he was off to her early in the morning, and came home only late in the evening. He knew nothing of that day’s business, he was aghast when he heard of it.”

  “From Linde’s manor to that place in the forest is no long journey for a mounted man,” said Cadfael relentlessly. “How if Meriet found him busy and bloodied over Clemence’s body, and said to him: Go, get clean away from here, leave him to me—go and be seen elsewhere all this day. I will do what must be done. What then?”

  “Are you truly saying,” demanded Leoric in a hoarse whisper, “that Nigel killed the man? Such a crime against hospitality, against kinship, against his nature?”

  “No,” said Cadfael. “But I am saying that it may be true that Meriet did so find him, just as you found Meriet. Why should what was such plain proof to you be any less convincing to Meriet? Had he not overwhelming reason to believe his brother guilty, to fear him guilty, or no less terrible, to dread that he might be convicted in innocence? For bear this ever in mind, if you could be mistaken in giving such instant credence to what you saw, so could Meriet. For those lost six hours still stick in my craw, and how to account for them I don’t yet know.”

  “Is it possible?” whispered Leoric, shaken and wondering. “Have I so wronged him? And my own part—must I not go straight to Hugh Beringar and let him judge? In God’s name, what are we to do, to set right what can be righted?”

  “You must go, rather, to Abbot Radulfus’s dinner,” said Cadfael, “and be such a convivial guest as he expects, and tomorrow you must marry your son as you have planned. We are still groping in the dark, and have no choice but to wait for enlightenment. Think of what I have said, but say no word of it to any other. Not yet. Let them have their wedding day in peace.”

  But for all that he was certain then, in his own mind, that it would not be in peace.

  *

  Isouda came to find him in his workshop in the herbarium. He took one look at her, forgot his broodings, and smiled. She came in the austere but fine array she had thought suitable for dining with abbots, and catching the smile and the lighting of Cadfael’s eyes, she relaxed into her impish grin and opened her cloak wide, putting off the hood to let him admire her.

  “You think it will do?”

  Her hair, too short to braid, was bound about her brow by an embroidered ribbon fillet, just such a one as Meriet had hidden in his bed in the dortoir, and below the confinement it clustered in a thick mane of curls on her neck. Her dress was an over-tunic of deep blue, fitting closely to the hip and there flowing out in gentle folds, over a long-sleeved and high-necked cotte of a pale rose-coloured wool; Exceedingly grown-up, not at all the colours or the cut to which a wild child would fly, allowed for once to dine with the adults. Her bearing, always erect and confident, had acquired a lordly dignity to go with the dress, and her gait as she entered was princely. The close necklace of heavy natural stones, polished but not cut, served beautifully to call the eye to the fine carriage of her head. She wore no other ornaments.

  “It would do for me,” said Cadfael simply, “if I were a green boy expecting a hoyden known from a child. Are you as unprepared for him, I wonder, as he will be for you?”

  Isouda shook her head until the brown curls danced, and settled again into new and distracting patterns on her shoulders. “No! I’ve thought of all you’ve told me, and I know my Meriet. Neither you nor he need fear. I can deal!”

  “Then before we go,” said Cadfael, “you had better be armed with everything I have gleaned in the meantime.” And he sat down with her and told her. She heard him out with a serious but tranquil face, unshaken.

  “Listen, Brother Cadfael, why should he not come to see his brother married, since things are as you say? I know it would not be a kindness, not yet, to tell him he’s known as an innocent and deceives nobody, it would only set him agonising for whoever it is he’s hiding. But you know him now. If he’s given his parole, he’ll not break it, and he’s innocent enough, God knows, to believe that other men are as honest as he, and will take his word as simply as he gives it. He would credit it if Hugh Beringar allowed even a captive felon to come to see his brother married.”

  “He could not yet walk so far,” said Cadfael, though he was captivated by the notion.

  “He need not. I would send a groom with a horse for him. Brother Mark could come with him. Why not? He could come early, and cloaked, and take his place privately where he could watch. Whatever follows,” said Isouda with grave determination, “for I am not such a fool as to doubt there’s grief here somehow for their house—whatever follows, I want him brought forth into daylight, where he belongs. Or whatever faces may be fouled! For his is fair enough, and so I want it shown.”

  “So do I,” said Cadfael heartily, “so do I!”

  “Then ask Hugh Beringar if I may send for him to come. I don’t know—I feel there may be need of him, that he has the right to be there, that he should be there.”

  “I will speak to Hugh,” said Cadfael. “And now, come, let’s be off to Saint Giles before the light fails.”

  They walked together along the Foregate, veered right at the bleached grass triangle of the horse-fair, and out between scattered houses and green fields to the hospice. The shadowy, skeleton trees made lace patterns against a greenish, pallid sky thinning to frost.

  “This is where even lepers may go for shelter?” she said, climbing the gentle grassy slope to the boundary fence.

  “They medicine them here, and do their best to heal? That is noble!”

  “They even have their successes,” said Cadfael. “There’s never any want of volunteers to serve here, even after a death. Mark may have gone far to heal your Meriet, body and soul.”

  “When I have finished what he has begun,” she said with a sudden shining smile, “I will thank him properly. Now where must we go?”

  Cadfael t
ook her directly to the barn, but at this hour it was empty. The evening meal was not yet due, but the light was too far gone for any activity outdoors. The solitary low pallet stood neatly covered with its dun blanket.

  “This is his bed?” she asked, gazing down at it with a meditative face.

  “It is. He had it up in the loft above, for fear of disturbing his fellows if he had bad dreams, and it was here he fell. By Mark’s account he was on his way in his sleep to make confession to Hugh Beringar, and get him to free his prisoner. Will you wait for him here? I’ll find him and bring him to you.”

  Meriet was seated at Brother Mark’s little desk in the anteroom of the hall, mending the binding of a service-book with a strip of leather. His face was grave in concentration on his task, his fingers patient and adroit. Only when Cadfael informed him that he had a visitor waiting in the barn was he shaken by sudden agitation. Cadfael he was used to, and did not mind, but he shrank from showing himself to others, as though he carried a contagion.

  “I had rather no one came,” he said, torn between gratitude for an intended kindness and reluctance to have to make the effort of bearing the consequent pain. “What good can it do, now? What is there to be said? I’ve been glad of my quietness here.” He gnawed a doubtful lip and asked resignedly: “Who is it?”

  “No one you need fear,” said Cadfael, thinking of Nigel, whose brotherly attentions might have proved too much to bear, had they been offered. But they had not. Bridegrooms have some excuse for putting all other business aside, certainly, but at least he could have asked after his brother. “It is only Isouda.”

  Only Isouda! Meriet drew relieved breath. “Isouda has thought of me? That was kind. But—does she know? That I am a confessed felon? I would not have her in a mistake…”

  “She does know. No need to say word of that, and neither will she. She would have me bring her because she has a loyal affection for you. It won’t cost you much to spend a few minutes with her, and I doubt if you’ll have to do much talking, for she will do the most of it.”