An Excellent Mystery (6 page)

I’ll
go back before Compline,” said Cadfael “and see if he sleeps, or if he needs
another draught. And whether the young one has remembered to take food for
himself as well as for Humilis! Now I wonder where that boy can have learned
his medicine, if he’s been caring for Brother Humilis alone, down there in
Hyde?” It was plain the responsibility had not daunted him, nor could he have
failed in his endeavours. To have kept any life at all in that valiant wreck
was achievement enough.

If
the boy had studied in the art of healing, he might make a good assistant in
the herbarium, and would be glad to learn more. It would be something in
common, a way in through the sealed door of his silence.

Brother
Fidelis fetched and carried, fed, washed, shaved his patient, tended to all his
bodily needs, apparently in perfect content so to serve day and night, if
Humilis had not ordered him away sometimes into the open air, or to rest in his
own cell, or to attend the offices of the church on behalf of both of them; as
within two days of slow recovery Humilis increasingly did order, and was
obeyed. The broken wound was healing, its lips no longer wet and limp, but
drawing together gradually under the plasters of freshly-bruised leaves.
Fidelis witnessed the slow improvement, and was glad and grateful, and assisted
without revulsion as the dressings were changed. This maimed body was no secret
from him.

A
favoured family servant? A natural son, as Edmund had hazarded? Or simply a
devout young brother of the Order who had fallen under the spell of a charm and
nobility all the more irresistible because it was dying? Cadfael could not
choose but speculate. The young can be wildly generous, giving away their years
and their youth for love, without thought of any gain.

“You
wonder about him,” said Humilis from his pillow, when Cadfael was changing his
dressing in the early morning, and Fidelis had been sent down with the brothers
to Prime.

“Yes,”
said Cadfael honestly.

“But
you don’t ask. Neither have I asked anything. My future,” said Humilis
reflectively, “I left in Palestine. What remained of me I gave to God, and I
trust the offering was not all worthless. My novitiate, clipped though it was
because of my state, was barely ending when he entered Hyde. I have had good
cause to thank God for him.”

“No
easy matter,” said Cadfael, musing, “for a dumb man to vouch for himself and
make known his vocation. Had he some elder to speak for him?”

“He
had written his plea, how his father was old, and would be glad to see his sons
settled, and while his elder brother had the lands, he, the younger, wished to
choose the cloister. He brought an endowment with him, but it was his fine hand
and his scholarship chiefly commended him. I know no more of him,” said
Humilis, “except what I have learned from him in silence, and that is enough.
To me he has been all the sons I shall never father.”

“I
have wondered,” said Cadfael, drawing the clean linen carefully over the
newly-knit wound, “about his dumbness. Is it possible that it stems only from
some malformation in the tongue? For plainly he is not deaf, to blot out speech
from his knowledge. He hears keenly. I have usually found the two go together,
but not in him. He learns by ear, and is quick to learn. He was taught, as you
say, a fine hand. If I had him with me always among the herbs I could teach him
all the years have taught me.”

“I
ask no questions of him, he asks none of me,” said Humilis. “God knows I ought
to send him away from me, to a better service than nursing and comforting my
too early corruption. He’s young, he should be in the sun. But I am too craven
to do it. If he goes, I will not hold him, but I have not the courage to
dismiss him. And while he stays, I never cease to thank God for him.”

August
pursued its unshadowed course, without a cloud, and the harvest filled the
barns. Brother Rhun missed his new companion from the gardens and the garth,
where the roses burst open daily in the noon and faded by night from the heat.
The grapes trained along the north wall of the enclosed garden swelled and
changed colour. And far south, in ravaged Winchester, the queen’s army closed
round the sometime besiegers, severed the roads by which supplies might come
in, and began to starve the town. But news from the south was sparse, and
travellers few, and here the unbiddable fruit was ripening early.

Of
all the cheerful workers in that harvest, Rhun was the blithest. Less than
three months ago he had been lame and in pain, now he went in joyous vigour,
and could not have enough of his own happy body, or put it to sufficient
labours to testify to his gratitude. He had no learning as yet, to admit him to
the work of copying or study or colouring of manuscripts, he had a pleasant
voice but little musical training; the tasks that fell to him were the
unskilled and strenuous, and he delighted in them. There was no one who could
fail to reflect the same delight in watching him stretch and lift and stride,
dig and hew and carry, he who had lately dragged his own light weight along
with crippled effort and constant pain. His elders beheld his beauty and vigour
with fond admiration, and gave thanks to the saint who had healed him.

Beauty
is a perilous gift, but Rhun had never given a thought to his own face, and
would have been astonished to be told that he possessed so rare an endowment.
Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart
ache that beholds and has lost it.

Brother
Urien had lost more than his youth, and had not lost his youth long enough to
have grown resigned to its passing. He was thirty-seven years old, and had come
into the cloister barely a year past, after a ruinous marriage that had left
him contorted in mind and spirit. The woman had wrung and left him, and he was
not a mild man, but of strong and passionate appetites and imperious will.
Desperation had driven him into the cloister, and there he found no remedy.
Deprivation and rage bite just as deeply within as without.

They
were working side by side over the first summer apples, at the end of August,
up in the dimness of the loft over the barn, laying out the fruit in wooden
trays to keep as long as it would. The hot weather had brought on the ripening
by at least ten days. The light in there was faintly golden, and heady with
motes of dust, they moved as through a shimmering mist. Rhun’s flaxen head, as
yet unshorn, might have been a fair girl’s, the curve of his cheek as he
stooped over the shelves was suave as a rose-leaf, and the curling lashes that
shadowed his eyes were long and lustrous. Brother Urien watched him sidewise,
and his heart turned in him, shrunken and wrung with pain.

Rhun
had been thinking of Fidelis, how he would have enjoyed the expedition to the
Gaye, and he noticed nothing amiss when his neighbour’s hand brushed his as
they laid out the apples, or their shoulders touched briefly by chance. But it
was not by chance when the outstretched hand, instead of brushing and removing,
slid long fingers over his hand and held it, stroking from fingertips to wrist,
and there lingering in a palpable caress.

By
all the symbols of his innocence he should not have understood, not yet, not
until much more had passed. But he did understand. His very candour and purity
made him wise. He did not snatch his hand away, but withdrew it very gently and
kindly, and turned his fair head to look Urien full in the face with wide,
wide-set eyes of the clearest blue-grey, with such comprehension and pity that
the wound burned unbearably deep, corrosive with rage and shame. Urien took his
hand away and turned aside from him.

Revulsion
and shock might have left a morsel of hope that one emotion could yet, with
care, be changed gradually into another, since at least he would have known he
had made a sharp impression. But this open-eyed understanding and pity repelled
him beyond hope. How dared a green, simple virgin, who had never become aware
of his body but through his lameness and physical pain, recognise the fire when
it scorched him, and respond only with compassion? No fear, no blame, and no
uncertainty. Nor would he complain to confessor or superior. Brother Urien went
away with grief and desire burning in his bowels, and the remembered face of
the woman clear and cruel before his mind’s eyes. Prayer was no cure for the
memory of her.

Rhun
brought away from that encounter, only a moment long and accomplished in
silence, his first awareness of the tyranny of the body. Troubles from which he
was secure could torture another man. His heart ached a little for Brother
Urien, he would mention him in his prayers at Vespers. And so he did, and as
Urien beheld still his lost wife’s hostile visage, so did Rhun continue to see
the dark, tense, handsome face that had winced away from his gaze with burning
brow and hooded eyes, bitterly shamed where he, Rhun, had felt no blame, and no
bitterness. This was indeed a dark and secret matter.

He
said no word to anyone about what had happened. What had happened? Nothing! But
he looked at his fellow men with changed eyes, by one dimension enlarged to
take in their distresses and open his own being to their needs.

This
happened to Rhun two days before he was finally acknowledged as firm in his
vocation, and received the tonsure, to become the novice, Brother Rhun.

“So
our little saint has made good his resolve,” said Hugh, encountering Cadfael as
he came from the ceremony. “And his cure shows no faltering! I tell you
honestly, I go in awe of him. Do you think Winifred had an eye to his
comeliness, when she chose to take him for her own? Welshwomen don’t baulk
their fancy when they see a beautiful youth.”

“You
are an unregenerate heathen,” said Cadfael comfortably, “but the lady should be
used to you by now. Never think you’ll shock her, there’s nothing she has not
seen in her time. And had I been in her reliquary I would have drawn that child
to me, just as she did. She knew worth when she saw it. Why, he has almost
sweetened even Brother Jerome!”

“That
will never last!” said Hugh, and laughed. “He’s kept his own name — the boy?”

“It
never entered his mind to change it.”

“They
do not all so,” said Hugh, growing serious. “This pair that came from
Hyde-Humilis and Fidelis. They made large claims, did they not? Brother Humble
we know by his former name, and he needs no other. What do we know of Brother
Faithful? And I wonder which name came first?”

“The
boy is a younger son,” said Cadfael. “His elder has the lands, this one chose
the cowl. With his burden, who could blame him? Humilis says his own novitiate
was not yet completed when the young one came, and they drew together and
became fast friends. They may well have been admitted together, and the names…
Who knows which of them chose first?”

They
had halted before the gatehouse to look back at the church. Rhun and Fidelis
had come forth together, two notably comely creatures with matched steps, not
touching, but close and content. Rhun was talking with animation. Fidelis bore
the traces of much watching and anxiety, but shone with a responsive glow.
Rhun’s new tonsure was bared to the sun, the fair hair round it roused like an
aureole.

“He
frequents them,” said Cadfael, watching. “No marvel, he reaches out to every
soul who has lost a piece of his being, such as a voice.” He said nothing of
what the elder of that pair had lost. “He talks for both. A pity he has small
learning yet. There’s neither of those two can read to Humilis, the one for
want of a voice, the other for want of letters. But he studies, and he’ll
learn. Brother Paul thinks well of him.”

The
two young men had vanished at the archway of the day stairs, plainly bound for
the dortoir cell where Brother Humilis was still confined to his bed. Who would
not be heartened by the vision of Brother Rhun just radiant from his admission
to his heart’s desire? And it was fitting, that reticent kinship between two
barren bodies, the one virgin unawakened, the other hollowed out and despoiled
in its prime. Two whose seed was not of this world.

It
was that same afternoon that a young man in a soldier’s serviceable riding
gear, with rolled cloak at his saddlebow, came in towards the town by the main
London road to Saint Giles, and there asked directions to the abbey of Saint
Peter and Saint Paul. He went bare-headed in the sun, and in his shirt-sleeves,
with breast bared, and face and breast and naked forearms were brown as from a
hotter sun even than here, where the summer did but paint a further copper
shade on a hide already gilded. A neatly-made young man, on a good horse, with
an easy seat in the saddle and a light hand on the rein, and a bush of wiry
dark hair above a bold, blunt-featured face.

Brother
Oswin directed him, and with pricking curiosity watched him ride on, wondering
for whom he would enquire there. Evidently a fighting man, but from which army,
and from whose household troops, to be heading for Shrewsbury abbey so
particularly? He had not asked for town or sheriff. His business was not
concerned with the warfare in the south. Oswin went back to his work with mild
regret at knowing no more, but dutifully.

The
rider, assured that he was near his goal, eased to a walk along the Foregate,
looking with interest at all he saw, the blanched grass of the horse-fair
ground, still thirsty for rain, the leisurely traffic of porter and cart and
pony in the street, the gossiping neighbours out at their gates in the sun, the
high, long wall of the abbey enclave on his left hand, and the lofty roof and
tower of the church looming over it. Now he knew that he was arriving. He
rounded the west end of the church, with its great door ajar outside the
enclosure for parish use, and turned in under the arch of the gatehouse.