The Confession of Brother Haluin (3 page)

Brother
Conradin, busy almost beneath his scaffolding, had leaped clear only just in
time, spattered and stung and half blinded for a moment by the blown drift of
the fall. Brother Urien, standing well back, and arrested in the very act of
calling up to his companion to stop, for the light was too far gone, uttered
instead a great cry of warning, too late to save, and sprang forward, to be
half buried by the edge of the fall. Shaking off snow, they reached Brother
Haluin together.

It
was Brother Urien who came in haste and grim silence looking for Cadfael, while
Conradin ran out the other way into the great court, and sent the first brother
he encountered to fetch Brother Edmund the infirmarer. Cadfael was in his
workshop, just turfing over his brazier for the night, when Urien erupted into
the doorway, a dark, dour man burning with ill news.

“Brother,
come quickly! Brother Haluin has fallen from the roof!”

Cadfael,
no less sparing of words, swung about, clouted down the last turf, and reached
for a woolen blanket from the shelf.

“Dead?”
The drop must be forty feet at least, timber by way of obstacles on the way
down, and packed ice below, but if by chance he had fallen into deep snow made
deeper still by the clearance of the roof, he might yet be lucky.

“There’s
breath in him. But for how long? Conradin’s gone for more helpers, Edmund knows
by now.”

“Come!”
said Cadfael, and was out of the door and running for the little bridge over
the leat, only to change his mind and dart along the narrow neck of causeway
between the abbey pools, and leap the leat at the end of it, to come the more
quickly to where Haluin lay. From the great court the gleam of two torches
advanced to meet them, and Brother Edmund with a couple of helpers and a hand
litter, hard on Brother Conradin’s heels.

Brother
Haluin, buried to the knees under heavy slates, with blood staining the ice
beneath his head, lay still in the middle of the turmoil he had caused.

Chapter Two

WHATEVER
THE RISKS OF MOVING HIM, to leave him where he was for a moment longer than was
necessary would have been to consent to and abet the death that already had a
fast hold on him. In mute and purposeful haste they lifted aside the fallen
planks and dug out with their hands the knife-edged slates that crushed and
lacerated his feet and ankles into a pulp of blood and bone. He was far gone
from them, and felt nothing that was done to him as they eased him out of the
icy bed of the drain enough to get slings under him, and hoisted him onto the
litter. In mourne procession they bore him out through the darkened gardens to
the infirmary, where Brother Edmund had prepared a bed for him in a small cell
apart from the old and infirm who spent their last years there.

“He
cannot live,” said Edmund, looking down at the remote and pallid face.

So
Cadfael thought, too. So did they all. But still there was breath in him, even
if it was a harsh, groaning breath that spoke of head injuries perhaps past
mending; and they went to work on him as one who could and must live, even
against their own virtual certainty that he could not. With infinite, wincing
care they stripped him of his icy garments, and padded him round with blankets
wrapped about heated stones, while Cadfael went over him gently for broken
bones, and set and bound the left forearm that grated as he handled it, and
still brought never a flicker to the motionless face. He felt carefully about
Haluin’s head before cleaning and dressing the bleeding wound, but could not
determine whether the skull was fractured. The bitter, snoring breathing
indicated that it was, but he could not be sure. As for the broken feet and
ankles, Cadfael labored over them for a long time after they had covered the
rest of Brother Haluin with warmed brychans against simple death of cold, his
body laid straight and shored securely every way to guard against the shock and
pain of movement should he regain his senses. As no one believed he would,
unless it was an obstinate, secret remnant of belief that caused them so to
exert themselves to nourish even the failing spark.

“He
will never walk again,” said Brother Edmund, shuddering at the shattered feet
Cadfael was laboriously bathing.

“Never
without aid,” Cadfael agreed somberly. “Never on these.” But for all that, he
went on patiently putting together again, as best he could, the mangled
remains.

Long,
narrow, elegant feet Brother Haluin had had, in keeping with his slender build.
The deep and savage cuts the slates had made penetrated to the bone in places,
here and there had splintered the bone. It took a long time to clean away the
bloody fragments, and bind up each foot at least into its human shape, and
encase it in a hastily improvised cradle of felt, well padded within, to hold
it still and let it heal as near as possible to what it had once been. If, of
course, there was to be healing.

And
all the while, Brother Haluin lay snoring painfully and oblivious of all that
was done to him, very far sunk beneath the lights and shadows of the world,
until even his breathing subsided gradually into a there shallow whisper, no
more than the stirring of a solitary leaf in a scarcely perceptible breeze, and
they thought that he was gone. But the leaf continued to stir, however faintly.

“If
he comes to himself, even for a moment, call me at once,” said Abbot Radulfus,
and left them to their watch.

Brother
Edmund was gone to get some sleep. Cadfael shared the night watch with Brother
Rhun, newest and youngest among the choir monks. One on either side the bed,
they stared steadily upon the unbroken sleep beyond sleep of a body anointed
and blessed and armed for death.

It
was many years since Haluin had passed out of Cadfael’s care to go to manual
labor in the Gaye. Cadfael reexamined with deep attention linaments he had
almost forgotten in their early detail, and found now both changed and
poignantly familiar. Not a big man, Brother Haluin, but somewhat taller than
the middle height, with long, fine, shapely bones, and more sinew and less
flesh on them now than when first he came into the cloister, a boy still short
of his full growth, and just hardening into manhood. Thirty-five or thirty-six
he must be now, barely eighteen then, with the softness and bloom still on him.
His face was a long oval, the bones of cheek and jaw strong and clear, the
thin, arched brows almost black, shades darker than the mane of crisp brown
hair he had sacrificed to the tonsure. The face upturned now from the pillow
was blanched to a clay-white pallor, the hollows of the cheeks and deep pits of
the closed eyes blue as shadows in the snow, and round the drawn lips the same
livid blueness was gathering even as they watched. In the small hours of the
night, when the life sinks to its frailest, he would end or mend.

Across
the bed Brother Rhun kneeled, attentive, unintimidated by another’s death any
more than he would be, someday, by his own. Even in the dimness of this small,
stony room Rhun’s radiant fairness, his face creamy with youth, his ring of
flaxen hair and aquamarine eyes, diffused a lambent brightness. Only someone of
Rhun’s virgin certainty could sit serenely by a deathbed, with such ardent
loving-kindness and yet no taint of pity. Cadfael had seen other young
creatures come to the cloister with something of the same charmed faith, only
to see it threatened, dulled and corroded gradually by the sheer burden of
being human under the erosion of the years. That would never happen to Rhun.
Saint Winifred, who had bestowed on him the physical perfection he had lacked,
would not suffer the gift to be marred by any maiming of his spirit.

The
night passed slowly, with no perceptible change in Brother Haluin’s unrelenting
stillness. It was towards dawn when at last Rhun said softly, “Look, he is
stirring!”

The
faintest quiver had passed over the livid face, the dark brows drew together,
the eyelids tightened with the first distant awareness of pain, the lips
lengthened in a brief grimace of stress and alarm. They waited for what seemed
a long while, unable to do more than wipe the moist forehead, and the trickle
of spittle that oozed from the corner of the drawn mouth.

In
the first dim, reflected snowlight before dawn Brother Haluin opened his eyes,
onyx black in their blue hollows, and moved his lips to emit a hair-fine thread
of a voice that Rhun had to stoop his young, sharp ear to catch and interpret.

“Confession…”
said the whisper from the threshold between life and death, and for a while
that was all.

“Go
and bring Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.

Rhun
departed silently and swiftly. Haluin lay gathering his senses, and by the
growing clarity and sharpening focus of his eyes he knew where he was and who
sat beside him, and was mustering what life and wit remained to him for a
purpose. Cadfael saw the quickening of pain in the strained whiteness of mouth
and jaw, and made to trickle a little of the draught of poppies between his
patient’s lips, but Haluin kept them tightly clenched and turned his head away.
He wanted nothing to dull or hamper his senses, not yet, not until he had got
out of him what he had to say.

“Father
Abbot is coming,” said Cadfael, close to the pillow. “Wait, and speak but
once.”

Abbot
Radulfus was at the door by then, stooping under the low lintel. He took the
stool Rhun had vacated, and leaned down to the injured man. Rhun had remained
without, ready to run errands if he should be needed, and had drawn the door
closed between. Cadfael rose to withdraw likewise, and suddenly yellow sparks
of anxiety flared in Haluin’s hollow eyes, and a brief convulsion went through
his body and fetched a moan of pain, as though he had willed to lift a hand to
arrest Cadfael’s going, but could not do it. The abbot leaned closer, to be
seen as well as heard.

“I
am here, my son. I am listening. What is it troubles you?”

Haluin
drew in breath, hoarding it to have a voice to speak with. “I have sins…” he
said, “… never told.” The words came slowly and with much labor, but clearly.
“One against Cadfael… Long past… never confessed…”

The
abbot looked up at Cadfael across the bed. “Stay! He wishes it.” And to Haluin,
touching the lax hand that was too weak to be lifted: “Speak as you can, we shall
be listening. Spare many words, we can read between.”

“My
vows,” said the thread-fine voice remotely. “Impure… not out of devotion…
Despair!”

“Many
have entered for wrong reasons,” said the abbot, “and remained for the right
ones. Certainly in the four years of my abbacy here I have found no fault in
your true service. On this head have no fear. God may have brought you into the
cloister roundabout for his own good reasons.”

“I
served de Clary at Hales,” said the thin voice. “Better, his lady—he being in
the Holy Land then. His daughter…” A long silence while doggedly and patiently
he renewed his endurance to deliver more and worse. “I loved her… and was
loved. But the mother… my suit was not welcome. What was forbidden us we took…”

Another
and longer silence. The blue, sunken lids were lowered for a moment over the
burning eyes. “We lay together,” he said clearly. “That sin I did confess, but
never named her. The lady cast me out. Out of despair I came here… at least to
do no more harm. And the worst harm yet to come!”

The
abbot closed his hand firmly on the nerveless hand at Haluin’s side, to hold
him fast by the grip, for the face on the pillow had sunk into a mask of clay,
and a long shudder passed through the bruised and broken body, and left it
tensed and chill to the touch.

“Rest!”
said Radulfus, close to the sufferer’s ear. “Take ease! God hears even what is
not said.”

It
seemed to Cadfael, watching, that Haluin’s hand responded, however feeble its
hold. He brought the drink of wine and herbs with which he had been moistening
the patient’s mouth while he lay senseless, and trickled a few drops between
the pained lips, and for the first time the offering was accepted, and the
strings of the lean throat made the effort to swallow. His time was not yet. Whatever
more he might have to heave off his heart, there was yet time for it. They fed
him sips of wine, and watched the clay of his features again cohere into flesh,
however pale and feeble. This time, when he came back to them, it was very
faintly and with eyes still closed.

“Father…?”
questioned the remote voice fearfully.

“I
am here. I will not leave you.”

“Her
mother came… I did not know till then Bertrade was with child! The lady was in
terror of her lord’s anger when he came home. I served then with Brother
Cadfael, I had learned… I knew the herbs… I stole and gave her… hyssop,
fleur-de-lis… Cadfael knows better uses for them!”

Yes,
better by far! But what could help a badly congested chest and a killing cough,
in small doses, or fight off the jaundice that turned a man yellow, could also
put an end to the carrying of a child, in an obscene misuse abhorrent to the
Church and perilous even to the woman it was meant to deliver. From fear of an
angry father, fear of shame before the world, fear of marriage prospects ruined
and family feuds inflamed. Had the girl’s mother entreated him, or had he
persuaded her? Years of remorse and self-punishment had not exorcised the
horror that still wrung his flesh and contorted his visage.