The Devils Novice (24 page)

“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
took 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.”

Meriet
went with him, still a little reluctantly, but not greatly disturbed by the
thought of having to bear the regard, the sympathy, the obstinate championship,
perhaps, of a child playmate. The children among his beggars had been good for
him, simple, undemanding, accepting him without question. Isouda’s sisterly
fondness he could meet in the same way, or so he supposed.

She
had helped herself to the flint and tinder in the box beside the cot, struck
sparks, and kindled the wick of the small lamp, setting it carefully on the broad
stone placed for it, where it would be safe from contact with any drifting
straw, and shed its mellow, mild light upon the foot of the bed, where she had
seated herself. She had put back her cloak to rest only upon her shoulders and
frame the sober grandeur of her gown, her embroidered girdle, and the hands
folded in her lap. She lifted upon Meriet as he entered the discreet, age-old
smile of the Virgin in one of the more worldly paintings of the Annunciation,
where the angel’s embassage is patently superfluous, for the lady has known it
long before.

Meriet
caught his breath and halted at gaze, seeing this grown lady seated calmly and
expectantly upon his bed. How could a few months so change anyone? He had meant
to say gently but bluntly: “You should not have come here,” but the words were
never uttered. There she sat in possession of herself and of place and time,
and he was almost afraid of her, and of the sorry changes she might find in
him, thin, limping, outcast, no way resembling the boy who had run wild with
her no long time ago. But Isouda rose, advanced upon him with hands raised to
draw his head down to her, and kissed him soundly.

“Do
you know you’ve grown almost handsome? I’m sorry about your broken head,” she
said, lifting a hand to touch the healed wound, “but this will go, you’ll bear
no mark. Someone did good work closing that cut. You may surely kiss me, you
are not a monk yet.”

Meriet’s
lips, still and chill against her cheek, suddenly stirred and quivered, closing
in helpless passion. Not for her as a woman, not yet, simply as a warmth, a
kindness, someone coming with open arms and no questions or reproaches. He
embraced her inexpertly, wavering between impetuosity and shyness of this
transformed being, and quaked at the contact.

“You’re
still lame,” she said solicitously. “Come and sit down with me. I won’t stay
too long, to tire you, but I couldn’t be so near without coming to see you
again. Tell me about this place,” she ordered, drawing him down to the bed
beside her. “There are children here, too, I heard their voices. Quite young
children.”

Spellbound,
he began to tell her in stumbling, broken phrases about Brother Mark, small and
fragile and indestructible, who had the signature of God upon him and longed to
become a priest. It was not hard to talk about his friend, and the unfortunates
who were yet fortunate in falling into such hands. Never a word about himself
or her, while they sat shoulder to shoulder, turned inwards towards each other,
and their eyes ceaselessly measured and noted the changes wrought by this
season of trial. He forgot that he was a man self-condemned, with only a brief
but strangely tranquil life before him, and she a young heiress with a manor
double the value of Aspley, and grown suddenly beautiful. They sat immured from
time and unthreatened by the world; and Cadfael slipped away satisfied, and
went to snatch a word with Brother Mark, while there was time. She had her
finger on the pulse of the hours, she would not stay too long. The art was to
astonish, to warm, to quicken an absurd but utterly credible hope, and then to
depart.

When
she thought fit to go, Meriet brought her from the barn by the hand. They had
both a high colour and bright eyes, and by the way they moved together they had
broken free from the first awe, and had been arguing as of old; and that was
good. He stooped his cheek to be kissed when they separated, and she kissed him
briskly, gave him a cheek in exchange, said he was a stubborn wretch as he
always had been, and yet left him exalted almost into content, and herself went
away cautiously encouraged.

“I
have as good as promised him I will send my horse to fetch him in good time
tomorrow morning,” she said, when they were reaching the first scattered houses
of the Foregate.

“I
have as good as promised Mark the same,” said Cadfael. “But he had best come
cloaked and quietly. God, he knows if I have any good reason for it, but my
thumbs prick and I want him there, but unknown to those closest to him in
blood.”

“We
are troubling too much,” said the girl buoyantly, exalted by her own success.
“I told you long ago, he is mine, and no one else will have him. If it is
needful that Peter Clemence’s slayer must be taken, to give Meriet to me, then
why fret, for he will be taken.”

“Girl,”
said Cadfael, breathing in deeply, “you terrify me like an act of God. And I do
believe you will pull down the thunderbolt.”

In
the warmth and soft light in their small chamber in the guesthall after supper,
the two girls who shared a bed sat brooding over their plans for the morrow.
They were not sleepy, they had far too much on their minds to wish for sleep.
Roswitha’s maid-servant, who attended them both, had gone to her bed an hour
ago; she was a raw country girl, not entrusted with the choice of jewels,
ornaments and perfumes for a marriage. It would be Isouda who would dress her
friend’s hair, help her into her gown, and escort her from guest-hall to church
and back again, withdrawing the cloak from her shoulders at the church door, in
this December cold, restoring it when she left on her lord’s arm, a new-made
wife.

Roswitha
had spread out her wedding gown on the bed, to brood over its every fold,
consider the set of the sleeves and the fit of the bodice, and wonder whether
it would not be the better still for a closer clasp to the gilded girdle.

Isouda
roamed the room restlessly, replying carelessly to Roswitha’s dreaming comments
and questions. They had the wooden chests of their possessions,
leather-covered, stacked against one wall, and the small things they had taken
out were spread at large on every surface; bed, shelf and chest. The little box
that held Roswitha’s jewels stood upon the press beside the guttering lamp.
Isouda delved a hand idly into it, plucking out one piece after another. She
had no great interest in such adornments.