by Ellis Peters
And the third day, early in the afternoon, they came to the manor of Hales.
*
The manor house lay a little aside from the village and the church, timber-built on the stone undercroft, in level, well-drained fields, with gentle wooded slopes beyond. Within its wooden fence, stable and barn and bakehouse were ranged along the pale, well maintained and neat. Brother Haluin stood in the open gateway, and looked at the place of his old service with a face fixed and still, only his eyes alive and full of pain.
“Four years,” he said, “I kept the manor roll here. Bertrand de Clary was my father’s overlord. I was sent here before I was fourteen, to be page to his lady. Will you believe, the man himself I never saw. Before I came here he was already in the Holy Land. This is but one of his manors, the only one in these parts, but his son was already installed in his place, and ruled the honor from Staffordshire. She always liked Hales best, she left her son to his lordship and settled here, and it was here I came. Better for her if I had never entered this house. Better far for Bertrade!”
“It’s too late,” said Cadfael mildly, “to do right whatever was done amiss then. This day is for doing aright what you have pledged yourself to do now, and for that it is not too late. You’ll be freer with her, maybe, if I wait for you without.”
“No,” said Haluin. “Come with me! I need your witness, I know it will be just.”
A tow-haired youth came out of the stable with a pitchfork in his hands, steaming gently in the chill air. At sight of two black Benedictine habits in the gateway he turned and came towards them, leisurely and amiable.
“If you’re wanting a bed and a meal, Brothers, come in, your cloth’s always welcome here. There’s good lying in the loft, and they’ll feed you in the kitchen if you’ll please to walk through.”
“I do remember,” said Haluin, his eyes still fixed upon a distant past, “your lady kept always a hospitable house for travelers. But I shall need no bed this night. I have an errand to the lady Adelais de Clary herself, if she will give me audience. A few minutes of her time is all I ask.”
The boy shrugged, staring them over with grey, unreadable Saxon eyes, and waved them towards the stone steps that led up to the hall door.
“Go in and ask for her woman Gerta, she’ll see if the lady’ll speak with you.” And he stood to watch them as they crossed the yard, before turning back to his labours among the horses.
A manservant was just coming up the steps from the kitchen into the passage as they entered the great doorway. He came to ask their business, and being told, sent off a kitchen boy to carry word to the lady’s woman of the chamber, who presently came out from the hall to see who these monastic guests might be. A woman of about forty years, very brisk and neat, plain in her dress and plain in her face, for she was pockmarked. But of her confidence in office there was no question. She looked them over somewhat superciliously, and listened to Haluin’s meekly uttered request without a responsive smile, in no hurry to open a door of which she clearly felt herself the privileged custodian.
“From the abbey at Shrewsbury, you come? And on the lord abbot’s business, I suppose?”
“On an errand the lord abbot has sanctioned,” said Haluin.
“It is not the same,” said Gerta sharply. “What other than abbey business can send a monk of Shrewsbury here? If this is some matter of your own, let my lady know with whom she is dealing.”
“Tell her,” said Haluin patiently, leaning heavily on his crutches, and with eyes lowered from the woman’s unwelcoming face, “that Brother Haluin, a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury abbey, humbly begs of her grace to receive him.”
The name meant nothing to her. Clearly she had not been in Adelais de Clary’s service, or certainly not in her confidence or even close enough to guess at her preoccupations, eighteen years ago. Some other woman, perhaps nearer her mistress’s years, had filled this intimate office then. Close body servants, grown into their mistress’s trust and into their own blood loyalty, carry a great treasury of secrets, often to their deaths. There must somewhere, Cadfael thought, watching in silence, be a woman who would have stiffened and opened her eyes wide at that name, even if she had not instantly known the changed and time-worn face.
“I will ask,” said the tirewoman, with a touch of condescension still, and went away through the hall to a leather-curtained doorway at the far end. Some minutes passed before she appeared again, drawing back the hangings, and without troubling to approach them, called from the doorway: “My lady says you may come.”
The solar they entered was small and dim, for the windward of the two windows was shuttered fast against the weather, and the tapestries that draped the walls were old, and in rich dark colors. There was no fireplace, but a stone hearth laid close to the most sheltered corner carried a charcoal brazier, and between that and the one window that gave light a woman was sitting at a little embroidery frame, on a cushioned stool. Against the light from the window she showed as a tall, erect shape, dark-clothed, while the glow of the brazier shone in copper highlights on her shadowed face. She had left her needle thrust into the stretched cloth. Her hands were clenched fast on the raised arms of the stool, and her eyes were on the doorway, into which Brother Haluin lurched painfully on his crutches, his one serviceable foot sore with use and bearing him wincingly at every step, the blocked toe of his left foot barely touching the floor as a meager aid to balance. Constant leaning into the crutches had hunched his shoulders and bent his straight back. Having heard his name, she must surely have expected something nearer to the lively, comely young man she had cast out all those years ago. What could she make now of this mangled wreckage?
He was barely within the room when she rose abruptly to her feet, stiff as a lance. Over their heads she spoke first to the waiting-woman, who had made to follow them in.
“Leave us!” said Adelais de Clary, and to Haluin, as the leather curtain swung heavily into place between solar and hall: “What is this? What have they done to you?”
Chapter 4
SHE MUST, Cadfael reckoned, growing used to the play of light and shadow within the room, be within ten years of his own age, but she looked younger. The dark hair that was coiled in heavy braids on either side of her head was bareiy touched with grey, and the imperious, fine bones of her face had kept their imperishable elegance, though the flesh that covered them was a little shrunken and sapless now, and her body had grown angular and lean as the juices of youth dried up. Her hands, though shapely still, betrayed her with swollen knuckles and seamed veins, and there was a languor upon her pale skin at throat and wrist where once the rounded gloss of youth had been. But for all that, in the oval face, the long, resolute lips, and large eyes in their deep settings Cadfael saw the ashes of great beauty. No, not ashes, embers, still alive and as hot at least as the coals burning in the heart of the brazier.
“Come nearer!” she said. And when Haluin stood before her with the light upon his face, pale and cold light from the window, flushed from the fire: “It is you!” she said. “I wondered. How have you come to this?”
Her voice was low-pitched, full and authoritative, but the first implication of dismay and concern was gone. She looked at him neither compassionately nor coldly, but with a kind of detached indifference, a curiosity of no deep root.
“This is no man’s blame but mine,” said Haluin. “Don’t regard it! I have what I earned. I came by a great fall, but by the grace of God I am alive, who by this time had thought to be dead. And as I have eased my soul to God and my confessor for old sins, so I come to beg forgiveness of you.”
“Was that needful?” she said, marveling. “After so many years, and all this way?”
“Yes, it was needful. I do greatly need to hear you say that you forgive me the wrong I did, and the grief I brought upon you. There can be no rest for me now until the leaf is washed clear of every last stain.”
“And you have told over all the old writing,” said Adelais with some bitterness, �
��all that was secret and shameful, have you? To your confessor? And how many more? This good brother who bears you company? The whole household at chapter? Could you not bear to be still a sinner unshriven, rather than betray my daughter’s name to the world, and she so long in her grave? I would have gone sinful into purgatory rather!”
“And so would I!” cried Haluin, wrung. “But no, it is not so. Brother Cadfael bears me company because he is the only one who knows, excepting only Abbot Radulfus, who heard my confession. No other will ever know from us. Brother Cadfael was also grossly wronged in what I did, he had a right to give or withhold forgiveness. It was from his store and after his teaching that I stole those medicines I gave to you.”
She turned her gaze upon Cadfael in a long, steady stare, and her face, for once seen clearly, was intent and still. “Well,” she said, again turning away into indifference, “it was very long ago. Who would remember now? And I am not dying yet. What do I know! I shall need a priest myself someday, I could better have answered you then. Well, to put an end to it… Have what you ask! I do forgive you. I would not add to what you suffer. Go back in peace to your cloister. I forgive you as I hope for forgiveness.”
It was said without passion; the brief spurt of anger was already gone. It cost her no effort to absolve him; she did it as neutrally, it seemed, and with as little feeling as she would have handed out food to a beggar. Of gentlewomen of her nobility alms could properly be asked, and granting was a form of largesse, the due fulfillment of a rite of lordship. But what she gave lightly came as relieving grace to Haluin. The braced tension went out of his leaning shoulders and stiffly clenched hands. He bent his head humbly before her, and uttered his thanks in a low and halting voice, like a man momentarily dazed.
“Madam, your mercy lifts a load from me, and from my heart I am grateful.”
“Go back to the life you have chosen and the duties you have undertaken,” she said, again seating herself, though she did not yet reach for her needle. “Think no more of what happened long ago. You say you have a life spared. Use it as best you can, and so will I mine.”
It was a dismissal, and as such Haluin accepted it. He made her a deep reverence, and turned carefully upon his crutches, and Cadfael reached a hand to steady him in the movement. She had not so much as bidden them be seated, perhaps too shaken by so sudden and startling a visit, but as they reached the doorway she called after them suddenly:
“Stay if you will, take rest and meat in my house. My servants will provide you everything you need.”
“I thank you,” said Haluin, “but our leave of absence enjoins a return as soon as my pilgrimage here is done.”
“God hasten your way home, then,” said Adelais de Clary, and with a steady hand took up her needle again.
*
The church lay a short distance from the manor, where two tracks crossed, and the huddle of village house-plots gathered close about the churchyard wall.
“The tomb is within,” said Haluin, as they entered at the gate. “It was never opened when I was here, but Bertrand’s father is buried here, and surely it must have been opened for Bertrade. She died here. I am sorry, Cadfael, that I refused hospitality also for you. I had not thought in time. I shall need no bed tonight.”
“You said no word of that to the lady,” Cadfael observed.
“No. I hardly know why. When I saw her again my heart misgave me that I did ill to bring before her again that old pain, that the very sight of me was an offense to her. Yet she did forgive. I am the better for that, and she surely none the worse. But you could have slept easy tonight. No need for two to watch.”
“I’m better fitted for a night on my knees than you,” said Cadfael. “And I am not sure the welcome there would have been very warm. She wished us gone. No, it’s very well as it is. Most likely she thinks we’re on the homeward way already, off her land and out of her life.”
Haluin halted for a second with his hand on the heavy iron ring latch of the church door, his face in shadow. The door swung open, creaking, and he gripped his crutches to ease himself down the two wide, shallow steps into the nave. It was dim and stonily chilly within. Cadfael waited a moment on the steps till his eyes grew accustomed to the changed light, but Haluin set off at once up the nave towards the altar. Nothing here was greatly changed in eighteen years, and nothing had been forgotten. Even the rough edges of the floor tiles were known to him. He turned aside towards the right-hand wall, his crutches ringing hollowly, and Cadfael, following, found him standing beside a stone table-tomb fitted between the pillars. The carved image recumbent there was in crude chain mail, and had one leg crossed over the other, and a hand on his sword hilt. Another Crusader, surely the father of Bertrand, who in his turn had followed him to the Holy Land. This one, Cadfael calculated, might well have been with Robert of Normandy’s army in my time, at the taking of Jerusalem. Clearly the de Clary men were proud of their warfare in the east.
A man came through from the sacristy, and seeing two unmistakable Benedictine habits, turned amicably to come towards them. A man of middle age, in a rusty black cassock, advancing upon them with a mildly inquiring expression and a welcoming smile, Haluin heard his steps, soft as they were, and swung about gladly to greet a remembered neighbor, only to recoil on the instant at seeing a stranger.
“Good day, Brothers! God be with you!” said the priest of Hales. “To travelers of your cloth my house is always open, like this house of God. Have you come far?”
“From Shrewsbury,” said Haluin, strongly recovering himself. “Forgive me, Father, if I was taken aback. I had expected to see Father Wulfnoth. Foolish of me, indeed, for I have not been here for many years, and he was growing grey when I knew him, but to me in youth it seemed he would be here forever. Now I dare hardly ask!”
“Father Wulfnoth is gone to his rest,” said the priest, “seven years ago now it must be. Ten years back I came here, after he was brought to his bed by a seizure, and three years I looked after him until he died. I was newly priest then, I learned much from Wulfnoth, his mind was clear and bright if the flesh had failed him.” His good-natured round face offered sympathetic curiosity. “You know this church and this manor, then? Were you born in Hales?”
“No, not that. But for some years I served with the lady Adelais at the manor. Church and village I knew well, before I took the cowl at Shrewsbury. Now,” said Haluin earnestly, observing how brightly he was studied, and feeling the need to account for his return, “I have good need to give thanks for escaping alive from a mishap that might have caused my death, and I have taken thought to discharge, while I may, every debt I have on my conscience. Of which number, one brings me here to this tomb. There was a lady of the de Clary family whom I reverenced, and she died untimely. I should like to spend the night here at her burial place, in prayers for her. It was long before your time, eighteen years ago now. It will not disturb you if I spend the night here within?”
“Why, as to that, you’d be welcome,” said the priest heartily, “and I could light a cresset for you. It gives some help against the cold. But surely, Brother, you’re under some mistake. True, what you say puts this before my time, but Father Wulfnoth told me much concerning the church and the manor, he’d been in the service of the lords of Hales all his life. It was they helped him to his studies and set him up here as priest. There has been no burial here in this tomb since the old lord died, this one who’s carved here on the stone. And that was more than thirty years back. It’s his grandson rules now. A lady of the family, you say? And died young?”
“A kinswoman,” said Haluin, low-voiced and shaken, his eyes lowered to the stone which had not been raised for thirty years. “She died here at Hales. I had thought she must be buried here.” He would not name her, or betray more than he must of himself and what moved him, even to this kindly man. And Cadfael stood back from them, watched, and held his peace.
“And only eighteen years ago? Then be certain. Brother, she is not here. If you kn
ew Father Wulfnoth, you know you can rely upon what he told me. And I know his wits were sharp until the day he died.”
“I do believe it, “ said Haluin, quivering with the chill of disappointment. “He would not be mistaken. So—she is not here!”
“But this is not the chief seat of the de Clary honor,” the priest pointed out gently, “for that’s Elford, in Staffordshire. The present lord, Audemar, took his father there for burial; the family has a great vault there. If there are any close kin dead these last years, that’s where they’ll be. No doubt the lady you speak of was also taken there to lie among her kinsfolk.”
Haluin seized upon the hope hungrily. “Yes… yes, it could well be so, it must be so. There I shall find her.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said the priest. “But it’s a long way to go afoot.” He had sensed an urgency that was very unlikely to listen to reason, but he did his best to temper it. “You’d be well advised to go mounted, if you must go now, or put it off for longer days and better weather. At least come inside, to my house, and take meat with me, and rest overnight.”
But that Haluin would not do, so much was already clear to Brother Cadfael. Not while there was still an hour or more of daylight left at the windows, and he had still the strength to go a mile further. He excused himself with slightly guilty thanks, and took a restrained leave of the good man, who watched them in wondering speculation until they had climbed the steps to the porch, and closed the door after them.
*
“No!” said Cadfael firmly, as soon as they were clear of the churchyard, and passing along the track between the village houses to reach the highroad. “That you cannot do!”
“I can, I must!” Brother Haluin responded with no less determination. “Why should I not?”
“Because, in the first place, you do not know how far it is to Etford. As far again as we have come, and half as far after that. And you know very well how hard you have pushed yourself already. And in the second place, because you were given leave to attempt this journey in the belief that it would end here, and we two return from here. And so we should. No, never shake your head at me, you know very well Father Abbot never envisaged more than that, and would never have given you leave for more. We should turn back here.”