Holy Thief (2 page)

“That
is true,” Radulfus allowed. “Sulien Blount, of the manor of Longner. He came
here to us, with Abbot Walter’s countenance. The young man had not taken his
final vows. He was approaching the end of his novitiate, and was in some doubt
of his vocation. He came here upon terms, with his abbot’s full leave, to
consider on his future. It was his own decision to leave this house, and return
to his family, and I absolved him accordingly. In my view he had entered the
Order mistakenly. Nevertheless, he must and will answer for himself. I will
have one of the brothers show you the way to his elder brother’s manor.”

“I
shall do my best to recall him to his better self,” Herluin stated, with a
distinct implication in his tone that he would enjoy hounding back to the fold
a reluctant but out-argued penitent.

Brother
Cadfael, studying this formidable personage from his retired corner, and his
long years of secular and monastic experience of all sorts and conditions of
men, reflected that the sub-prior would probably make a very good preacher at
the High Cross, and exact donations from a great many guilty consciences; for
he was voluble enough, even capable of passion in the service of Ramsey. But
over his chances of shifting young Sulien Blount’s mind, as against the fine
girl he was shortly to marry, Cadfael shook his head. If he could do it, he was
a miracle-worker, and on his way to sainthood. There were uncomfortable saints
in Cadfael’s hagiology, whom he personally would have consigned to a less
reverend status, but whose aggravating rectitude he could not deny. On the
whole, he could even feel a little sorry for Sub-Prior Herluin, who was about
to blunt all his weapons against the impregnable shield of love. Try and get
Sulien Blount away from Pernel Otmere now! He had learned to know the pair of
them too well to be in doubt.

He
found that he was not, so far, greatly attracted to Sub-Prior Herluin, though
he could respect the man’s toughness on this long journey afoot, and his
determination to replenish Ramsey’s plundered coffers and rebuild its ruined
halls. They were a pair very oddly assorted, these itinerant brothers from the
Fens. The sub-prior was a big man, long-boned, wide-shouldered, carrying flesh
once ample, perhaps even excessive, but shrunken and a little flabby now.
Certainly no reproach to him; he had shared, it seemed, the short commons on
which the unfortunate fen-dwellers had had to survive during this harvestless
year of oppression. His uncovered head showed a pale tonsure encircled with
grizzled, springy hair more brown than grey, and a long, lantern face, austere
of feature, deep-set and stern of eye, with a long straight stroke of a mouth,
almost lipless in repose, as though totally stranger to smiling. Such lines as
his countenance had acquired, during a lifetime Cadfael judged at about fifty
years, all bore heavily downward, repressed and forbidding.

Not
a very amiable companion on a long journey, unless his looks belied him. Brother
Tutilo, who stood modestly a little behind his superior, following with rapt
attention every word Herluin said, looked about twenty years old, perhaps even
less; a lightly-built lad, notably lissome and graceful in movement, a model of
disciplined composure in stillness. His crown only just topped Herluin’s
shoulder, and was ringed with a profusion of light brown curls, the crop grown
during a lengthy journey. No doubt they would be clipped austerely close when
Herluin got him back to Ramsey, but now they would have done credit to a
painted seraph in a missal, though the face beneath this aureole was scarcely
seraphic, in spite of its air of radiant devotion. At first glance a lovely
innocent, as open as his wide eyes, and with the silken pink and whiteness of a
girl, but a more penetrating study revealed that this childlike colouring was
imposed upon an oval face of classic symmetry and sharp and incisive moulding.
The colouring of roses on those pure marble lines had almost the air of a
disguise, behind which an engaging but slightly perilous creature lurked in
possibly mischievous ambush.

Tutilo,
a strange name for an English youth; for there was nothing of the Norman or the
Celtic about this young man. Perhaps the name chosen for him when he entered his
novitiate. He must ask Brother Anselm what it signified, and where the
authorities in Ramsey could have found it. Cadfael turned his attention once
again to what was being discussed between host and guests.

“While
you are in these parts,” said the abbot, “I take it you may wish to visit other
Benedictine houses. We will provide horses, if you so please. The season is not
the most favourable for travelling. The rivers are running high, some of the
fords will be impassable, you will be better mounted. We will hasten whatever
arrangements you may choose to make, confer with Father Boniface about the use
of the church, for he has the cure of souls in the parish of Holy Cross, and
with Hugh Beringar as sheriff and the provost and Guild Merchant of the town concerning
your gathering at the High Cross in Shrewsbury. If there is anything more we
can do to be of service, you need but state it.”

“We
shall be grateful indeed to go mounted a while,” agreed Herluin, coming as near
to smiling as his features would permit, “for we intend to go on at least to
our brothers at Worcester, perhaps also to Evesham and Pershore, and it would
be simple to return by Shrewsbury and bring back your horses. Ours were taken,
every one, by the outlaws before they departed. But first, even this day if
possible, we would wish to go and speak with Brother Sulien.”

“As
you think best,” said Radulfus simply. “Brother Cadfael, I think, is best
acquainted with the way, there is a ferry to be crossed, and also with the
household of the lord of Longner. It may be well if he accompanies you.”

“Brother
Sulien,” remarked Cadfael, crossing the court afterwards with Brother Anselm
the precentor and librarian, “has not been called by that title for some while,
and is hardly likely to take kindly to it again now. And so Radulfus could have
told him, for he knows the whole story of that young man as well as I do. But
if he had said as much, this Herluin would not have listened, I suppose.
‘Brother’ means his own brother Eudo now to Sulien. He’s in training for arms,
and will be one of Hugh’s young men of the garrison up there in the castle as
soon as his mother dies, and they tell me that’s very close now. And a married
man, very likely, even before that happens. There’ll be no going back to
Ramsey.”

“If
his abbot sent the boy home to come to his own decision,” said Anselm
reasonably,”the sub-prior can hardly be empowered to bring too severe pressure
on him to return. Argue and exhort as he may, he’s helpless, and must know it,
if the young man stands fast. It may well be,” he added drily, “that what he
hopes for from that quarter is a conscience fee in silver.”

“Likely
enough. And he may very well get it, too. There’s more than one conscience in
that house,” agreed Cadfael, “feels a debt towards Ramsey. And what,” he asked,
“do you make of the other?”

“The
young one? An enthusiast, with grace and fervour shining out of his creamy
cheeks. Chosen to go with Herluin to temper the chill, would you say?”

“And
where did he get that outlandish name of his?”

Tutilo!
Yes,” said Anselm, musing. “Not at his baptism! There must be a reason why they
chose that for him. Tutilo you’ll find among the March saints, though we don’t
pay him much attention here. He was a monk of Saint Gall, two hundred years and
more ago since he died, and by all accounts he was a master of all the arts,
painter, poet, musician and all. Perhaps we have a gifted lad among us. I must
get him to try his hand on rebec or organetto, and see what he can do. We had
the roving singer here once, do you remember? The little tumbler who got
himself a wife out of the goldsmith’s scullery before he left us. I mended his
rebec for him. If this one can do better, maybe he has some small claim to the
name they’ve given him. Sound him out, Cadfael, if you’re to be their guide out
to Longner this afternoon. Herluin will be hot on the heels of his strayed
novice. Try your hand with Tutilo.”

The
path to the manor of Longner set off northeastward from the lanes of the
Foregate, threaded a short, dense patch of woodland, and climbed over a low
crest of heath and meadow to look down upon the winding course of the Severn,
downstream from the town. The river was running high and turgid, rolling fallen
branches and clumps of turf from the banks down in its currents. There had been
ample snows in the winter, without any great gales or frosts. The thaw still
filled the valleys everywhere with the soft rippling of water, even the meadows
by the river and the brook whispered constantly and shimmered with lingering
silver among the grass. The ford a short way upstream was already impassable,
the island that helped foot traffic across at normal times was under water. But
the ferryman poled his passengers across sturdily, so familiar and at ease with
his troubled waters that storm, flood and calm were all one to him.

On
the further side of the Severn the path threaded wet water-meadows, the river
lipping the bleached winter grass a yard inland already. If heavy Spring rains
came on the hills of Wales, to follow the thaw-water, there would be flooding
under the walls of Shrewsbury, and the Meole Brook and the mill pond would back
up strongly and threaten even the nave of the abbey church. It had happened
twice since Cadfael entered the Order. And westward the sky hung ponderous and
grey, leaning upon the distant mountains.

They
skirted the encroaching waters, below the dark ploughland of the Potter’s
Field, climbed thankfully inland up the gentle slope beyond, into the wellkept
woodlands of the manor of Longner, and came to the clearing where the house
backed snugly into the hillside, sheltered from the prevailing winds, and
surrounded by its high stockade and the encrustation of demesne buildings
within.

As
they entered at the gate Sulien Blount came out from the stables to cross to
the house. He wore leather jerkin and the working cotte and hose becoming a
younger brother doing his share on his elder’s estate until he could find
occasion to carve out his own holding, as surely he would. At the sight of the
trio entering he halted, stiffly at gaze, instantly recognizing his former
spiritual superior, and startled to see him here so far from home. But at once
he came to meet them, with reverent and perhaps slightly apprehensive courtesy.
The stresses of the past year had removed him so far from the cloister and the
tonsure that the reappearance so close to home of what was past and done seemed
for a moment to offer a threat to his new and hard-earned composure, and the
future he had chosen. Only for a moment. Sulien was in no doubt now of where he
was going.

“Father
Herluin, welcome to my home! I rejoice to see you well, and to know that Ramsey
is restored to the Order. Will you not come within, and let us know in what
particular we of Longner can serve you?”

“You
cannot but understand,” said Herluin, addressing himself warily to possible
battle ahead, “in what state we have regained our abbey. For a year it has been
the den of a rogue army, pillaged and stripped of everything burnable, even the
walls defiled, where they did not shatter them before they departed. We have
need of every son of the house, and every friend to the Order, to make good
before God what has been desecrated. It is to you I come, and with you I wish
to speak.”

“A
friend to the Order,” said Sulien, “I hope I am. A son of Ramsey and a brother
of its brothers I no longer am. Abbot Walter sent me back here, very fairly, to
consider my vocation, which he knew to be dubious, and committed my probation
to Abbot Radulfus, who has absolved me. But come within, and we can confer as
friends. I will listen reverently, Father, and respect all you may have to
say.”

And
so he would, for he was a young man brought up to observe all the duties of
youth towards his elders; all the more as a younger son with no inheritance and
his own way to make, and therefore all the greater need to please those who had
power and authority, and could advance his career. He would listen and defer,
but he would not be shifted. Nor did he need any friendly witness to support his
side of the case, and why should Herluin’s side of it be weighted even by a
devout and silent young acolyte, imposing on an ex-brother by his very presence
a duty he no longer owed, and had undertaken mistakenly and for the wrong
reasons in the first place?

“You
will wish to confer strictly in private,” said Cadfael, following the sub-prior
up the stone steps to the hall door. “With your leave, Sulien, this young
brother and I will look in upon your mother. If, of course, she is well enough
and willing to receive visits.”

“Yours,
always!’ said Sulien, with a brief, flashing smile over his shoulder. “And a
new face will refresh her. You know how she views life and the world now, very
peacefully.”

It
had not always been so. Donata Blount had suffered years of some consuming and
incurable disease that devoured her substance slowly and with intense pain.
Only with the last stages of her bodily weakness had she almost outlived pain
itself, and grown reconciled to the world she was leaving as she drew nearer to
the door opening upon another.

“It
will be very soon,” said Sulien simply. He halted in the high dim hall. “Father
Herluin, be pleased to enter the solar with me, and I will send for some
refreshment for you. My brother is at the farm. I am sorry he is not here to
greet you, but we had no prior word. You will excuse him. If your errand is to
me, it may be better so.” And to Cadfael: “Go in to my mother’s chamber. I know
she is awake, and never doubt but you are always welcome to her.”