Holy Thief (22 page)

AT THE END OF
MASS, when the children had been dismissed to their schooling with Brother
Paul, and only the choir monks were left as awed witnesses, Abbot Radulfus
offered a brief and practical prayer for divine guidance, and approached Saint
Winifred’s altar.

“With
respect,” said Earl Robert, standing courteously aloof, and in the mildest and
most reasonable of voices, “how should we determine who should be first to try
the fates? Is there some rule we ought to follow?”

“We
are here to ask,” said the abbot simply. “Let us ask from beginning to end,
from contention to resolution, and advance no plea or reservation of our own.
We agreed. Keep to that. Of the order of procedure I will ask, and beyond that
I leave Shrewsbury’s cause to Prior Robert, who made the journey to Wales to
find Saint Winifred, and brought her relics here. If any one of you has
anything to object, name whom you will. Father Boniface would not refuse to do
us this service, if you require it.”

No
one had any observation to make, until Robert Bossu took it upon himself, very
amiably, to give voice to a consent otherwise expressed in silence. “Father
Abbot, do you proceed, and we are all content.”

Radulfus
mounted the three shallow steps, and with both hands opened the Gospels, his
eyes fixed above, upon the cross, so that he might not calculate where, on the
exposed page, his finger should rest.

“Come
close,” he said, “and confirm for yourselves that there is no deceit. See the
words, that what I read aloud to you is what the sortes have sent me.”

Herluin
without hesitation came hungrily to peer. Earl Robert stood tranquilly where he
was, and bowed away the necessity for any such confirmation.

Abbot
Radulfus looked down to where his index finger rested, and reported without
emotion: “I am in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the twentieth chapter. And the
line reads: “The last shall be first, and the first last.””.

No
arguing with that, thought Cadfael, looking on with some anxiety from his
retired place. If anything, it was rather suspicious that the first assay
should produce an answer so apt; the prognostics of bishops were often known to
be ambiguous in the extreme. Had this been anyone but Radulfus testing the
waters, Radulfus in his inflexible uprightness, a man might almost have
suspected... But that was to limit or doubt the range of the saint’s power. She
who could call a lame youth to her and support him with her invisible grace
while he laid down his crutches on the steps of her altar, why doubt that she
could turn the leaves of a Gospel, and guide a faithful finger to the words her
will required?

“It
would seem,” said Earl Robert, after a moment of courteous silence in deference
to any other who might wish to speak,”that as the last comer, this verdict
sends me first into the lists. Is that your reading, Father?”

“The
meaning seems plain enough,” said Radulfus; carefully he closed the Gospels,
aligned the book scrupulously central upon the reliquary, and descended the
steps to stand well aside. “Proceed, my lord.”

“God
and Saint Winifred dispose!” said the earl, and mounted without haste, to stand
for a moment motionless, before turning the book, with slow, hieratic gestures
that could be clearly seen by all, upon its spine between his long, muscular
hands, thumbs meeting to part the pages. Opening it fully, he flattened both
palms for a moment upon the chosen pages, and then let his finger hover a
moment again before touching. He had neither glanced down nor passed a
fingertip over the edges of the leaves, to determine how far advanced in the
book his page might be. There are ways of trying to manipulate even the sortes
Biblicae, but he had meticulously and demonstratively avoided them. He never
was in earnest, Cadfael reflected with certainty, and it would spoil his sport
to use contrivance. His interest is in pricking Prior Robert and Sub-Prior
Herluin into bristling at each other with wattles glowing scarlet and throats
gobbling rage.

The
earl read aloud, translating into the vernacular as fluently as any cleric: “
‘Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me; and where I am, thither ye cannot
come.’ “ He looked up, musing. “It is John, the seventh chapter and the
fifty-fourth verse. Father Abbot, here is a strange saying, for she came to me
when I was not seeking her at all, when I knew nothing of her. It was she found
me. And here surely is a hard riddle to read, that where she is I cannot come,
for here indeed she is, and here am I beside her. How do you decipher this?”

Cadfael
could have told him, but kept his mouth very firmly closed, though it would
have been interesting to answer the query, and hear how this subtle man would
respond. It was even tempting, for here was a man who would have appreciated
every irony. Robert Bossu had pursued the dispute here to Shrewsbury in search
of diversion in a time of frustration and inaction, a pity he must be denied
the best of the joke that was so much more than merely a joke. That would still
have to be shared only with Hugh, who knew the best and the worst of his friend
Cadfael. No, there was one more who knew everything. Surely Saint Winifred
sometimes remembered and smiled, in her tranquil sleep in Gwytherin, even
laughed when she roused to extend the sunrays of her grace to lift up a lame
boy here in Shrewsbury.

And
in a way this answer, like the first, was astonishingly appropriate,
brandishing a secret truth and a paradox before a man who would have
appreciated it to the full, but could not be let into the secret. If his will
was to tantalize and bewilder, why should not she take her own gentle revenge?

“I
am in the same case as you,” said the abbot, and smiled. “I listen and labour
to understand. It may be that we must wait until all has been answered before
hoping for enlightenment. Shall we proceed, and wait for revelation?”

“Willingly!”
said the earl, and turned to descend the three steps, the skirts of his crimson
surcoat swirling around him. From this angle, stepping down with the altar
candles behind him, his high shoulder and the bulge behind it scarcely broke the
symmetry of a body beautifully compact and admirably handled. He withdrew at
once to a gracious distance, not to disturb in any way the privacy and
composure of the next contender, and his two young squires, well-trained to be
equally unobtrusive in attendance, drew in silently at either shoulder.

If
he plays games to while away the tedious time, thought Cadfael, he plays them
by noble rules, even those he makes up as he goes. Hugh liked him from the
first; and so do I like him, I like him very well. And it entered his mind
uninvited to wonder about the strangeness of human relationships. What has such
a man as this, he marvelled, to do with our loud, headlong, candid Stephen, who
charges at events like a stamping bull? For that matter, now that I see them
for this moment so clearly, what has Hugh to do with the king, either? Must not
all such thinking souls be growing hideously weary with this long contention
that makes no progress, that wastes men and harvests and the very wellbeing of
the land? Weary not only with Stephen, but also, perhaps even more, with this
lady who sinks her teeth into empire and will not let go. Somewhere there must
be an inheritor of more promise, a hint before sunrise of a sun fit to disperse
doubts like morning mists, and dazzle out of our vision both king and empress,
with all the confusion, chaos and waste they have visited upon this land.

“Father
Herluin,” said Radulfus, “will you assay?” Herluin advanced upon the altar very
slowly, as though these few paces, and the climbing of the three steps, must be
utilized to the full for prayer, and passionate concentration on this single
effort which would make or break for him a dear ambition. In his long, pale
lantern face his eyes burned darkly, like half-consumed embers. For all his eagerness,
when he came to the testing time he hesitated to touch, and two or three times
poised his hands over the book, only to withdraw them again from contact. An
interesting study, this of the varying techniques with which different men
approached the moment of truth. Robert Bossu had stood the book briskly on edge
between his flattened palms, parted the leaves with both thumbs, opened them
fully, and poised a finger wherever chance guided it. Herluin, when finally he
did touch, touched as if the vellum might burn him, timidly and convulsively,
and even when he had the book open, for better or worse, agonized a few moments
over where to choose on the page, shifting from recto to verso and back again
before settling. Once committed, he drew breath hard, and stooped nearsightedly
to see what fate had granted him. And swallowed, and was silent.

“Read!”
Radulfus prompted him delicately.

There
was no help for it. His voice grated, but he spoke out clearly, perhaps even a
little louder than was natural because it cost him such an effort to get it out
at all. “It is the thirteenth chapter of Luke, the twenty-seventh verse. “ ‘I
tell you, I know you not, whence you came. Depart from me, ye workers of
iniquity...’ “ He lifted his head, his face grey with outrage, and firmly
closed the book before he looked round at all the carefully respectful
countenances ringing him round like the pales of a fence, a barrier through
which he found the only dignified way, at someone else’s expense. “I have been
shamefully beguiled and deceived. She shows me my fault, that ever I trusted a
liar and thief. It was not with her will, not at her command, that Brother
Tutilo, dare I even call him Brother still?, stole her away, and worse, in the
blackness of his offence brought another innocent soul into sin, if not to his
death. His crime is blasphemy no less than theft, for from the beginning he
lied impiously, saying he had his revelation from the saint, and he has covered
his offence ever since with lie after lie. Now she has clearly given me to know
his villainy, and shown that all this wandering since her abduction she has
indeed herself devised, to return to this place from which she was taken.
Father Abbot, I withdraw with grief and humility. Such pity as she well may
have felt for Ramsey in its distress, he has traduced and despoiled, and here
we have no rights. I acknowledge it with tears, and pray her pardon!”

For
himself! Certainly not for that hapless lad sleeping in a narrow stone cell at
this moment. Small pardon there would be for him if Herluin had his way. Every
pang of this humiliation would be visited upon Tutilo, as every particle of
guilt was being visited upon him now, the more successfully to extricate
Herluin, innocent and devout, only wickedly deceived, with nothing to repent
but his too profound faith.

“Wait!”
said Abbot Radulfus. “Make no judgements yet. It is possible to deceive
oneself, no less than others. In the first anger no man should be condemned.
And the saint has not yet spoken to us of Shrewsbury.”

Only
too true, reflected Cadfael, for she may well have some strictures to level at
us, no less than at Ramsey. How if she chooses this moment and this audience to
make it known that she visits us only out of pure charity, that what lies in her
handsome reliquary is in reality the body of the young man who committed murder
to secure her for Shrewsbury, and himself died by accident, in circumstances
that made it vital he should vanish? A worse offence than Tutilo committed in a
similar cause, to win her for Ramsey. In laying her reverently back in the
grave from which he had taken her, and sealing the murderer in her abandoned
coffin, Cadfael had been and still was convinced that he did her will, and
restored her to the resting-place she desired. But was it not possible that
Tutilo had believed just as sincerely?

The
one venture the saint had just condemned. Now to put the other to the test!
Lucky for Prior Robert that this moment at least he approached in absolute
innocence. But I, thought Cadfael, on thorns, may be about to pay in full for
all my sins.

Well,
it was fair!

Prior
Robert may have had some qualms concerning his own worthiness, though that was
a weakness to which he seldom succumbed. He ascended the steps of the altar
very solemnly, and joined his hands before his face for a final convulsive
moment of prayer, his eyes closed. Indeed, he kept them closed as he opened the
Gospels, and planted his long index finger blindly upon the page. By the length
of the pause that followed, before he opened his eyes and looked dazedly down
to see what fate had granted him, he went in some devout fear of his deserving.
Who would ever have expected the pillar of the house to shake?

The
balance was instantly restored. Robert erected his impressive silvery head, and
a wave of triumphant colour swept up from his long throat and flushed his
cheeks. In a voice hesitant between exultation and awe he read out: “Saint
John, the fifteenth chapter and the sixteenth verse: ‘Ye have not chosen me,
but I have chosen you.’ “

All
round the assembly of brothers waiting and watching with held breath, the great
shudder and sigh passed like a gust of wind, or the surging of a wave up the
shore, and then, like the shattering of the wave in spray, disintegrated into a
whispering, stirring murmur as they shifted, nudged one another, shook with
relief and a suggestion of hysterical emotion between laughter and tears. Abbot
Radulfus stiffened instantly into rigid authority, and lifted a sobering hand
to still the incipient storm.

“Silence!
Respect this holy place, and abide all fates with composure, as mankind should.
Father Prior, come down to us now. All that was needful has been done.”