The Devils Novice (9 page)

“He
had no grounds for stealing from me,” flared Meriet hotly.

“He
had a right to confiscate what is forbidden here.”

“I
still call it stealing. And he had no right to destroy it before my eyes—nor to
speak as though women were unclean!”

“Well,
if you’ve paid for your offences, so has he for his,” said Cadfael tolerantly.
“He has a sore throat will keep him quiet for a week yet, and for a man who
likes the sound of his own sermons that’s no mean revenge. But as for you, lad,
you’ve a long way to go before you’ll ever make a monk, and if you mean to go
through with it, you’d better spend your penance here doing some hard
thinking.”

“Another
sermon?” said Meriet into his crossed arms, and for the first time there was
almost a smile in his voice, if a rueful one.

“A
word to the wise.”

That
caused him to check and hold his breath, lying utterly still for one moment,
before he turned his head to bring one glittering, anxious eye to bear on
Cadfael’s face. The dark-brown hair coiled and curled agreeably in the nape of
his summer-browned neck, and the neck itself had still the elegant, tender
shaping of boyhood. Vulnerable still to all manner of wounds, on his own
behalf, perhaps, but certainly on behalf of others all too fiercely loved. The
girl with the red-gold hair?

“They
have not said anything?” demanded Meriet, tense with dismay. “They don’t mean
to cast me out? He wouldn’t do that—the abbot? He would have told me openly!”
He turned with a fierce, lithe movement, drawing up his legs and rising on one
hip, to seize Cadfael urgently by the wrist and stare into his eyes. “What is
it you know? What does he mean to do with me? I can’t, I won’t, give up now.”

“You’ve
put your own vocation in doubt,” said Cadfael bluntly, “no other has had any
hand in it. If it had rested with me, I’d have clapped your pretty trophy back
in your hand, and told you to be off out of here, and find either her or
another as like her as one girl is to another equally young and fair, and stop
plaguing us who ask nothing more than a quiet life. But if you still want to
throw your natural bent out of door, you have that chance. Either bend your
stiff neck, or rear it, and be off!”

There
was more to it than that, and he knew it. The boy sat bolt unright, careless of
his half-nakedness in a cell stony and chill, and held him by the wrist with
strong, urgent fingers, staring earnestly into his eyes, probing beyond into
his mind, and not afraid of him, or even wary.

“I
will bend it,” he said. “You doubt if I can, but I can, I will. Brother
Cadfael, if you have the abbot’s ear, help me, tell him I have not changed, tell
him I do want to be received. Say I will wait, if I must, and learn and be
patient, but I will deserve! In the end he shall not be able to complain of me.
Say so to him! He won’t reject me.”

“And
the gold-haired girl?” said Cadfael, purposely brutal.

Meriet
wrenched himself away and flung himself down again on his breast. “She is
spoken for,” he said no less roughly, and would not say one word more of her.

“There
are others,” said Cadfael. “Take thought now or never. Let me tell you, child,
as one old enough to have a son past your age, and with a few regrets in his
own life, if he had time to brood on them—there’s many a young man has got his
heart’s dearest wish, only to curse the day he ever wished for it. By the grace
and good sense of our abbot, you will have time to make certain before you’re
bound past freeing. Make good use of your time, for it won’t return once you’re
pledged.”

A
pity, in a way, to frighten a young creature so, when he was already torn many
ways, but he had ten days and nights of solitude before him now, a low diet,
and time both for prayer and thought. Being alone would not oppress him, only
the pressure of uncongenial numbers around him had done that. Here he would
sleep without dreams, not starting up to cry out in the night. Or if he did,
there would be no one to hear him and add to his trouble.

“I’ll
come and bring the salve in the morning,” said Cadfael, taking up his lamp.
“No, wait!” He set it down again. “If you lie so, you’ll be cold in the night.
Put on your shirt, the linen won’t trouble you too much, and you can bear the
brychan over it.”

“I’m
well enough,” said Meriet, submitting almost shamefacedly, and subsiding with a
sigh into his folded arms again. “I… I do thank you—brother!” he ended as an
awkward afterthought, and very dubiously, as if the form of address did no
justice to what was in his mind, though he knew it to be the approved one here.

“That
came out of you doubtfully,” remarked Cadfael judicially, “like biting on a
sore tooth. There are other relationships. Are you still sure it’s a brother
you want to be?”

“I
must,”
blurted Meriet, and turned his face morosely away.

Now
why, wondered Cadfael, banging on the door of the cell for the porter to open
and let him out, why must the one thing of meaning he says be said only at the
end, when he’s settled and eased, and it would be shame to plague him further?
Not: I do! or: I will! but: I must! Must implies a resolution enforced, either
by another’s will, or by an overwhelming necessity. Now who has willed this
sprig into the cloister, or what force of circumstance has made him choose this
way as the best, the only one left open to him?

Cadfael
came out from Compline that night to find Hugh waiting for him at the
gatehouse.

“Walk
as far as the bridge with me. I’m on my way home, but I hear from the porter
here that you’re off on an errand for the lord abbot tomorrow, so you’ll be out
of my reach day-long. You’ll have heard about the horse?”

“That
you’ve found him, yes, nothing more. We’ve been all too occupied with our own
miscreants and crimes this day to have much time or thought for anything
outside,” owned Cadfael ruefully. “No doubt you’ve been told about that.”
Brother Albin, the porter, was the most consummate gossip in the enclave. “Our
worries go side by side and keep pace, it seems, but never come within touch of
each other. That’s strange in itself. And now you find the horse miles away to
the north, or so I heard.”

They
passed through the gate together and turned left towards the town, under a
chill, dim sky of driving clouds, though on the ground there was no more than a
faint breeze, hardly enough to stir the moist, sweet, rotting smells of autumn.
The darkness of trees on the right of the road, the flat metallic glimmer of
the mill-pond on their left, and the scent and sound of the river ahead,
between them and the town.

“Barely
a couple of miles short of Whitchurch,” said Hugh, “where he had meant to pass
the night, and have an easy ride to Chester next day.” He recounted the whole
of it;

Cadfael’s
thoughts were always a welcome illumination from another angle. But here their
two minds moved as one.

“Wild
enough woodland short of the place,” said Cadfael sombrely, “and the mosses
close at hand. If it was done there, whatever was done, and the horse, being
young and spirited, broke away and could not be caught, then the man may be
fathoms deep. Past finding. Not even a grave to dig.”

“It’s
what I’ve been thinking myself,” agreed Hugh grimly. “But if I have such
footpads living wild in my shire, how is it I’ve heard no word of them until
now?”

“A
venture south out of Cheshire? You know how fast they can come and go. And even
where your writ runs, Hugh, the times breed changes. But if these were
masterless men, they were no skilled hands with horses. Any outlaw worth his
salt would have torn out an arm by the shoulder rather than lose a beast like
that one. I went to have a look at him in the stables,” owned Cadfael, “when I
was free. And the silver on his harness… only a miracle could have got it away
from them once they clapped eyes on it. What the man himself had on him can
hardly have been worth more than horse and harness together.”

“If
they’re preying on travellers there,” said Hugh, “they’ll know just where to
slide a weighted man into the peat-hags, where they’re hungriest. But I’ve men
there searching, whether or no. There are some among the natives there can tell
if a pool has been fed recently—will you believe it? But I doubt, truly I
doubt, if even a bone of Peter Clemence will ever be seen again.”

They
had reached the near end of the bridge. In the half-darkness the Severn slid by
at high speed, close to them and silent, like a great serpent whose scales
occasionally caught a gleam of starlight and flashed like silver, before that
very coil had passed and was speeding downstream far too fast for overtaking.
They halted to take leave.

“And
you are bound for Aspley,” said Hugh. “Where the man lay safely with his kin, a
single day short of his death. If indeed he is dead! I forget we are no better
than guessing. How if he had good reasons to vanish there and be written down
as dead? Men change their allegiance these days as they change their shirts,
and for every man for sale there are buyers. Well, use your eyes and your wits
at Aspley for your lad—I can tell by now when you have a wing spread over a
fledgling—but bring me back whatever you can glean about Peter Clemence, too,
and what he had in mind when he left them and rode north. Some innocent there
may be nursing the very word we need, and thinking nothing of it.”

“I
will so,” said Cadfael, and turned back in the gloaming towards the gatehouse
and his bed.

Chapter Five

HAVING
THE ABBOT’S AUTHORITY ABOUT HIM, and something more than four miles to go,
Brother Cadfael helped himself to a mule from the stables in preference to
tackling the journey to Aspley on foot. Time had been when he would have
scorned to ride, but he was past sixty years old, and minded for once to take
his ease. Moreover, he had few opportunities now for riding, once a prime
pleasure, and could not afford to neglect such as did come his way.

He
left after Prime, having taken a hasty bite and drink. The morning was misty
and mild, full of the heavy, sweet, moist melancholy of the season, with a
thickly veiled sun showing large and mellow through the haze. And the way was
pleasant, for the first part on the highway.

The
Long Forest, south and south-west of Shrewsbury, had survived unplundered
longer than most of its kind, its assarts few and far between, its hunting
coverts thick and wild, its open heaths home to all manner of creatures of
earth and air. Sheriff Prestcote kept a weather eye on changes there, but did
not interfere with what reinforced order rather than challenging it, and the
border manors had been allowed to enlarge and improve their fields, provided
they kept the peace there with a firm enough hand. There were very ancient
holdings along the rim which had once been assarts deep in woodland, and now
had hewn out good arable land from old upland, and fenced their intakes. The
three old neighbour-manors of Linde, Aspley and Foriet guarded this eastward
fringe, half-wooded, half-open. A man riding for Chester from this place would
not need to go through Shrewsbury, but would pass it by and leave it to
westward. Peter Clemence had done so, choosing to call upon his kinsfolk when
the chance offered, rather than make for the safe haven of Shrewsbury abbey.
Would his fate have been different, had he chosen to sleep within the pale of
Saint Peter and Saint Paul? His route to Chester might even have missed
Whitchurch, passing to westward, clear of the mosses. Too late to wonder!

Cadfael
was aware of entering the lands of the Linde manor when he came upon
well-cleared fields and the traces of grain long harvested, and stubble being
culled by sheep. The sky had partially cleared by then, a mild and milky sun
was warming the air without quite disseminating the mist, and the young man who
came strolling along a headland with a hound at his heel and a half-trained
merlin on a creance on his wrist had dew-darkened boots, and a spray of drops
on his uncovered light-brown hair from the shaken leaves of some copse left
behind him. A young gentleman very light of foot and light of heart, whistling
merrily as he rewound the creance and soothed the ruffled bird. A year or two
past twenty, he might be. At sight of Cadfael he came bounding down from the
headland to the sunken track, and having no cap to doff, gave him a very
graceful inclination of his fair head and a blithe:

“Good-day,
brother! Are you bound for us?”

“If
by any chance your name is Nigel Aspley,” said Cadfael, halting to return the
airy greeting, “then indeed I am.” But this could hardly be the elder son who
had five or six years the advantage of Meriet, he was too young, of too
markedly different a colouring and build, long and slender and blue-eyed, with
rounded countenance and ready smile. A little more red in the fair hair, which
had the elusive greenish-yellow of oak leaves just budded in spring, or just
turning in autumn, and he could have provided the lock that Meriet had
cherished in his bed.

“Then
we’re out of luck,” said the young man gracefully, and made a pleasant grimace
of disappointment. “Though you’d still be welcome to halt at home for a rest and
a cup, if you have the leisure for it? For I’m only a Linde, not an Aspley, and
my name is Janyn.”