The Raven in the Foregate (22 page)

“The blow to Ailnoth’s head,” said Cadfael, jolted,
“was deep to the back. Men in conflict go face to face.”

“True, but one may easily be spun aside and
involuntarily turn his back for an instant. But you know how the wound lay, and
I know. But do the commons know?”

“And you will really do this?” marvelled Cadfael.

“Most publicly, my friend, I will do it. Tomorrow
morning, at Ailnoth’s funeral—even those who most hated him will be there to
make sure he’s safely underground, what better occasion could there be? If it
bears fruit, then we have our answer, and the town can be at peace, once the
turmoil’s over. If not, Jordan will be none the worse for a short-lived fright,
and a few nights, perhaps,” pondered Hugh, gleaming mischief, “on a harder bed
than usual with him, and lying alone. He may even learn that his own bed is the
safest from this on.”

“And how if no man speaks up to deliver him,” said
Cadfael with mild malice, “and the thing happened just as you have pictured it
to me a minute ago, and Jordan really is your man? What then? If he keep his
head and deny all, and the girl bears witness for him, you’ll have trailed your
bait in vain.”

“Ah, you know the man better than that,” said Hugh,
undisturbed. “Big-boned and hearty, but no great stiffening in his back. If he
did it, deny it as loudly as he may when he’s first accused, a couple of nights
on stone and he’ll be blabbing out everything, how he did no more than defend
himself, how it was mere accident, and he could not haul the priest out of the
water, and took fright, and dared not speak, knowing that the bad blood between
them was common knowledge. A couple of nights in a cell won’t hurt him. And if
he holds out stoutly any longer than that,” said Hugh, rising, “then he
deserves to get away with it. The parish will think so.”

“You are a devious creature,” said Cadfael, in a tone
uncertain between reproach and admiration. “I wonder why I bear with you?”

Hugh turned in the doorway to give him a flashing
glance over his shoulder. “Like calling to like, I daresay!” he suggested, and
went striding away along the gravel path, to disappear into the gathering dusk.

At Vespers the psalms had a penitential solemnity, and
at Collations in the chapter house after supper the readings were also of a
funereal colouring. The shadow of Father Ailnoth hung over the death of the
year, and it seemed that the year of Our Lord 1142 would be born, not at
midnight, but only after the burial service was over, and the grave filled in.
The morrow might, according to the Church’s calendar, be the octave of the
Nativity and the celebration of the Circumcision of Our Lord, but to the people
of the Foregate it was rather the propitiatory office that would lift their
incubus from them. A wretched departure for any man, let alone a priest.

“On the morrow,” said prior Robert, before dismissing
them to the warming room for the blessed last half-hour of ease before
Compline, “the funeral office for Father Ailnoth will follow immediately after
the parish Mass, and I myself shall preside. But the homily will be delivered
by Father Abbot, at his desire.” The prior’s incisive and well-modulated voice
made this statement with a somewhat ambiguous emphasis, as if in doubt whether
to welcome the abbot’s decision as a devout compliment to the dead, or to
regret and perhaps even resent it as depriving him of an opportunity to
exercise his own undoubted eloquence. “Matins and Lauds will be said according
to the Office of the Dead.”

That meant that they would be long, and prudent
brothers would be wise to make straight for their beds after Compline. Cadfael
had already turfed down his brazier to burn slowly through the night, and keep
lotions and medicines from freezing and bottles from bursting, should a hard
frost set in again in the small hours. But the air was certainly not cold
enough yet for frost, and he thought by the slight wind and lightly overcast
sky that they would get through the night safely. He went thankfully to the
warming room with his brothers, and settled down to half an hour of pleasant
idleness.

This was the hour when even the taciturn relaxed into
speech, and not even the prior frowned upon a degree of loquacity. And
inevitably the subject of their exchanges tonight was the brief rule of Father
Ailnoth, his grim death, and the coming ceremonial of his burial.

“So Father Abbot means to pronounce the eulogy
himself, does he?” said Brother Anselm in Cadfael’s ear. “That will make
interesting listening.” Anselm’s business was the music of the Divine Office,
and he had not quite the same regard for the spoken word, but he appreciated its
power and influence. “I had thought he’d be only too glad to leave it to
Robert. Nil nisi bonum… Or do you suppose he looks upon it as a fitting penance
for bringing the man here in the first place?”

“There may be something in that,” admitted Cadfael. “But
more, I think, in a resolve that only truth shall be told. Robert would be
carried away into paeans of praise. Radulfus intends clarity and honesty.”

“No easy task,” said Anselm. “Well for me no one
expects words from me. There’s been no hint yet of who’s to follow in the
parish. They’ll be praying for a man they know, whether he has any Latin or
not. Even a man they did not much like would be welcomed, if he belongs here,
and knows them. You can deal with the devil you know.”

“No harm in hoping for better than that,” said
Cadfael, sighing. “A very ordinary man, more than a little lower than the
angels, and well aware of his own shortcomings, would do very nicely for the
Foregate. A pity these few weeks were wasted, wanting him.”

In the big stone hearth the fire of logs burned
steadily, sinking down now into a hot core of ash, nicely timed to last the
evening out, and die down with little waste when the bell rang for Compline.
Faces pinched with cold and outdoor labour during the day flushed into rosy
content, and chapped hands smoothed gratefully at the ointment doled out from
Cadfael’s store. Friends foregathered in their own chosen groups, voices
decorously low blended into a contented murmur like a hive of bees. Some of the
healthy young, who had been out in the air most of the day, had much ado to
keep their eyelids open in the warmth. Compline would be wisely brief tonight,
as Matins would be long and sombre.

“Another year tomorrow,” said Brother Edmund the
infirmarer, “and a new beginning.”

Some said: “Amen!” whether from habit or conviction,
but Cadfael stuck fast at the word. ‘Amen’ belongs rather to an ending, a
resolution, an acceptance into peace, and as yet they were within reach of none
of these things.

A mile to the west of Cadfael’s bed in his narrow cell
in the dortoir, Ninian lay in the plenteous hay of a well stocked loft, rolled
in the cloak Sanan had brought for him, and with the heartening warmth of her
still in his arms, though she had been gone two hours and more, in time to have
her pony back in the town stable before her step-father returned from the night
office at Saint Chad’s church. Ninian had been urgent with her that she should
not venture alone by night, but as yet he had no authority over her, and she
would do what she would do, having been born into the world apparently without
fear. This byre and loft on the edge of the forest belonged to the Giffards,
who had grazing along the open meadow that rimmed the trees, but the elderly
hind who kept the cattle was from Sanan’s own household, and her willing and
devoted slave. The two good horses she had bought and stabled here were his
joy, and his privity to Sanan’s marriage plans would keep him proud and glad to
the day of his death.

She had come, and she had lain with Ninian in the
loft, the two rolled in one cloak and anchored with embracing arms, not yet for
the body’s delight but rather for its survival and comfort. Snug like dormice
in their winter sleep, alive and awake enough to be aware of profound pleasure,
they had talked together almost an hour, and now that she had left him he
hugged the remembrance of her and got warmth from it to keep him glowing
through the night. Some day, some night, please God soon, she would not have to
rise and leave him, he would not have to open reluctant arms and let her go,
and the night would be perfect, a lovely, starry dark shot through with flame.
But now he lay alone, and ached a little, and fretted about her, about the
morrow, about his own debts, which seemed to him so inadequately paid.

With her hair adrift against his cheek, and her breath
warm in the hollow of his throat, she had told him everything that had happened
during these last days of the old year, how Brother Cadfael had found the ebony
staff, how he had visited Diota and got her story out of her, how Father
Ailnoth’s funeral was to take place next day after the parish Mass. And when he
started up in anxiety for Diota, she had drawn him down to her again with her
arms wreathed about his neck, and told him he need have no uneasiness, for she
had promised to go with Diota to the priest’s funeral Mass, and take as great
care of her as he himself could have done, and deal with any threat that might
arise against her as valiantly as even he would have dealt with it. And she had
forbidden him to stir from where he lay hidden until she should come to him
again. But just as she was a lady not lightly to be disobeyed, so he was a man
not lightly to be forbidden.

All the same, she had got a promise out of him that he
would wait, as she insisted, unless something unforeseen should arise to make
action imperative. And with that she had had to be content, and they had kissed
on it, and put away present anxieties to whisper about the future. How many
miles to the Welsh border? Ten? Certainly not much more. And Powys might be a
wild land, but it had no quarrel with a soldier of the Empress more than with
an officer of King Stephen, and would by instinct take the part of the hunted
rather than the forces of English law. Moreover, Sanan had claims to a distant
kinship there, through a Welsh grandmother, who had bequeathed her her
un-English name. And should they encounter master-less men in the forests,
Ninian was a good man of his hands, and there was a good sword and a long
dagger hidden away in the hay, arms once carried by John Bernières at the siege
of Shrewsbury, where he had met his death. They would do well enough on the
journey, they would reach Gloucester and marry there, openly and honourably.

Except that they could not go, not yet, not until he
was satisfied that all danger to Diota was past, and her living secure under
the abbot’s protection. And now that he lay alone, Ninian could see no present
end to that difficulty. The morrow would lay Ailnoth’s body to rest, but not
the ugly shadow of his death. Even if the day passed without threat to Diota,
that would not solve anything for the days yet to come.

Ninian lay wakeful until past midnight, fretting at
the threads that would not untangle for him. Over the watershed between the old
year and the new he drifted at last into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed of
fighting his way through interminable forest tracks overgrown with bramble and
thorn towards a Sanan forever withdrawn from him, and leaving behind for him
only a sweet, aromatic scent of herbs.

Under the vast inverted keel of the choir, dimly lit
for Matins, the solemn words of the Office of the Dead echoed and re-echoed as
sounds never seemed to do by day, and the fine, sonorous voice of Brother
Benedict the sacristan was magnified to fill the whole vault as he read the
lessons in between the spoken psalms, and at every ending came the insistent
versicle and response:

“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine…”

“Et lux perpetua luceat eis…”

And Brother Benedict, deep and splendid: “My soul is
weary of my life… I will speak in the bitterness of my soul, I will say unto
God, Do not condemn me, show me wherefore thou contendest with me…”

Not much comfort in the book of Job, thought Cadfael,
listening intently in his stall, but a great deal of fine poetry—could not that
in itself be a kind of comfort, after all? Making even discomfort, degradation
and death, everything Job complained of, a magnificent defiance?

“O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou
wouldst keep me secret until thy wrath be past…”

“My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the grave
is ready for me… I have made my bed in the darkness, I have said to corruption,
Thou art my father, to the worm, Thou art my mother. And where is now my hope?”

“Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take
comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of
darkness and the shadow of death… land without order, where even the light is
as darkness…”

Yet in the end the entreaty that was itself a
reassurance rose again, one step advanced beyond hope towards certainty:

“Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord…”

“And let light perpetual shine upon them.”

Stumbling up the night stairs back to bed after Lauds,
half asleep, Cadfael still had that persistent appeal echoing in his mind, and
by the time he slept again it had become almost a triumphant claim reaching up
to take what it pleaded for. Rest eternal and light perpetual… even for Ailnoth.

Not only for Ailnoth, but for most of us, thought
Cadfael, subsiding into sleep, it will be a long journey through purgatory, but
no doubt even the most winding way gets there in the end.