The Confession of Brother Haluin Read online

  “I hope you have slept well, Brothers,” said Cenred, rising to greet them, “Are you recovered fully from last night’s indispostion? If there is anything my house has failed to offer you, you have but to ask for it. Use my manor as you would your own dwelling. And you will, I hope, consent to stay yet a day or two before you need set out again.”

  Cadfael shared the hope, but was all too afraid that Haluin would rouse his overanxious conscience to find objections. But he had no time to do more than open his mouth, for Cenred went on at once:

  “For I have something to ask of you… Is either of you ordained a priest?”

  Chapter 7

  “YES,” SAID HALUIN, after a moment of blank silence. “I am a priest. I studied for minor orders from the I time I entered the abbey, and became full priest when I reached thirty years. We are encouraged to do so now, those who enter young and are already lettered. As a priest, what is there I can do to serve you?”

  “I want you to conduct a marriage,” said Cenred.

  This time the silence was longer, and their concentration on him more wary and thoughtful. For if a marriage was contemplated in this house, surely provision would already have been made for a priest, and one who knew the circumstances and the parties, not a chance Benedictine benighted here by a fall of snow. Cenred saw their doubts reflected in Haluin’s attentive face.

  “I know what you would say. This must surely be the proper business of my own parish priest. There is no church here in Vivers, though I intend to build and endow one. And it so happens that our nearest parish church is at this moment without a priest until it pleases the bishop to name his choice, for the advowson is with him. I had meant to send for a cousin of our house who is in orders, but if you are willing we may spare him a wintry journey. I promise you there is nothing underhand in this matter, and if it is being arranged in some haste, there are sound reasons. Sit down with me, at least, and I’ll tell you freely all you need to know, and you shall judge.”

  With the impulsive and generous vehemence that seemed to be natural to him, he strode forward himself to support Haluin by the forearms as he lowered himself to the cushioned bench built against the paneled wall. Cadfael sat down beside his friend, content to watch and listen, since he was no priest, and here had no hard decision to consider, and the delay came gratefully to him for Haluin’s sake.

  “In his old age,” said Cenred, coming bluntly to the business in hand, “my father married a second time, a wife thirty years younger than he was. I was already married, with a son a year old, when my sister Helisende was born. Those two children grew up in this house, boy and girl together, like brother and sister, and close at that. And we, their elders, have taken them for granted and been glad they should have each other’s company. I have been much to blame. I never noticed when they began to be more than playmates. I never thought how childish companionship and affection could change so after years, into something more perilous by far. I do not blink away facts, Brothers, once I have seen them, and been forced to see them. Those two were left alone to play too long and too lovingly. They have slipped into an inordinate affection under my very nose, and I stone-blind to it until almost too late. They love each other in a fashion and to a degree that is anathema between two so closely kin. Thanks be to God, they have not sinned in the flesh, not yet. I hope I have awakened in time. God knows I want what is best for them both, I would have them happy, but what happiness can there be in a love which is an abomination? Better by far to tear them apart now, and trust to time to take away the pain. I have sent my son away to serve his apprenticeship to arms with my overlord, who is a good friend, and knows the reason and the need. And sore as he is at being banished so, my son has pledged himself not to return until I give him leave. Have I done right?”

  “I think,” said Haluin slowly, “you could have done no other. But it is a pity it went so far unchecked.”

  “So it is. But when two grow up from babes together as brother and sister, that in itself is commonly enough to put away from them without grief all thought of affection after the way of marriage. I have wondered sometimes how much Edgytha noticed that I did not. She indulged them always. But never, never did she say word to me or to my wife, and whether I have done well or not, I must go on.”

  “Tell me,” said Cadfael, speaking for the first time “is not your son’s name Roscelin?”

  Cenred’s eyes flashed to Cadfael’s face, astonished. “So it is. But how can you know that?”

  “And your overlord is Audemar de Clary. Sir, we came hither directly from Elford, we have spoken with your son there, he lent Brother Haluin here a strong arm to lean on when he needed it.”

  “You have talked with him! And what did my son have to say, there at Elford? What had he to say of me?” He was alert and ready to hear bitter rumor of complaint and estrangement, and to swallow that grief if he must.

  “Very little, and certainly nothing you could not have heard with a quiet mind. No word of your sister. He mentioned that he had left home at his father’s wish, and that he could not refuse you the obedience due. We had no more than a few minutes talk with him, by pure chance. But I saw nothing there of which you should not be glad and proud. Consider, he is barely three miles away, and against his own wish, but he keeps true to his word. There is but one thing I remember him saying,” pursued Cadfael with sudden probing intent, “that perhaps you have a father’s right to hear. He asked us, very solemnly, whether our order could provide a worthwhile life for a man—if the life he most longed for was forbidden to him.”

  “No!” cried Cenred in sharp protest. “Not that! I would not for the world he should turn his back on arms and reputation and hide himself away in the cloister. He is not made for that! A youth of such promise! Brother, this does but confirm me in what I am asking. There is no putting off what must be done. Once done, he will accept it. As long as the loss is not final he will go on hoping and hankering after the impossible. It is why I want her married, married and out of this house, before ever Roscelin enters it again.”

  “I understand your reasons very well,” said Haluin, opening his hollow eyes challengingly wide, “but it would not be right to make them reasons for a marriage, if the lady is unwilling. However hard your plight, you cannot sacrifice the one to preserve the other.”

  “You mistake the case,” said Cenred without heat. “I love my young sister, I have talked with her openly and fairly. She knows, she acknowledges, the enormity of what threatened them both, the impossibility of such a love ever coming to fruit. She wants this terrible knot severed, as truly as I do. She wants a career of honor for Roscelin because she loves him, and rather than see it blighted through her she agrees to seek refuge in marriage with another man. This has been no forced surrender. And no wanton choice, either. I have done the best I could for her, it is a match any family would welcome. Jean de Perronet is a well-endowed, well-conditioned young man of good estate. He is due here today, so you may see him for yourself. Helisende already knows him, and likes if she cannot yet love him. That may come, for he is greatly drawn to her. She has fully consented to this marriage. And de Perronet has this one inestimable advantage,” he added grimly. “His seat is far away. He will take her home to Buckingham, out of Roscelin’s sight. Out of sight, out of mind, I will not say, but at least the lines of a remembered face may fade gradually over the years, as even stubborn wounds heal.”

  He had become eloquent by reason of his own deep disquiet and distress, a good man concerned for the best interests of all his household. He had not remarked, as Cadfael did, the gradual blanching of Haluin’s thin face, the tight and painful set of his lips, or the way his linked hands gripped together in the lap of his habit until the bones shone white through the flesh. The words Cenred had not deliberately chosen to pierce or move had their own inspired force to reopen the old wound he had come all this way to try and heal. The lines of a remembered face, surely somewhat dimmed in eighteen years, were burning into vivid life
again for him. And wounds that have not ceased to fester within cannot heal until they have again broken out and been cleansed, by fire if need be.

  “And you need not fear, and neither need I,” said Cenred, “that she will not be cherished and held in high regard with de Perronet. Two years back he asked for her, and for all she would have none of him or any suitor then, he has waited his time.”

  “Your lady is in agreement in this matter?” asked Cadfael.

  “We have all three talked of it together. And we are agreed. Will you do it? I felt it a kind of blessing on what we intend,” said Cenred simply, “when a priest came to my door unsummoned on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming. Stay over tomorrow, Brother—Father!—and marry them.”

  Haluin unlocked his contorted hands slowly, and drew breath like a man awaking in pain. In low voice he said, “I will stay. And I will marry them.”

  *

  “I trust I have done right,” said Haluin when they were back in their own quarters. But it did not seem that he was asking to be confirmed in his decision, rather setting it squarely before his own eyes as a responsibility he had no intention of hedging or sharing. “I know only too well,” he said, “the perils of proximity, and their case is more desperate than ever was mine. Cadfael, I feel myself listening to echoes I thought had died out long ago. It is all for a purpose. Nothing is without purpose. How if I fell only to show me how far I was already fallen, and force me to make the assay to rise afresh? How if I came to life again as a cripple, to make me undertake those journeys of body and spirit that I dreaded when I was strong and whole? How if God put it into my mind to go on pilgrimage in order to become some other needy soul’s miracle? Were we led to this place?”

  “Driven, rather,” said Cadfael practically, remembering the blinding snow, and the small beckoning spark of the torch in the drifting dark.

  “It’s true, to arrive on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming is very apt timing. I can but go with the burden of the day,” said Haluin, “and hope to be led aright. These second marriages in old age, Cadfael, have sorry tangles to answer for. How can two babes playing together in the rushes of the floor know that they are aunt and nephew, and fruit forbidden? A pity that love should be spent to no end.”

  “I am not sure,” said Cadfael, “that love is ever spent for no end. Well, at least now you can be still and rest for a day or so, and all the better for it. That, at any rate, comes timely.”

  And that was plainly the best use Haluin could make of this halt on the way home, since he had already tried himself very near the end of his endurance. Cadfael left him in peace, and went out to take a daylight look at this manor of Vivers. A cloudy day with a fitful wind, the air free of frost, and occasional fine drifts of rain in the air, but none that lasted long.

  He walked the width of the enclave to the gate, to see the full extent of the house. There were windows in the steep roof above the solar, probably two retiring rooms were available there. Haluin and companion had been accommodated considerately on the living floor. No doubt one of those upper chambers was being prepared at this moment for the expected bridegroom. The daily bustle about the courtyard seemed everywhere to be in hand without haste or confusion; things were well ordered here.

  Beyond the pale of the stockade the soft, undulating landscape extended in field and copse and sparsely treed upland, all the greens still bleached and dried with winter, but the black branches showed here and there the first nodules of the leaf buds of spring. Faint frills of snow outlined all the hollows and sheltered places, but a gleam of sun was breaking through the low cloud, and by noon all the remnant of last night’s fall would be gone.

  Cadfael looked into the stables and the mews, and found both well supplied and proudly kept by servitors ready and willing to show them off to an interested visitor. In a separate stall in the kennels a hound bitch lay curled in clean straw with her six pups around her, perhaps five weeks old. He could not resist going into the dim shed to take up one of the young ones, and the dam was complacent, and welcomed admiration of her brood. The soft warmth of the small body in his arms had a smell like new bread. He was just stooping to lay the pup back among its siblings when a clear, cool voice behind him said:

  “Are you the priest who is to marry me?”

  And there she was in the doorway, again a shadowy form against the light, so composed, so assured that she might easily be taken for a mature and stately woman of thirty, though the fresh, light voice belonged to her proper age. The girl Helisende Vivers, not yet decked out to receive her bridegroom, but in a plain housewifely gown of dark blue wool, and with a gently steaming pail of meat and meal for the hounds in one hand.

  “Are you the priest who is to marry me?”

  “No,” said Cadfael, slowly straightening up from the wriggling litter and the crooning bitch. “That is Brother Haluin. I never studied for orders. I know myself better.”

  “It’s the lame man, then,” she said with detached sympathy. “I am sorry he suffers such hardship. I hope they have made him comfortable, here in our house. You do know about my marriage—that Jean comes here today?”

  “Your brother has told us,” said Cadfael, watching the features of her oval face emerge softly from shadow, every plaintive, ingenuous line testifying to her youth. “But there are things he could not tell us,” he said, watching her intently, “except by hearsay. Only you can tell us whether this match has your consent, freely given, or no.”

  Her brief silence at that did not suggest hesitation so much as a grave consideration of the man who raised the question. Her large eyes, dauntlessly honest, embraced and penetrated, quite unafraid of being penetrated in return. If she had judged him so alien to her needs and predicament as to be unacceptable, she would have closed the encounter there and then, civilly but without satisfying what would then have been there intrusive curiosity. But she did not.

  “If we do anything freely, once we are grown,” she said, “then yes, this I do freely. There are rules that must be kept. There are others in the world with us who have rights and needs, and we are all bound. You may tell Brother Haluin—Father Haluin I must call him—that he need have no qualms for me. I know what I am doing. No one is forcing my hand.”

  “I will tell him so,” said Cadfael. “But I think you do it for others, not for yourself.”

  “Then say to him that I choose—freely—to do it for others.”

  “And what of Jean de Perronet?” said Cadfael.

  For one instant her firm, full lips shook. It was the one thing that still disrupted her resolute composure, that she was not being fair to the man who was to be her husband. Cenred would certainly not have told him that he was getting only a sad remainder after the heart was gone. Nor could she tell him so. The secret belonged only to the family. The only hope for this hapless pair was that love might come with time, a kind of love, better, perhaps, than many marriages ever achieve, but still far short of the crown.

  “I will try,” she said steadily, “to give him all that he is asking, all that he wants and expects. He deserves well, he shall have the best I can do.”

  There was no point in saying to her that it might not be enough, she already knew that, and was uneasy about a degree of deception she could not evade. It might even be that what had already been said here in the dimness of the kennels had reopened a deep abyss of doubt which she had almost succeeded in sealing over. Better let well alone, where there was no possibility of rendering the load she carried any lighter.

  “Well, I pray you may be blessed in all you do,” said Cadfael, and drew back out of her way. The bitch had uncoiled herself from among her puppies and was nuzzling the pail, and waving a feathered tail in hungry expectation. The ordinary business of the day goes on through births, marriages, deaths, and festivals. When he looked back from the doorway the girl Helisende was stooping to fill the bitch’s bowl, the heavy braid of her brown hair swinging among the scrambling litter. She did not look up, but for all that, h
e had the feeling that she was deeply and vulnerably aware of him until he turned and walked softly away.

  *

  “You’ll miss your nurseling,” said Cadfael when Edgytha came at noon to serve food and drink for them. “Or will you be going south with her when she’s married?”

  The old woman lingered, taciturn by nature but visibly in need of unburdening a heart by no means reconciled to losing her darling. Within the stiff folds of her wimple her withered cheek trembled.

  “What should I do at my age, in a strange place? I am too old to be of much value now, I shall stay here. At least I know the way of things here, and everyone knows me. What respect should I have in a strange household? But she’ll go, I know that! She’ll go, I suppose, as go she must. And the young man’s well enough—if my lamb had not another in her eye and in her heart.”

  “And one placed so far out of reach,” Haluin reminded her gently, but his face was pale, and when she turned and looked at him in silence for a long moment he averted his eyes and turned away his head.

  Her eyes were the pale, washed blue of fading harebells. Once, shadowed by lashes now grown thin and meager, they might have resembled more the color of periwinkles. “So my lord will have told you,” she said. “So they all say. And if there’s no help, she might do much worse, I know! I came here in attendance on her mother, all those years ago, and that was no lovers’ match, her so young, and him nigh on three times her age. A decent, kind man he was, but old, old! She had good need, poor lady, of someone from home, someone she knew well and could trust. At least they’re marrying my girl to somebody young.”

  Cadfael asked what had been preoccupying his mind for some little while, since no word had been said on the matter: “Is Helisende’s mother dead?”