Brother Cadfael's Penance bc-19 Read online

  Truth, indeed, since he had taken up arms in this endless contention in support of his father before he reached twenty.

  “I have known both,” said Cadfael, “and complain of neither.”

  “So they told me, I recall, at Coventry. Some who knew of you. As I did not, not then,” said Philip, and drew his gown closer about him. “I, too, had a word to say to God,” he said, and passed Cadfael and entered his chapel. “Come to me after Mass.”

  “Not behind a closed door this time,” said Philip, taking Cadfael by the arm as they came out from Mass, “but publicly in hall. No, you need not speak at all, your part is done. I have considered all that has emerged concerning Brien de Soulis and Yves Hugonin, and if the one matter is still unproven, guilty or no, the other cries out too loud to be passed over. Let Brien de Soulis rest as well as he may, it is too late to accuse him, at least here. But Hugonin, no, there is too great a doubt. I no longer accuse him, I dare not. Come, see him released to ride and rejoin his own faction, wherever he pleases.”

  In the hall of La Musarderie trestle tables and benches were all cleared away, leaving the great space stark and bare, the central fire roused and well tended, for winter was beginning to bite with night frosts, and for all the shelter of the deep river valley the winds found their bitter way in by every shutter and every arrow-slit. Philip’s officers gathered there turned impartial faces as he entered, and a cluster of men-at-arms held off and watched, awaiting his will.

  “Master of arms,” said Philip, “go and bring up Yves Hugonin from his cell. Take the smith with you, and strike off his chains. It has been shown me that in all probability I have done him wrong in thinking him guilty of de Soulis’s death. At least I have doubt enough in me to turn him loose and clear him of all offence against me. Go and fetch him here.”

  They went without hesitation, with a kind of indifferent briskness that came naturally to these men who served him. Fear had no part in their unquestioning promptness. Any who feared him would have fallen off from him and taken themselves elsewhere.

  “You have given me no chance to be grateful,” said Cadfael in Philip’s ear.

  “There is no occasion for gratitude here. If you have told me truth, this is due. I make too much haste, sometimes, but I do not of intent spit in the face of truth.” And to some of the men who hovered in the doorway: “See his horse saddled, and his saddle-roll well provided. No, wait a while for that. His own grooming may take a while, and we must send our guests forth fed and presentable.”

  They went to do his bidding, to heat water and carry it to an empty apartment, and install there the saddle-roll that had been hoisted from the horse when Yves had been brought in prisoner. So it was more than half an hour later when the boy was brought into the hall before his captor, and baulked and stared at the sight of Brother Cadfael standing at Philip’s side.

  “Here is one says I have grossly mistaken you,” said Philip directly, “and I have begun to be of his opinion. I make known now that you are free to go, no enemy henceforth of mine, and not to be meddled with where my writ runs.”

  Yves looked from one to the other, and was at a loss, so suddenly hailed out of his prison and brought forth into the light. He had been captive for so short a time that the signs hardly showed on him at all. His wrists were bruised from the irons, but there was no more than a thin blue line to be seen, and either he had been housed somewhere clean and dry, or he had changed into fresh clothes. His hair, still damp, curled about his head, drying fluffy as a child’s. But there were the dark shadows of anger and suspicion in the stiffness of his face when he looked at Philip.

  “You won him fairly,” said Philip indifferently, smiling a little at the boy’s black stare. “Embrace him!”

  Bewildered and wary, Yves tensed at the very touch of Cadfael’s hands on his shoulders, but as suddenly melted, and inclined a flushed and still half-reluctant cheek for the kiss, quivering. In a stumbling breath he demanded helplessly: “What have you done? What brings you here? You should never have followed.”

  “Question nothing!” said Cadfael, putting him off firmly to the length of his arms. “No need! Take what is offered you, and be glad. There is no deceit.”

  “He said you had won me.” Yves turned upon Philip, frowning, ready to blaze. “What has he done? How did he get you to let go of me? I do not believe you do it for nothing. What has he pledged for me?”

  “It is true,” said Philip coolly,”that Brother Cadfael came offering a life. Not, however, for you. He has reasoned me out of you, my friend, no price has been paid. Nor asked.”

  “That is truth,” said Cadfael.

  Yves looked from one to the other, swayed between belief in the one and disbelief in the other. “Not for me,” he said slowly. “It’s true, then, it must be true. Olivier is here! Who else?”

  “Olivier is here,” agreed Philip equably, and added with finality: “And stays here.”

  “You have no right.” Yves was too intent and solemn now to have room for anger. “What you held against me was at least credible. Against him you have no justification. Let him go now. Keep me if you will, but let Olivier go free.”

  “I will be the judge,” said Philip, his brows drawn formidably, but his voice as level as before, “whether I have ground of bitter complaint against Olivier de Bretagne. As for you, your horse is saddled and provided, and you may ride where you will, back to your empress without hindrance from any man of mine. The gate will open for you. Be on your way.”

  The curtness of the dismissal raised a flush in Yves’ smooth, scrubbed cheeks, and for a moment Cadfael feared for the young man’s newly achieved maturity. Where would be the sense in protesting further when the situation put all but dignified compliance out of his reach? A few months back, and he might have blazed in ineffective rage, in the perilous confusion of the transition from boy to man. But somewhere beneath one of the curtain towers of La Musarderie Yves had completed his growing up. He confronted his antagonist with mastered face and civil bearing.

  “Let me at least ask,” he said, “what is your intent with Brother Cadfael. Is he also prisoner?”

  “Brother Cadfael is safe enough with me. You need not fear for him. But for the present I desire to retain his company, and I think he will not deny me. He is free to go when he will, or stay as long as he will. He can keep the hours as faithfully in my chapel as in Shrewsbury. And so he does,” said Philip with a brief smile, remembering the night encounter, “even the midnight matin. Leave Brother Cadfael to his own choice.”

  “I have still business here,” said Cadfael, meeting the boy’s earnest eyes, that widened to take in more meanings than the mere words conveyed.

  “I go, then,” he said. “But I give you to know, Philip FitzRobert, that I shall come back for Olivier de Bretagne in arms.”

  “Do so,” said Philip, “but do not complain then of your welcome.”

  He was gone, without looking back. A hand to the bridle, a foot in the stirrup, and a light spring into the saddle, and the reins were gathered in one hand, and his spurless heels drove into the horse’s dappled flanks. The ranks of curious soldiers, servants and retainers parted to let him through, and he was out at the gate and on the descending causeway, towards the rim of the trees in the river valley below. There he would cross, and climb out again through the thick belt of woodland that everywhere surrounded Greenhamsted. By the same way that Cadfael had come, Yves departed, out to the great, straight road the Romans had made long ago, arrow-straight across the plateau of the Cotswolds, and when he reached it he would turn left, towards Gloucester and back to his duty.

  Cadfael did not go towards the gate to watch him depart. The last he saw of him that day was clear against a sullen sky in the gateway, his back as straight as a lance, before the gates were closed and barred behind him.

  “He means it,” said Cadfael by way of warning. For there are young men who say things they do not really mean, and those who fail to understand how to distin
guish between the two may live to regret it. “He will come back.”

  “I know it,” said Philip. “I would not grudge him his flourish even if it was no more than a flourish.”

  “It is more. Do not disdain him.”

  “God forbid! He will come, and we shall see. It depends how great a force she has now in Gloucester, and whether my father is with her.” He spoke of his father quite coldly, simply estimating in his competent mind the possible forces arrayed against him.

  The men of the garrison had dispersed to their various duties. A wind from the courtyard brought in the scent of fresh, warm bread carried in trays from the bakery, sweet as clover, and the sharp, metallic chirping of hammers from the armoury.

  “Why,” asked Cadfael, “should you wish to retain my company? It is I who had business unfinished with you, not you with me.”

  Philip stirred out of his pondering to consider question and questioner with sharp attention. “Why did you choose to remain? I told you you might go whenever you wished.”

  “The answer to that you know,” said Cadfael patiently. “The answer to my question I do not know. What is it you want of me?”

  “I am not sure myself,” Philip owned with a wry smile. “Some signpost into your mind, perhaps. You interest me more than most people.”

  That, if it was a compliment, was one which Cadfael could have returned with fervent truth. Some signpost into this man’s mind, indeed, might be a revelation. To get some grasp of the son might even illuminate the father. If Yves found Robert of Gloucester with the empress in the city, would he urge her to the attack against Philip with a bitterness the match of Philip’s own, or try to temper her animosity and spare his son?

  “I trust,” said Philip, “you will use my house as your own, brother, while you are here. If there is anything lacking to you, ask.”

  “There is a thing lacking.” He stepped directly into Philip’s path, to be clearly seen and heard, and if need be, denied, eye to eye. “My son is withheld from me. Give me leave to see him.”

  Philip said simply: “No.” Without emphasis or need of emphasis.

  “Use your house as my own, you said. Do you now place any restriction on where I may go within these walls?”

  “No, none. Go where you will, open any unlocked door, wherever you please. You may find him, but you will not be able to get in to him,” said Philip dispassionately, “and he will not be able to get out.”

  In the early twilight before Vespers, Philip made the rounds of his fortress, saw every guard set, and all defences secured. On the western side, where the ground rose steeply towards the village on the ridge, the wall was bratticed with a broad timber gallery braced out from its crest, since this was the side which could more easily be approached closely to attack the walls with rams or mining. Philip paced the length of the gallery to satisfy himself that all the traps built into its floor to allow attack from above on any besiegers who reached the wall, without exposing the defenders to archery, were clear of all obstacles and looked down stark stone to the ground, uncluttered by outside growth of bush or sapling. True, the brattice itself could be fired. He would have preferred to replace the timber with stone, but was grateful that Musard had at least provided this temporary asset. The great vine that climbed the wall on the eastern side had been permitted to remain, clothing a corner where a tower projected, but approach from that direction, climbing steeply over ground cleared of cover, was no great threat.

  On this loftier side, too, he had stripped a great swathe of the hillside bare, so that siege engines deployed along the ridge must stay at a distance to remain in cover, and unless heavy engines were brought up for the attack, the walls of La Musarderie would be safely out of range.

  His watchmen on the towers were easy with him, sure of his competence and their own, respected and respecting. Many of his garrison had served him for years, and come here with him from Cricklade. Faringdon had been a different matter, a new garrison patched together from several bases, so that he had had less cause to expect absolute trust and understanding from them. Yet it was the man deepest in his affection and confidence, the one on whom he had most relied for understanding, who had turned upon him with uncomprehending contempt, and led the recusants against him. A failure of language? A failure somewhere in the contact of minds? Of vision? Of reading of the stages in the descent to despair? A failure of love. That, certainly.

  Philip looked down from the wall into his own castle wards, where torches began to flare, resinous fires in the deepening dusk. Overhanging the towers on this western side the clouds were heavy, perhaps with snow, and the watchmen on the wall swathed themselves in their cloaks and gathered themselves stolidly against a biting wind. That gallant, silly boy must have reached Gloucester by now, if indeed Gloucester was where he was bound.

  Philip recalled Yves’ stiffnecked simplicity with a faint, appreciative smile. No, the Benedictine was almost certainly right about him. Folly to suppose such a creature could kill by stealth. He showed as a minor copy of that other, all valour and fealty; no room there for the troubled mind that might look for a way through the labyrinth of destruction by less glorious ways than the sword. White on white on the one hand, black on black on the other, and nowhere room for those unspectacular shades of grey that colour most mortals. Well, if some of us mottled and maimed souls can somehow force a way to a future for the valiant and disdainful innocents, why grudge it to them? But why, having achieved that effort of the mind, is it so hard to come by the tough resignation that should go with it? Burning is never easy to bear.

  The activity in the ward below, customary and efficient, sealed in La Musarderie for the night, small, foreshortened figures going about from the buildings under the wall to hall and keep, a tiny hearth of reflected light from the smith’s furnace red on the cobbles outside the forge. Two gowned figures swept their dark skirts in at the door of the keep. Chaplain and Benedictine monk together, heading for Vespers. An interesting man, this Benedictine from Shrewsbury, a brother but deprecating his own brotherhood, no priest and yet a father, and having experienced a son’s confrontation with a father of his own in youth, since doubtless he was engendered like the rest of humankind. And now himself a father for more than twenty years without knowing it, until he was suddenly presented with the revelation of his offspring in the fullness of manhood, with none of the labours, frustrations and anxieties that go to the making of a mature man. And such a man, perfect and entire, but for the saving leaven of selfdoubt which keeps a man humble. And I have not shown much of that myself, thought Philip wryly.

  Well, it was time. He descended the narrow stone staircase that led down from the guardwalk, and went to join them at Vespers.

  They were a reduced company at the office that night, the guard having been strengthened, and the smiths still at work in forge and armoury. Philip listened with an open mind as the Benedictine brother from Shrewsbury read the psalm. It was the feast day of Saint Nicholas, the sixth day of December.

  ‘I am numbered among such as go down into the pit; I am made as one having no more strength: ‘Thou hast committed me to the lowest pit, in darkness, in the depths…’ Even here he reminds me, thought Philip, accepting the omen. Yet the psalm was set for this day, and not by Cadfael.

  ‘Thou hast put away my acquaintance, far distant from me; thou hast made me an abomination to them. I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.’ How easy it is to be persuaded into believing that God puts words into the office of the day of intent, for the appropriate mouth to utter them. The sortes by another way. But I, thought Philip, between regret and defiance, do not believe it. All this chaotic world fumbles along by chance.

  ‘Wilt thou show forth thy marvels to men entombed? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?’ Well? Philip challenged in silence: Shall they?

  After the evening meal in hall Philip withdrew alone to his own quarters, took the most private of his keys, and went out from the keep to the tower at the north-western corner of the
curtain wall. A thin sleet was falling, not yet snow, though it made a faint and fleeting white powdering upon the cobbles. By morning it would be gone. The watchman on the tower marked the passage of the tall figure across the ward, and was motionless, knowing the man and his errand. It had not happened now for a matter of weeks. There was a name which had been banished from mention, but not from mind. What could have recalled it on this particular night the guard speculated, but without overmuch curiosity.

  The door at the foot of the tower, which opened to the first key, was narrow and tall. One swordsman, with an archer three steps up the stair at his back and aiming above his head, could hold it against an army. There was a short brand burning in a sconce on the wall within, shedding light down the well of the continuing stair that spiralled downwards. Even the airshafts that slanted up to the light on the two levels below, through the thick stone of the walls, gave only on to the enclosed and populous ward, not the outer world. Even could a man slough off his chains and compress himself painfully into the narrowing shaft, he would emerge only to be thrust back into his prison. There was no escape there.

  On the lower level Philip thrust his second key into the lock of another door, narrow and low. It functioned as smoothly and quietly as everything else that served him. Nor did he trouble to lock it behind him when he entered.

  This lower cell was carved out from the rock for more than half the height of the walls, clenched together with stone above, and spacious enough for a wary captor, if he visited at all, to stay well out of reach of a prisoner in irons. The cold within was sharp but dry. The shaft that slanted up to a grid in the tower wall within the ward sent a chill draught across the cell. On a bracket in the solid rock a massive candle burned steadily, well aside from the current of air, and within reach from the levelled rock ledge on which the prisoner’s bed was laid. At the edge of the bracket there was a new candle standing ready, for the present one was burning down to its ending.

  And on the bed, rigidly erect at the first grate of key in lock, and eyes levelled like javelins upon the doorway, was Olivier de Bretagne.