The Confession of Brother Haluin Read online

  “Who escapes them, in winter? It’s the weight of the snow that’s shifted the slates, broken some of them, and found a way through to douse the bishop’s chaplain in his bed. If we left it till the thaw we’d have a flood, and far worse damage to repair.”

  “And your master builder reckons he can make it good, frost or no frost.” Hugh had recognised the brawny figure halfway up the long ladder, hefting a hodful of slates surely few of his younger labourers could have lifted. “Bitter work up there, though,” said Hugh, eyeing the highest platform of the scaffolding, stacked with a great pile of slates, and the two diminutive figures moving with painful caution on the exposed roof.

  “We take it in short spells, and there’s a fire in the warming room when we come down. We elders are excused the service, but most of us take a turn, barring the sick and infirm. It’s fair, but I doubt if it pleases Conradin. It irks him having foolhardy youngsters up there, and he’d just as soon work only the ones he’s sure of, though I will say he keeps a close watch on them. If he sees any blanch at being up so high, he soon has them on solid earth again. We can’t all have the head for it.”

  “Have you been up there?” asked Hugh curiously.

  “I did my stint yesterday, before the light began to fail. Short days are no help, but another week should see it finished.”

  Hugh narrowed his eyes against a sudden brief lance of sunlight that reflected back dazzlingly from the crystalline whiteness. “Who are those two up there now? Is that Brother Urien? The dark fellow? Who’s the other one?”

  “Brother Haluin.” The thin, alert figure was all but obscured by the jut of the scaffolding, but Cadfael had seen the pair climb the ladders barely an hour earlier.

  “What, Anselm’s best illuminator? How comes it you allow such abuse of an artist? He’ll ruin his hands in this bitter cold. Small chance of him handling a fine brush for the next week or two, after grappling with slates.”

  “Anselm would have begged him off,” Cadfael admitted, “but Haluin would have none of it. No one would have grudged him the mercy, seeing how valuable his work is, but if there’s a hair shirt anywhere within reach Haluin will claim it and wear it. A lifelong penitent, that lad, God knows for what imagined sins, for I never knew him so much as break a rule, since he entered as a novice, and seeing he was no more than eighteen when he took his first vows, I doubt if he’d had time to do the world much harm up to then. But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they, lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we’re humankind, and not angels. If the overflow from Haluin’s penitence and piety washes off a few of my shortcomings, may it redound to him for credit in the accounting. And I shan’t complain.”

  It was too cold to linger very long in the deep snow, watching the cautious activities on the guest hall roof. They resumed their passage through the gardens, skirting the frozen pools where Brother Simeon had chopped jagged holes to let in air to the fish below, and crossing the mill leat that fed the ponds by the narrow plank bridge glazed over with a thin and treacherous crust of ice. Closer now, the piers of the scaffolding jutted from the south wall of the guest hall across the drainage channel, and the workers on the roof were hidden from sight.

  “I had him with me among the herbs as a novice, long ago,” said Cadfael as they threaded the snowy beds of the upper garden and emerged into the great court. “Haluin, I mean. It was not long after I ended my own novitiate. I came in at past forty, and he barely turned eighteen. They sent him to me because he was lettered and had the Latin at his finger ends, and after three or four years I was still learning. He comes of a landed family, and would have inherited a good manor if he hadn’t chosen the cloister. A cousin has it now. The boy had been put out to a noble household, as the custom is, and was clerk to his lord’s estate, being uncommonly bright at learning and figuring. I often wondered why he changed course, but as every man within here knows, there’s no questioning a vocation. It comes when it will, and there’s no refusal.”

  “It would have been simpler to plant the lad straight into the scriptorium, if he came in with so much learning,” said Hugh practically. “I’ve seen some of his work, he’d be wasted on any other labour.”

  “Ah, but his conscience would have him pass through every stage of the common apprenticeship before he came to rest. I had him for three years among the herbs, then he did two years more at the hospital of Saint Giles, among the sick and crippled, and two more labouring in the gardens at the Gaye, and helping with the sheep out at Rhydycroesau, before he’d settle to do what we found he could do best. Even now, as you saw, he’ll have no privilege because he has a delicate hand with the brushes and pens. If others must slither perilously on a snowy roof, so will he. A good fault, mind you,” admitted Cadfael, “but he takes it to extremes, and the Rule disapproves extremes.”

  They crossed the great court towards the gatehouse, where Hugh’s horse was tethered, the tall, rawboned grey that was always his favorite mount, and could have carried twice or three times his master’s light weight.

  “There’ll be no more snow tonight,” said Cadfael, eyeing the veiled sky and sniffing the light, languid wind, “nor for a few days more, I fancy. Nor hard frost, either, we’re on the edge of it. I pray you’ll have a tolerable ride south.”

  “We’ll be away at dawn. And back, God willing, by the new year.” Hugh gathered his bridle and swung himself into the high saddle, “May the thaw hold off until your roof’s weatherproof again! And don’t forget Aline will be expecting you.”

  He was off out of the gate, with a sharp echo of hooves ringing from the cobbles, and a single brilliant spark that had come and gone almost before the iron shoe left the frozen ground. Cadfael turned back to the door of the infirmary, and went to check the stores in Brother Edmund’s medicine cupboard. Another hour, and the light would be already dimming, in these shortest days of the year. Brother Urien and Brother Haluin would be the last pair up on the roof for this day.

  *

  Exactly how it happened no one ever clearly established. Brother Urien, who had obeyed Brother Conradin’s order to come down as soon as the call came, pieced together what he thought the most probable account, but even he admitted there could be no certainty. Conradin, accustomed to being obeyed, and sensibly concluding that no one in his right senses would wish to linger a moment longer than he must in the bitter cold, had simply shouted his command, and turned away to clear the last of the day’s broken slates out of the way of his descending workmen. Brother Urien let himself down thankfully to the boards of the scaffolding, and fumbled his way carefully down the long ladder to the ground, only too happy to leave the work. He was strong and willing, and had no special skills but a wealth of hard experience, and what he did would be well done, but he saw no need to do more than was asked of him. He drew off some yards to look up at what had been accomplished, and saw Brother Haluin, instead of descending the short ladder braced up the slope of the roof on his side, mount several rungs higher, and lean out sidelong to clear away a further sweep of snow and extend the range of the uncovered slates. It appeared that he had seen reason to suspect that the damage extended further on that side, and wished to sweep away the snow there to remove its weight and prevent worse harm.

  The rounded bank of snow shifted, slid down in great folds upon itself, and fell, partly upon the end of the planks and the stack of slates waiting there, partly over the edge and sheer to the ground below. No such avalanche had been intended, but the frozen mass loosed its hold of the steep slates and dropped away in one solid block, to shatter as it struck the scaffolding. Haluin had leaned too far. The ladder slid with the snow that had helped to keep it stable, and he fell rather before than with it, struck the end of the planks a glancing blow, and crashed down without a cry to the frozen channel below. Ladder and snowfall dropped upon the planks and hurled them after him in a great downpour of heavy sharp-edged slates, slashing into his flesh.

  Brother Conradin, busy a
lmost beneath his scaffolding, had leaped clear only just in time, spattered and stung and half blinded for a moment by the blown drift of the fall. Brother Urien, standing well back, and arrested in the very act of calling up to his companion to stop, for the light was too far gone, uttered instead a great cry of warning, too late to save, and sprang forward, to be half buried by the edge of the fall. Shaking off snow, they reached Brother Haluin together.

  *

  It was Brother Urien who came in haste and grim silence looking for Cadfael, while Conradin ran out the other way into the great court, and sent the first brother he encountered to fetch Brother Edmund the infirmarer. Cadfael was in his workshop, just turfing over his brazier for the night, when Urien erupted into the doorway, a dark, dour man burning with ill news.

  “Brother, come quickly! Brother Haluin has fallen from the roof!”

  Cadfael, no less sparing of words, swung about, clouted down the last turf, and reached for a woolen blanket from the shelf.

  “Dead?” The drop must be forty feet at least, timber by way of obstacles on the way down, and packed ice below, but if by chance he had fallen into deep snow made deeper still by the clearance of the roof, he might yet be lucky.

  “There’s breath in him. But for how long? Conradin’s gone for more helpers, Edmund knows by now.”

  “Come!” said Cadfael, and was out of the door and running for the little bridge over the leat, only to change his mind and dart along the narrow neck of causeway between the abbey pools, and leap the leat at the end of it, to come the more quickly to where Haluin lay. From the great court the gleam of two torches advanced to meet them, and Brother Edmund with a couple of helpers and a hand litter, hard on Brother Conradin’s heels.

  Brother Haluin, buried to the knees under heavy slates, with blood staining the ice beneath his head, lay still in the middle of the turmoil he had caused.

  Chapter 2

  WHATEVER THE RISKS of moving him, to leave him where he was for a moment longer than was necessary would have been to consent to and abet the death that already had a fast hold on him. In mute and purposeful haste they lifted aside the fallen planks and dug out with their hands the knife-edged slates that crushed and lacerated his feet and ankles into a pulp of blood and bone. He was far gone from them, and felt nothing that was done to him as they eased him out of the icy bed of the drain enough to get slings under him, and hoisted him onto the litter. In mourne procession they bore him out through the darkened gardens to the infirmary, where Brother Edmund had prepared a bed for him in a small cell apart from the old and infirm who spent their last years there.

  “He cannot live,” said Edmund, looking down at the remote and pallid face.

  So Cadfael thought, too. So did they all. But still there was breath in him, even if it was a harsh, groaning breath that spoke of head injuries perhaps past mending; and they went to work on him as one who could and must live, even against their own virtual certainty that he could not. With infinite, wincing care they stripped him of his icy garments, and padded him round with blankets wrapped about heated stones, while Cadfael went over him gently for broken bones, and set and bound the left forearm that grated as he handled it, and still brought never a flicker to the motionless face. He felt carefully about Haluin’s head before cleaning and dressing the bleeding wound, but could not determine whether the skull was fractured. The bitter, snoring breathing indicated that it was, but he could not be sure. As for the broken feet and ankles, Cadfael laboured over them for a long time after they had covered the rest of Brother Haluin with warmed brychans against simple death of cold, his body laid straight and shored securely every way to guard against the shock and pain of movement should he regain his senses. As no one believed he would, unless it was an obstinate, secret remnant of belief that caused them so to exert themselves to nourish even the failing spark.

  “He will never walk again,” said Brother Edmund, shuddering at the shattered feet Cadfael was labouriously bathing.

  “Never without aid,” Cadfael agreed somberly. “Never on these.” But for all that, he went on patiently putting together again, as best he could, the mangled remains.

  Long, narrow, elegant feet Brother Haluin had had, in keeping with his slender build. The deep and savage cuts the slates had made penetrated to the bone in places, here and there had splintered the bone. It took a long time to clean away the bloody fragments, and bind up each foot at least into its human shape, and encase it in a hastily improvised cradle of felt, well padded within, to hold it still and let it heal as near as possible to what it had once been. If, of course, there was to be healing.

  And all the while, Brother Haluin lay snoring painfully and oblivious of all that was done to him, very far sunk beneath the lights and shadows of the world, until even his breathing subsided gradually into a there shallow whisper, no more than the stirring of a solitary leaf in a scarcely perceptible breeze, and they thought that he was gone. But the leaf continued to stir, however faintly.

  “If he comes to himself, even for a moment, call me at once,” said Abbot Radulfus, and left them to their watch.

  Brother Edmund was gone to get some sleep. Cadfael shared the night watch with Brother Rhun, newest and youngest among the choir monks. One on either side the bed, they stared steadily upon the unbroken sleep beyond sleep of a body anointed and blessed and armed for death.

  It was many years since Haluin had passed out of Cadfael’s care to go to manual labour in the Gaye. Cadfael reexamined with deep attention linaments he had almost forgotten in their early detail, and found now both changed and poignantly familiar. Not a big man, Brother Haluin, but somewhat taller than the middle height, with long, fine, shapely bones, and more sinew and less flesh on them now than when first he came into the cloister, a boy still short of his full growth, and just hardening into manhood. Thirty-five or thirty-six he must be now, barely eighteen then, with the softness and bloom still on him. His face was a long oval, the bones of cheek and jaw strong and clear, the thin, arched brows almost black, shades darker than the mane of crisp brown hair he had sacrificed to the tonsure. The face upturned now from the pillow was blanched to a clay-white pallor, the hollows of the cheeks and deep pits of the closed eyes blue as shadows in the snow, and round the drawn lips the same livid blueness was gathering even as they watched. In the small hours of the night, when the life sinks to its frailest, he would end or mend.

  Across the bed Brother Rhun kneeled, attentive, unintimidated by another’s death any more than he would be, someday, by his own. Even in the dimness of this small, stony room Rhun’s radiant fairness, his face creamy with youth, his ring of flaxen hair and aquamarine eyes, diffused a lambent brightness. Only someone of Rhun’s virgin certainty could sit serenely by a deathbed, with such ardent loving-kindness and yet no taint of pity. Cadfael had seen other young creatures come to the cloister with something of the same charmed faith, only to see it threatened, dulled and corroded gradually by the sheer burden of being human under the erosion of the years. That would never happen to Rhun. Saint Winifred, who had bestowed on him the physical perfection he had lacked, would not suffer the gift to be marred by any maiming of his spirit.

  The night passed slowly, with no perceptible change in Brother Haluin’s unrelenting stillness. It was towards dawn when at last Rhun said softly, “Look, he is stirring!”

  The faintest quiver had passed over the livid face, the dark brows drew together, the eyelids tightened with the first distant awareness of pain, the lips lengthened in a brief grimace of stress and alarm. They waited for what seemed a long while, unable to do more than wipe the moist forehead, and the trickle of spittle that oozed from the corner of the drawn mouth.

  In the first dim, reflected snowlight before dawn Brother Haluin opened his eyes, onyx black in their blue hollows, and moved his lips to emit a hair-fine thread of a voice that Rhun had to stoop his young, sharp ear to catch and interpret.

  “Confession…” said the whisper from the threshold be
tween life and death, and for a while that was all.

  “Go and bring Father Abbot,” said Cadfael.

  Rhun departed silently and swiftly. Haluin lay gathering his senses, and by the growing clarity and sharpening focus of his eyes he knew where he was and who sat beside him, and was mustering what life and wit remained to him for a purpose. Cadfael saw the quickening of pain in the strained whiteness of mouth and jaw, and made to trickle a little of the draught of poppies between his patient’s lips, but Haluin kept them tightly clenched and turned his head away. He wanted nothing to dull or hamper his senses, not yet, not until he had got out of him what he had to say.

  “Father Abbot is coming,” said Cadfael, close to the pillow. “Wait, and speak but once.”

  Abbot Radulfus was at the door by then, stooping under the low lintel. He took the stool Rhun had vacated, and leaned down to the injured man. Rhun had remained without, ready to run errands if he should be needed, and had drawn the door closed between. Cadfael rose to withdraw likewise, and suddenly yellow sparks of anxiety flared in Haluin’s hollow eyes, and a brief convulsion went through his body and fetched a moan of pain, as though he had willed to lift a hand to arrest Cadfael’s going, but could not do it. The abbot leaned closer, to be seen as well as heard.

  “I am here, my son. I am listening. What is it troubles you?”

  Haluin drew in breath, hoarding it to have a voice to speak with. “I have sins…” he said, “…never told.” The words came slowly and with much labour, but clearly. “One against Cadfael… Long past… never confessed…”

  The abbot looked up at Cadfael across the bed. “Stay! He wishes it.” And to Haluin, touching the lax hand that was too weak to be lifted: “Speak as you can, we shall be listening. Spare many words, we can read between.”

  “My vows,” said the thread-fine voice remotely. “Impure… not out of devotion… Despair!”

  “Many have entered for wrong reasons,” said the abbot, “and remained for the right ones. Certainly in the four years of my abbacy here I have found no fault in your true service. On this head have no fear. God may have brought you into the cloister roundabout for his own good reasons.”