The Devil's Novice Read online

  The covey of awed, inquisitive novices gathered round the opening of Meriet’s cell, heads thrust cautiously within and rusty black rumps protruding without, whirled in alarm at hearing this angry apparition bearing down on them, and broke away with agitated clucking like so many flurried hens. In the very threshold of his small domain Meriet came nose to nose with Brother Jerome emerging.

  On the face of it it was a very uneven confrontation: a mere postulant of a month or so, and one who had already given trouble and been cautioned, facing a man in authority, the prior’s right hand, a cleric and confessor, one of the two appointed for the novices. The check did give Meriet pause for one moment, and Cadfael leaned to his ear to whisper breathlessly: “Hold back, you fool! He’ll have your hide!” He might have saved the breath of which he was short, for Meriet did not even hear him. The moment when he might have come to his senses was already past, for his eye had fallen on the small, bright thing Jerome dangled before him from outraged fingers, as though it were unclean. The boy’s face blanched, not with the pallor of fear, but the blinding whiteness of pure anger, every line of bone in a strongly-boned countenance chiselled in ice.

  “That is mine,” he said with soft and deadly authority, and held out his hand. “Give it to me!”

  Brother Jerome rose on tiptoe and swelled like a turkey-cock at being addressed in such tones. His thin nose quivered with affronted rage. “And you openly avow it? Do you not know, impudent wretch, that in asking for admittance here you have forsworn “mine,” and may not possess property of any kind? To bring in any personal things here without the lord abbot’s permission is flouting the Rule. It is a sin! But wilfully to bring with you this—this!—is to offend foully against the very vows you say you desire to take. And to cherish it in your bed is a manner of fornication. Do you dare? Do you dare? You shall be called to account for it!”

  All eyes but Meriet’s were on the innocent cause of offence; Meriet maintained a burning stare upon his adversary’s face. And all the secret charm turned out to be was a delicate linen ribbon, embroidered with flowers in blue and gold and red, such a band as a girl would use to bind her hair, and knotted into its length a curl of that very hair, reddish gold.

  “Do you so much as know the meaning of the vows you say you wish to take?” fumed Jerome. “Celibacy, poverty, obedience, stability—is there any sign in you of any of these? Take thought now, while you may, renounce all thought of such follies and pollutions as this vain thing implies, or you cannot be accepted here. Penance for this backsliding you will not escape, but you have time to amend, if there is any grace in you.”

  “Grace enough, at any rate,” said Meriet, unabashed and glittering, “to keep my hands from prying into another man’s sheets and stealing his possessions. Give me,” he said through his teeth, very quietly, “what is mine!”

  “We shall see, insolence, what the lord abbot has to say of your behaviour. Such a vain trophy as this you may not keep. And as for your insubordination, it shall be reported faithfully. Now let me pass!” ordered Jerome, supremely confident still of his dominance and his tightness.

  Whether Meriet mistook his intention, and supposed that it was simply a matter of sweeping the entire issue into chapter for the abbot’s judgment, Cadfael could never be sure. The boy might have retained sense enough to accept that, even if it meant losing his simple little treasure in the end; for after all, he had come here of his own will, and at every check still insisted that he wanted with all his heart to be allowed to remain and take his vows. Whatever his reason, he did step back, though with a frowning and dubious face, and allowed Jerome to come forth into the corridor.

  Jerome turned towards the night-stairs, where the lamp was still burning, and all his mute myrmidons followed respectfully. The lamp stood in a shallow bowl on a bracket on the wall, and was guttering towards its end. Jerome reached it, and before either Cadfael or Meriet realised what he was about, he had drawn the gauzy ribbon through the flame. The tress of hair hissed and vanished in a small flare of gold, the ribbon fell apart in two charred halves, and smouldered in the bowl. And Meriet, without a sound uttered, launched himself like a hound leaping, straight at Brother Jerome’s throat. Too late to grasp at his cowl and try to restrain him, Cadfael lunged after.

  No question but Meriet meant to kill. This was no noisy brawl, all bark and no bite, he had his hands round the scrawny throat, bringing Jerome crashing to the floor-tiles under him, and kept his grip and held to his purpose though half a dozen of the dismayed and horrified novices clutched and clawed and battered at him, themselves ineffective, and getting in Cadfael’s way. Jerome grew purple, heaving and flapping like a fish out of water, and wagging his hands helplessly against the tiles. Cadfael fought his way through until he could stoop to Meriet’s otherwise oblivious ear, and bellow inspired words into it.

  “For shame, son! An old man!”

  In truth, Jerome lacked twenty of Cadfael’s own sixty years, but the need justified the mild exaggeration. Meriet’s ancestry nudged him in the ribs. His hands relaxed their grip, Jerome halsed in breath noisily and cooled from purple to brick-red, and a dozen hands hauled the culprit to his feet and held him, still breathing fire and saying no word, just as Prior Robert, tall and awful as though he wore the mitre already, came sailing down the tiled corridor, blazing like a bolt of the wrath of God.

  In the bowl of the lamp, the two ends of flowered ribbon smouldered, giving off a dingy and ill-scented smoke, and the stink of the burned ringlet still hung upon the air.

  *

  Two of the lay servants, at Prior Robert’s orders, brought the manacles that were seldom used, shackled Meriet’s wrists, and led him away to one of the punishment cells isolated from all the communal uses of the house. He went with them, still wordless, too aware of his dignity to make any resistance, or put them to any anxiety on his account. Cadfael watched him go with particular interest, for it was as if he saw him for the first time. The habit no longer hampered him, he strode disdainfully, held his head lightly erect, and if it was not quite a sneer that curled his lips and his still roused nostrils, it came very close to it. Chapter would see him brought to book, and sharply, but he did not care. In a sense he had had his satisfaction.

  As for Brother Jerome, they picked him up, put him to bed, fussed over him, brought him soothing draughts which Cadfael willingly provided, bound up his bruised throat with comforting oils, and listened dutifully to the feeble, croaking sounds he soon grew wary of assaying, since they were painful to him. He had taken no great harm, but he would be hoarse for some while, and perhaps for a time he would be careful and civil in dealing with the still unbroken sons of the nobility who came to cultivate the cowl. Mistakenly? Cadfael brooded over the inexplicable predilection of Meriet Aspley. If ever there was a youngster bred for the manor and the field of honour, for horse and arms, Meriet was the man.

  “For shame, son! An old man!” And he had opened his hands and let his enemy go, and marched off the field prisoner, but with all the honours.

  The outcome at chapter was inevitable; there was nothing to be done about that. Assault upon a priest and confessor could have cost him excommunication, but that was set aside in clemency. But his offence was extreme, and there was no fitting penalty but the lash. The discipline, there to be used only in the last resort, was nevertheless there to be used. It was used upon Meriet. Cadfael had expected no less. The criminal, allowed to speak, had contented himself with saying simply that he denied nothing of what was alleged against him. Invited to plead in extenuation, he refused, with impregnable dignity. And the scourge he endured without a sound.

  In the evening, before Compline, Cadfael went to the abbot’s lodging to ask leave to visit the prisoner, who was confined to his solitary cell for some ten days of penance.

  “Since Brother Meriet would not defend himself,” said Cadfael, “and Prior Robert, who brought him before you, came on the scene only late, it is as well that you should know all that happen
ed, for it may bear on the manner in which this boy came to us.” And he recounted the sad history of the keepsake Meriet had concealed in his cell and fondled by night. “Father, I don’t claim to know. But the elder brother of our most troublous postulant is affianced, and is to marry soon, as I understand.”

  “I take your meaning,” said Radulfus heavily, leaning linked hands upon his desk, “and I, too, have thought of this. His father is a patron of our house, and the marriage is to take place here in December. I had wondered if the younger son’s desire to be out of the world… It would, I think, account for him.” And he smiled wryly for all the plagued young who believe that frustration in love is the end of their world, and there is nothing left for them but to seek another. “I have been wondering for a week or more,” he said, “whether I should not send someone with knowledge to speak with his sire, and examine whether we are not all doing this youth a great disservice, in allowing him to take vows very ill-suited to his nature, however much he may desire them now.”

  “Father,” said Cadfael heartily, “I think you would be doing right.”

  The boy has qualities admirable in themselves, even here,” said Radulfus half-regretfully, “but alas, not at home here. Not for thirty years, and after satiety with the world, after marriage, and child-getting and child-rearing, and the transmission of a name and a pride of birth. We have our ambience, but they—they are necessary to continue both what they know, and what we can teach them. These things you understand, as do all too few of us who harbour here and escape the tempest. Will you go to Aspley in my behalf?”

  “With all my heart, Father,” said Cadfael.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Gladly, if you so wish. But may I, then, go now and see both what can be done to settle Brother Meriet, mind and body, and also what I can learn from him?”

  “Do so, with my goodwill,” said the abbot.

  *

  In his small stone penal cell, with nothing in it but a hard bed, a stool, a cross hung on the wall, and the necessary stone vessel for the prisoner’s bodily needs, Brother Meriet looked curiously more open, easy and content than Cadfael had yet seen him. Alone, unobserved and in the dark, at least he was freed from the necessity of watching his every word and motion, and fending off all such as came too near. When the door was suddenly unlocked, and someone came in with a tiny lamp in hand, he certainly stiffened for a moment, and reared his head from his folded arms to stare; and Cadfael took it as a compliment and an encouragement that on recognising him the young man just as spontaneously sighed, softened, and laid his cheek back on his forearms, though in such a way that he could watch the newcomer. He was lying on his belly on the pallet, shirtless, his habit stripped down to the waist to leave his weals open to the air. He was defiantly calm, for his blood was still up. If he had confessed to all that was charged against him, in perfect honesty, he had regretted nothing.

  “What do they want of me now?” he demanded directly, but without noticeable apprehension.

  “Nothing. Lie still, and let me put this lamp somewhere steady. There, you hear? We’re locked in together. I shall have to hammer at the door before you’ll be rid of me again.” Cadfael set his light on the bracket below the cross, where it would shine upon the bed. “I’ve brought what will help you to a night’s sleep, within and without. If you choose to trust my medicines? There’s a draught can dull your pain and put you to sleep, if you want it?”

  “I don’t,” said Meriet flatly, and lay watchful with his chin on his folded arms. His body was brown and lissome and sturdy, the bluish welts on his back were not too gross a disfigurement. Some lay servant had held his hand; perhaps he himself had no great love for Brother Jerome. “I want wakeful. This is quiet here.”

  “Then at least keep still and let me salve this copper hide of yours. I told you he would have it!” Cadfael sat down on the edge of the narrow pallet, opened his jar, and began to anoint the slender shoulders that rippled and twitched to his touch. “Fool boy,” he said chidingly, “you could have spared yourself all.”

  “Oh, that!” said Meriet indifferently, nevertheless passive under the soothing fingers. “I’ve had worse,” he said, lax and easy on his spread arms. “My father, if he was roused, could teach them something here.”

  “He failed to teach you much sense, at any rate. Though I won’t say,” admitted Cadfael generously, “that I haven’t sometimes wanted to strangle Brother Jerome myself. But on the other hand, the man was only doing his duty, if in a heavy-handed fashion. He is a confessor to the novices, of whom I hear—can I believe it?—you are one. And if you do so aspire, you are held to be renouncing all ado with women, my friend, and all concern with personal property. Do him justice he had grounds for complaint of you.”

  “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 g
ot 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?