“Our pleasure to ride in company,” said Mark.
“I’ll come for you as soon as they take their places at table,” the canon promised, well content, and left them to an hour of rest. Not until he was gone did the girl come back, bearing a dish of honey cakes and a jar of mead. She served them in silence, but made no move to go. After a moment of sullen thought she asked abruptly: “What did he tell you?”
“That he and his daughter are bound for Bangor tomorrow, as we two are. It seems,” said Cadfael equably, and watching her unrevealing face, “that we shall have a prince’s escort as far as Aber.”
“So he does still own he is my father,” she said with a curling lip.
“He does, and why should he not profess it proudly? If you look in your mirror,” said Cadfael candidly, “you will see very good reason why he should boast of it.” That coaxed a reluctant smile out of her. He pursued the small success: “What is it between you two? Is it some threat from the new bishop? If he’s bent on ridding himself of all the married priests in his diocese he has an uphill row to hoe. And your father seems to me an able man, one a new incumbent can ill afford to lose.”
“So he is,” she agreed, warming, “and the bishop wants to keep him. His case would have been much worse, but my mother was in her last illness when Bishop Gilbert arrived, and it seemed she could not last long, so they waited! Can you conceive of it? Waiting for a wife to die, so that he need not part with her husband, who was useful to him! And die she did, last Christmas, and ever since then I have kept his house, cooked and cleaned for him, and thought we could go on so. But no, I am a reminder of a marriage the bishop says was unlawful and sacrilegious. In his eyes I never should have been born! Even if my father remains celibate the rest of his life, I am still here, to call to mind what he wants forgotten. Yes, he, not only the bishop! I stand in the way of his advancement.”
“Surely,” said Mark, shocked, “you do him injustice. I am certain he feels a father’s affection for you, as I do believe you feel a daughter’s for him.”
“It never was tested before,” she said simply. “No one grudged us a proper love. Oh, he wishes me no ill, neither does the bishop. But very heartily they both wish that I may go somewhere else to thrive, so far away I shall trouble them no more.”
“So that is why they’ve planned to match you with a man of Anglesey. As far away,” said Cadfael ruefully, “as a man could get and still be in North Wales. Yes, that would certainly settle the bishop’s mind. But what of yours? Do you know the man they intend for you?”
“No, that was the prince’s doing, and he meant it kindly, and indeed I take it kindly. No, the bishop wanted to send me away to a convent in England, and make a nun of me. Owain Gwynedd said that would be a wicked waste unless it was my wish, and asked me there in front of everyone in the hall if I had any mind to it, and very loudly and clearly I said no. So he proposed this match for me. His man is looking for a wife, and they tell me he’s a fine fellow, not so young but barely past thirty, which is not so old, and good to look at, and well regarded. Better at least,” she said without great enthusiasm, “than being shut up behind a grid in an English nunnery.”
“So it is,” agreed Cadfael heartily, “unless your own heart drives you there, and I doubt that will ever happen to you. Better, too, surely, than living on here and being made to feel an outcast and a burden. You are not wholly set against marriage?”
“No!” she said vehemently.
“And you know of nothing against this man the prince has in mind?”
“Only that I have not chosen him,” she said, and set her red lips in a stubborn line.
“When you see him you may approve him. It would not be the first time,” said Cadfael sagely, “that an intelligent matchmaker got the balance right.”
“Well or ill,” she said, rising with a sigh, “I have no choice but to go. My father goes with me to see that I behave, and Canon Morgant, who is as rigid as the bishop himself, goes with us to see that we both behave. Any further scandal now, and goodbye to any advancement under Gilbert. I could destroy him if I so wished,” she said, dwelling vengefully on something she knew could never be a possibility, for all her anger and disdain. And from the evening light in the doorway she looked back to add: “I can well live without him. Soon or late, I should have gone to a husband. But do you know what most galls me? That he should give me up so lightly, and be so thankful to get rid of me.”
Canon Meirion came for them as he had promised, just as the bustle in the courtyard was settling into competent quietness, building work abandoned for the day, all the domestic preparations for the evening’s feast completed, the small army of servitors mustered into their places, and the household, from princes to grooms, assembled in hall. The light was still bright, but softening into the gilded silence before the sinking of the sun.
Dressed for ceremony, the canon was brushed and immaculate but plain, maintaining the austerity of his office, perhaps, all the more meticulously to smooth away from memory all the years when he had been married to a wife. Time had been, once, long ago in the age of the saints, when celibacy had been demanded of all Celtic priests, just as insistently as it was being demanded now by Bishop Gilbert, by reason of the simple fact that the entire structure of the Celtic Church was built on the monastic ideal, and anything less was a departure from precedent and a decline in sanctity. But long since even the memory of that time had grown faint to vanishing, and there would be just as indignant a reaction to the reimposition of that ideal as there must once have been to its gradual abandonment. For centuries now priests had lived as decent married men and raised families like their parishioners. Even in England, in the more remote country places, there were plenty of humble married priests, and certainly no one thought the worse of them. In Wales it was not unknown for son to follow sire in the cure of a parish, and worse, for the sons of bishops to take it for granted they should succeed their mitred fathers, as though the supreme offices of the Church had been turned into heritable fiefs. Now here came this alien bishop, imposed from without, to denounce all such practices as abominable sin, and clear his diocese of all but the celibate clergy.
And this able and impressive man who came to summon them to the support of his master had no intention of suffering diminution simply because, though he had buried his wife just in time, the survival of a daughter continued to accuse him. Nothing against the girl, and he would see her provided for, but somewhere else, out of sight and mind.
To do him justice, he made no bones about going straight for what he wanted, what would work to his most advantage. He meant to exploit his two visiting monastics and their mission to his bishop’s pleasure and satisfaction.
“They are just seated. There will be silence until princes and bishop are settled. I have seen to it there is a clear space below the high table, where you will be seen and heard by all.”
Do him justice, too, he was no way disappointed or disparaging in contemplating Brother Mark’s smallness of stature and plain Benedictine habit, or the simplicity of his bearing; indeed he looked him over with a nod of satisfied approval, pleased with a plainness that would nevertheless carry its own distinction.
