estrangement that time must have brought about, until now scarcely realized. What had once been familiar was now alien, and it would take time to edge his way back to it. Cadfael watched him disappear round the corner of the box hedge, torn between sympathy and envy.
The house of Girard of Lythwood, like so many of the merchant burgages of Shrewsbury, was in the shape of an L, the short base directly on the street, and pierced by an arched entry leading through to the yard and garden behind. The base of the L was of only one story, and provided the shop where Jevan, the younger brother, stored and sold his finished leaves and gatherings of vellum and the cured skins from which they were folded and cut to order. The upright of the L showed its gable end to the street, and consisted of a low undercroft and the living floor above, with a loft in the steep roof that provided extra sleeping quarters. The entire burgage was not large, space being valuable within so enclosed a town, in its tight noose of river. Outside the loop, in the suburbs of Frankwell on one side and the Foregate on the other, there was room to expand, but within the wall every inch of ground had to be used to the best advantage.
Elave halted before the house, and stood a moment to take in the strangeness of what he felt, a sudden warmth of homecoming, an almost panic reluctance to go in and declare himself, a mute wonder at the smallness of the house that had been his home for a number of years. In the overwhelming basilicas of Constantinople, as in the profound isolation of deserts, a man grows used to immensity.
He went in slowly through the narrow entry and into the yard. On his right the stables, the byre for the cow, the store shed, and the low coop for the chickens were just as he remembered them, and on his left the house door stood wide open, as it always had on such summer days. A woman was just coming up from the garden that stretched away beyond the house, with a basket of clothes in her arms, crisp washing just gathered from the hedge. She observed the stranger entering, and quickened her step to meet him.
“Good day, sir! If you’re wanting my husband
” She halted there, astonished, recognizing but not believing at first what she saw. Between eighteen and twenty-five a young man does not change so much as to be unrecognizable to his own family, however he may have filled out and matured during that time. It was simply that she had had no warning, no word to indicate that he was within five hundred miles of her.
“Mistress Margaret,” said Elave, “you’ve not forgotten me?”
The voice completed what his face had begun. She flushed bright with acceptance and evident pleasure. “Dear, now, and it is you! Just for a moment there you had me struck out of my wits, thinking I was seeing visions, and you still half the world away, in some outlandish place. Well, now, and here you are safe and sound, after all that journeying. Glad I am to see you again, boy, and so will Girard and Jevan be. Who’d have thought you’d spring out of nowhere like this, all in a moment, and just in time for Saint Winifred’s festival. Come within, come, let me put this laundry down and get you a draught to drink, and tell me how you’ve fared all this long time.”
She freed a hand to take him warmly by the arm and usher him within, to a bench by the unshuttered window of the hall, with such voluble goodwill that his silence passed unnoticed. She was a neat, brown-haired, bustling woman in her middle forties, healthy and hardworking and a good and discreet neighbor, and her shining housekeeping reflected her own strong-willed brightness.
“Girard’s away making up the wool clip. He’ll be a day or so yet. His face will be a sight to see when he comes in and sees Uncle William sitting here at the table like in the old days. Where is he? Is he following you up now, or has he business below at the abbey?”
Elave drew breath and said what had to be said. “He’ll not be coming, mistress.”
“Not coming?” she said, astonished, turning sharply in the doorway of her larder.
“Sorry I am to have no better word to bring you. Master William died in France, before we could embark for home. But I’ve brought him home, as I promised him I would. He lies at the abbey now, and tomorrow he’s to be buried there, in the cemetery among the patrons of the house.”
She stood motionless, staring at him with pitcher and cup forgotten in her hands, and for a long moment she was silent.
“It was what he wanted,” said Elave. “He did what he set out to do, and he has what he wanted.”
“Not everyone can say as much,” said Margaret slowly. “So Uncle William’s gone! Business below at the abbey, did I say? And so he has, but not as I supposed. And you left to bring him over the sea alone! And Girard away, and who’s to tell where at this moment? It will grieve him if he’s not here to pay the last dues to a good man.” She shook herself, and stirred out of her brief stillness, practical always. “Well, now, no fault of yours, you did well by him, and have no need to look back. Sit you down and be easy. You’re home, at least. Done your wanderings for the time being, you can do with a rest.”
She brought him ale, and sat down beside him, considering without distress all that was now needful. A competent woman, she would have everything ordered and seemly whether her husband returned in time or not.
“He was nearing eighty years old,” she said, “by my reckoning. He had a good life, and was a good kinsman and a good neighbor, and he ended doing a blessed thing, and one that he wanted with all his heart, once that old preacher from Saint Osyth’s put the thought in his mind. There,” said Margaret, shaking her head with a sigh, “here am I harking back like a fool, and I never meant to. Time’s short! I should have thought the abbot could have sent us word of the need as soon as you came in at the gatehouse.”
“He knew nothing of it until this morning at chapter. He’s been here only four years, and we’ve been gone seven. But everything is in hand now.”
“Maybe it is, down there, but I must see to it that all’s ready up here, for there’ll be all the neighbors in to join us, and I hope you’ll come back with us, after the funeral. Conan’s here, that’s lucky. I’ll send him west to see if he can find Girard in time, though there’s no knowing just where he’ll be. There are six flocks he has to deal with out there. Sit you here quietly, while I go and bring Jevan from the shop, and Aldwin from his books, and you can tell us all how it was with the old man. Fortunata’s off in the town marketing, but she’ll surely be back soon.”
She was off on the instant, bustling out to fetch Jevan out of his shop, and Elave was left breathless and mute with her ready volubility, having had no chance as yet to mention the charge he had still to deliver. In a few minutes she was back with the vellum-maker, the clerk, and the shepherd Conan hard on her heels, the entire core of the household but for the absent foster child. All these Elave knew well from his former service, and only one was much changed. Conan had been a youngster of twenty when last seen, slender and willowy; now he had broadened out and put on flesh and muscle, swelling into gross good looks, ruddy and strong with outdoor living. Aldwin had entered the household in Girard’s service, and stepped into Elave’s shoes when William took his own boy with him on pilgrimage. A man of past forty at that time, barely literate but quick with numbers as a gift of nature, Aldwin looked much the same now at nearing fifty, but that his hair had rather more grey in it, and was thinning on the crown. He had had to work hard to earn his place and hold it, and his long face had set into defensive lines of effort
