substantial; or it might have been simply the growing strength and clarity of the light now gleaming in at every window, paling the candles on the altar. Certainly the mild and modest voice had never been so eloquent.
‘Surely the range is so wide,’ he said with slow and careful deliberation, ‘that even that is possible. Yet I doubt if such a marvel was demanded of you.’
‘In three days more,’ said Ruald more gently, watching the flames he had lit burn tall and steady and golden, ‘it will be Saint Illtud’s day. You are Welsh, you will know what is told of him. He had a wife, a noble lady, willing to live simply with him in a reed hut by the River Nadafan. An angel told him to leave his wife, and he rose up early in the morning, and drove her out into the world alone, thrusting her off, so we are told, very roughly, and went to receive the tonsure of a monk from Saint Dyfrig. I was not rough, yet that is my own case, for so I parted from Generys. Cadfael, what I would ask is, was that an angel who commanded it, or a devil?’
‘You are posing a question,’ said Cadfael,’to which only God can know the answer, and with that we must be content. Certainly others before you have received the same call that came to you, and obeyed it. The great earl who founded this house and sleeps there between the altars, he, too, left his lady and put on the habit before he died.’ Only three days before he died, actually, and with his wife’s consent, but no need at this moment to say any word of that.
Never before had Ruald opened up the sealed places within him where his wife was hidden, even from his own sight, first by the intensity of his desire for holiness, then by the human fallibility of memory and feeling which had made it hard even to recall the lines of her face. Conversion had fallen on him like a stunning blow that had numbed all sensation, and now in due time he was coming back to life, remembrance filling his being with sharp and biting pain. Perhaps he never could have wrenched his heart open and spoken about her, except in this timeless and impersonal solitude, with no witness but one.
For he spoke as if to himself, clearly and simply, rather recalling than recounting. ‘I had no intent to hurt her?Generys
I could not choose but go, yet there are ways and ways of taking leave. I was not wise. I had no skills, I did not do it well. And I had taken her from her own people, and she content all these years with little reward but the man I am, and wanting nothing more. I can never have given her a tenth part, not a mere tithe, of all that she gave me.’
Cadfael was motionless, listening, as the quiet voice continued its threnody. ‘Dark, she was, very dark, very beautiful. Everyone would call her so, but now I see that none ever knew how beautiful, for to the world outside it was as if she went vetted, and only I ever saw her uncover her face. Or perhaps, to children?to them she might show herself unconcealed. We never had children, we were not so blessed. That made her tender and loving to those her neighbours bore. She is not yet past all hope of bearing children of her own. Who knows but with another man, she might yet conceive.’
‘And you would be glad for her?’ said Cadfael, so softly as not to break this thread.
‘I would be glad. I would be wholly glad. Why should she continue barren, because I am fulfilled? Or bound, where I am free? I never thought of that when the longing came on me.’
‘And do you believe she told you truth, the last time, saying that she had a lover?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruald, simply and without hesitation, ‘I do believe. Not that she might not lie to me then, for I was crass and did her bitter offence, as now I understand, even by visiting her then I offended. I believe because of the ring. You remember it? The ring that Sulien brought back with him when he came from Ramsey.’
‘I remember it,’ said Cadfael.
The dormitory bell was just ringing to rouse the brothers for Prime. In some remote corner of their consciousness it sounded very faintly and distantly, and neither of them heeded it.
‘It never left her finger, from the time I put it there. I would not have thought it could be eased over her knuckle, after so long. The first time that I visited her with Brother Paul I know she was wearing it as she always did. But the second time
I had forgotten, but now I understand. It was not on her finger when I saw her the last time. She had stripped her marriage to me from her finger with the ring, and given it to someone else, as she stripped me from her life, and offered it to him. Yes, I believe Generys had a lover. One worth the loving, she said. With all my heart I hope he has proved so to her.’
Chapter Ten
THROUGHOUT THE ceremonies and services and readings of Saint Winifred’s day a morsel of Cadfael’s mind, persistent and unrepentant, occupied itself, much against his will, with matters which had nothing to do with the genuine adoration he had for his own special saint, whom he thought of always as she had been when her first brief life was so brutally ended: a girl of about seventeen, fresh, beautiful and radiant, brimming over with kindness and sweetness as the waters of her well brimmed always sparkling and pure, defying frost, radiating health of body and soul. He would have liked his mind to be wholly filled with her all this day, but obstinately it turned to Ruald’s ring, and the pale circle on the finger from which Generys had ripped it, abandoning him as he had abandoned her.
It became ever more clear that there had indeed been another man. With him she had departed, to settle, it seemed in Peterborough, or somewhere in that region, perhaps a place even more exposed to the atrocities of de Mandeville’s barbarians. And when the reign of murder and terror began, she and her man had taken up their new, shallow roots, turned what valuables they had into money, and removed further from the threat, leaving the ring for young Sulien to find, and bring home with him for Ruald’s deliverance. That, at least, was surely what Ruald believed. Every word he had spoken before the altar that morning bore the stamp of sincerity. So now much depended on the matter of forty miles or so between Cambridge and Peterborough. Not such a short distance, after all, but if all went well with the king’s business, and he thought fit soon to dispense with a force that could be better employed keeping an eye on the Earl of Chester, a passage by way of Peterborough would not greatly lengthen the way home.
And if the answer was yes, confirming every word of Sulien’s story, then Generys was indeed still living, and not abandoned to loneliness, and the dead woman of the Potter’s Field was still left adrift and without a name. But in that case, why should Sulien have stirred himself so resolutely to prove Britric, who was nothing to him, as innocent as Ruald? How could he have known, and why should he even have conceived the possibility, that the pedlar was innocent? Or that the woman Gunnild was alive, or even might be alive?
And if the answer was no, and Sulien had never spent the night with the silversmith in Peterborough, never begged the ring of him, but made up his story in defence of Ruald out of whole cloth, and backed it with a ring he had had in his possession all along, then surely he had been weaving a rope for his own neck while he was so busy unpicking someone else’s bonds.
But as yet there was no answer, and no way of hastening it, and Cadfael did his best to pay proper attention to
