And the third day, early in the afternoon, they came to the manor of Hales.
The manor house lay a little aside from the village and the church, timber-built on the stone undercroft, in level, well-drained fields, with gentle wooded slopes beyond. Within its wooden fence, stable and barn and bakehouse were ranged along the pale, well maintained and neat. Brother Haluin stood in the open gateway, and looked at the place of his old service with a face fixed and still, only his eyes alive and full of pain.
“Four years,” he said, “I kept the manor roll here. Bertrand de Clary was my father’s overlord. I was sent here before I was fourteen, to be page to his lady. Will you believe, the man himself I never saw. Before I came here he was already in the Holy Land. This is but one of his manors, the only one in these parts, but his son was already installed in his place, and ruled the honor from Staffordshire. She always liked Hales best, she left her son to his lordship and settled here, and it was here I came. Better for her if I had never entered this house. Better far for Bertrade!”
“It’s too late,” said Cadfael mildly, “to do right whatever was done amiss then. This day is for doing aright what you have pledged yourself to do now, and for that it is not too late. You’ll be freer with her, maybe, if I wait for you without.”
“No,” said Haluin. “Come with me! I need your witness, I know it will be just.”
A tow-haired youth came out of the stable with a pitchfork in his hands, steaming gently in the chill air. At sight of two black Benedictine habits in the gateway he turned and came towards them, leisurely and amiable.
“If you’re wanting a bed and a meal. Brothers, come in, your cloth’s always welcome here. There’s good lying in the loft, and they’ll feed you in the kitchen if you’ll please to walk through.”
“I do remember,” said Haluin, his eyes still fixed upon a distant past, “your lady kept always a hospitable house for travelers. But I shall need no bed this night. I have an errand to the lady Adelais de Clary herself, if she will give me audience. A few minutes of her time is all I ask.”
The boy shrugged, staring them over with grey, unreadable Saxon eyes, and waved them towards the stone steps that led up to the hall door.
“Go in and ask for her woman Gerta, she’ll see if the lady’ll speak with you.” And he stood to watch them as they crossed the yard, before turning back to his labors among the horses.
A manservant was just coming up the steps from the kitchen into the passage as they entered the great doorway. He came to ask their business, and being told, sent off a kitchen boy to carry word to the lady’s woman of the chamber, who presently came out from the hall to see who these monastic guests might be. A woman of about forty years, very brisk and neat, plain in her dress and plain in her face, for she was pockmarked. But of her confidence in office there was no question. She looked them over somewhat superciliously, and listened to Haluin’s meekly uttered request without a responsive smile, in no hurry to open a door of which she clearly felt herself the privileged custodian.
“From the abbey at Shrewsbury, you come? And on the lord abbot’s business, I suppose?”
“On an errand the lord abbot has sanctioned,” said Haluin.
“It is not the same,” said Gerta sharply. “What other than abbey business can send a monk of Shrewsbury here? If this is some matter of your own, let my lady know with whom she is dealing.”
“Tell her,” said Haluin patiently, leaning heavily on his crutches, and with eyes lowered from the woman’s unwelcoming face, “that Brother Haluin, a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury abbey, humbly begs of her grace to receive him.”
The name meant nothing to her. Clearly she had not been in Adelais de Clary’s service, or certainly not in her confidence or even close enough to guess at her preoccupations, eighteen years ago. Some other woman, perhaps nearer her mistress’s years, had filled this intimate office then. Close body servants, grown into their mistress’s trust and into their own blood loyalty, carry a great treasury of secrets, often to their deaths. There must somewhere, Cadfael thought, watching in silence, be a woman who would have stiffened and opened her eyes wide at that name, even if she had not instantly known the changed and time-worn face.
“I will ask,” said the tirewoman, with a touch of condescension still, and went away through the hall to a leather-curtained doorway at the far end. Some minutes passed before she appeared again, drawing back the hangings, and without troubling to approach them, called from the doorway: “My lady says you may come.”
The solar they entered was small and dim, for the windward of the two windows was shuttered fast against the weather, and the tapestries that draped the walls were old, and in rich dark colors. There was no fireplace, but a stone hearth laid close to the most sheltered corner carried a charcoal brazier, and between that and the one window that gave light a woman was sitting at a little embroidery frame, on a cushioned stool. Against the light from the window she showed as a tall, erect shape, dark-clothed, while the glow of the brazier shone in copper highlights on her shadowed face. She had left her needle thrust into the stretched cloth. Her hands were clenched fast on the raised arms of the stool, and her eyes were on the doorway, into which Brother Haluin lurched painfully on his crutches, his one serviceable foot sore with use and bearing him wincingly at every step, the blocked toe of his left foot barely touching the floor as a meager aid to balance. Constant leaning into the crutches had hunched his shoulders and bent his straight back. Having heard his name, she must surely have expected something nearer to the lively, comely young man she had cast out all those years ago. What could she make now of this mangled wreckage?
He was barely within the room when she rose abruptly to her feet, stiff as a lance. Over their heads she spoke first to the waiting-woman, who had made to follow them in.
“Leave us!” said Adelais de Clary, And to Haluin, as the leather curtain swung heavily into place between solar and hall: “What is this? What have they done to you?”
Chapter Four
She must, cadfael reckoned, growing used to the play of light and shadow within the room, be within ten years of his own age, but she looked younger. The dark hair that was coiled in heavy braids on either side of her head was bareiy touched with grey, and the imperious, fine bones of her face had kept their imperishable elegance, though the flesh that covered them was a little shrunken and sapless now, and her body had grown angular and lean as the juices of youth dried up. Her hands, though shapely still, betrayed her with swollen knuckles and seamed veins, and there was a languor upon her pale skin at throat and wrist where once the rounded gloss of youth had been. But for all that, in the oval face, the long, resolute lips, and large eyes in their deep settings Cadfael saw the ashes of great beauty. No, not ashes, embers, still alive and as hot at least as the coals burning in the heart of the brazier.
“Come nearer!” she said. And when Haluin stood before her with the light upon his face, pale and cold light from the window, flushed from the fire: “It is you!” she said. “I wondered. How have you.come to this?”
