“What could I do,” said Sioned, “but thank him for his good offices, when he brought divine reassurance for my father’s weal? And yet it outrages me, I would rather have stood up and said that I am not and never have been in the least doubt that my father is in blessedness this moment, for he was a good man who never did a mean wrong to anyone. And certainly it’s kind of Saint Winifred to offer him the lodging she’s leaving, and graciously forgive him, but — forgiveness for what? Absolution for what? She might have praised him while she was about it, and said outright that he was justified, not forgiven.”
“Yet a very ambassadorial message,” admitted Cadfael appreciatively, “calculated to get us what we came for, assuage the people of Gwytherin, make peace all round — “
“And to placate me, and cause me to give up the pursuit of my father’s murderer,” said Sioned, “burying the deed along with the victim. Except that I will not rest until I know.”
” — and shed reflected glory upon Prior Robert, I was going to say. And I wish I knew which mind conceived the idea!”
They had met for a few hurried minutes at Bened’s smithy, where Cadfael had gone to borrow mattock and spade for the holy work now to be undertaken. Even a few of the men of Gwytherin had come forward and asked to have a share in breaking the sacred earth, for though they were still reluctant to lose their saint, if it was her will to leave them they had no wish to cross her. Prodigious things were happening, and they intended to be in receipt of her approval and blessing rather than run the risk of encountering her arrows.
“It seems to me most of the glory is falling, rather, on Brother Columbanus of late,” said Sioned shrewdly. “And the prior took it meekly, and never made any attempt to filch it back fro from him. That’s the one thing that makes me believe he may be honest.”
She had said something that caused Cadfael to pause and look attentively at her, scrubbing dubiously at his nose.
“You may well be right. And certainly this story is bound to go back to Shrewsbury with us, and spread through all our sister houses, when we come home with our triumph. Yes, Columbanus will certainly have made himself a great name for holiness and divine favour in the order.”
“They say an ambitious man can make a grand career in the cloister,” she said. “Maybe he’s busy laying the foundations, a great step up towards being prior himself when Robert becomes abbot. Or even abbot, when Robert supposes he’s about to become abbot! For it’s not his name they’ll be buzzing round the shires as the visionary the saints use to make their wants known.”
“That,” agreed Cadfael, “may not even have dawned on Robert yet, but when the awe of the occasion passes it will. And he’s the one who’s pledged to write a life of the saint, and complete it with the account of this pilgrimage. Columbanus may very well end up as an anonymous brother who happened to be charged with a message to the prior from his patroness. Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad. But I grant you, this lad comes of a thrusting Norman family that doesn’t put even its younger sons into the Benedictine habit to spend their lives doing menial work like gardening.”
“And we’re no further forward,” said Sioned bitterly.
“No. But we have not finished yet.”
“But as I see it, this is devised to be an ending, to close this whole episode in general amity, as if everything was resolved. But everything is not resolved! Somewhere in this land there is a man who stabbed my father in the back, and we’re all being asked to draw a veil over that and lose sight of it in the great treaty of peace. But I want that man found, and Engelard vindicated, and my father avenged, and I won’t rest, or let anyone else rest, until I get what I want. And now tell me what I am to do.”
“What I’ve already told you,” said Cadfael. “Have all your household party and friends gathered at the chapel to watch the grave opened, and make sure that Peredur attends.”
“I’ve already sent Annest to beg him to come,” said Sioned. “And then? What have I to say or do to Peredur?”
“That silver cross you wear round your neck,” said Cadfael. “Are you willing to part with it in exchange for one step ahead towards what you want to know?”
“That and all the rest of the valuables I own. You know it.”
“Then this,” said Cadfael, “is what you will do….”
With prayers and psalms they carried their tools up to the tangled graveyard by the chapel, trimmed back the brambles and wild flowers and long grass from the little mound of Winifred’s grave, and reverently broke the sod. By turns they laboured, all taking a share in the work for the merit to be acquired. And most of Gwytherin gathered round the place in the course of the day, all work left at a standstill in the fields and crofts, to watch the end of this contention. For Sioned had spoken truly. She and all her household servants were there among the rest, in mourning and massed to bring out Rhisiart’s body for burial when the time came, but this funeral party had become, for the time being, no more than a side-issue, an incident in the story of Saint Winifred, and a closed incident at that.
Cadwallon was there, Uncle Meurice was there, and Bened, and all the other neighbours. And there at his father’s elbow, withdrawn and brooding, stood young Peredur, by the look of him wishing himself a hundred leagues away. His thick dark brows were drawn together as though his head ached, and wherever his brown eyes wandered, it was never towards Sioned. He had crept here reluctantly at her express asking, but he could not or would not face her. The bold red mouth was chilled and pale from the tension with which it was tightened against his teeth. He watched the dark pit deepen in the grass, and breathed hard and deep, like a man containing pain. A far cry from the spoiled boy with the long, light step and the audacious smile, who so plainly had taken it for granted that the world was his for the wooing. Peredur’s demons were at him within.
The ground was moist but light, not hard to work, but the grave was deep. Gradually the diggers sank to the shoulders in the pit, and by mid-afternoon Brother Cadfael, shortest of the party, had almost disappeared from view when he took his final turn in the depths. No one dared to doubt openly if they were in the right place, but some must have been wondering. Cadfael, for no good reason that he could see, had no doubts at all. The girl was here. She had lived many years as an abbess after her brief martyrdom and miraculous restoration, yet he thought of her as that devout, green girl, in romantic love with celibacy and holiness, who had fled from Prince Cradoc’s advances as from the devil himself. By some perverse severance of the heart in two he could feel both for her and for the desperate lover, so roughly molten out of the flesh and presumably exterminated in the spirit. Did anyone every pray for him? He was in greater need than Winifred. In the end, perhaps the only prayers he ever benefited by were Winifred’s prayers. She was Welsh, and capable of detachment and subtlety. She might well have put in a word for him, to reassemble his liquefied person and congeal it again into the shape of a man. A chastened man, doubtless, but still the same shape as before. Even a saint may take pleasure, in retrospect, in having been once desired.
