heart belonged. If he did not live to see it again, it mattered all the more that while he lived that link should not be broken. It was also a solemn part of his consolation in keeping the monastic observances that he could do it in solitude. The chaplain observed every part of the daily worship due from a secular priest, but did not keep the Benedictine hours. Only once, on that one occasion when Philip had also had a word to say to God, had Cadfael had to share the chapel at Matins with anyone.
On this night he came a little early, without the necessity of waking from sleep. There would be little sleep for most of the garrison of La Musarderie. He said the office, and continued on his knees in sombre thought rather than private prayer. All the prayers he could make for Olivier had already been uttered and heard, and repeated in the mind over and over, reminders to God. And all that he might have pleaded for himself was seen to be irrelevant in this hour, when the day is put away, with all its unresolved anxieties, and the morrow’s troubles are not yet, and need not be anticipated.
When he rose from his knees and turned towards the door, he saw the folds of the curtain behind it quiver. A hand emerged at the edge, putting the heavy cloth aside. Cadfael made no sound and no movement, as Yves stepped forth before his eyes, soiled and dishevelled from his climb, with urgent gesture and dilated eyes enjoining caution and silence. For a moment they both hung still, staring at each other. Then Cadfael flattened a hand against Yves’ breast, pressing him back gently into hiding, and himself leaned out from the doorway to look both ways along the stone corridor. Philip’s own chamber was close, but it was questionable whether he would be in it this night. Here nothing stirred, and Cadfael’s narrow cell was not ten yards distant. He reached back to grip Yves’ wrist, and pluck him hastily along the passage into sanctuary there, and close the door against the world. For a moment they embraced and stood tense, listening, but all was still.
“Keep your voice low,” said Cadfael then, “and we are safe enough. The chaplain sleeps nearby.” The walls, even these interior walls, were very thick. “Now, what are you doing here? And how did you get in?” He was still gripping the boy’s wrist, so tightly as to bruise. He eased his grip, and sat his unexpected visitor down on the bed, holding him by both shoulders, as if to touch was to hold inviolable. “This was madness! What can you do here? And I was glad to know that you were out of it, whatever comes.”
“I climbed up by the vine,” said Yves, whispering. “And I must go back the same way, unless you know of a better.” He was shivering a little in reaction; Cadfael felt him vibrating between his hands like a bowstring gradually stilling after the shot. “No great feat, if the guard can be distracted while I reach the gallery. But let that wait. Cadfael, I had to get word in here to you somehow. He must be told what she intends…”
“He?” said Cadfael sharply. “Philip?”
“Philip, who else? He has to know what he may have to deal with. She, the empress, she has half a dozen of her barons with her, they were all gathered in Gloucester, and all their levies with them. Salisbury, Redvers of Devon, FitzRoy, Bohun, the king of Scots and all, the greatest army she has had to hand for a year or more. And she means to use everything against this place. It may cost her high, but she will have it, and quickly, before Gloucester can get word what’s in the wind.”
“Gloucester?” said Cadfael incredulously. “But she needs him, she can do nothing without him. All the more as this is his son, revolted or not.”
“No!” said Yves vehemently. “For that very reason she wants him left ignorant in Hereford until all’s over. Cadfael, she means to hang Philip and be done with him. She has sworn it, and she’ll do it. By the time Robert knows of it, there’ll be nothing for him but a body to bury.”
“She would not dare!” said Cadfael on a hissing breath.
“She will dare. I saw her, I heard her! She is hellbent on killing, and this is her chance. Her teeth are in his throat already, I doubt if Robert himself could break her death-grip, but she has no mind to give him the opportunity. It will all be over before ever he knows of it.”
“She is mad!” said Cadfael. He dropped his hands from the boy’s shoulders, and sat staring down the long procession of excesses and atrocities that would follow that death: every remaining loyalty torn apart, every kinship disrupted, the last shreds of hope for conciliation and sanity ripped loose to the winds. “He would abandon her. He might even turn his hand against her.” And that, indeed, might have ended it, and brought about by force the settlement they could not achieve by agreement. But no, he would not be able to bring himself to touch her, he would only withdraw from the field with his bereavement and grief, and let others bring her down. A longer business, and a longer and more profound agony for the country fought over, back and forth to the last despair.
“I know it,” said Yves. “She is destroying her own cause, and damning to this continued chaos every man of us, on either side, and God knows, all the poor souls who want nothing but to sow and reap their fields and go about their buying and selling, and raising their children in peace. I tried to tell her so, to her face, and she flayed me for it. She listens to no one. So I had to come.”
And not only to try and avert a disastrous policy, Cadfael thought, but also because that imminent death was an offence to him, and must be prevented solely as the barbaric act it was. Yves did not want Philip FitzRobert dead. He had come back in arms for Olivier, certainly, and he would stand by that to his last breath, but he would not connive at his liege lady’s ferocious revenge.
“To me,” said Cadfael. “You come to me. So what is it you want of me, now you are here?”
“Warn him,” said Yves simply. “Tell him what she has in mind for him, make him believe it, for she’ll never relent. At least let him know the whole truth, before he has to deal with her demands. She would rather keep the castle and occupy it intact than raze it, but she’ll raze it if she must. It may be he can make a deal that will keep him man alive, if he gives up La Musarderie.” But even the boy did not really believe in that ever happening, and Cadfael knew it never would. “At least tell him the truth. Then it is his decision.”
“I will see to it,” said Cadfael very gravely, “that he is in no doubt what is at stake.”
“He will believe you,” said Yves, sounding curiously content. And he stretched and sighed, leaning his head back against the wall. “Now I had better be thinking how best to get out of here.”
They were quite used to Cadfael by that time, he was accepted in La Musarderie as harmless, tolerated by the castellan, and respectably what his habit represented him as being. He mixed freely, went about the castle as he pleased, and talked with whom he pleased. It stood Yves in good stead in the matter of getting out by the same route by which he had entered.
The best way to escape notice, said Cadfael, was to go about as one having every right and a legitimate reason for going wherever he was seen to be going, with nothing furtive about him. Risky by daylight, of course, even among a large garrison of reasonably similar young men, but perfectly valid now in darkness, crossing wards even less illuminated than normally, to avoid affording even estimates of provision for defence to the assembled enemy.
Yves crossed the ward to the foot of the staircase up to the guardwalk by Cadfael’s side, quite casually and
