the man that begot her. And yet,’ she owned, shaking her head, ‘I may be wrong about him. He may be the one of his kind who does what his kind does not do. There is always one.’ The girl believes absolutely that he is guilty,’ said Cadfael thoughtfully, ‘perhaps because she is all too well aware of what she feels to be her own guilt. The sire returns and the lovers are to be torn apart, no great step to dream of his failure to return, and only one more leap to see death as the final and total cause of that failure. But dreams they surely were, never truly even wished. The boy is on firmer ground when he swears he went to try and win her father to look kindly on his suit.
‘For if ever I saw a lad sunlit and buoyed up with hope by nature, Elis is the one.’ ‘And this girl?’ wondered Sister Magdalen, twirling her wine, cup between nursing palms. ‘If they’re of an age, then she must be the more mature by some years. So it goes! Is it anyway possible that she …?’ ‘No,’ said Cadfael with certainty. ‘She was with the lady, and Hugh, and the Welsh princelings, throughout. I know she left her father living, and never came near him again until he was dead, and then in Hugh’s company. No, she torments herself vainly. If you had her in your hands,’ said Cadfael with conviction, ‘you would soon find her out for the simple, green child she is.’ Sister Magdalen was in the act of saying philosophically: ‘I’m hardly likely to get the chance,’ when the tap on the door came. So light and tentative a sound, and yet so staunchly repeated, they fell silent and still to make sure of it.
Cadfael rose to open it and peer out through the narrowest possible chink, convinced there was no one there; and there she stood, her hand raised to knock again, pallid, wretched and resolute, half a head taller than he, the simple, green child of his description, with a steely core of Norman nobility forcing her to transcend herself. Hastily he flung the door wide. ‘Come within from the cold. How can I serve you?’ ‘The porter told me,’ said Melicent,’that the sister from Godric’s Ford came a while ago, and might be here wanting remedies from your store. I should like to speak with her.’ ‘Sister Magdalen is here,’ said Cadfael. ‘Come, sit with her by the brazier, and I’ll leave you to talk with her in private.’ She came in half afraid, as though this small, unfamiliar place held daunting secrets. She stepped with fastidious delicacy, almost inch by inch, and yet with that determination in her that would not let her turn back. She looked at Sister Magdalen eye to eye, fascinated, doubtless having heard her history both ancient and recent, and found some difficulty in reconciling the two.
‘Sister,’ said Melicent, going arrow, straight to the point, ‘when you go back to Godric’s Ford, will you take me with you?’ Cadfael, as good as his word, withdrew softly and with alacrity, drawing the door to after him, but not so quickly that he did not hear Sister Magdalen reply simply and practically: ‘Why?’ She never did or said quite what was expected of her, and it was a good question. It left Melicent in the delusion that this formidable woman knew little or nothing about her, and necessitated the entire retelling of the disastrous story, and in the retelling it might fall into truer proportion, and allow the girl to reconsider her situation with somewhat less desperate urgency. So, at any rate, Brother Cadfael hoped, as he trotted away through the garden to go and spend a pleasant half, hour with Brother Anselm, the precentor, in his carrel in the cloister, where he would certainly be compiling the sequence of music for the burial of Gilbert Prestcote.
‘I intend,’ said Melicent, rather grandly because of the jolt the blunt question had given her,’to take the veil, and I would like it to be among the Benedictine sisters of Polesworth.’ ‘Sit down here beside me,’ said Sister Magdalen comfortably, ‘and tell me what has turned you to this withdrawal, and whether your family are in your confidence and approve your choice. You are very young, and have the world before you…’ ‘I am done with the world,’ said Melicent.
‘Child, as long as you live and breathe you will not have done with this world. We within the pale live in the same world as all poor souls without. Come, you have your reasons for wishing to enter the conventual life. Sit and tell me, let me hear them. You are young and fair and nobly born, and you wish to abandon marriage, children, position, honours, all… Why?’ Melicent, yielding, sank beside her on the bench, hugged her slenderness in the warmth of the brazier, and let fall the barriers of her bitterness to loose the flood. What she had vouchsafed to the preoccupied ears of Sybilla was no more than the thread on which this confession was strung. All that heady dream of minstrels’ love, tales poured out of her.
‘Even if you are right in rejecting one man,’ said Magdalen mildly, ‘you may be most unjust in rejecting all. Let alone the possibility that you mistake even this Elis ap Cynan. For until it is proved he lies, you must bear in mind he may be telling truth.’ ‘He said he would kill for me,’ said Melicent, relentless, ‘he went to where my father lay, and my father is dead. There was no other known to have gone near. As for me, I have no doubts. I wish I had never seen his face, and I pray I never may again.’ ‘And you will not wait to make your peace with one betrayal, and still show your countenance to others who do not betray?’ ‘At least I do know,’ said Melicent bitterly,’that God does not betray. And I am done with men.’ ‘Child,’ said Sister Magdalen, sighing, ‘not until the day of your death will you have done with men. Bishops, abbots, priests, confessors, all are men, blood, brothers to the commonest of sinful mankind. While you live, there is no way of escape from your part in humanity.’ ‘I have finished, then, with love,’ said Melicent, all the more vehemently because a morsel of her heart cried out to her that she lied.
‘Oh, my dear soul, love is the one thing with which you must never dispense. Without it, what use are you to us or to any? Granted there are ways and ways of loving,’ said the nun come late to her celibacy, recalling what at the time she had hardly recognised as deserving the title, but knew now for one aspect of love, ‘yet for all there is a warmth needed, and if that fire goes out it cannot be rekindled. Well,’ she said, considering, ‘if your stepmother approve your going with me, then you may come, and welcome. Come and be quiet with us for a while, and we shall see.’ ‘Will you come with me to my mother, then, and hear me ask her leave?’ ‘I will,’ said Sister Magdalen, and rose and plucked her habit about her ready to set forth.
She told Brother Cadfael the gist of it when she stayed to attend Vespers before going back to the cloth, merchant’s house in the town.
‘She’ll be better out of here, away from the lad, but left with the image of him she already carries about with her. Time and truth are what the pair of them most need, and I’ll see she takes no vows until this whole matter is resolved. The boy is better left to you, if you can keep an eye on him now and then.’ ‘You don’t believe,’ said Cadfael with certainty,’that he ever did violence to her father.’ ‘Do I know? Is there man or woman who might not kill, given the driving need? A proper, upstanding, impudent, open, hearted lad, though,’ said Sister Magdalen, who had never repented anything she did, ‘one that I might have fancied, when my fancying days were.’ Cadfael went to supper in the refectory, and then to Collations in the chapter-house, which he often missed if he had vulnerable preparations brewing in his workshop. In thinking over such slight gains as he had made in his quest for the truth, he had got nowhere, and it was good to put all that aside and listen with good heart to the lives of saints who had shrugged off the cares of the world to let in the promises of a world beyond, and viewed earthly justice as no more than a futile shadow, play obscuring the absolute justice of heaven, for which no man need wait longer than the life, span of mortality.
They were past St Gregory and approaching St Edward the Confessor and St Benedict himself, the middle days of March, and the blessed works of spring beginning, with everything hopeful and striving ahead. A good time. Cadfael had spent the hours before Sister Magdalen came digging and clearing the fresh half of his mint, bed, to give it space to proliferate new and young and green, rid of the old and debilitated. He emerged from the chapter, house feeling renewed, and it came at first as no more than a mild surprise when Brother Edmund came seeking him before Compline, looking almost episcopal as he brandished in one hand what at first sight might have been a crozier, but when lowered to the ground reached no higher than his armpit, and was manifestly a crutch.
‘I found it lying in a corner of the stable, yard. Anion’s! Cadfael, he did not come for his supper tonight and he is nowhere in the infirmary, neither in the common room, nor in his bed, nor in the chapel. Have you seen him anywhere this day?’ ‘Not since morning,’ said Cadfael, thinking back with something of an effort from the peace of the chapter, house. ‘He came to dinner at midday?’.
