young and fair, and stop plaguing us who ask nothing more than a quiet life. But if you still want to throw your natural bent out of door, you have that chance. Either bend your stiff neck, or rear it, and be off!’ There was more to it than that, and he knew it. The boy sat bolt unright, careless of his half-nakedness in a cell stony and chill, and held him by the wrist with strong, urgent fingers, staring earnestly into his eyes, probing beyond into his mind, and not afraid of him, or even wary.
‘I will bend it,’ he said. ‘You doubt if I can, but I can, I will. Brother Cadfael, if you have the abbot’s ear, help me, tell him I have not changed, tell him I do want to be received. Say I will wait, if I must, and learn and be patient, but I will deserve! In the end he shall not be able to complain of me. Say so to him! He won’t reject me.’ ‘And the gold-haired girl?’ said Cadfael, purposely brutal.
Meriet wrenched himself away and flung himself down again on his breast. ‘She is spoken for,’ he said no less roughly, and would not say one word more of her.
‘There are others,’ said Cadfael. ‘Take thought now or never. Let me tell you, child, as one old enough to have a son past your age, and with a few regrets in his own life, if he had time to brood on them-there’s many a young man has got his heart’s dearest wish, only to curse the day he ever wished for it. By the grace and good sense of our abbot, you will have time to make certain before you’re bound past freeing. Make good use of your time, for it won’t return once you’re pledged.’ A pity, in a way, to frighten a young creature so, when he was already torn many ways, but he had ten days and nights of solitude before him now, a low diet, and time both for prayer and thought. Being alone would not oppress him, only the pressure of uncongenial numbers around him had done that. Here he would sleep without dreams, not starting up to cry out in the night. Or if he did, there would be no one to hear him and add to his trouble.
‘I’ll come and bring the salve in the morning,’ said Cadfael, taking up his lamp. ‘No, wait!’ He set it down again. ‘If you lie so, you’ll be cold in the night. Put on your shirt, the linen won’t trouble you too much, and you can bear the brychan over it.’ ‘I’m well enough,’ said Meriet, submitting almost shamefacedly, and subsiding with a sigh into his folded arms again. ‘I… I do thank you-brother!’ he ended as an awkward afterthought, and very dubiously, as if the form of address did no justice to what was in his mind, though he knew it to be the approved one here.
‘That came out of you doubtfully,’ remarked Cadfael judicially, ‘like biting on a sore tooth. There are other relationships. Are you still sure it’s a brother you want to be?’ ‘I must,” blurted Meriet, and turned his face morosely away.
Now why, wondered Cadfael, banging on the door of the cell for the porter to open and let him out, why must the one thing of meaning he says be said only at the end, when he’s settled and eased, and it would be shame to plague him further? Not: I do! or: I will! but: I must! Must implies a resolution enforced, either by another’s will, or by an overwhelming necessity. Now who has willed this sprig into the cloister, or what force of circumstance has made him choose this way as the best, the only one left open to him?
Cadfael came out from Compline that night to find Hugh waiting for him at the gatehouse.
‘Walk as far as the bridge with me. I’m on my way home, but I hear from the porter here that you’re off on an errand for the lord abbot tomorrow, so you’ll be out of my reach day-long. You’ll have heard about the horse?’ ‘That you’ve found him, yes, nothing more. We’ve been all too occupied with our own miscreants and crimes this day to have much time or thought for anything outside,’ owned Cadfael ruefully. ‘No doubt you’ve been told about that.’ Brother Albin, the porter, was the most consummate gossip in the enclave. ‘Our worries go side by side and keep pace, it seems, but never come within touch of each other. That’s strange in itself. And now you find the horse miles away to the north, or so I heard.’ They passed through the gate together and turned left towards the town, under a chill, dim sky of driving clouds, though on the ground there was no more than a faint breeze, hardly enough to stir the moist, sweet, rotting smells of autumn. The darkness of trees on the right of the road, the flat metallic glimmer of the mill-pond on their left, and the scent and sound of the river ahead, between them and the town.
‘Barely a couple of miles short of Whitchurch,’ said Hugh, ‘where he had meant to pass the night, and have an easy ride to Chester next day.’ He recounted the whole of it; Cadfael’s thoughts were always a welcome illumination from another angle. But here their two minds moved as one.
‘Wild enough woodland short of the place,’ said Cadfael sombrely, ‘and the mosses close at hand. If it was done there, whatever was done, and the horse, being young and spirited, broke away and could not be caught, then the man may be fathoms deep. Past finding. Not even a grave to dig.’ ‘It’s what I’ve been thinking myself,’ agreed Hugh grimly. ‘But if I have such footpads living wild in my shire, how is it I’ve heard no word of them until now?’ ‘A venture south out of Cheshire? You know how fast they can come and go. And even where your writ runs, Hugh, the times breed changes. But if these were masterless men, they were no skilled hands with horses. Any outlaw worth his salt would have torn out an arm by the shoulder rather than lose a beast like that one. I went to have a look at him in the stables,’ owned Cadfael, ‘when I was free. And the silver on his harness… only a miracle could have got it away from them once they clapped eyes on it. What the man himself had on him can hardly have been worth more than horse and harness together.’ ‘If they’re preying on travellers there,’ said Hugh,’they’ll know just where to slide a weighted man into the peat-hags, where they’re hungriest. But I’ve men there searching, whether or no. There are some among the natives there can tell if a pool has been fed recently-will you believe it? But I doubt, truly I doubt, if even a bone of Peter Clemence will ever be seen again.’ They had reached the near end of the bridge. In the half-darkness the Severn slid by at high speed, close to them and silent, like a great serpent whose scales occasionally caught a gleam of starlight and flashed like silver, before that very coil had passed and was speeding downstream far too fast for overtaking. They halted to take leave.
‘And you are bound for Aspley,’ said Hugh. ‘Where the man lay safely with his kin, a single day short of his death. If indeed he is dead! I forget we are no better than guessing. How if he had good reasons to vanish there and be written down as dead? Men change their allegiance these days as they change their shirts, and for every man for sale there are buyers. Well, use your eyes and your wits at Aspley for your lad-I can tell by now when you have a wing spread over a fledgling-but bring me back whatever you can glean about Peter Clemence, too, and what he had in mind when he left them and rode north. Some innocent there may be nursing the very word we need, and thinking nothing of it.’ ‘I will so,’ said Cadfael, and turned back in the gloaming towards the gatehouse and his bed.
CHAPTER FIVE.
Having the abbot’s authority about him, and something more than four miles to go, Brother Cadfael helped himself to a mule from the stables in preference to tackling the journey to Aspley on foot. Time had been when he would have scorned to ride, but he was past sixty years old, and minded for once to take his ease. Moreover, he had few opportunities now for riding, once a prime pleasure, and could not afford to neglect such as did come his way.
He left after Prime, having taken a hasty bite and drink. The morning was misty and mild, full of the heavy, sweet, moist melancholy of the season, with a thickly veiled sun showing large and mellow through the haze. And the way was pleasant, for the first part on the highway.
The Long Forest, south and south-west of Shrewsbury, had survived unplundered longer than most of its kind, its assarts few and far between, its hunting coverts thick and wild, its open heaths home to all manner of creatures of earth and air. Sheriff Prestcote kept a weather eye on changes there, but did not interfere with what reinforced
