cooled. Brother Oswin, young, enthusiastic and devoted, was nonetheless liable to overlook details, though he had now outlived his tendency to break things. Cadfael ran an eye over everything, and found it good. There was no hurry now, he had time before Compline to sit down here in the wood-scented dimness and think. Time for others to lose and find one another, and use or waste these closing moments of the day. For those three blameless tradesmen, Walter Bagot, glover; John Shure, tailor; William Hales, farrier; to betake themselves to wherever their dice school was to meet this night, and run their necks into Hugh’s trap. Time for that more ambiguous character, Simeon Poer, to evade or trip into the same snare, or go the other way about some other nocturnal business of his own. Cadfael had seen two of the former three go out from the gatehouse, and the third follow some minutes later, and was sure in his own mind that the self-styled merchant of Guildford would not be long after them. Time, too, for that unaccountably solitary young man, somehow loosed off his chain, to range this whole territory suddenly opened to him, and happen upon the solitary girl.
Cadfael put up his feet on the wooden bench, and closed his eyes for a brief respite.
Matthew was there at her back before she knew it. The sudden rustle as he stepped into sun-dried long grass at the edge of the field startled her, and she swung round in alarm, scrambling to her knees and staring up into his face with dilated eyes, half-blinded by the blaze of the sunset into which she had been steadily staring. Her face was utterly open, vulnerable and childlike. She looked as she had looked when he had swept her up in his arms and leaped the ditch with her, clear of the galloping horses. Just so she had opened her eyes and looked up at him, still dazed and frightened, and just so had her fear melted away into wonder and pleasure, finding in him nothing but reassurance, kindness and admiration.
That pure, paired encounter of eyes did not last long. She blinked, and shook her head a little to clear her dazzled vision, and looked beyond him, searching, not believing he could be here alone.
“Ciaran…? Is there something you need for him?”
“No,” said Matthew shortly, and for a moment turned his head away. “He’s in his bed.”
“But you never leave his bed!” It was said in innocence, even in anxiety. Whatever she grudged to Ciaran, she still pitied and understood him.
“You see I have left it,” said Matthew harshly. “I have needs, too… a breath of air. And he is very well where he is, and won’t stir.”
“I was well sure,” she said with resigned bitterness, “that you had not come out to look for me.” She made to rise, swiftly and gracefully enough, but he put out a hand, almost against his will, as it seemed, to take her under the wrist and lift her. It was withdrawn as abruptly when she evaded his touch, and rose to her feet unaided. “But at least,” she said deliberately, “you did not turn and run from me when you found me. I should be grateful even for that.”
“I am not free,” he protested, stung. “You know it better than any.”
“Then neither were you free when we kept pace along the road,” said Melangell fiercely, “when you carried my burden, and walked beside me, and let Ciaran hobble along before, where he could not see how you smiled on me then and were gallant and cherished me when the road was rough and spoke softly, as if you took delight in being beside me. Why did you not give me warning then that you were not free? Or better, take him some other way, and leave us alone? Then I might have taken good heed in time, and in time forgotten you. As now I never shall! Never, to my life’s end!”
All the flesh of his lips and cheeks shrank and tightened before her eyes, in a contortion of either rage or pain, she could not tell which. She was staring too close and too passionately to see very clearly. He turned his head sharply away, to evade her eyes.
“You charge me justly,” he said in a harsh whisper, “I was at fault. I never should have believed there could be so clean and sweet a happiness for me. I should have left you, but I could not… Oh, God! You think I could have turned him? He clung to you, to your good aunt… Yet I should have been strong enough to hold off from you and let you alone…” As rapidly as he had swung away from her he swung back again, reaching a hand to take her by the chin and hold her face to face with him, so ungently that she felt the pressure of his fingers bruising her flesh. “Do you know how hard a thing you are asking? No! This countenance you never saw, did you, never but through someone else’s eyes. Who would provide you a mirror to see yourself? Some pool, perhaps, if ever you had the leisure to lean over and look. How should you know what this face can do to a man already lost? And you marvel I took what I could get for water in a drought, when it walked beside me? I should rather have died than stay beside you, to trouble your peace. God forgive me!”
She was five years nearer childhood than he, even taking into account the two years or more a girl child has advantage over the boys of her own age. She stood entranced, a little frightened by his intensity, and inexpressibly moved by the anguish she felt emanating from him like a raw, drowning odour. The long-fingered hand that held her shook terribly, his whole body quivered. She put up her own hand gently and closed it over his, uplifted out of her own wretchedness by his greater and more inexplicable distress.
“I dare not speak for God,” she said steadily, “but whatever there may be for me to forgive, that I dare. It is not your fault that I love you. All you ever did was be kinder to me than ever man was since I left Wales. And I did know, love, you did tell me, if I had heeded then, you did tell me you were a man under vow. What it was you never told me, but never grieve, oh, my own soul, never grieve so…”
While they stood rapt, the sunset light had deepened, blazed and burned silently into glowing ash, and the first feathery shade of twilight, like the passing of a swift’s wings, fled across their faces and melted into sudden pearly, radiant light. Her wide eyes were brimming with tears, almost the match of his. When he stooped to her, there was no way of knowing which of them had begun the kiss.
The little bell for Compline sounded clearly through the gardens on so limpid an evening, and stirred Brother Cadfael out of his half-doze at once. He was accustomed, in this refuge of his maturity as surely as in the warfaring of his youth, to awake fresh and alert, as he fell asleep, making the most of the twin worlds of night and day. He rose and went out into the earliest glowing image of evening, and closed the door after him.
It was but a few moments back to church through the herbarium and the rose garden. He went briskly, happy with the beauty of the evening and the promise for the morrow, and never knew why he should look aside to westward in passing, unless it was that the whole expanse of the sky on that side was delicate, pure and warming, like a girl’s blush. And there they were, two clear shadows clasped together in silhouette against the fire of the west, outlined on the crest above the slope to the invisible brook. Matthew and Melangell, unmistakable, constrained still but in each other’s arms, linked in a kiss that lasted while Brother Cadfael came, passed and slipped away to his different devotions, but with that image printed indelibly on his eyes, even in his prayers.
Chapter Seven.
THE OUTRIDER of the bishop-legate’s envoy-or should he rather be considered the empress’s envoy?-arrived within the town and was directed through to the gatehouse of the castle in mid-evening of that same twenty-first day of June, to be presented to Hugh Beringar just as he was marshalling a half-dozen men to go down to the
