bring them to give up the saint’s bones.”
“All of which,” said Hugh, warmed and attentive beside him, “I know very well, since all men here know it.”
“Surely! But you do not know to the end what followed. There was one Welsh lord in Gwytherin who would not suffer the girl to be disturbed, and would not be persuaded or bribed or threatened into letting her go. And he died, Hugh, murdered. By one of us, a brother who came from high rank, and had his eyes already set on a mitre. And when we came near to accusing him, it was his life or a better. There were certain young people of that place put in peril by him, the dead lord’s daughter and her lover. The boy lashed out in anger, with good reason, seeing his girl wounded and bleeding. He was stronger than he knew. The murderer’s neck was broken.”
“How many knew of this?” asked Hugh, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully upon the glossy-leaved rose- bushes.
“When it befell, only the lovers, the dead man and I. And Saint Winifred, who had been raised from her grave and laid in that casket of which you and all men know. She knew. She was there. From the moment I raised her,” said Cadfael, “and by God, it was I who took her from the soil, and I who restored her-and still that makes me glad-from the moment I uncovered those slender bones, I felt in mine they wished only to be left in peace. It was so little and so wild and quiet a graveyard there, with the small church long out of use, meadow flowers growing over all, and the mounds so modest and green. And Welsh soil! The girl was Welsh, like me, her church was of the old persuasion, what did she know of this alien English shire? And I had those young things to keep. Who would have taken their word or mine against all the force of the church? They would have closed their ranks to bury the scandal, and bury the boy with it, and he guilty of nothing but defending his dear. So I took measures.”
Hugh’s mobile lips twitched. “Now indeed you amaze me! And what measures were those? With a dead brother to account for, and Prior Robert to keep sweet…”
“Ah, well, Robert is a simpler soul than he supposes, and then I had a good deal of help from the dead brother himself. He’d been busy building himself such a reputation for sanctity, delivering messages from the saint herself-it was he told us she was offering the grave she’d left to the murdered man-and going into trance-sleeps, and praying to leave this world and be taken into bliss living… So we did him that small favour. He’d been keeping a solitary night-watch in the old church, and in the morning when it ended, there were his habit and sandals fallen together at his prayer-stool, and the body of him lifted clean out of them, in sweet odours and a shower of may-blossom. That was how he claimed the saint had already visited him, why should not Robert recall it and believe? Certainly he was gone. Why look for him? Would a modest brother of our house be running through the Welsh woods mother- naked?”
“Are you telling me,” asked Hugh cautiously, “That what you have there in the reliquary is not… Then the casket had not yet been sealed?” His eyebrows were tangling with his black forelock, but his voice was soft and unsurprised.
“Well…” Cadfael twitched his blunt brown nose bashfully between finger and thumb. “Sealed it was, but there are ways of dealing with seals that leave them unblemished. It’s one of the more dubious of my remembered skills, but for all that I was glad of it then.”
“And you put the lady back in the place that was hers, along with her champion?”
“He was a decent, good man, and had spoken up for her nobly. She would not grudge him house-room. I have always thought,” confided Cadfael, “that she was not displeased with us. She has shown her power in Gwytherin since that time, by many miracles, so I cannot believe she is angry. But what a little troubles me is that she has not so far chosen to favour us with any great mark of her patronage here, to keep Robert happy, and set my mind at rest. Oh, a few little things, but nothing of unmistakable note. How if I have displeased her, after all? Well for me, who know what we have within there on the altar-and mea culpa if I did wrongly! But what of the innocents who do not know, and come in good faith, hoping for grace from her? What if I have been the means of their deprivation and loss?”
“I see,” said Hugh with sympathy, “that Brother Mark had better make haste through the degrees of ordination, and come quickly to lift the load from you. Unless,” he added with a flashing sidelong smile, “Saint Winifred takes pity on you first, and sends you a sign.”
“I still do not see,” mused Cadfael, “what else I could have done. It was an ending that satisfied everyone, both here and there. The children were free to marry and be happy, the village still had its saint, and she had her own people round her. Robert had what he had gone to find-or thought he had, which is the same thing. And Shrewsbury abbey has its festival, with every hope of a full guest-hall, and glory and gain in good measure. If she would but just cast an indulgent look this way, and wink her eye, to let me know I understood her aright.”
“And you’ve never said word of this to anyone?”
“Never a word. But the whole village of Gwytherin knows it,” admitted Cadfael with a remembering grin. “No one told, no one had to tell, but they knew. There wasn’t a man missing when we took up the reliquary and set out for home. They helped to carry it, whipped together a little chariot to bear it. Robert thought he had them nicely tamed, even those who’d been most reluctant from the first. It was a great joy to him. A simple soul at bottom! It would be great pity to undo him now, when he’s busy writing his book about the saint’s life, and how he brought her to Shrewsbury.”
“I would not have the heart to put him to such distress,” said Hugh. “Least said, best for all. Thanks be to God, I have nothing to do with canon law, the common law of a land almost without law costs me enough pains.” No need to say that Cadfael could be sure of his secrecy, that was taken for granted on both sides. “Well, you speak the lady’s own tongue, no doubt she understood you well enough, with or without words. Who knows? When this festival of yours takes place-the twenty-second day of June, you say?-she may take pity on you, and send you a great miracle to set your mind at rest.”
And so she might, thought Cadfael an hour later, on his way to obey the summons of the Vesper bell. Not that he had deserved so signal an honour, but there surely must be one somewhere among the unceasing stream of pilgrims who did deserve it, and could not with justice be rejected. He would be perfectly and humbly and cheerfully content with that. What if she was eighty miles or so away, in what was left of her body? It had been a miraculous body in this life, once brutally dead and raised alive again, what limits of time or space could be set about such a being? If it so pleased her she could be both quiet and content in her grave with Rhisiart, lulled by bird-song in the hawthorn trees, and here attentive and incorporeal, a little flame of spirit in the coffin of unworthy Columbanus, who had killed not for her exaltation but for his own.
Brother Cadfael went to Vespers curiously relieved at having confided to his friend a secret from before the time when they had first known each other, in the beginning as potential antagonists stepping subtly to outwit each other, then discovering how much they had in common, the old man-alone with himself Cadfael admitted to being somewhat over the peak of a man’s prime-and the young one, just setting out, exceedingly well-equipped in shrewdness and wit, to build his fortune and win his wife. And both he had done, for he was now undisputed sheriff of Shropshire, if under a powerless and captive king, and up there in the town, near St Mary’s church, his wife and his year-old son made a nest for his private happiness when he shut the door on his public burdens.
