An Excellent Mystery (19 page)

Urien
stepped within the carrel, and stood close at Fidelis’s shoulder, looking down
at the intricate M that still lacked its touches of gold. Looking down also,
with more intense awareness, at the inch or two of thin silver chain that showed
within the dropped folds of collar and cowl, threading the short russet hairs
on the bent neck. A cross a little finger long, on a neck-chain, and studded
with yellow, green and purple stones… He could have inserted a finger under the
chain and plucked it forth, but he did not touch. He had learned that a touch
is witchcraft, instant separation, putting cold distance between.

“Fidelis,”
said the softest of yearning voices at Fidelis’s shoulder, “you keep from me.
Why do you so? I can be the truest friend ever you had, if you will let me.
What is there I will not do for you? And you have need of a friend. One who
will keep secrets and be as silent as you are. Let me in to you, Fidelis…” He
did not say ‘brother’. ‘Brother’ is a title beyond desire, an easy title, no
shaker of the mind or spirit. “Let me in, and I can be to you all you need of
love and loyalty. To the death!”

Fidelis
laid aside his brush very slowly, and set both hands to the edge of the desk as
though bracing himself to rise, and all this with rigid body and held breath.
Urien pressed on in hushed haste.

“You
need not fear me, I mean you only good. Don’t stir, don’t draw away! I know
what you have done, I know what you have to hide… No one else will ever hear it
from me, if only you’ll do your part. Silence deserves a reward… love deserves
love!”

Fidelis
slid along the polished wood of the bench and stood clear, putting the desk
between them. His face was pale and fixed, the dilated grey eyes enormous. He
shook his head vehemently, and moved round to push past Urien and quit the
carrel, but Urien spread his arms and blocked the way.

“Oh,
no, not this time! Not now! That’s over. I’ve asked, I’ve begged, now I give
you to know even asking is over.” His tight control had burned into abrupt and
savage anger, his eyes flared redly. “I have ears, I could be your ruin if I
were so minded. You had best be kind to me.” His voice was still very low, no
one would hear, and no one passed along the cloister flagstones to see and
wonder. He moved closer, driving Fidelis deeper into shadow within the carrel.
“What is it you wear round your neck, under your habit, Fidelis? Will you show
it to me? Or shall I tell you what it is? And what it means! There are those
who would give a good deal to know. To your cost, Fidelis, unless you grow kind
to me.”

He
had backed his quarry into the deepest comer, and pinned him there with arms
outspread, and a palm flattened against the wall on either side, preventing
escape. Still the pale, oval face confronted him icily, even scornfully, and
the grey eyes had burned into a slow blaze of anger, utterly rejecting him.

Urien
struck like a snake, flashing a hand into the bosom of Fidelis’s habit, down
within the ample folds, to drag out of hiding the length of the silver chain,
and the trophy that hung hidden upon it, warmed by the flesh and the heart
beneath. Fidelis uttered a strange, breathy sound, and leaned back hard against
the wall, and Urien started back from him one unsteady step, himself appalled,
and echoed the gasp. For an instant there was a silence so deep that both
seemed to drown in it, then Fidelis gathered up the slack of the chain in his
hand, and stowed his treasure away again in its hiding place. For that one
moment he had closed his eyes, but instantly he opened them again and kept them
fixed with a bleak, unbending stare upon his persecutor.

“Now,
more than ever,” said Urien in a whisper, “now you shall lower those proud eyes
of yours, and stoop that stiff neck, and come to me pliantly, or go to whatever
fate such an offence as yours brings down on the offender. But no need to
threaten, if you will but listen to me. I pledge you my help, oh, yes,
faithfully, with my whole heart — you have only to let me in to yours. Why not?
And what choice have you, now? You need me, Fidelis, as cruelly as I need you.
But we two together — and there need be no cruelty, only tenderness, only
love…”

Fidelis
burned up abruptly like a candle-flame, and with the hand that was not
clutching his profaned treasure to his breast he struck Urien in the mouth and
silenced him.

For
a moment they hung staring, eye to eye, with never a sound or a breath between
them. Then Urien said thickly, in a grating whisper that was barely audible:
“Enough! Now you shall come to me! Now you shall be the beggar. Of your own
need and your own will you shall come, and beg me for what you now refuse. Or I
will tell all that I know, and what I know is enough to damn you. You shall
come to me and plead, and follow me like a little dog at my heels, or else I
will destroy you, as now you know I can. Three days I give you, Fidelis! If you
do not seek me out and give yourself to me by Vespers of the third day from
now, Brother, I will let loose hell to swallow you, and smile to watch you
burn!”

He
swung on his heel then, and flew out of the carrel. The long black shadow
vanished, the afternoon light came in again placidly. Fidelis leaned in the
darkness of his corner a long moment with eyes closed and breast heaving in
deep, exhausted rise and fall. Then he groped his way heavily back to his bench
and sat down, and took up his brush in a hand too unsteady to be able to use
it. Holding it gave him a hold on normality, and presented a fitting picture of
an illuminator at work, if anyone should come to witness it. Within, there was
a numbed desperation past which he could not see any light or any deliverance.

It
was Rhun who came to be a witness. He had met Brother Urien in the garth, and
seen the set face and smouldering, wounded eyes. He had not seen from which
carrel Urien had issued, but here he sensed, smelled, felt in the prickling of
his own flesh where Urien in his rank rage and pain had been.

He
said no word of it to Fidelis, nor remarked on the pallor of his friend’s face
or the strange stiffness of his movements as he greeted him. He sat down beside
him on the bench, and talked of the simple matters of the day and the pattern
of the capital letter still unfinished, and took up the fine brush for the
gilding and laid in carefully the gold edges of two or three leaves, the tip of
his tongue arching at the corner of his mouth, like a child at his letters.

When
the bell rang for Vespers they went in together, both with calm faces, neither
with a quiet heart.

Rhun
absented himself from supper, and went instead to the infirmary, and into the
small room where Brother Humilis lay sleeping. He sat beside the bed patiently
for a long time, but the sick man slept on. And now, in this silence and
solitude, Rhun could scan every line of the worn, ageing face, and see how the
eyes were sunk deep into the skull, the cheeks fallen into gaunt hollows, and
the flesh slack and grey. He was so full of life himself that he recognised
with exquisite clarity the approach of another man’s death. He abandoned his first
purpose. For even if Humilis should awaken, and however ardently he would exert
what life was left to him for the sake of Fidelis, Rhun could not now cast any
part of this load upon a man already burdened with the spiritual baggage of his
own departure. But he sat there still, and waited, and after supper Brother
Edmund came to make the rounds of his patients before nightfall.

Rhun
approached him in the stone-flagged passage.

“Brother
Edmund, I’m anxious about Humilis. I’ve been sitting with him, and surely he
grows weaker before our eyes. I know you keep good care of him always, but I
thought — could not a cot be put in with him for Fidelis? It would be much to
the comfort of them both. In the dortoir with the rest of us Fidelis will fret,
and not sleep. And if Humilis should wake in the night, it would be a grace to
see Fidelis close by him, ready to serve as he always is. They went through the
fire at Hyde together…” He drew breath, watching Brother Edmund’s face. “They
are closer,” he said gravely, “than ever were father and son.”

Brother
Edmund went himself to look at the sleeping man. Breath came shallowly and
rapidly. The single light cover lay very flat and lean over the long body.

“It
might be well so,” said Edmund. “There is an empty cot in the anteroom of the
chapel, and it would go in here, though the space is a little tight for it.
Come and help me to carry it, and then you may tell Brother Fidelis he can come
and sleep here this night, if that’s his wish.”

“He
will be glad,” said Rhun with certainty.

The
message was delivered to Fidelis simply as a decision by Brother Edmund, taken
for the peace of mind and better care of his patient, which seemed sensible
enough. And certainly Fidelis was glad. If he suspected that Rhun had had a
hand in procuring the dispensation, that was acknowledged only with a fleeting
smile that flashed and faded in his grave face too rapidly to be noticed. He
took his breviary and went gratefully across the court, and into the room where
Humilis still slept his shallow, old man’s sleep, he who was barely forty-seven
years old, and had lived at a gallop the foreshortened life that now crept so
softly and resignedly towards death. Fidelis kneeled by the bedside to shape
the night prayers with his mute lips.

It was the most
sultry night of the hot, oppressive summer, a low cloud cover had veiled the
stars. Even within stone walls the heat hung too heavy to bear. And here at
last there was true privacy, apart from the necessities and duties of
brotherhood, not low panelled partitions separating them from their chosen kin,
but walls of stone, and the width of the great court, and the suffocating
weight of the night. Fidelis stripped off his habit and lay down to sleep in
his linen. Between the two narrow cots, on the stand beside the breviary, the
little oil lamp burned all night long with a dwindling golden flame.

Chapter Ten

IN
HIS SHALLOW HALF-SLEEP, HALF-SWOON BROTHER HUMILIS dreamed that he heard
someone weeping, very softly, almost without sound but for the break in the
breath, the controlled but extreme weeping of a strong being brought to a
desperation from which there was no escape. It so stirred and troubled him that
he was lifted gradually out of his dream and into a wakeful reality, but by
then there was only silence. He knew that he was not alone in the room, though
he had not heard the second cot carried in, nor the coming of the one who was
to lie beside him. But even before he turned his head, and saw by the faint
glimmer of lamplight the white shape stretched on the pallet, he knew who it
was. The presence or absence of this one creature was the pulse of his life
now. If Fidelis was by, the beat of his blood was strong and comforting,
without him it flagged and weakened.

And
therefore it must be Fidelis who had grieved alone in the night, enduring what
he could not change, whatever burden of sin or sorrow it was that swelled in
him speechless and found no remedy.

Humilis
put back the single cover from over him, and sat up, swinging his feet to the
stone floor between the two beds. He had no need to stand, only to lift the little
lamp carefully and lean towards the sleeper, shielding the light so that it
should not fall too sharply upon the young man’s face.

Seen
thus, aloof and impenetrable, it was a daunting face. Under the ring of curling
hair, the colour of ripe chestnuts, the forehead was both lofty and broad,
ivory-smooth above level, strong brows darker than the hair. Large, arched
eyelids, faintly veined like the petals of a flower, hid the clear grey eyes.
An austere face, the jaw sharply outlined and resolute, the mouth fastidious,
the cheekbones high and proud. If he had indeed shed tears, they were gone.
There was only a fine dew of sweat on his upper lip. Humilis sat studying him
steadily for a long time.

The
boy had shed his habit in order to sleep in better comfort. He lay on his side,
cheek pressed into the pillow, the loose linen shirt open at his throat, and
the chain that he wore had slid its links down in a silver coil into the hollow
of his neck, and laid bare to view on the pillow the token that hung upon it.

Not
a cross studded with semi-precious stones, but a ring, a thin gold finger-ring
made in the spiral form of a coiled snake, with two splinters of red for eyes.
An old ring, very old, for the finer chasing of head and scales was worn smooth
with time, and the coils were wafer-thin.

Humilis
sat gazing at this small, significant thing, and could not turn his eyes away.
The lamp shook in his hand, and he laid it back on its stand in careful haste,
for fear he should spill a drop of hot oil on the naked throat or outflung arm,
and startle Fidelis out of what was at least oblivion, if not genuine rest. Now
he knew everything, the best and the worst, all there was to know, except how
to find a way out of this web. Not for himself — his own way out opened clear
before him, and was no long journey. But for this sleeper…

Humilis
lay back on his bed, trembling with the knowledge of a great wonder and a great
danger, and waited for morning.

Brother
Cadfael rose at dawn, long before Prime, and went out into the garden, but even
there there was little air to breathe. A leaden stillness hung over the world,
under a thin ceiling of cloud, through which the rising sun seemed to burn
unimpeded. He went down to the Meole Brook, down the bleached slopes of the
pease-fields, from which the haulms had long since been sickled and taken in
for stable-bedding, leaving the white stubble to be ploughed into the ground
for the next year’s crop. Cadfael shed his sandals and waded into the slack,
shallow water that was left, and found it warm where he had hoped for a little
coolness. This weather, he thought, cannot continue much longer, it must break.
Someone will get the brunt of the storm, and if it’s thunder, as by the smell
in the air and the prickling of my skin it surely will be, Shrewsbury will get
its share. Thunder, like commerce, followed the river valleys.