Ellis Peters - The Pilgrim of Hate

“Make your own way from here,” said Hugh, “as well as you may. You need fear nothing now from footpads here, and the border is not far. What you have to fear from God, take up with God.”

He turned his back, with so decisive a movement that his men recognised the sign that all was over, and stirred willingly about the captives and the horses.

“And those two?” asked Hugh. “Had I not better leave a man behind on the track there, with a spare horse for Luc? He followed his quarry afoot, but no need for him to foot it back. Or ought I to send men after them?”

“No need for that,” said Cadfael with certainty. “Olivier will manage all. They’ll come home together.”

He had no qualms at all, he was beginning to relax into the warmth of content. The evil he had dreaded had been averted, however narrowly, at whatever cost. Olivier would find his stray, bear with him, follow if he tried to avoid, wrung and ravaged as he was, with the sole obsessive purpose of his life for so long ripped away from him, and within him only the aching emptiness where that consuming passion had been. Into that barren void Olivier would win his way, and warm the ravished heart to make it habitable for another love. There was the most comforting of messages to bring from Juliana Bossard, the promise regained of a home and a welcome. There was a future. How had Matthew-Luc seen his future when he emptied his purse of the last coin at the abbey, before taking up the pursuit of his enemy? Surely he had been contemplating the end of the person he had hitherto been, a total ending, beyond which he could not see. Now he was young again, there was a life before him, it needed only a little time to make him whole again.

Olivier would bring him back to the abbey, when the worst desolation was over. For Olivier had promised that he would not leave without spending some time leisurely with Cadfael, and upon Olivier’s promise the heart could rest secure.

As for the other… Cadfael looked back from the saddle, after they had mounted, and saw the last of Ciaran, still on his knees under the tree, where they had left him. His face was turned to them, but his eyes seemed to be closed, and his hands were wrung tightly together before his breast. He might have been praying, he might have been simply experiencing with every particle of his flesh the life that had been left to him. When we are all gone, thought Cadfael, he will fall asleep there where he lies, he can do no other, for he is far gone in something beyond exhaustion. Where he falls asleep, there he will have died. But when he awakes, I trust he may understand that he has been born again.

The slower cortege that would bring the prisoners into the town began to assemble, making the tethering thongs secure, and the torch-bearers crossed the clearing to mount, withdrawing their yellow light from the kneeling figure, so that Ciaran vanished gradually, as though he had been absorbed into the bole of the beech-tree.

Hugh led the way out to the track, and turned homeward. “Oh, Hugh, I grow old!” said Cadfael, hugely yawning. “I want my bed.”

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT when they rode in at the gatehouse, into a great court awash with moonlight, and heard the chanting of Matins within the church. They had made no haste on the way home, and said very little, content to ride companionably together as sometimes before, through summer night or winter day. It would be another hour or more yet before Hugh’s officers got their prisoners back to Shrewsbury Castle, since they must keep a foot-pace, but before morning Simeon Poer and his henchmen would be safe in hold, under lock and key.

“I’ll wait with you until Lauds is over,” said Hugh, as they dismounted at the gatehouse. “Father Abbot will want to know how we’ve sped. Though I hope he won’t require the whole tale from us tonight.”

“Come down with me to the stables, then,” said Cadfael, “and I’ll see this fellow unsaddled and tended, while they’re still within. I was always taught to care for my beast before seeking my own rest. You never lose the habit.”

In the stableyard the moonlight was all the light they needed. The quietness of midnight and the stillness of the air carried every note of the office to them softly and clearly. Cadfael unsaddled his horse and saw him settled and provided in his stall, with a light rug against any possible chill, rites he seldom had occasion to perform now. They brought back memories of other mounts and other journeys, and battlefields less happily resolved than the small but desperate skirmish just lost and won.

Hugh stood watching with his back turned to the great court, but his head tilted to follow the chant. Yet it was not any sound of an approaching step that made him look round sudenly, but the slender shadow that stole along the moonlit cobbles beside his feet. And there hesitant in the gateway of the yard stood Melangell, startled and startling, haloed in that pallid sheen.

“Child,” said Cadfael, concerned, “what are you doing out of your bed at this hour?”

“How could I rest?” she said, but not as one complaining. “No one misses me, they are all sleeping.” She stood very still and straight, as if she had spent all the hours since he had left her in earnest endeavour to put away for ever any memories he might have of the tear-stained, despairing girl who had sought solitude in his workshop. The great sheaf of her hair was braided and pinned up on her head, her gown was trim, and her face resolutely calm as she asked, “Did you find him?”

A girl he had left her, a woman he came back to her. “Yes,” said Cadfael, “we found them both. There has nothing ill happened to either. The two of them have parted. Ciaran goes on his way alone.”

“And Matthew?” she asked steadily.

“Matthew is with a good friend, and will come to no harm. We two have outridden them, but they will come.” She would have to learn to call him by another name now, but let the man himself tell her that. Nor would the future be altogether easy, for her or for Luc Meverel, two human creatures who might never have been brought within hail of each other but for freakish circumstance. Unless Saint Winifred had had a hand in that, too? On this night Cadfael could believe it, and trust her to bring all to a good end. “He will come back,” said Cadfael, meeting her candid eyes, that bore no trace of tears now. “You need not fear. But he has suffered a great turmoil of the mind, and he’ll need all your patience and wisdom. Ask him nothing. When the time is right he will tell you everything. Reproach him with nothing, “

“God forbid,” she said,”that I should ever reproach him. It was I who failed him.”

“No, how could you know? But when he comes, wonder at nothing. Be like one who is thirsty and drinks. And so will he.”

She had turned a little towards him, and the moonlight blanched wonderfully over her face, as if a lamp within her had been newly lighted. “I will wait,” she said.

“Better go to your bed and sleep, the waiting may be longer than you think, he has been wrung. But he will come.”

But at that she shook her head. “I’ll watch till he comes,” she said, and suddenly smiled at them, pale and lustrous as pearl, and turned and went away swiftly and silently towards the cloister.

“That is the girl you spoke of?” asked Hugh, looking after her with somewhat frowning interest. “The lame boy’s sister? The girl that young man fancies?”

“That is she,” said Cadfael, and closed the half-door of the stall.

“The weaver-woman’s niece?”

“That, too. Dowerless and from common stock,” said Cadfael, understanding but untroubled. “Yes, true! I’m from common stock myself. I doubt if a young fellow who has been torn apart and remade as Luc has tonight will care much about such little things. Though I grant you others may! I hope the lady Juliana has no plans yet for marrying him off to some heiress from a neighbour manor, for I fancy things have gone so far now with these two that she’ll be forced to abandon her plans. A manor or a craft, if you take pride in them, and run them well, where’s the difference?”