Ellis Peters - The Pilgrim of Hate

Matthew-Luc came once again to ask audience of the abbot, a little before Vespers. Radulfus had him admitted without question, and sat with him alone, divining his present need.

“Father, will you hear me my confession? For I need absolution from the vow I could not keep. And I do earnestly desire to be clean of the past before I undertake the future.”

“It is a right and a wise desire,” said Radulfus. “One thing tell me, are you asking absolution for failing to fulfil the oath you swore?”

Luc, already on his knees, raised his head for a moment from the abbot’s knee, and showed a face open and clear. “No, Father, but for ever swearing such an oath. Even grief has its arrogance.”

“Then you have learned, my son, that vengeance belongs only to God?”

“More than that, Father,” said Luc. “I have learned that in God’s hands vengeance is safe. However long delayed, however strangely manifested, the reckoning is sure.”

When it was done, when he had raked out of his heart, with measured voice and long pauses for thought, every drifted grain of rancour and bitterness and impatience that fretted him, and received absolution, he rose with a great sigh, and raised a bright and resolute face.

“Now, Father, if I may pray of you one more grace, let me have one of your priests to join me to a wife before I go from here. Here, where I am made clean and new, I would have love and life begin together.”

ON THE NEXT MORNING, which was the twenty-fourth day of June, the general bustle of departure began. There was packing of belongings, buying and parcelling of food and drink for the journey, and much leave-taking from friends newly made, and arranging of company for the road. No doubt the saint would have due regard for her own reputation, and keep the June sun shining until all her devotees were safely home, and with a wonderful tale to tell. Most of them knew only half the wonder, but even that was wonder enough.

Among the early departures went Brother Adam of Reading, in no great hurry along the way, for today he would go no farther than Reading’s daughter-house of Leominster, where there would be letters waiting for him to carry home to his abbot. He set out with a pouch well filled with seeds of species his garden did not yet possess, and a scholarly mind still pondering the miraculous healing he had witnessed from every theological angle, in order to be able to expound its full significance when he reached his own monastery. It had been a most instructive and enlightening festival.

“I’d meant to start for home today, too,” said Mistress Weaver to her cronies Mistress Glover and the apothecary’s widow, with whom she had formed a strong matronly alliance during these memorable days, “but now there’s such work doing, I hardly know whether I’m waking or sleeping, and I must stay over yet a night or two. Who’d ever have thought what would come of it, when I told my lad we ought to come and make our prayers here to the good saint, and have faith that she’d be listening? Now it seems I’m to lose the both of them, my poor sister’s chicks; for Rhun, God bless him, is set on staying here and taking the cowl, for he says he won’t ever leave the blessed girl who healed him. And truly I don’t wonder at it, and won’t stand in his way, for he’s too good for this wicked world outside, so he is! And now comes young Matthew, no, but it seems we must call him Luc, now, and he’s well-born, if from a poor landless branch, and will come in for a manor or two in time, by his good kinswoman’s taking him in…”

“Well, and so did you take the boy and girl in,” pointed out the apothecary’s widow warmly, “and gave them a roof and a living. There’s good sound justice there.”

“Well, so Matthew, I mean Luc, he comes to me and asks for my girl for his wife, last night it was, and when I answered honestly, for honest I am and always will be, that my Melangell has but a meagre dowry, though the best I can give her I will, what says he? That as at this moment he himself has not one penny to his name in this world, but must go debtor to the young lord’s charity that came to find him, and as for the future, if fortune favours him he’ll be thankful, and if not, he has hands and a will, and can make a way for two to live. Provided the other is my girl, he says, for there’s none other for him. So what can I say but God bless them both, and stay to see them wedded?”

“It’s a woman’s duty,” said Mistress Glover heartily, “to make sure all’s done properly, when she hands over a young girl to a husband. But sure, you’ll miss the two of them.”

“So I will,” agreed Dame Alice, shedding a few tears rather of pride and joy than of grief, at the advancement to semi-sainthood and promising matrimony of the charges who had cost her dear enough, and could now be blessed and sped on their respective and respectable ways with a quiet mind. “So I will! But to see them both set up where they would be… And good children both, that will take pains for me when I come to need, as I have for them.”

“And they’re to marry here, tomorrow?” asked the apothecary’s widow, visibly considering putting off her own departure for another day.

“They are indeed, before Mass in the morning. So it seems I’ll have none to take home but my sole self,” said Dame Alice, dropping another proud tear or two, and wearing her reflected glory with admirable grace, “when I take to the road again. But the day after tomorrow there’s a sturdy company leaving southward, and with them I’ll go.”

“And duty well done, my dear soul,” said Mistress Glover, embracing her friend in a massive arm, “duty very well done!”

They were married in the privacy of the Lady Chapel, by Brother Paul, who was not only master of the novices, but the chief of their confessors, too, and already had Rhun under his care and instruction, and felt a fatherly interest in him, which the boy’s affection very readily extended to embrace the sister. No one else was present but the family and their witnesses, and the bridal pair wore no festal garments, for they had none. Luc was in the serviceable brown cotte and hose he had slept in, out in the fields, and the same crumpled shirt, though newly washed and smoothed. Melangell was neat and modest in her homespun, proudly balancing her coronal of braided, deep-gold hair. They were pale as lilies, bright as stars, and solemn as the grave.

After high and moving events, daily life must still go on. Cadfael went to his work that afternoon well content. With the meadow grasses in ripe seed and the harvest imminent he had preparations to make for two seasonal ailments which could be relied upon to recur every year. There were some who suffered with eruptions on their hands when working in the harvest, and others who took to sneezing and wheezing, with running eyes, and needed lotions to help them.

He was busy bruising fresh leaves of dock and mandrake in a mortar for a soothing ointment, when he heard light, long-striding steps approaching along the gravel of the path, and then half of the sunlight from the wide-open door was cut off, as someone hesitated in the doorway. He turned with the mortar hugged to his chest, and the green-stained wooden pestle arrested in his hand, and there stood Olivier, dipping his tall head to evade the hanging bunches of herbs, and asking, in the mellow, confident voice of one assured of the answer, “May I come in?”

He was in already, smiling, staring about him with a boy’s candid curiosity, for he had never been here before. “I’ve been a truant, I know, but with two days to wait before Luc’s marriage I thought best to get on with my errand to the sheriff of Stafford, being so close, and then come back here. I was back, as I said I’d be, in time to see them wedded. I thought you would have been there.”