Ellis Peters - The Sanctuary Sparrow

The child yawned, halted, and abandoned his hold on his toy, letting it drop into the dust. “I hit Davey with that when he tripped me in the water, but it broke. I threw it away.” So he would, having proved its uselessness, just as he walked away from this discarded weapon, leaving it lying, and went off scrubbing at sleepy eyes with the knuckles of a grimy fist.

Brother Cadfael picked up the sorry remnant and examined ruefully its stove-in ribs and trailing, tangled strings. No help for it, this was all that remained of the lost rebec. He took it back with him, only too well aware of the grief he was about to cause its luckless owner. Say that Liliwin came alive in the end out of his present trouble, still he must emerge penniless, and deprived now even of his chief means of livelihood. But there was more in it even than that. He knew it even before he presented the broken instrument to Liliwin’s appalled hands, and watched the anguish and despair mantle like bleak twilight over his face. The boy took the ruin in his hands and fondled it, rocked it in his arms, bowed his head to its splintered frame, and burst into tears. It was not the loss of a possession so much as the death of a sweetheart.

Cadfael sat down apart, in the nearest carrel of the scriptorium, and kept decently silent until the storm passed, and Liliwin sat drained and motionless, hugging his broken darling, his thin shoulders hunched against the world.

“There are men,” said Cadfael then mildly, “who understand such arts as repairing instruments of music. I am not one of them, but Brother Anselm, our precentor, is. Why should we not ask him to look at your fiddle and see what can be done to make it sing again?”

“ This? ” Liliwin turned on him passionately, holding out the pathetic wreck in both hands. “Look at it—no better than firewood. How could anyone restore it?”

“Do you know that? Do I? What’s lost by asking the man who may? And if this is past saving, Brother Anselm can make one new.”

Bitter disbelief stared back at him. Why should he credit that anyone would go out of his way to do a kindness to sod espised and unprofitable a creature as himself? Those within here held that they owed him shelter and food, but nothing more, and even that as a duty. And no one without had ever offered him any benefit that cost more than a crust.

“As if I could ever pay for a new one! Don’t mock me!”

“You forget, we do not buy and sell, we have no use for money. But show Brother Anselm a good instrument damaged, and he’ll want to heal it. Show him a good musician lost for want of an instrument, and he’ll be anxious to provide him a new voice. Are you a good musician?”

Liliwin said: “Yes!” with abrupt and spirited pride. In one respect, at least, he knew his worth.

“Then show him you are, and he’ll give you your due.”

“You mean it?” wondered Liliwin, shaken between hope and doubt. “You will truly ask him? If he would teach me, perhaps I could learn the art.” He faltered there, losing his momentary brightness with a suddenness that was all too eloquent. Whenever he took heart for the future, the bleak realisation came flooding over him afresh that he might have no future. Cadfael cast about hurriedly in his mind for some crumb of distraction to ward off the recurrent despair.

“Never suppose that you’re friendless, that’s black ingratitude when you have forty days of grace, a fair-minded man like Hugh Beringar enquiring into your case, and one creature at least who stands by you stoutly and won’t hear a word against you.” Liliwin kindled a little at that, still doubtfully, but at least it had put the gallows and the noose out of his mind for the moment. “You’ll remember her—a girl named Rannilt.”

Liliwin’s face at once paled and brightened. It was the first smile Cadfael had yet seen from him, and even now tentative, humble, frightened to reach for anything desired, for fear it should vanish like melting snow as he clutched it.

“You’ve seen her? Talked to her? And she does not believe what they all say of me?”

“Not a word of it! She affirms—she knows— you never did violence nor theft in that house. If all the tongues in Shrewsbury cried out against you, she would still stand her ground and speak for you.”

Liliwin sat cradling his broken rebec, as gently and shyly as if he clasped a sweetheart indeed. His faint, frightened smile shone in the dimming light within the cloister.

“She is the first girl who ever looked kindly at me. You won’t have heard her sing—such a small, sweet voice, like a reed. We ate in the kitchen together. It was the best hour of my life, I never thought… And it’s true? Rannilt believes in me?”

Chapter Four

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Sunday

Liliwin folded away his brychans and made himself presentable before Prime on the sabbath, determined to cause as little disruption as possible in the orderly regime within these walls. In his wandering life he had had little opportunity to become familiar with the offices of the day, and Latin was a closed book to him, but at least he could attend and pay his reverences, if that would make him more acceptable.

After breakfast Cadfael dressed the gash in the young man’s arm again, and unwound the bandage from the graze on his head. “This is healing well,” he said approvingly. “We’d best leave it uncovered, and let in the air to it now. Good clean flesh you have, boy, if something too little of it. And you’ve lost that limp that had you going sidewise. How is it with all those bruises?”

Liliwin owned with some surprise that most of his aches and pains were all but gone, and performed a few startling contortions to prove it. He had not lost his skills. His fingers itched for the coloured rings and balls he used for his juggling, safely tucked away in their knotted cloth under his bed, but he feared they would be frowned on here. The ruin of his rebec also reposed in the corner of the porch next the cloister. He returned there after his breakfast to find Brother Anselm turning the wreck thoughtfully in his hands, and running a questing finger along the worst of the cracks.

The precentor was past fifty, a vague, slender, shortsighted person who peered beneath an untidy brown tonsure and bristling brows to match, and smiled amiably and encouragingly at the owner of this disastrous relic.

“This is yours? Brother Cadfael told me how it had suffered. This has been a fine instrument. You did not make it?”

“No. I had it from an old man who taught me. He gave it to me before he died. I don’t know,” said Liliwin, “how to make them.”

It was the first time Brother Anselm had heard him speak since the shrill terror of the first invasion. He looked up alertly, tilting his head to listen. “You have the upper voice, very true and clear. I could use you, if you sing? But you must sing! You have not thought of taking the cowl, here among us?” He recalled with a sigh why that was hardly likely under present circumstances. “Well, this poor thing has been villainously used, but it is not beyond help. We may try. And the bow is lost, you say.” Liliwin had said no such thing, he was mute with wonder. Evidently Brother Cadfael had given precise information to a retentive enthusiast. “The bow, I must say, is almost harder to perfect than the fiddle, but I have had my successes. Have you skills on other instruments?”

“I can get a tune out of most things,” said Liliwin, charmed into eagerness.

“Come,” said Brother Anselm, taking him firmly by the arm, “I will show you my workshop and you and I between us, after High Mass, will try what can best be done for this rebec of yours. I shall need a helper to tend my resins and gums. But this will be slow and careful work, mind, and matter for prayer, not to be hastened for any cause. Music is study for a lifetime, son—a lifetime however long.”