Ellis Peters - The Devil's Novice

And indeed, the victim proved it by opening one dazed eye, staring round him as if in search of the enemy who had done this to him, and becoming voluble in complaint of his injuries. The relieved circle closed round him, offering aid, and Meriet was left to gather what he had spilled, in stiff obedience, still without word or sound. The frozen mask was very slow to melt, the green eyes were veiled before ever the light revived behind them.

The sufferer’s wound proved to be, as Cadfael had said, a messy but shallow graze, soon staunched and bound close with a shirt sacrificed by one of the novices, and the stout linen band from the repaired handle of one of the fruit-baskets. His knock on the head had raised a bump and given him a headache, but no worse than that. He was despatched back to the abbey as soon as he felt inclined to rise and test his legs, in the company of two of his fellows big enough and brawny enough to make a chair for him with their interlaced hands and wrists if he foundered. Nothing was left of the incident but the trampling of many feet about the patch of drying blood in the grass, and the sickle which a frightened boy came timidly to reclaim. He hovered until he could approach Cadfael alone, and was cheered and reassured at being told there was no great harm done, and no blame being urged against his father for an unfortunate oversight. Accidents will happen, even without the assistance of forgetful goat-keepers and clumsy and overweight boys.

As soon as everyone else was off his hands, Cadfael looked round for the one remaining problem. And there he was, one black-habited figure among the rest, working away steadily; just like the others, except that he kept his face averted, and while all the rest were talking shrilly about what had happened, the subsiding excitement setting them twittering like starlings, he said never a word. A certain rigour in his movements, as if a child’s wooden doll had come to life; and always the high shoulder turned if anyone came near. He did not want to be observed; not, at least, until he had recovered the mastery of his own face.

They carried their harvest home, to be laid out in trays in the lofts of the great barn in the grange court, for these later apples would keep until Christmas. On the way back, in good time for Vespers, Cadfael drew alongside Meriet, and kept pace with him in placid silence most of the way. He was adept at studying people while seeming to have no interest in them beyond a serene acceptance that they were in the same world with him.

“Much ado, back there,” said Cadfael, essaying a kind of apology, which might have the merit of being surprising, “over a few inches of skin. I spoke you rough, brother, in haste. Bear with me! He might as easily have been what you thought him. I had that vision before me as clear as you had. Now we can both breathe the freer.”

The head bent away from him turned ever so swiftly and warily to stare along a straight shoulder. The flare of the green-gold eyes was like very brief lightning, sharply snuffed out. A soft, startled voice said: “Yes, thank God! And thank you, brother!” Cadfael thought the ‘brother’ was a dutiful but belated afterthought, but valued it none the less. “I was small use, you were right. I… am not accustomed…” said Meriet lamely.

“No, lad, why should you be? I’m well past double your age, and came late to the cowl, not like you. I have seen death in many shapes, I’ve been soldier and sailor in my time; in the east, in the Crusade, and for ten years after Jerusalem fell. I’ve seen men killed in battle. Come to that, I’ve killed men in battle. I never took joy in it, that I can remember, but I never drew back from it, either, having made my vows.” Something was happening there beside him, he felt the young body braced to sharp attention. The mention, perhaps, of vows other than the monastic, vows which had also involved the matter of life and death? Cadfael, like a fisherman with a shy and tricky bite on his line, went on paying out small-talk, easing suspicion, engaging interest, exposing, as he did not often do, the past years of his own experience. The silence favoured by the Order ought not to be allowed to stand in the way of its greater aims, where a soul was tormenting itself on the borders of conviction. A garrulous old brother, harking back to an adventurous past, ranging half the known world—what could be more harmless, or more disarming?

“I was with Robert of Normandy’s company, and a mongrel lot we were, Britons, Normans, Flemings, Scots, Bretons—name them, they were there! After the city was settled and Baldwin crowned, the most of us went home, over a matter of two or three years, but I had taken to the sea by then, and I stayed. There were pirates ranged those coasts, we had always work to do.”

The young thing beside him had not missed a word of what had been said, he quivered like an untrained but thoroughbred hound hearing the horn, though he said nothing.

“And in the end I came home, because it was home and I felt the need of it,” said Cadfael. “I served here and there as a free man-at-arms for a while and then I was ripe, and it was time. But I had had my way through the world.”

“And now, what do you do here?” wondered Meriet.

“I grow herbs, and dry them, and make remedies for all the ills that visit us. I physic a great many souls besides those of us within.”

“And that satisfies you?” It was a muted cry of protest; it would not have satisfied him.

“To heal men, after years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does what he must do,” said Cadfael carefully, “whether the duty he has taken on himself is to fight, or to salvage poor souls from the fighting, to kill, to die or to heal. There are many will claim to tell you what is due from you, but only one who can shear through the many, and reach the truth. And that is you, by what light falls for you to show the way. Do you know what is hardest for me here of all I have vowed? Obedience. And I am old.”

And have had my fling, and a wild one, was implied. And what am I trying to do now, he wondered, to warn him off pledging too soon what he cannot give, what he has not got to give?

“It is true!” said Meriet abruptly. “Every man must do what is laid on him to do and not question. If that is obedience?” And suddenly he turned upon Brother Cadfael a countenance altogether young, devout and exalted, as though he had just kissed, as once Cadfael had, the crossed hilt of his own poniard, and pledged his life’s blood to some cause as holy to him as the deliverance of the city of God.

Cadfael had Meriet on his mind the rest of that day, and after Vespers he confided to Brother Paul the uneasiness he felt in recalling the day’s disaster; for Paul had been left behind with the children, and the reports that had reached him had been concerned solely with Brother Wolstan’s fall and injuries, not with the unaccountable horror they had aroused in Meriet.

“Not that there’s anything strange in shying at the sight of a man lying in his blood, they were all shaken by it. But he—what he felt was surely extreme.”

Brother Paul shook his head doubtfully over his difficult charge. “Everything he feels is extreme. I don’t find in him the calm and the certainty that should go with a true vocation. Oh, he is duty itself, whatever I ask of him he does, whatever task I set him he performs, he’s greedy to go faster than I lead him. I never had a more diligent student. But the others don’t like him, Cadfael. He shuns them. Those who have tried to approach him say he turns from them, and is rough and short in making his escape. He’d rather go solitary. I tell you, Cadfael, I never knew a postulant pursue his novitiate with so much passion, and so little joy. Have you once seen him smile since he entered here?”