The Raven in the Foregate (9 page)

“By the south door, through the cloisters,” he said.
“No one will be there to see us tonight.”

The soft, warm breath in his ear said: “Need we wait?
I could slip into the porch now. Matins will be so long tonight. Will you
follow?”

And she was away, not waiting for an answer, stealing
silently and reverently across the tiles of the nave, and taking station for a
few moments where she could be seen to be gazing devoutly in towards the high
altar, beyond the chanting in the choir, in case anyone should be taking note
of her movements. By that time he would have followed her wherever she chose to
lead him. It hurt even to wait patiently the many minutes she delayed, before
she chose her moment to withdraw into the darkness of the south porch. When he
followed her, by cautious stages, reaching the darkness of the closed doorway
with a great heaved breath of relief, he found her waiting with the heavy latch
in her hand, motionless against the door. There they waited, close and
quivering, for the first jubilant antiphon of Matins, and the triumphant
answering cry:

“Christ is born unto us!”

“Oh, come, let us worship!”

Benet set his hand over hers on the massive latch, and
lifted it softly as the hymn began. Outside, the night’s darkness matched the
darkness within. Who was to pay any attention now to two young creatures
slipping through the chink of the door into the cold of the night, and
cautiously letting the latch slide back into place? There was no one in the
cloister, no one in the great court as they crossed it. Whether it was Benet
who reached for her hand, or she for his, they rounded the corner of the thick
box hedge in the garden hand in hand, and slowed to a walk there, panting and
smiling, palms tightly clasped together, their breath a faint silver mist. The
vast inverted bowl of sky, dark blue almost to blackness but polished bright
and scintillating with stars, poured down upon them a still coldness they did
not feel.

Brother Cadfael’s timbered hut, solid and squat in the
sheltered enclosure, never quite lost its warmth. Benet closed the door gently
behind them, and groped along the little shelf he knew now almost as well as
did Cadfael himself, where the tinder box and lamp lay ready to hand. It took
him two or three attempts before the charred linen caught at the spark, and let
him blow it carefully into a glow. The wick of the lamp put up a tiny, wavering
flame that grew into a steady flare, and stood up tall and erect. The leather
bellows lay by the brazier, he had only to shift a turf or two and spend a
minute industriously pumping, and the charcoal glowed brightly, and accepted a
feeding of split wood to burn into a warm hearth.

“He’ll know someone has been here,” said the girl, but
very tranquilly.

“He’ll know I was here,” said Benet, getting up
lithely from his knees, his bold, boy’s face conjured into summer bronze by the
glow from the brazier. “I doubt if he’ll say so. But he may wonder why. And
with whom!”

“You’ve brought other women here?” She tilted her head
at him in challenge, abruptly displeased.

“Never any, until now. Never any, hereafter. Unless
you so pleasure me a second time,” he said, and stared her down with fiery
solemnity.

Some resinous knot in the new wood caught and hissed,
sending up a clear, white flame for a moment between them. Across its pale,
pure gold the two young faces sprang into mysterious brightness, lit from
below, lips parted, eyes rounded in astonished gravity.

Each of them stared into a mirror, matched and mated,
and could not look away from the unexpected image of love.

Chapter Five

PRIME WAS SAID AT AN EARLY HOUR, after a very short
interlude for sleep, and the dawn Mass followed with first light. Almost all
the people of the Foregate had long since gone home, and the brothers, dazed
with long standing and strung taut with the tensions of music and wonder, filed
a little unsteadily up the night stairs to rest briefly before preparing for
the day.

Brother Cadfael, stiff with being still for so long a
time, felt himself in need rather of movement than of rest. Solitary in the
lavatorium, he made unusually leisurely ablutions, shaved with care, and went
out into the great court, just in time to see Dame Diota Hammet come hurrying
in through the wicket in the gate, stumbling and slipping on the glazed
cobbles, clutching her dark cloak about her, and gazing round in evident
agitation. A furry fringe of hoar frost had formed on the collar of her cloak
from her breath. Every outline of wall or bush or branch was silvered with the
same glittering whiteness.

The porter had come out to greet her and ask her
business, but she had observed Prior Robert emerging from the cloisters, and
made for him like a homing bird, making him so low and unwary a reverence that
she almost fell on her knees.

“Father Prior, my master—Father Ailnoth—has he been
all night in the church with you?”

“I have not seen him,” said Robert, startled, and put
out a hand in haste to help her keep her feet, for the rounded stones were
wickedly treacherous. He held on to the arm he had grasped, and peered
concernedly into her face. “What is amiss? Surely he has his own Mass to take
care of soon. By this time he should be robing. I should not interrupt him now,
unless for some very grave reason. What is your need?”

“He is not there,” she said abruptly. “I have been up
to see. Cynric is there waiting, ready, but my master has not come.”

Prior Robert had begun to frown, certain that this
silly woman was troubling him for no good reason, and yet made uneasy by her
agitation. “When did you see him last? You must know when he left his house.”

“Last evening, before Compline,” she said bleakly.

“What? And has not been back since then?”

“No, Father. He never came home all night. I thought
he might have come to take part in your night offices, but no one has seen him
even here. And as you say, by now he should be robing for his own Mass. But he
is not there!”

Halted at the foot of the day stairs, Cadfael could
not choose but overhear, and having overheard, inevitably recalled the ominous
black-winged bird swooping along the Foregate towards the bridge at very much
the same hour, according to Diota, when Ailnoth had left his own house. On what
punitive errand, Cadfael wondered? And where could those raven wings have
carried him, to cause him to fail of his duty on such a festal day?

“Father,” he said, coming forward with unwary haste,
slithering on the frosty cobbles, “I met the priest last night as I was coming
back from the town to be in time for Compline. Not fifty paces from the
gatehouse here, going towards the bridge, and in a hurry.”

Prior Robert looked round, frowning, at this
unsolicited witness, and gnawed a lip in doubt how to proceed. “He did not
speak to you? You don’t know where he was bound in such haste?”

“No. I spoke to him,” said Cadfael drily, “but he was
too intent to mark me. No, I have no notion where he was bound. But it was he.
I saw him pass the light of the torches under the gate. No mistaking him.”

The woman was staring at him now with bruised, hollow
eyes and still face, and the hood had slipped back from her forehead unnoticed,
and showed a great leaden bruise on her left temple, broken at the centre by a
wavering line of dried blood.

“You’re hurt!” said Cadfael, asking no leave, and put
back the folds of cloth from her head and turned her face to the dawning light.
“This is a bad blow you’ve suffered, it needs tending. How did you come by it?”

She shrank a little from his touch, and then submitted
with a resigned sigh. “I came out in the night, anxious about him, to see if
there was anyone stirring, or any sign of him. The doorstone was frozen, I fell
and struck my head. I’ve washed it well, it’s nothing.”

Cadfael took her hand and turned up to view a palm
rasped raw in three or four grazes, took up its fellow and found it marked
almost as brutally. “Well, perhaps you saved yourself worse by putting out
these hands. But you must let me dress them for you, and your brow, too.”

Prior Robert stood gazing beyond them, pondering what
it was best to do. “Truly I wonder… If Father Ailnoth went out at that hour,
and in such haste, may not he also have fallen, somewhere, and so injured
himself that he’s lying helpless? The frost was already setting in…”

“It was,” said Cadfael, remembering the glassy sheen
on the steep slope of the Wyle, and the icy ring of his own steps on the
bridge. “And sharply! And I would not say he was minding his steps when I saw
him.”

“Some charitable errand…” murmured Robert anxiously.
“He would not spare himself…”

No, neither himself nor any other soul! But true
enough, those hasty steps might well have lunged into slippery places.

“If he has lain all night helpless in the cold,” said
Robert, “he may have caught his death. Brother Cadfael, do you tend to this
lady, do whatever is needful, and I will go and speak to Father Abbot. For I
think we had best call all the brothers and lay brothers together, and set in hand
a hunt for Father Ailnoth, wherever he may be.”

In the dim, quiet shelter of the workshop in the
garden Cadfael sat his charge down on the bench against the wall, and turned to
his brazier, to uncover it for the day. All the winter he kept it thus turfed
overnight, to be ready at short notice if needed, the rest of the year he let
it out, since it could easily be rekindled. None of his brews within here
required positive warmth, but there were many among them that would not take
kindly to frost.

The thick turves now damping it down were almost
fresh, though neatly placed, and the fire beneath them live and comforting.
Someone had been here during the night, and someone who knew how to lay his
hand on the lamp and the tinder without disturbing anything else, and how to
tend the fire to leave it much as he had found it. Young Benet had left few
traces, but enough to set his signature to the nocturnal invasion. Even by
night, it seemed, he practised very little dissembling where Cadfael was
concerned, he was intent rather on leaving everything in order than on
concealing his intrusion.

Cadfael warmed water in a pan, and diluted a lotion of
betony, comfrey and daisy to cleanse the broken bruise on her forehead and the
scored grazes in both palms, scratches that ran obliquely from the wrist to the
root of the forefinger and thumb, torn by the frozen and rutted ground. She
submitted to his ministrations with resigned dignity, her eyes veiled.

“That’s a heavy fall you had,” said Cadfael, wiping
away the dried line of blood from her temple.

“I was not minding myself,” she said, so simply that
he knew it for plain truth. “I am not of any importance.”

Her face, seen thus below him as he fingered her
forehead, was a long oval, with fine, elongated features. Large, arched eyelids
hid her eyes, her mouth was well shaped and generous but drooping with
weariness. She braided her greying hair severely and coiled it behind her head.
Now that she had told what she had come to tell, and laid it in other hands,
she was calm and still under his handling.

“You’ll need to get some rest now,” said Cadfael, “if
you’ve been up fretting all night, and after this blow. Whatever needs to be
done Father Abbot will do. There! I’ll not cover it, better to have it open to
the air, but as soon as you’re dismissed go home and keep from the frost. Frost
can fester.” He made a leisurely business of putting away such things as he had
used, to give her time to think and breathe. “Your nephew works here with me.
But of course you know that. I remember you visited him here in the garden a
few days ago. A good lad, your Benet.”

After a brief, deep silence she said: “So I have
always found him.” And for the first time, though pallidly and briefly, she
smiled.

“Hard-working and willing! I shall miss him if he
goes, but he’s worth a more testing employment.”

She said nothing to that. Her silence was marked, as
though words hovered behind it ready for spilling, and were strongly held back.
She said no more, barring a sedate word of thanks, when he led her back to the
great court, where a buzzing murmur of voices like a disturbed hive met them
before ever they rounded the hedge. Abbot Radulfus was there, and had the
brothers already mustering about him, bright and quivering with curiosity,
their sleepiness almost forgotten.

“We have cause to fear,” said Radulfus, wasting no
words,”that some accident has befallen Father Ailnoth. He went out from his
house towards the town last night, before Compline, and no one has any word of
him since. He has not been home, nor did he attend with us in church overnight.
He may have suffered a fall on the ice, and lain either senseless, or unable to
walk, through the night. It is my order that those of you who did not serve
throughout the night in the choir should take some food quickly, and go out to
search for him. The last we know of him is that he had passed our gate before
Compline, hurrying towards the town. From that point we must consider and
attempt every path he may have taken, for who knows upon what parish errand he was
called forth? Those of you who have been wakeful all night long, take food and
then sleep, and you are excused attendance from the office, so that you may be
fit to take up the search when your fellows return. Robert, see to it! Brother
Cadfael will show where Father Ailnoth was last seen. The searchers had best go
forth in pairs or more, for two at least may be needed if he is found injured.
But I pray he may be found in reasonable case, and quickly.”