Monk's Hood

CHAPTER 10

“No,” said the voice in his ear, low and savagely, “no need of witnesses. My business is with you alone, monk, and brief enough.” But the arms withdrew from him, and in a moment the heavy doors closed with a hollow sound upon the glimpse of sky in which, from this walled darkness within, the stars showed doubly large and bright.

Cadfael stood motionless, and heard the soft brushing of cloth as Meurig leaned back against the closed door, arms spread, drawing deep breaths to savour the moment of arrival, and anticipate the last vengeful achievement. There was no other way out, and he knew his quarry had not moved by so much as a step.

“You have branded me murderer, why should I draw back now from murder? You have ruined me, shamed me, made me a reproach to my own kin, taken from me my birthright, my land, my good name, everything that made my existence worth calling a life, and I will have your life in recompense. I cannot live now, I cannot even die, until I have been your death, Brother Cadfael.”

Strange how the simple act of giving his victim a name changed everything, even this blind relationship, like the first gleam of light. Further light could only assist the change.

“Hanging behind the door, where you are,” said Cadfael practically, “you’ll find a lantern, and on another nail there a leather bag with flint and steel and tinder in it. We may as well see each other. Take care with the sparks, you’ve nothing against our sheep, and fire would bring people running. There’s a shelf where the lantern will stand.”

“And you will make your bid to keep your forfeit life. I know!”

“I shall not move hand or foot,” said Cadfael patiently. “Why do you suppose I have made so certain the last work tonight should fall to me? Did I not say I was expecting you? I have no weapon, and if I had I would not use it. I finished with arms many years ago.”

There was a long pause, during which, though he felt that more was expected of him, he added nothing more. Then he heard the creek of the lantern as Meurig’s questing hand found it, the grating noise of the horn shutter being opened, the groping of fingers to find the shelf, and the sound of the lantern being set down there. Flint and steel tapped sharply several times, sparks flashed and vanished, and then a corner of charred cloth caught and held the tiny fire, and Meurig’s face hung ghostlike over it, blowing until the wick caught in its turn, and sent up a lengthening flame. Dim yellow light brought into being the feeding-rack, the trough, the forest of shadows in the network of beams above, and the placid, incurious ewes; and Cadfael and Meurig stood looking intently at each other.

“Now,” said Cadfael, “you can at least see to take what you came for.” And he sat down and settled himself solidly on a corner of the feeding-rack.

Meurig came towards him with long, deliberate strides through the straw-dust and chaff of the floor. His face was fixed and grey, his eyes sunken deep into his head and burning with frenzy and pain. So close that their knees touched, he advanced the knife slowly until the point pricked Cadfael’s throat; along eight inches of steel they eyed each other steadily.

“Are you not afraid of death?” asked Meurig, barely above a whisper.

“I’ve brushed elbows with him before. We respect each other. In any case there’s no evading him for ever, we all come to it, Meurig. Gervase Bonel … you … I. We have to die, every one of us, soon or late. But we do not have to kill. You and I both made a choice, you only a week or so ago, I when I lived by the sword. Here am I, as you willed it. Now take what you want of me.”

He did not take his eyes from Meurig’s eyes, but he saw at the edge of vision the tightening of the strong brown fingers and the bracing of the muscles in the wrist to strike home. But there was no other movement. All Meurig’s body seemed suddenly to writhe in an anguished attempt to thrust, and still he could not. He wrenched himself backward, and a muted animal moan came from his throat. He cast the knife out of his hand to whine and stick quivering in the beaten earth of the floor, and flung up both arms to clasp his head, as though all his strength of body and will could not contain or suppress the pain that filled him to overflowing. Then his knees gave under him, and he was crouched in a heap at Cadfael’s feet, his face buried in his arms against the hay-rack. Round yellow eyes, above placidly chewing muzzles, looked on in detached surprise at the strangeness of men.

Broken sounds came from Meurig’s buried mouth, muffled and sick with despair “Oh, God, that I could so face my death … for I owe it, I owe it, and dare not pay! If I were clean … if I were only clean again …”And in a great groan he said: “Oh, Mallilie …”

“Yes,” said Cadfael softly. “A very fair place. Yet there is a world outside it.”

“Not for me, not for me … I am forfeit. Give me up! Help me … help me to be fit to die …” He raised himself suddenly, and looked up at Cadfael, clutching with one hand at the skirts of his habit. “Brother, those things you said of me … never meant to be a murderer, you said …”

“Have I not proved it?” said Cadfael. “I live, and it was not fear that stayed your hand.”

“Mere chance that led me, you said, and that because of an act of simple kindness… . Great pity it is, you said! Pity … Did you mean all those things, brother? Is there pity?”

“I meant them,” said Cadfael, “every word. Pity, indeed, that ever you went so far aside from your own nature, and poisoned yourself as surely as you poisoned your father. Tell me, Meurig, In these last days you have not been back to your grandfather’s house, or had any word from him?”

“No,” said Meurig, very low, and shuddered at the thought of the upright old man now utterly bereft.

“Then you do not know that Edwin was fetched away from there by the sheriff’s men, and is now in prison in Shrewsbury.”

No, he had not known. He looked up aghast, seeing the implication, and shook with the fervour of his denial: “No, that I swear I did not do. I was tempted… . I could not prevent that they cast the blame on him, but I did not betray him … I sent him here, I would have seen that he got clear… . I know it was not enough, but oh, this at least don’t lay to my charge! God knows I liked the boy well.”

“I also know it,” said Cadfael, “and know it was not you who sent them to take him. No one wittingly betrayed him. None the less, he was taken. Tomorrow will see him free again. Take that for one thing set right, where many are past righting.”

Meurig laid his clasped hands, white-knuckled with tension, on Cadfael’s knees, and lifted a tormented face into the soft light of the lantern. “Brother, you have been conscience to other men in your time, for God’s sake do as much by me, for I am sick, I am maimed, I am not my own. You said … great pity! Hear me all my evil!”

“Child,” said Cadfael, shaken, and laid his own hand over the stony fists that felt chill as ice, “I am not a priest, I cannot give absolution, I cannot appoint penance …”

“Ah, but you can, you can, none but you, who found out the worst of me! Hear me my confession, and I shall be better prepared, and then deliver me to my penalty, and I will not complain.”

“Speak, then, if it gives you ease,” said Cadfael heavily, and kept his hand closed over Meurig’s as the story spilled out in broken gouts of words, like blood from a wound: how he had gone to the infirmary with no ill thought, to pleasure an old man, and learned by pure chance of the properties of the oil he was using for its true purpose, and how it could be put to a very different use. Only then had the seed been planted in his mind. He had a few weeks, perhaps, of grace before Mallilie was lost to him forever, and here was a means of preventing the loss.

“And it grew in me, the thought that it would not be a hard thing to do … and the second time I went there I took the vial with me, and filled it. But it was still only a mad dream … Yet I carried it with me, that last day, and I told myself it would be easy to put in his mead, or mull wine for him… . I might never have done it, only willed it, though that is sin enough. But when I came to the house, they were all in the inner room together, and I heard Aldith saying how the prior had sent a dish from his own table, a dainty to please my father. It was there simmering on the hob, a spoon in it … The thing was done almost before I knew I meant to do it … And then I heard Aelfric and Aldith coming back from the table, and I had no time for more than to step quickly outside the door again, as if I had just opened it, and I was scraping my shoes clean to come in when they came into the kitchen… . What could they think but that I had only just come? A score of times in the next hour, God knows how wildly, I wished it undone, but such things cannot be undone, and I am damned… . What could I do but go forward, when there was no going back?”

What, indeed, short of what he was doing now, and this had been forced on him. Yet it was not to kill that he had flown like a homing bird to this meeting, whatever he himself had believed.

“So I went on. I fought for the fruit of my sin, for Mallilie, as best I could. I never truly hated my father, but Mallilie I truly loved, and it was mine, mine … if only I could have come by it cleanly! But there is justice, and I have lost, and I make no complaint. Now deliver me up, and let me pay for his death with mine, as is due. I will go with you willingly, if you will wish me peace.”

He laid his head on Cadfael’s steadying hand with a great sigh, and fell silent; and after a long moment Cadfael laid his other hand on the thick dark hair, and held him so. Priest he might not be, and absolution he could not give, yet here he was in the awful situation of being both judge and confessor. Poison is the meanest of killings, the steel he could respect. And yet … Was not Meurig also a man gravely wronged? Nature had meant him to be amiable, kindly, unembittered, circumstances had so deformed him that he turned against his nature once, and fatally, and he was all too well aware of his mortal sickness. Surely one death was enough, what profit in a second? God knew other ways of balancing the scale.

“You asked your penance of me,” said Cadfael at last. “Do you still ask it? And will you bear it and keep faith, no matter how terrible it may be?”

The heavy head stirred on his knee. “I will,” said Meurig in a whisper, “and be grateful.”

“You want no easy penalty?”

“I want all my due. How else can I find peace?”

“Very well, you have pledged yourself. Meurig, you came for my life, but when it came to the stroke, you could not take it. Now you lay your life in my hands, and I find that I cannot take it, either, that I should be wrong to take it. What benefit to the world would your blood be? But your hands, your strength, your will, that virtue you still have within you, these may yet be of the greatest profit. You want to pay in full. Pay, then! Yours is a lifelong penance, Meurig, I rule that you shall live out your life—and may it be long!—and pay back all your debts by having regard to those who inhabit this world with you. The tale of your good may yet outweigh a thousand times the tale of your evil. This is the penance I lay on you.”

Meurig stirred slowly, and raised a dazed and wondering face, neither relieved nor glad, only utterly bewildered. “You mean it? This is what I must do?”

“This is what you must do. Live, amend, in your dealings with sinners remember your own frailty, and in your dealings with the innocent, respect and use your own strength in their service. Do as well as you can, and leave the rest to God, and how much more can saints do?”

“They will be hunting for me,” said Meurig, still doubting and marvelling. “You will not hold that I’ve failed you if they take and hang me?”

“They will not take you. By tomorrow you will be well away from here. There is a horse in the stable next to the barn, the horse I rode today. Horses in these parts can very easily be stolen, it’s an old Welsh game, as I know. But this one will not be stolen. I give it, and I will be answerable. There is a whole world to reach on horseback, where a true penitent can make his way step by step through a long life towards grace. Were I you, I should cross the hills as far west as you may before daylight, and then bear north into Gwynedd, where you are not known. But you know these hills better than I.”

“I know them well,” said Meurig, and now his face had lost its anguish in open and childlike wonder. “And this is all? All you ask of me?”

“You will find it heavy enough,” said Brother Cadfael. “But yes, there is one thing more. When you are well clear, make your confession to a priest, ask him to write it down and have it sent to the sheriff at Shrewsbury. What has passed today in Llansilin will release Edwin, but I would not have any doubt or shadow left upon him when you are gone.”

“Neither would I,” said Meurig. “It shall be done.”

“Come, then, you have a long pilgrimage to go. Take up your knife again.” And he smiled. “You will need it to cut your bread and hunt your meat.”

It was ending strangely. Meurig rose like one in a dream, both spent and renewed, as though some rainfall from heaven had washed him out of his agony and out of his wits, to revive, a man half-drowned and wholly transformed. Cadfael had to lead him by the hand, once they had put out the lantern. Outside, the night was very still and starlit, on the edge of frost. In the stable Cadfael himself saddled the horse.

“Rest him when you safely may. He’s carried me today, but that was no great journey. I’d give you the mule, for he’s fresh, but he’d be slower, and more questionable under a Welshman. There, mount and go. Go with God!”

Meurig shivered at that, but the pale, fixed brightness of his face did not change. With a foot already in the stirrup, he said with sudden inexpressibly grave and burdened humility:

“Give me your blessing! For I am bound by you while I live.”

He was gone, up the slope above the folds, by ways he knew better than did the man who had set him free to ride them, back into the world of the living. Cadfael looked after him for only a moment, before turning down towards the house. He thought as he went: Well, if I have loosed you on the world unchanged and perilous, if this cleansing wears off once you are safe, then on me be the guilt. But he found he could not feel greatly afraid; the more he reviewed the course he had taken, the more profound became his soul’s tranquillity.

“You were a long time, brother,” said Simon, welcoming him with pleasure into the evening warmth within the house. “We were wondering about you.”

“I was tempted to stay and meditate among the ewes,” said Brother Cadfael. “They are so calming. And it is a beautiful night.”