The Raven in the Foregate

Chapter Ten

CADFAEL HAD BEEN BACK IN HIS WORKSHOP NO MORE THAN HALF AN HOUR, and the light was only just beginning to dim towards the Vesper office, when Hugh came seeking him, as he usually did if shire affairs brought him to confer with the abbot. He brought in with him a gust of moist, chill air and the quiver of a rising breeze that might bring more snow, now that the hard frost had eased, or might blow away the heavy cloud and clear the sky for the morrow.

“I’ve been with Father Abbot,” said Hugh, and sat down on the familiar bench by the wall and spread his feet appreciatively towards the brazier. “Tomorrow, I hear, you’re burying the priest. Cynric has the grave dug for him so deep you’d think he feared the man might break out of it without six feet of earth on top of him to hold him down. Well, he’s going to his funeral unavenged, for we’re no nearer knowing who killed him. You said from the first that the entire Foregate would turn blind, deaf and dumb. A man would think the whole parish had been depeopled on Christmas Eve, no one will admit to having been out of his own house but to hurry to church, and not a man of them set eyes on any other living being in the streets that night. It took a stranger to let fall even one little word of furtive comings and goings at an ungodly hour, and I place no great credence in that. And how have you been faring?”

Cadfael had been wondering the same thing in his own mind ever since leaving Diota, and could see no possibility of keeping back from Hugh what he had learned. He had not promised secrecy, only discretion, and he owed help to Hugh as surely as to the woman caught in the trap of her own devotion.

“Better, perhaps, than I deserve,” he said sombrely, and put aside the tray of tablets he had just set out to dry, and went to sit beside his friend. “If you had not come to me, Hugh, I should have had to come to you. Last night it was brought back to me what I had seen in Ailnoth’s possession that night, and had not found nor thought to look for again the next day, when we brought him back here dead. Two things, indeed, though the first I did not find myself, but got it from the little boys who went down hopefully to the pool on Christmas morning, thinking it might be frozen over. Wait a moment, I’ll bring both, and you shall hear.”

He brought them, and carried the lamp closer, to show the detail that might mean so much or so little.

“This cap the children found among the reeds of the shallows. You see how the stitches are started in the one seam, and the binding ripped loose. And this staff—this I found only this morning, almost opposite the place where we found Ailnoth.” He told that story simply and truthfully, but for omitting any mention of Ninian, though that, too, might have to come. “You see how the silver band is worn into a mere wafer from age, and crumpled at the edges, being so thin. This notch here…” He set a fingertip to the razor-sharp points. “From this I wormed out these!”

He had dabbed a tiny spot of grease into one of his clay saucers for selecting seed, and anchored the rescued hairs to the congealed fat, so that no chance draught should blow them away. In the close yellow light of the lamp they showed clearly. Cadfael drew out one of them to its full length.

“A metal edge fissured like this might pick up a stray hair almost anywhere,” said Hugh, but not with any great conviction.

“So it might, but here are five, captured at the same mis-stroke. Which makes this a different matter. Well?”

Hugh likewise laid a finger to the glistening threads and said deliberately: “A woman’s. Not young.”

“Whether you yet know it or no,” said Cadfael,”there are but two women in all this coil, and one of them is young, and will not be grey, please God, for many years yet.”

“I think,” said Hugh, eyeing him with a faint, wise smile, “you had better tell me. You were here from the beginning, I came late, and brought with me another matter warranted to confuse the first. I am not interested in preventing young Bachiler from making clean away to Gloucester to fight for his Empress, if he has nothing on his conscience that chances to be more particularly my business. But I am interested in burying the ugly fact of murder along with Ailnoth tomorrow, if by any means I can. I want the town and the Foregate going about their day’s work with a quiet mind, and the way cleared for another priest, and let’s hope one easier to live with. Now, what I make of these hairs is that they came from the head of Dame Diota Hammet. I have not even seen the woman in a good light, to know if this colouring is hers, but even there indoors the bruise on her brow was plain to be seen. She had a fall on the icy step—so I had been told, and so she told me. I think you are saying she came by that injury in a very different manner.”

“She came by it,” said Cadfael, “by the mill that night, when she followed the priest in desperation, to plead with him to let well alone and turn a blind eye to the boy’s deception, instead of confronting him like an avenging demon and fetching your sergeants down on him to throw him into prison. She was Ninian’s nurse, she would dare almost anything for his sake. She clung about Ailnoth’s skirts and begged him to let be, and because he could not shake her off, he clubbed this staff of his and struck her on the head, and would have struck again if she had not loosed him and scrambled away half-stunned, and run for her life back to the house.”

He told the whole of it as he had had it from Diota herself, and Hugh listened with a grave face but the hint of the smile lingering thoughtfully in his eyes. “You believe this,” he said at the end of it; not a question, but a fact, and relevant to his own thinking.

“I do believe it. Entirely.”

“And she can add nothing more, to point us to any other person. Or would she, even if she could?” wondered Hugh. “She may very well feel with the Foregate, and prefer to keep her own counsel.”

“So she might, I won’t deny, but for all that, I think she knows no more. She ran from him dazed and in terror. I think there’s no more to be got from her.”

“Nor from your boy Benet?” said Hugh slyly, and laughed at seeing Cadfael turn a sharp glance on him and bridle for a moment. “Oh, come now, I do accept that it was not you who warned the boy to make himself scarce when Giffard brought the law down on him. But only because someone else had already spared you the trouble. You were very well aware that he was gone, when you so helpfully led us all round the garden here hunting for him. I’ll even believe that you had seen him here not half an hour before. You have a way of telling simple truths which is anything but simple. And when did you ever have a young fellow in trouble under your eye, and not wind your way into his confidence? Of course he’ll have opened his mind to you. I daresay you know where he is this very moment. Though I’m not asking!” he added hastily.

“No,” said Cadfael, well satisfied with the way that was phrased, “no, that I don’t know, so you may ask, for I can’t tell you.”

“Having gone to some trouble not to find out or be told,” agreed Hugh, grinning. “Well, I did tell you to keep him out of sight if you should happen on him. I might even turn a blind eye myself, once this other matter is cleared up.”

“As to that,” said Cadfael candidly, “he’s of the same mind as you, for until he knows that all’s made plain, and Dame Hammet safe and respected, he won’t budge. Much as he wants to get to honest service in Gloucester, here he stays while she’s in trouble. Which is only fair, seeing the risks she has taken for him. But once this is over, he’ll be away, out of your territory. And not alone!” said Cadfael, meeting Hugh’s quizzical glance with a complacent countenance. “Is it possible I still know something you do not know?”

Hugh furrowed his brow and considered this riddle at leisure. “Not Giffard, that’s certain! He could not get himself out of the trap fast enough. Two women in the affair, you said, one of them young… Do you tell me this young venturer has found himself a wife in these parts? Already? These imps of Anjou work briskly, I grant them that! Let’s see, then…” He pondered, drumming his fingers thoughtfully on the rim of the clay saucer. “He had got himself into a monastery, where women do not abound, and I think you will have got your due of work out of him, he had small opportunity to go wooing among the townswomen. And as far as I know, he made no approach to any other of the local lordlings. I’m left with Giffard’s household, where the boy’s embassage may have been a none too well-kept secret, and where there’s a very pleasing young woman, of the Empress’s faction by blood, and bold and determined enough to choose differently from her step-father. Why, pure curiosity would have brought her to have a close look at such a paladin of romance, come in peril of his liberty and life from over the sea. Sanan Bernières? Is he truly wanting to take her with him?”

“Sanan it is. But I think it was she who made the decision. They have horses hidden away ready for departure, and she has her own small estate in jewels from her mother, easily carried. No doubt she’s provided him sword and dagger, too. She’ll not let him come before the Empress or Robert of Gloucester shabby, or without arms and horse.”

“They mean this earnestly?” wondered Hugh, frowning over a private doubt as to what his own course ought to be in such a case.

“They mean it. Both of them. I doubt if Giffard will mind much, though he’s done his duty by her fairly enough. It saves him a dowry. And the man’s had his losses, and is ambitious for his son.”

“And what,” demanded Hugh, “does she get out of it?”

“She gets her own way. She gets what she wants, and the man she’s chosen for herself. She gets Ninian. I think it may not be a bad bargain.”

Hugh sat silent for a brooding while, weighing the rights and wrongs of allowing such a flight, and recalling, perhaps, his own determined pursuit of Aline, not so long past. After a while his brow smoothed, and the private gleam of mischief quickened in his black eyes and twitched at the corner of his mouth. An eloquent eyebrow tilted above a covert glance at Cadfael.

“Well, I can as easily put a stop to that as cross the court here, yes, and bring the lad flying out of hiding into my arms, if I choose. You’ve taught me the way to flush him out of cover. All I need do is arrest Mistress Hammet, or even put it abroad that I’m about to, and he’ll come running to defend her. If I accused her of murder, as like as not he’d go so far as to confess to an act he never committed, to see her free and vindicated.”

“You could do it,” Cadfael admitted, without any great concern, “but you won’t. You are as convinced as I am that neither he nor Dame Diota ever laid hand on Ailnoth, and you certainly won’t pretend otherwise.”

“I might, however,” said Hugh, grinning, “try the same trick with another victim, and see if the man who did drown Ailnoth will be as honest and chivalrous as your lad would be. For I came here today with a small item of news you will not yet have heard, concerning one of Ailnoth’s flock who’ll be none the worse for a salutary shock. Who knows, there are plenty of rough and ready fellows who would kill lightly enough, but not stand by and let another man be hanged for it. It would be worth the trial, to hook a murderer, and even if it failed, the bait would come to no lasting harm.”

“I would not do it to a dog!” said Cadfael.

“Neither would I, dogs are honest, worthy creatures that fight fair and bear no grudges. When they set out to kill, they do it openly in broad daylight, and never care how many witnesses there may be. I have less scruples about some men. This one—ah, he’s none so bad, but a fright won’t hurt him, and may do a very sound turn for his poor drab of a wife.”

“You have lost me,” said Cadfael.

“Let me find you again! This morning Alan Herbard brought me a man he’d happened on by chance, a country kinsman of Erwald’s who came to spend Christmas with the provost and his family here in the Foregate. The man’s a shepherd by calling, and Erwald had a couple of ewes too early in lamb, penned in his shed out beyond the Gaye, and one of them threatened to cast her lamb too soon. So his cousin the shepherd went to the shed after Matins and Lauds on Christmas morning, to take a look at them, and brought off the threatened lamb safely, too, and was on his way back, just coming up from the Gaye and along to the Foregate at first light. And who do you suppose he saw sneaking very furtively up from the path to the mill and heading for home, but Jordan Achard, rumpled and bleared from sleep and hardly expecting to be seen at that hour. By chance one of the few people our man would have known by sight and name here, being the baker from whose oven he’d fetched his cousin’s bread the day before. It came out in purest gossip, in all innocence. The countryman knew Jordan’s reputation, and thought it a harmless joke to have seen him making for home from some strange bed.”

“Along that path?” said Cadfael, staring.

“Along that path. It was well trodden that night, it seems.”

“Ninian was the first,” said Cadfael slowly. “I never told you that, but he went there early, not being sure of Giffard. He took himself off smartly when he saw Ailnoth come raging to the meeting, and nothing more did he know of it until morning, when Diota came crying the priest was lost. She was there, as I’ve told you. I said there must be a third. But Jordan? And blundering homeward at first light? It’s hard to believe he had so much durable malice in him as to carry his grudge so long. A big, spoiled babe, I should have said, but for being an excellent baker.”

“So should I. But he was there, no question. Who’s abroad at first light on Christmas morning after a long night’s worship? Barring, of course, a shepherd anxious about an ailing ewe! That was very ill luck for Jordan. But it goes further, Cadfael. I went myself to talk to Jordan’s wife, while he was busy at his ovens. I told her what news we had of his moves, and made her understand it was proven beyond doubt where he’d been. I think she was ready to break like a branch over-fruited. Do you know how many children she’s borne, poor soul? Eleven, and only two of them living. And how he managed to engender so many, considering how seldom he lies at home, only the recording angel can tell. Not a bad-looking woman, if she were not so worn and harried. And still fond of him!”

“And this time,” said Cadfael, awed, “she really told you truth?”

“Of course she did, she was rightly afraid for him. Yes, she told truth. Yes, he was out all that night, it was nothing new. But not murdering anyone! No, on that she was insistent, he would not hurt a fly. He’s done his worst by a poor wretch of a wife, however! All he’d been about, she said, was bedding his latest fancy girl, and that was the bold little bitch who’s maidservant to the old woman who lives next to the miller, by the pool.”

“Ah, now that’s a far more likely thing,” said Cadfael, enlightened. “That rings true! We talked to her,” he recalled, fascinated, “next morning, when we were looking for Ailnoth.” A pretty slut of about eighteen, with a mane of dark hair and bold, inquisitive eyes, saying: “Not a soul that I know of came along here in the night, why should they?” No, she had not been lying. She had never thought of her covert lover as counting among the furtive visitors to the mill in the darkness. His errand was known, and if not innocent, entirely natural and harmless. She spoke according to her understanding.

“And she never said word of Jordan! No, why should she? She knew what he’d been up to, it was not about him you were asking. Oh, no, I’ve nothing against the girl. But I would stake much that she knows nothing of time, and has no notion exactly when he came or when he left, except by the beginning of light. He could have killed a man before ever he whispered at the deaf woman’s door, for ears that were forewarned and sharp enough.”

“I doubt if he did,” said Cadfael.

“So do I. But see how beautiful a case I can make against him! His wife has admitted that he went there. The shepherd saw him leaving. We know that Father Ailnoth went along that same path. After Mistress Hammet had fled from him, still he waited for his prey. And how if he saw a parishioner of his, already in dispute with him, and whose reputation he may well have heard before then, whispering his way furtively into a strange house, and being let in by a young woman? How then? His nose was expert at detecting sinners, he might well be distracted from his first purpose to flush out an evil-doer on the spot. The old woman is stone deaf. The girl, if she witnessed such a collision, and saw its end, would hold her tongue and tell a good story. In such a case, Cadfael, old friend, the priest might well have started too hot a hare, and got the worst of it, ending in the pool.”

“The blow to Ailnoth’s head,” said Cadfael, jolted, “was deep to the back. Men in conflict go face to face.”

“True, but one may easily be spun aside and involuntarily turn his back for an instant. But you know how the wound lay, and I know. But do the commons know?”

“And you will really do this?” marvelled Cadfael.

“Most publicly, my friend, I will do it. Tomorrow morning, at Ailnoth’s funeral—even those who most hated him will be there to make sure he’s safely underground, what better occasion could there be? If it bears fruit, then we have our answer, and the town can be at peace, once the turmoil’s over. If not, Jordan will be none the worse for a short-lived fright, and a few nights, perhaps,” pondered Hugh, gleaming mischief, “on a harder bed than usual with him, and lying alone. He may even learn that his own bed is the safest from this on.”

“And how if no man speaks up to deliver him,” said Cadfael with mild malice, “and the thing happened just as you have pictured it to me a minute ago, and Jordan really is your man? What then? If he keep his head and deny all, and the girl bears witness for him, you’ll have trailed your bait in vain.”

“Ah, you know the man better than that,” said Hugh, undisturbed. “Big-boned and hearty, but no great stiffening in his back. If he did it, deny it as loudly as he may when he’s first accused, a couple of nights on stone and he’ll be blabbing out everything, how he did no more than defend himself, how it was mere accident, and he could not haul the priest out of the water, and took fright, and dared not speak, knowing that the bad blood between them was common knowledge. A couple of nights in a cell won’t hurt him. And if he holds out stoutly any longer than that,” said Hugh, rising, “then he deserves to get away with it. The parish will think so.”

“You are a devious creature,” said Cadfael, in a tone uncertain between reproach and admiration. “I wonder why I bear with you?”

Hugh turned in the doorway to give him a flashing glance over his shoulder. “Like calling to like, I daresay!” he suggested, and went striding away along the gravel path, to disappear into the gathering dusk.

At Vespers the psalms had a penitential solemnity, and at Collations in the chapter house after supper the readings were also of a funereal colouring. The shadow of Father Ailnoth hung over the death of the year, and it seemed that the year of Our Lord 1142 would be born, not at midnight, but only after the burial service was over, and the grave filled in. The morrow might, according to the Church’s calendar, be the octave of the Nativity and the celebration of the Circumcision of Our Lord, but to the people of the Foregate it was rather the propitiatory office that would lift their incubus from them. A wretched departure for any man, let alone a priest.

“On the morrow,” said prior Robert, before dismissing them to the warming room for the blessed last half-hour of ease before Compline, “the funeral office for Father Ailnoth will follow immediately after the parish Mass, and I myself shall preside. But the homily will be delivered by Father Abbot, at his desire.” The prior’s incisive and well-modulated voice made this statement with a somewhat ambiguous emphasis, as if in doubt whether to welcome the abbot’s decision as a devout compliment to the dead, or to regret and perhaps even resent it as depriving him of an opportunity to exercise his own undoubted eloquence. “Matins and Lauds will be said according to the Office of the Dead.”

That meant that they would be long, and prudent brothers would be wise to make straight for their beds after Compline. Cadfael had already turfed down his brazier to burn slowly through the night, and keep lotions and medicines from freezing and bottles from bursting, should a hard frost set in again in the small hours. But the air was certainly not cold enough yet for frost, and he thought by the slight wind and lightly overcast sky that they would get through the night safely. He went thankfully to the warming room with his brothers, and settled down to half an hour of pleasant idleness.

This was the hour when even the taciturn relaxed into speech, and not even the prior frowned upon a degree of loquacity. And inevitably the subject of their exchanges tonight was the brief rule of Father Ailnoth, his grim death, and the coming ceremonial of his burial.

“So Father Abbot means to pronounce the eulogy himself, does he?” said Brother Anselm in Cadfael’s ear. “That will make interesting listening.” Anselm’s business was the music of the Divine Office, and he had not quite the same regard for the spoken word, but he appreciated its power and influence. “I had thought he’d be only too glad to leave it to Robert. Nil nisi bonum… Or do you suppose he looks upon it as a fitting penance for bringing the man here in the first place?”

“There may be something in that,” admitted Cadfael. “But more, I think, in a resolve that only truth shall be told. Robert would be carried away into paeans of praise. Radulfus intends clarity and honesty.”

“No easy task,” said Anselm. “Well for me no one expects words from me. There’s been no hint yet of who’s to follow in the parish. They’ll be praying for a man they know, whether he has any Latin or not. Even a man they did not much like would be welcomed, if he belongs here, and knows them. You can deal with the devil you know.”

“No harm in hoping for better than that,” said Cadfael, sighing. “A very ordinary man, more than a little lower than the angels, and well aware of his own shortcomings, would do very nicely for the Foregate. A pity these few weeks were wasted, wanting him.”

In the big stone hearth the fire of logs burned steadily, sinking down now into a hot core of ash, nicely timed to last the evening out, and die down with little waste when the bell rang for Compline. Faces pinched with cold and outdoor labour during the day flushed into rosy content, and chapped hands smoothed gratefully at the ointment doled out from Cadfael’s store. Friends foregathered in their own chosen groups, voices decorously low blended into a contented murmur like a hive of bees. Some of the healthy young, who had been out in the air most of the day, had much ado to keep their eyelids open in the warmth. Compline would be wisely brief tonight, as Matins would be long and sombre.

“Another year tomorrow,” said Brother Edmund the infirmarer, “and a new beginning.”

Some said: “Amen!” whether from habit or conviction, but Cadfael stuck fast at the word. ‘Amen’ belongs rather to an ending, a resolution, an acceptance into peace, and as yet they were within reach of none of these things.

A mile to the west of Cadfael’s bed in his narrow cell in the dortoir, Ninian lay in the plenteous hay of a well stocked loft, rolled in the cloak Sanan had brought for him, and with the heartening warmth of her still in his arms, though she had been gone two hours and more, in time to have her pony back in the town stable before her step-father returned from the night office at Saint Chad’s church. Ninian had been urgent with her that she should not venture alone by night, but as yet he had no authority over her, and she would do what she would do, having been born into the world apparently without fear. This byre and loft on the edge of the forest belonged to the Giffards, who had grazing along the open meadow that rimmed the trees, but the elderly hind who kept the cattle was from Sanan’s own household, and her willing and devoted slave. The two good horses she had bought and stabled here were his joy, and his privity to Sanan’s marriage plans would keep him proud and glad to the day of his death.

She had come, and she had lain with Ninian in the loft, the two rolled in one cloak and anchored with embracing arms, not yet for the body’s delight but rather for its survival and comfort. Snug like dormice in their winter sleep, alive and awake enough to be aware of profound pleasure, they had talked together almost an hour, and now that she had left him he hugged the remembrance of her and got warmth from it to keep him glowing through the night. Some day, some night, please God soon, she would not have to rise and leave him, he would not have to open reluctant arms and let her go, and the night would be perfect, a lovely, starry dark shot through with flame. But now he lay alone, and ached a little, and fretted about her, about the morrow, about his own debts, which seemed to him so inadequately paid.

With her hair adrift against his cheek, and her breath warm in the hollow of his throat, she had told him everything that had happened during these last days of the old year, how Brother Cadfael had found the ebony staff, how he had visited Diota and got her story out of her, how Father Ailnoth’s funeral was to take place next day after the parish Mass. And when he started up in anxiety for Diota, she had drawn him down to her again with her arms wreathed about his neck, and told him he need have no uneasiness, for she had promised to go with Diota to the priest’s funeral Mass, and take as great care of her as he himself could have done, and deal with any threat that might arise against her as valiantly as even he would have dealt with it. And she had forbidden him to stir from where he lay hidden until she should come to him again. But just as she was a lady not lightly to be disobeyed, so he was a man not lightly to be forbidden.

All the same, she had got a promise out of him that he would wait, as she insisted, unless something unforeseen should arise to make action imperative. And with that she had had to be content, and they had kissed on it, and put away present anxieties to whisper about the future. How many miles to the Welsh border? Ten? Certainly not much more. And Powys might be a wild land, but it had no quarrel with a soldier of the Empress more than with an officer of King Stephen, and would by instinct take the part of the hunted rather than the forces of English law. Moreover, Sanan had claims to a distant kinship there, through a Welsh grandmother, who had bequeathed her her un-English name. And should they encounter master-less men in the forests, Ninian was a good man of his hands, and there was a good sword and a long dagger hidden away in the hay, arms once carried by John Bernières at the siege of Shrewsbury, where he had met his death. They would do well enough on the journey, they would reach Gloucester and marry there, openly and honourably.

Except that they could not go, not yet, not until he was satisfied that all danger to Diota was past, and her living secure under the abbot’s protection. And now that he lay alone, Ninian could see no present end to that difficulty. The morrow would lay Ailnoth’s body to rest, but not the ugly shadow of his death. Even if the day passed without threat to Diota, that would not solve anything for the days yet to come.

Ninian lay wakeful until past midnight, fretting at the threads that would not untangle for him. Over the watershed between the old year and the new he drifted at last into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed of fighting his way through interminable forest tracks overgrown with bramble and thorn towards a Sanan forever withdrawn from him, and leaving behind for him only a sweet, aromatic scent of herbs.

Under the vast inverted keel of the choir, dimly lit for Matins, the solemn words of the Office of the Dead echoed and re-echoed as sounds never seemed to do by day, and the fine, sonorous voice of Brother Benedict the sacristan was magnified to fill the whole vault as he read the lessons in between the spoken psalms, and at every ending came the insistent versicle and response:

“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine…”

“Et lux perpetua luceat eis…”

And Brother Benedict, deep and splendid: “My soul is weary of my life… I will speak in the bitterness of my soul, I will say unto God, Do not condemn me, show me wherefore thou contendest with me…”

Not much comfort in the book of Job, thought Cadfael, listening intently in his stall, but a great deal of fine poetry—could not that in itself be a kind of comfort, after all? Making even discomfort, degradation and death, everything Job complained of, a magnificent defiance?

“O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou wouldst keep me secret until thy wrath be past…”

“My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me… I have made my bed in the darkness, I have said to corruption, Thou art my father, to the worm, Thou art my mother. And where is now my hope?”

“Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death… land without order, where even the light is as darkness…”

Yet in the end the entreaty that was itself a reassurance rose again, one step advanced beyond hope towards certainty:

“Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord…”

“And let light perpetual shine upon them.”

Stumbling up the night stairs back to bed after Lauds, half asleep, Cadfael still had that persistent appeal echoing in his mind, and by the time he slept again it had become almost a triumphant claim reaching up to take what it pleaded for. Rest eternal and light perpetual… even for Ailnoth.

Not only for Ailnoth, but for most of us, thought Cadfael, subsiding into sleep, it will be a long journey through purgatory, but no doubt even the most winding way gets there in the end.