“Do so, with my goodwill,” said the abbot.
In his small stone penal cell, with nothing in it but a hard bed, a stool, a cross hung on the wall, and the necessary stone vessel for the prisoner’s bodily needs, Brother Meriet looked curiously more open, easy and content than Cadfael had yet seen him. Alone, unobserved and in the dark, at least he was freed from the necessity of watching his every word and motion, and fending off all such as came too near. When the door was suddenly unlocked, and someone came in with a tiny lamp in hand, he certainly stiffened for a moment, and reared his head from his folded arms to stare; and Cadfael took it as a compliment and an encouragement that on recognising him the young man just as spontaneously sighed, softened, and laid his cheek back on his forearms, though in such a way that he could watch the newcomer. He was lying on his belly on the pallet, shirtless, his habit stripped down to the waist to leave his weals open to the air. He was defiantly calm, for his blood was still up. If he had confessed to all that was charged against him, in perfect honesty, he had regretted nothing.
“What do they want of me now?” he demanded directly, but without noticeable apprehension.
“Nothing. Lie still, and let me put this lamp somewhere steady. There, you hear? We’re locked in together. I shall have to hammer at the door before you’ll be rid of me again.” Cadfael set his light on the bracket below the cross, where it would shine upon the bed. “I’ve brought what will help you to a night’s sleep, within and without. If you choose to trust my medicines? There’s a draught can dull your pain and put you to sleep, if you want it?”
“I don’t,” said Meriet flatly, and lay watchful with his chin on his folded arms. His body was brown and lissome and sturdy, the bluish welts on his back were not too gross a disfigurement. Some lay servant had held his hand; perhaps he himself had no great love for Brother Jerome. “I want wakeful. This is quiet here.”
“Then at least keep still and let me salve this copper hide of yours. I told you he would have it!” Cadfael sat down on the edge of the narrow pallet, opened his jar, and began to anoint the slender shoulders that rippled and twitched to his touch. “Fool boy,” he said chidingly, “you could have spared yourself all.”
“Oh, that!” said Meriet indifferently, nevertheless passive under the soothing fingers. “I’ve had worse,” he said, lax and easy on his spread arms. “My father, if he was roused, could teach them something here.”
“He failed to teach you much sense, at any rate. Though I won’t say,” admitted Cadfael generously, “that I haven’t sometimes wanted to strangle Brother Jerome myself. But on the other hand, the man was only doing his duty, if in a heavy-handed fashion. He is a confessor to the novices, of whom I hear—can I believe it?—you are one. And if you do so aspire, you are held to be renouncing all ado with women, my friend, and all concern with personal property. Do him justice he had grounds for complaint of you.”
“He had no grounds for stealing from me,” flared Meriet hotly.
“He had a right to confiscate what is forbidden here.”
“I still call it stealing. And he had no right to destroy it before my eyes—nor to speak as though women were unclean!”
“Well, if you’ve paid for your offences, so has he for his,” said Cadfael tolerantly. “He has a sore throat will keep him quiet for a week yet, and for a man who likes the sound of his own sermons that’s no mean revenge. But as for you, lad, you’ve a long way to go before you’ll ever make a monk, and if you mean to go through with it, you’d better spend your penance here doing some hard thinking.”
“Another sermon?” said Meriet into his crossed arms, and for the first time there was almost a smile in his voice, if a rueful one.
“A word to the wise.”
That caused him to check and hold his breath, lying utterly still for one moment, before he turned his head to bring one glittering, anxious eye to bear on Cadfael’s face. The dark-brown hair coiled and curled agreeably in the nape of his summer-browned neck, and the neck itself had still the elegant, tender shaping of boyhood. Vulnerable still to all manner of wounds, on his own behalf, perhaps, but certainly on behalf of others all too fiercely loved. The girl with the red-gold hair?
“They have not said anything?” demanded Meriet, tense with dismay. “They don’t mean to cast me out? He wouldn’t do that—the abbot? He would have told me openly!” He turned with a fierce, lithe movement, drawing up his legs and rising on one hip, to seize Cadfael urgently by the wrist and stare into his eyes. “What is it you know? What does he mean to do with me? I can’t, I won’t, give up now.”
“You’ve put your own vocation in doubt,” said Cadfael bluntly, “no other has had any hand in it. If it had rested with me, I’d have clapped your pretty trophy back in your hand, and told you to be off out of here, and find either her or another as like her as one girl is to another equally young and fair, and stop plaguing us who ask nothing more than a quiet life. But if you still want to throw your natural bent out of door, you have that chance. Either bend your stiff neck, or rear it, and be off!”
There was more to it than that, and he knew it. The boy sat bolt unright, careless of his half-nakedness in a cell stony and chill, and held him by the wrist with strong, urgent fingers, staring earnestly into his eyes, probing beyond into his mind, and not afraid of him, or even wary.
“I will bend it,” he said. “You doubt if I can, but I can, I will. Brother Cadfael, if you have the abbot’s ear, help me, tell him I have not changed, tell him I do want to be received. Say I will wait, if I must, and learn and be patient, but I will deserve! In the end he shall not be able to complain of me. Say so to him! He won’t reject me.”
“And the gold-haired girl?” said Cadfael, purposely brutal.
Meriet wrenched himself away and flung himself down again on his breast. “She is spoken for,” he said no less roughly, and would not say one word more of her.
“There are others,” said Cadfael. “Take thought now or never. Let me tell you, child, as one old enough to have a son past your age, and with a few regrets in his own life, if he had time to brood on them—there’s many a young man has got his heart’s dearest wish, only to curse the day he ever wished for it. By the grace and good sense of our abbot, you will have time to make certain before you’re bound past freeing. Make good use of your time, for it won’t return once you’re pledged.”
A pity, in a way, to frighten a young creature so, when he was already torn many ways, but he had ten days and nights of solitude before him now, a low diet, and time both for prayer and thought. Being alone would not oppress him, only the pressure of uncongenial numbers around him had done that. Here he would sleep without dreams, not starting up to cry out in the night. Or if he did, there would be no one to hear him and add to his trouble.
“I’ll come and bring the salve in the morning,” said Cadfael, taking up his lamp. “No, wait!” He set it down again. “If you lie so, you’ll be cold in the night. Put on your shirt, the linen won’t trouble you too much, and you can bear the brychan over it.”
“I’m well enough,” said Meriet, submitting almost shamefacedly, and subsiding with a sigh into his folded arms again. “I… I do thank you—brother!” he ended as an awkward afterthought, and very dubiously, as if the form of address did no justice to what was in his mind, though he knew it to be the approved one here.
“That came out of you doubtfully,” remarked Cadfael judicially, “like biting on a sore tooth. There are other relationships. Are you still sure it’s a brother you want to be?”
“I must,” blurted Meriet, and turned his face morosely away.