Chapter Nine
Father Elias, having visited all his fellow-priests within the town, came down to the abbey next morning, and appealed at chapter as to whether any of the brothers who were also priests had by any chance taken confession from the clerk Aldwin before the services of Saint Winifred’s translation. The eve of a festival day must have found plenty of work for the confessors, since it was natural for any worshippers who had neglected their spiritual condition for some time to find their consciences pricking them into the confessional, to come purged and refreshed to the celebrations of the day, and rest content in their renewed virtue and peace of mind. If any cleric here had been approached by Aldwin, he would be able to declare it. But no one had. It ended with Father Elias scurrying out of the chapter house disappointed and distrait, shaking his shaggy grey head and trailing the wide, frayed sleeves of his gown like a small, disheveled bird.
Brother Cadfael went out from chapter to his work in the garden with the rear view of that shabby little figure still before his mind’s eye. A stickler was Father Elias; he would not easily give up. Somewhere, somehow, he must find a reason to convince himself that Aldwin had died in a state of grace, and see to it that his soul had all the consolation and assistance the rites of the Church could provide. But it seemed he had already tried every cleric in the town and the Foregate, and so far fruitlessly. And he was not a man who could simply shut his eyes and pretend that all was well. His conscience had a flinty streak, and would pay him out with a vengeance if he lowered his standards without due grounds for clemency. Cadfael felt a dual sympathy for perfectionist priest and backsliding parishioner. At this moment their case seemed to him to take precedence even over Elave’s plight. Elave was safe enough now until Bishop Roger de Clinton declared his will towards him. If he could not get out, neither could any zealot get in, to break his head again. His wounds were healing and his bruises fading, and Brother Anselm, precentor and librarian, had given him the first volume of Saint Augustine’s Confessions to pass the time away. So that he might discover, said Anselm, that Augustine did write on other themes besides predestination, reprobation, and sin.
Anselm was ten years younger than Cadfael, a lean, active, gifted soul with a grain of irrepressible mischief still alive if usually dormant within him. Cadfael had suggested that he should rather give Elave Augustine’s Against Fortunatus to read. There he might find, written some years before the saint’s more orthodox outpourings, in one of his periods of sharply changing belief: “There is no sin unless through a man’s own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own will.” Let Elave commit that to memory, and he could quote it in his own defense. More than likely Anselm would take him at his word, and feed the suspect all manner of quotations supportive to his cause. It was a game any well-read student of the early fathers could play, and Anselm better than most.
So for some days at least, until Serlo could reach his bishop in Coventry and return with his response, Elave was safe enough, and could do with the time to get over his rough handling. But Aldwin, dead and in need of burial, could not wait.
Cadfael could not but wonder how things were going with Hugh’s enquiries within the town. He had seen nothing of him since the morning of the previous day, and the revelation of murder had removed the center of the action from the abbey into the wide and populated field of the secular world. Even if the original root of the case was within these walls, in the cloudy issue of heresy, and the obvious suspect here in close keeping, there outside the walls the last hours of Aldwin’s life remained to be filled in, and there were hundreds of men in town and Foregate who had known him, who might have old grudges or new complaints against him, nothing whatever to do with the charges against Elave. And there were frailties in the case against Elave which Hugh had seen for himself, and would not lightly discard in favor of the easy answer. No, Aldwin was the more urgent priority.
After dinner, in the half hour or so allowed for rest, Cadfael went into the church, into the grateful stony coolness, and stood for some minutes silent before Saint Winifred’s altar. Of late, if he felt the need to speak to her in actual words at all, he found himself addressing her in Welsh, but usually he relied on her to know all the preoccupations of his mind without words. Doubtful, in any case, if the young and beautiful Welsh girl of her first brief life had known any English or Latin, or even been able to read and write her own language, though the stately prioress of her second life, pilgrim to Rome and head of a community of holy women, must have had time to learn and study to her heart’s content. But it was as the girl that Cadfael always imagined her. A girl whose beauty was legendary, and caused her to be coveted by princes.
Before he left her, though he was not conscious of having expressed any need or request, he felt the quietude and certainty the thought of her always gave him. He circled the parish altar into the nave, and there was Father Boniface just filling the little altar lamp and straightening the candles in their holders. Cadfael stopped to pass the time of day.
“You’ll have had Father Elias from Saint Alkmund’s after you this morning, I daresay? He came to us at chapter on the same errand. A sad business, this of Aldwin’s death.”
Father Boniface nodded his solemn dark head, and wiped oily fingers, boylike, in the skirt of his gown. He was thin but wiry, and almost as taciturn as his verger, but that deferent shyness was gradually easing as he worked his way into the confidence of his flock.
“Yes, he came to me after Prime. I never knew this Aldwin, living. I wish I could have helped him, dead, but to my knowledge I never saw him until the wool merchant’s funeral, the day before the festival. Certainly he never came to me for confession.”
“Nor to any of those within here,” said Cadfael. “Nor in the town, for Elias asked there first. And your parish is a wide one. Poor Father Elias would have to walk a few miles to find the next priest. And if Aldwin never knocked on the door of any of his own neighbors, I doubt if he made a long journey to seek his penance elsewhere.”
“True, I have occasion to walk a few miles myself in the way of duty,” agreed Boniface, with pride rather than regret in the breadth of his cure. “Not that I grudge it, God knows! Night or day, it’s a joy to know that from the farthest hamlet they can call me when they need me, and know that I’ll come. Sometimes I question my fortune, knowing it so little deserved. Only two days ago I was called away to Betton, and missed all but the morning Mass. I was sorry it should be that day, but no choice, there was a man dying, or he and all his kin thought he was dying. It was worth the journey, for he took the turn for life, and I stayed until we were sure. It was getting dusk when I got back - ” He broke off suddenly, open-mouthed and round-eyed. “So it was!” he said slowly. “And I never thought to say!”
“What is it?” asked Cadfael curiously. It had been a long and confiding speech for this quiet, reticent young man, and this sudden halt was almost startling. “What have you thought of now?”
“Why, that there was one more priest here then who is not here now. Father Elias will not know. I had a visitor came for the day of her translation, one who was my fellow-student, and ordained only a month ago. He came on the eve of the festival, early in the afternoon, and stayed through the next day, and when I was called away that morning after Mass I left him here to take part in all the offices in my place. I knew that would please him. He stayed until I came back, but that was when it was growing dark, and he was in haste then to be on his way home. It’s only a short while, from past noon one day to nightfall the next, but how if he did have a penitent come asking?”