The young man had straightened up wincingly from stooping into the weight of the cart, and looked round him for the nearest authority. The porter came towards him, circling the cart and coffin with the circumspect bearing of one accustomed to everything, and not to be put out of countenance even by the apparition of death intruding like a morality play into the preparations for a festival. What passed between them was too soft, too earnest and private to be heard beyond the two of them, but it seemed that the stranger was asking lodging for both himself and his charge. His bearing was reverent and courteous, as was due in these surroundings, but also quietly confident. He turned his head and gestured with his hand towards the church. A young fellow of perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years, in clothes sun-faded and very dusty from the roads. Above average tall, thin and sinewy, large-boned and broad-shouldered, with a tangle of straw-colored hair somewhat fairer than the deep tan of his forehead and cheeks, and a good, bold prow of a nose, thin and straight. A proud face, somewhat drawn with effort just now, and earnest with the gravity of his errand, but by nature, Cadfael thought, studying him across the width of the court, it should be an open, hopeful, good-natured countenance, ready to smile, and a wide-lipped mouth ready to confide at the first friendly invitation.
“One of your flock from here in the Foregate?” asked Hugh, viewing him with interest. “But no, by the look of him he’s been on the roads from somewhere a good deal more distant.”
“But for all that,” said Cadfael, shaking his head over an elusive likeness, “it seems to me I’ve seen that face before, somewhere, at some time. Or else he reminds me of some other lad I’ve known.”
“The lads you’ve known in your time could come from half the world over. Well, you’ll find out, all in good time,” said Hugh, “for it seems Brother Denis is giving his attention to the matter, and one of your youngsters is off into the cloister in haste to fetch somebody else.”
The somebody else proved to be no less than Prior Robert himself, with Brother Jerome trotting dutifully at his heels. The length of Robert’s stride and the shortness of Jerome’s legs turned what should have been a busy, self-important bustle into a hasty shamble, but it would always get Jerome in time to any spot where there was something happening that might provide him with occasion for curiosity, censure, or sanctimony.
“Your strange visitors are acceptable,” observed Hugh, seeing how the conference was proceeding, “if only on probation. I suppose he could hardly turn away a dead man.”
“The fellow with the cart I do know,” said Cadfael. “He comes from close under the Wrekin. I’ve seen him bringing goods in to market. Cart and man must be hired for this delivery. But the other has come from far beyond that, for sure. Now I wonder how far he’s brought his charge, hiring help along the way. And whether he’s reached the end of his journey here.”
It was by no means certain that Prior Robert welcomed the sudden appearance of a coffin in the center of a court thronged with pilgrims hoping for good omens and pleasurable excitement. In fact, Prior Robert never showed an approving face to anything that in any way disrupted the smooth and orthodox course of events within the enclave. But clearly he could find no reason to refuse whatever was being requested here with due deference. If only on probation, as Hugh had said, they were to be permitted to remain. Jerome ran officiously to round up four sturdy brothers and novices, to hoist the coffin from the cart and bear it away towards the cloister, bound, no doubt, for the mortuary chapel within the church. The young man lifted the modest roll of his possessions, and trudged somewhat wearily along behind the cortege, to vanish into the south archway of the cloister. He walked as if he were stiff and footsore, but bore himself erect and steadily, with no studied show of grief, though his face remained thoughtfully solemn, preoccupied rather with what went on in his own mind than what those around him here might be thinking.
Brother Denis came down the steps from the guest hall and walked briskly down the court after this funereal procession, presumably to retrieve and house with decent friendliness the living guest. The onlookers stared after for a moment, and then returned to their interrupted occasions, and the hum and motion of activity resumed, at first softly and hesitantly, but very soon more vociferously than before, since they had now something pleasurably strange to talk about, once the moment of awe was over.
Hugh and Cadfael crossed the court to the gatehouse in considering silence. The carter had taken the shafts of his lightened cart and hauled it back through the arch of the gatehouse into the Foregate. Evidently he had been paid for his trouble in advance, and was content with his hire.
“It seems that one’s job is done,” said Hugh, watching him turn into the street. “No doubt you’ll soon hear what’s afoot from Brother Denis.”
His horse, the tall grey he perversely favored, was tethered at the gatehouse; no great beauty in looks or temperament, hard-mouthed, strong-willed, and obstinate, with a profound contempt for all humanity except his master, and nothing more than the tolerant respect of an equal even for Hugh.
“Come up soon,” said Hugh with his toe in the stirrup and the reins gathered in his hand, “and bring me all the gossip. Who knows, in a day or so you may be able to fit a name to the face.”
Chapter Two
Cadfael came out from the refectory after supper into a light, warm evening, radiant with reflected brightness from a rosy sunset. The readings during the meal, probably chosen by Prior Robert in compliment to Canon Gerbert, had been from the writings of Saint Augustine, of whom Cadfael was not as fond as he might have been. There is a certain unbending rigidity about Augustine that offers little compassion to anyone with whom he disagrees. Cadfael was never going to surrender his private reservations about any reputed saint who could describe humankind as a mass of corruption and sin proceeding inevitably towards death, or one who could look upon the world, for all its imperfections, and find it irredeemably evil. In this glowing evening light Cadfael looked upon the world, from the roses in the garden to the wrought stones of the cloister wails, and found it unquestionably beautiful. Nor could he accept that the number of those predestined to salvation was fixed, limited and immutable, as Augustine proclaimed, nor indeed that the fate of any man was sealed and hopeless from his birth, or why not throw away all regard for others and rob and murder and lay waste, and indulge every anarchic appetite in this world, having nothing beyond to look forward to?
In this undisciplined mood Cadfael proceeded to the infirmary, instead of to Collations, where the pursuit of Saint Augustine’s ferocious righteousness would certainly continue. Much better to go and check the contents of Brother Edmund’s medicine cupboard, and sit and gossip a little while with the few old brothers now too feeble to play a full part in the order of the monastic day.
Edmund, a child of the cloister from his fourth year and meticulous in observation, had gone dutifully to the chapter house to listen to Jerome’s reading. He came back to make his nightly rounds just as Cadfael was closing the doors of the medicine cupboard, and memorizing with silently moving lips the three items that needed replenishment.
“So this is where you got to,” said Edmund, unsurprised. “That’s fortunate, for I’ve brought with me someone who needs to borrow a sharp eye and a steady hand. I was going to try it myself, but your eyes are better than mine.”
Cadfael turned to see who this late evening patient might be. The light within there was none too good, and the man who came in on Edmund’s heels was hesitant in entering, and hung back shyly in the doorway. Young, thin, and about Edmund’s own height, which was above the average.