Aware abruptly of what he had done, he held very still, not shifting a finger, above all not that index finger, as he opened his eyes, and looked where it pointed.
He was in the Apostle Matthew, Chapter 10, and the fervent finger, pressing so hard it dimpled the leaf, rested on Verse 21..
Cadfael had learned his Latin late, but this was simple enough: “... and the brother shall deliver up the brother to death.”
He stood gazing at the words, and at first they made no sense to him, apart from the ominous mention of death, and death of intent, not the quiet closing of a life like Donata’s passing. The brother shall deliver up the brother to death... It was a part of the prophecy of disintegration and chaos to be expected in the latter days; within that context it was but one detail in a large picture, but here it was all, it was an answer. To one long years a member of a brotherhood the wording was significant. Not a stranger, not an enemy, but a brother betraying a brother.
And suddenly he was visited by a brief vision of a young man hurrying down a narrow woodland path on a dark night, in drizzling rain, a dun-coloured cloak on him, its hood drawn close over his head. The shape passed by, and was no more than a shape, dimly descried under the faint tempering of the darkness the thread of sky made between the trees: but the shape was familiar, a hooded man shrouded in voluminous cloth. Or a cowled man in a black habit? In such conditions, where would the difference be?
It was as if a door had opened before him into a dim but positive light. A brother delivered to death... How if that were true, how if another victim had been intended, not Aldhelm? No one but Tutilo had had known cause to fear Aldhelm’s witness, and Tutilo, though abroad from the enclave that night, firmly denied any attack upon the young man, and small points were emerging to bear out his testimony. And Tutilo was indeed a Brother, and at large that night, and expected to be upon that path. And in build, and in age, yes, striding along to get out of the rain the sooner, he might well be close enough to the shape Aldhelm would present, to an assassin waiting.
A Brother delivered up to death indeed, if another man had not taken that road before him. But what of the other, that one who had planned the death? If the meaning of this oracle was as it seemed, the word “brother” had surely a double monastic significance. A Brother of this house, or at least of the Benedictine Order. Cadfael knew of none besides Tutilo who had been out of the enclave that night, but a man intending such a deed would hardly publish his intent or let anyone know of his absence. Someone within the Order who hated Tutilo enough to attempt his murder? Prior Robert might not have been very greatly grieved if Tutilo had been made to pay for his outrageous offence with his skin, but Prior Robert had been at dinner with the abbot and several other witnesses that night, and in any case could hardly be imagined as lurking in wet woods to strike down the delinquent with his own elegant hands. Herluin might hold it against the boy that he had disgraced Ramsey not so much by attempting theft, but by making a botch of it, but Herluin had also been of the abbot’s party. And yet the oracle had lodged in Cadfael’s mind like a thorn from the blackthorn bushes, and would not be dislodged.
He went to his stall with the words echoing and reechoing in his inward ear: “and the brother shall deliver up the brother to death”. It took all his willpower and concentration to banish the sound of it, and fix heart and soul on the celebration of the Mass.
Chapter Nine
AT THE END OF MASS, when the children had been dismissed to their schooling with Brother Paul, and only the choir monks were left as awed witnesses, Abbot Radulfus offered a brief and practical prayer for divine guidance, and approached Saint Winifred’s altar.
“With respect,” said Earl Robert, standing courteously aloof, and in the mildest and most reasonable of voices, “how should we determine who should be first to try the fates? Is there some rule we ought to follow?”
“We are here to ask,” said the abbot simply. “Let us ask from beginning to end, from contention to resolution, and advance no plea or reservation of our own. We agreed. Keep to that. Of the order of procedure I will ask, and beyond that I leave Shrewsbury’s cause to Prior Robert, who made the journey to Wales to find Saint Winifred, and brought her relics here. If any one of you has anything to object, name whom you will. Father Boniface would not refuse to do us this service, if you require it.”
No one had any observation to make, until Robert Bossu took it upon himself, very amiably, to give voice to a consent otherwise expressed in silence. “Father Abbot, do you proceed, and we are all content.”
Radulfus mounted the three shallow steps, and with both hands opened the Gospels, his eyes fixed above, upon the cross, so that he might not calculate where, on the exposed page, his finger should rest.
“Come close,” he said, “and confirm for yourselves that there is no deceit. See the words, that what I read aloud to you is what the sortes have sent me.”
Herluin without hesitation came hungrily to peer. Earl Robert stood tranquilly where he was, and bowed away the necessity for any such confirmation.
Abbot Radulfus looked down to where his index finger rested, and reported without emotion: “I am in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the twentieth chapter. And the line reads: “The last shall be first, and the first last.””.
No arguing with that, thought Cadfael, looking on with some anxiety from his retired place. If anything, it was rather suspicious that the first assay should produce an answer so apt; the prognostics of bishops were often known to be ambiguous in the extreme. Had this been anyone but Radulfus testing the waters, Radulfus in his inflexible uprightness, a man might almost have suspected... But that was to limit or doubt the range of the saint’s power. She who could call a lame youth to her and support him with her invisible grace while he laid down his crutches on the steps of her altar, why doubt that she could turn the leaves of a Gospel, and guide a faithful finger to the words her will required?
“It would seem,” said Earl Robert, after a moment of courteous silence in deference to any other who might wish to speak,”that as the last comer, this verdict sends me first into the lists. Is that your reading, Father?”
“The meaning seems plain enough,” said Radulfus; carefully he closed the Gospels, aligned the book scrupulously central upon the reliquary, and descended the steps to stand well aside. “Proceed, my lord.”
“God and Saint Winifred dispose!” said the earl, and mounted without haste, to stand for a moment motionless, before turning the book, with slow, hieratic gestures that could be clearly seen by all, upon its spine between his long, muscular hands, thumbs meeting to part the pages. Opening it fully, he flattened both palms for a moment upon the chosen pages, and then let his finger hover a moment again before touching. He had neither glanced down nor passed a fingertip over the edges of the leaves, to determine how far advanced in the book his page might be. There are ways of trying to manipulate even the sortes Biblicae, but he had meticulously and demonstratively avoided them. He never was in earnest, Cadfael reflected with certainty, and it would spoil his sport to use contrivance. His interest is in pricking Prior Robert and Sub-Prior Herluin into bristling at each other with wattles glowing scarlet and throats gobbling rage.
The earl read aloud, translating into the vernacular as fluently as any cleric: “ ‘Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me; and where I am, thither ye cannot come.’ “ He looked up, musing. “It is John, the seventh chapter and the fifty-fourth verse. Father Abbot, here is a strange saying, for she came to me when I was not seeking her at all, when I knew nothing of her. It was she found me. And here surely is a hard riddle to read, that where she is I cannot come, for here indeed she is, and here am I beside her. How do you decipher this?”