The Confession of Brother Haluin (14 page)

“I
understand your reasons very well,” said Haluin, opening his hollow eyes
challengingly wide, “but it would not be right to make them reasons for a
marriage, if the lady is unwilling. However hard your plight, you cannot
sacrifice the one to preserve the other.”

“You
mistake the case,” said Cenred without heat. “I love my young sister, I have
talked with her openly and fairly. She knows, she acknowledges, the enormity of
what threatened them both, the impossibility of such a love ever coming to
fruit. She wants this terrible knot severed, as truly as I do. She wants a
career of honor for Roscelin because she loves him, and rather than see it
blighted through her she agrees to seek refuge in marriage with another man.
This has been no forced surrender. And no wanton choice, either. I have done
the best I could for her, it is a match any family would welcome. Jean de
Perronet is a well-endowed, well-conditioned young man of good estate. He is
due here today, so you may see him for yourself. Helisende already knows him,
and likes if she cannot yet love him. That may come, for he is greatly drawn to
her. She has fully consented to this marriage. And de Perronet has this one
inestimable advantage,” he added grimly. “His seat is far away. He will take
her home to Buckingham, out of Roscelin’s sight. Out of sight, out of mind, I
will not say, but at least the lines of a remembered face may fade gradually
over the years, as even stubborn wounds heal.”

He
had become eloquent by reason of his own deep disquiet and distress, a good man
concerned for the best interests of all his household. He had not remarked, as
Cadfael did, the gradual blanching of Haluin’s thin face, the tight and painful
set of his lips, or the way his linked hands gripped together in the lap of his
habit until the bones shone white through the flesh. The words Cenred had not
deliberately chosen to pierce or move had their own inspired force to reopen
the old wound he had come all this way to try and heal. The lines of a
remembered face, surely somewhat dimmed in eighteen years, were burning into
vivid life again for him. And wounds that have not ceased to fester within
cannot heal until they have again broken out and been cleansed, by fire if need
be.

“And
you need not fear, and neither need I,” said Cenred, “that she will not be
cherished and held in high regard with de Perronet. Two years back he asked for
her, and for all she would have none of him or any suitor then, he has waited
his time.”

“Your
lady is in agreement in this matter?” asked Cadfael.

“We
have all three talked of it together. And we are agreed. Will you do it? I felt
it a kind of blessing on what we intend,” said Cenred simply, “when a priest
came to my door unsummoned on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming. Stay over
tomorrow, Brother—Father!—and marry them.”

Haluin
unlocked his contorted hands slowly, and drew breath like a man awaking in
pain. In low voice he said, “I will stay. And I will marry them.”

“I
trust I have done right,” said Haluin when they were back in their own
quarters. But it did not seem that he was asking to be confirmed in his
decision, rather setting it squarely before his own eyes as a responsibility he
had no intention of hedging or sharing. “I know only too well,” he said, “the
perils of proximity, and their case is more desperate than ever was mine.
Cadfael, I feel myself listening to echoes I thought had died out long ago. It
is all for a purpose. Nothing is without purpose. How if I fell only to show me
how far I was already fallen, and force me to make the assay to rise afresh?
How if I came to life again as a cripple, to make me undertake those journeys
of body and spirit that I dreaded when I was strong and whole? How if God put
it into my mind to go on pilgrimage in order to become some other needy soul’s
miracle? Were we led to this place?”

“Driven,
rather,” said Cadfael practically, remembering the blinding snow, and the small
beckoning spark of the torch in the drifting dark.

“It’s
true, to arrive on the eve of the bridegroom’s coming is very apt timing. I can
but go with the burden of the day,” said Haluin, “and hope to be led aright.
These second marriages in old age, Cadfael, have sorry tangles to answer for.
How can two babes playing together in the rushes of the floor know that they
are aunt and nephew, and fruit forbidden? A pity that love should be spent to no
end.”

“I
am not sure,” said Cadfael, “that love is ever spent for no end. Well, at least
now you can be still and rest for a day or so, and all the better for it. That,
at any rate, comes timely.”

And
that was plainly the best use Haluin could make of this halt on the way home,
since he had already tried himself very near the end of his endurance. Cadfael
left him in peace, and went out to take a daylight look at this manor of
Vivers. A cloudy day with a fitful wind, the air free of frost, and occasional
fine drifts of rain in the air, but none that lasted long.

He
walked the width of the enclave to the gate, to see the full extent of the
house. There were windows in the steep roof above the solar, probably two
retiring rooms were available there. Haluin and companion had been accommodated
considerately on the living floor. No doubt one of those upper chambers was
being prepared at this moment for the expected bridegroom. The daily bustle
about the courtyard seemed everywhere to be in hand without haste or confusion;
things were well ordered here.

Beyond
the pale of the stockade the soft, undulating landscape extended in field and
copse and sparsely treed upland, all the greens still bleached and dried with
winter, but the black branches showed here and there the first nodules of the
leaf buds of spring. Faint frills of snow outlined all the hollows and
sheltered places, but a gleam of sun was breaking through the low cloud, and by
noon all the remnant of last night’s fall would be gone.

Cadfael
looked into the stables and the mews, and found both well supplied and proudly
kept by servitors ready and willing to show them off to an interested visitor.
In a separate stall in the kennels a hound bitch lay curled in clean straw with
her six pups around her, perhaps five weeks old. He could not resist going into
the dim shed to take up one of the young ones, and the dam was complacent, and
welcomed admiration of her brood. The soft warmth of the small body in his arms
had a smell like new bread. He was just stooping to lay the pup back among its
siblings when a clear, cool voice behind him said:

“Are
you the priest who is to marry me?”

And
there she was in the doorway, again a shadowy form against the light, so
composed, so assured that she might easily be taken for a mature and stately
woman of thirty, though the fresh, light voice belonged to her proper age.

The
girl Helisende Vivers, not yet decked out to receive her bridegroom, but in a
plain housewifely gown of dark blue wool, and with a gently steaming pail of meat
and meal for the hounds in one hand.

“Are
you the priest who is to marry me?”

“No,”
said Cadfael, slowly straightening up from the wriggling litter and the
crooning bitch. “That is Brother Haluin. I never studied for orders. I know
myself better.”

“It’s
the lame man, then,” she said with detached sympathy. “I am sorry he suffers
such hardship. I hope they have made him comfortable, here in our house. You do
know about my marriage—that Jean comes here today?”

“Your
brother has told us,” said Cadfael, watching the features of her oval face
emerge softly from shadow, every plaintive, ingenuous line testifying to her
youth. “But there are things he could not tell us,” he said, watching her
intently, “except by hearsay. Only you can tell us whether this match has your
consent, freely given, or no.”

Her
brief silence at that did not suggest hesitation so much as a grave
consideration of the man who raised the question. Her large eyes, dauntlessly
honest, embraced and penetrated, quite unafraid of being penetrated in return.
If she had judged him so alien to her needs and predicament as to be
unacceptable, she would have closed the encounter there and then, civilly but
without satisfying what would then have been there intrusive curiosity. But she
did not.

“If
we do anything freely, once we are grown,” she said, “then yes, this I do
freely. There are rules that must be kept. There are others in the world with
us who have rights and needs, and we are all bound. You may tell Brother
Haluin—Father Haluin I must call him—that he need have no qualms for me. I know
what I am doing. No one is forcing my hand.”

“I
will tell him so,” said Cadfael. “But I think you do it for others, not for
yourself.”

“Then
say to him that I choose—freely—to do it for others.”

“And
what of Jean de Perronet?” said Cadfael.

For
one instant her firm, full lips shook. It was the one thing that still
disrupted her resolute composure, that she was not being fair to the man who
was to be her husband. Cenred would certainly not have told him that he was
getting only a sad remainder after the heart was gone. Nor could she tell him
so. The secret belonged only to the family. The only hope for this hapless pair
was that love might come with time, a kind of love, better, perhaps, than many
marriages ever achieve, but still far short of the crown.

“I
will try,” she said steadily, “to give him all that he is asking, all that he
wants and expects. He deserves well, he shall have the best I can do.”

There
was no point in saying to her that it might not be enough, she already knew
that, and was uneasy about a degree of deception she could not evade. It might
even be that what had already been said here in the dimness of the kennels had
reopened a deep abyss of doubt which she had almost succeeded in sealing over.
Better let well alone, where there was no possibility of rendering the load she
carried any lighter.

“Well,
I pray you may be blessed in all you do,” said Cadfael, and drew back out of
her way. The bitch had uncoiled herself from among her puppies and was nuzzling
the pail, and waving a feathered tail in hungry expectation. The ordinary
business of the day goes on through births, marriages, deaths, and festivals.
When he looked back from the doorway the girl Helisende was stooping to fill
the bitch’s bowl, the heavy braid of her brown hair swinging among the
scrambling litter. She did not look up, but for all that, he had the feeling
that she was deeply and vulnerably aware of him until he turned and walked
softly away.

“You’ll
miss your nurseling,” said Cadfael when Edgytha came at noon to serve food and
drink for them. “Or will you be going south with her when she’s married?”

The
old woman lingered, taciturn by nature but visibly in need of unburdening a
heart by no means reconciled to losing her darling. Within the stiff folds of
her wimple her withered cheek trembled.

“What
should I do at my age, in a strange place? I am too old to be of much value
now, I shall stay here. At least I know the way of things here, and everyone
knows me. What respect should I have in a strange household? But she’ll go, I
know that! She’ll go, I suppose, as go she must. And the young man’s well
enough—if my lamb had not another in her eye and in her heart.”

“And
one placed so far out of reach,” Haluin reminded her gently, but his face was
pale, and when she turned and looked at him in silence for a long moment he
averted his eyes and turned away his head.

Her
eyes were the pale, washed blue of fading harebells. Once, shadowed by lashes
now grown thin and meager, they might have resembled more the color of
periwinkles. “So my lord will have told you,” she said. “So they all say. And
if there’s no help, she might do much worse, I know! I came here in attendance
on her mother, all those years ago, and that was no lovers’ match, her so
young, and him nigh on three times her age. A decent, kind man he was, but old,
old! She had good need, poor lady, of someone from home, someone she knew well
and could trust. At least they’re marrying my girl to somebody young.”

Cadfael
asked what had been preoccupying his mind for some little while, since no word
had been said on the matter: “Is Helisende’s mother dead?”

“No,
not dead. But she took the veil at Polesworth, it must be eight years ago now,
after the old lord died. She’s within your own order, a Benedictine nun. She
had always a leaning towards it, and when her husband died, and she began to be
talked about and bargained about as widow ladies are, and urged to marry again,
rather than that she left the world. It’s one way of escape,” said Edgytha, and
set her lips grimly.

“And
left her daughter motherless?” said Haluin, with more reproof in his voice than
he had intended.

“She
left her daughter very well mothered! She left her to the lady Emma and to me!”
Edgytha smoldered for a moment, and subdued the brief fire within lowered
eyelids. “Three mothers that child has had, and all fond. My lady Emma could
never be harsh to any young thing. Too soft, indeed, the pair of them could
always get their will of her. But my own lady was given to solitude and
melancholy, and when it came to a new marriage, no, she would not, she took the
veil gladly rather than marry again.”