The miller, knee-deep in midstream, stood to look on critically as Elis drove in his murderous stake, and bedded it firmly through the tenacious mattress of weed into the soil under the bank. “Good lad!” he said with mild approval. “We’ll find you a pikel, or the foresters may have an axe to spare among them. You shan’t go weaponless if your will’s good.”
Sister Magdalen, like the rest of the household, had been up since dawn, marshalling all the linens, scissors, knives, lotions, ointments and stunning draughts that might be needed within a matter of hours, and speculating how many beds could be made available with decorum and where, if any of the men of her forest army should be too gravely hurt to be moved. Magdalen had given serious thought to sending away the two young postulants eastward to Beistan, but decided against it, convinced in the end that they were safer where they were. The attack might never come. If it did, at least here there was readiness, and enough stout-hearted forest folk to put up a good defence. But if the raiders moved instead towards Shrewsbury, and encountered a force they could not match, then they would double back and scatter to make their way home, and two girls hurrying through the woods eastward might fall foul of them at any moment on the way. No, better hold together here. In any case, one look at Melicent’s roused and indignant face had given her due warning that that one, at any rate, would not go even if she was ordered.
“I am not afraid,” said Melicent disdainfully.
“The more fool you,” said Sister Magdalen simply. “Unless you’re lying, of course. Which of us doesn’t, once challenged with being afraid! Yet it’s generations of being afraid, with good reason, that have caused us to think out these defences.” She had already made all her dispositions within. She climbed the wooden steps into the tiny bell, turret and looked out over the exposed length of the brook and the rising bank beyond, thickly lined with bushes, and climbing into a slope once coppiced but now run to neglected growth. Countrymen who have to labour all the hours of daylight to get their living cannot, in addition, keep up a day, and, night vigil for long. Let them come today, if they’re coming at all, thought Sister Magdalen, now that we’re at the peak of resolution and readiness, can do no more, and can only grow stale if we must wait too long.
From the opposite bank she drew in her gaze to the brook itself, the deep, cut and rocky bed smoothing out under her walls to the broad stretch of the ford. And there John Miller was just wading warily ashore, the water turgid after his passage and someone else, a young fellow with a thatch of black curls, was bending over the last stake, vigorous arms and shoulders driving it home, low under the bank and screened by reeds. When he straightened up and showed a flushed face, she knew him.
She descended to the chapel very thoughtfully. Melicent was busy putting away, in a coffer clamped to the wall and strongly banded, the few valuable ornaments of the altar and the house. At least it should be made as difficult as possible to pillage this modest church.
“You have not looked out to see how the men progress?” said Sister Magdalen mildly. “It seems we have one ally more than we knew. There’s a young Welshman of your acquaintance and mine hard at work out there with John Miller. A change of allegiance for him, but by the look of him he relishes this cause more than when he came the last time.” Melicent turned to stare, her eyes very wide and solemn. “He?” she said, in a voice brittle and low. “He was prisoner in the castle. How can he be here?”
“Plainly he has slipped his collar. And been through a bog or two on his way here,” said Sister Magdalen placidly, “by the state of his boots and hose, and I fancy fallen in at least one by his dirty face.”
“But why make this way? If he broke loose… what is he doing here?” demanded Melicent feverishly.
“By all the signs he’s making ready to do battle with his own countrymen. And since I doubt if he remembers me warmly enough to break out of prison in order to fight for me,” said Sister Magdalen with a small, reminiscent smile, “I take it he’s concerned with your safety. But you may ask him by leaning over the fence.”
“No!” said Melicent in sharp recoil, and closed down the lid of the coffer with a clash. “I have nothing to say to him.” And she folded her arms and hugged herself tightly as if cold, as if some traitor part of her might break away and scuttle furtively into the garden.
“Then if you’ll give me leave,” said Sister Magdalen serenely, “I think I have.” And out she went, between newly-dug beds and first salad sowings in the enclosed garden, to mount the stone block that made her tall enough to look over the fence. And suddenly there was Elis ap Cynan almost nose to nose with her, stretching up to peer anxiously within. Soiled and strung and desperately in earnest, he looked so young that she, who had never borne children, felt herself grandmotherly rather than merely maternal. The boy recoiled, startled, and blinked as he recognised her. He flushed beneath the greenish smear the marsh had left across his cheek and brow, and reached a pleading hand to the crest of the fence between them.
“Sister, is she—is Melicent within there?”
“She is, safe and well,” said Sister Magdalen, “and with God’s help and yours, and the help of all the other stout souls busy on our account like you, safe she’ll remain. How you got here I won’t enquire, boy, but whether let out or broken out you’re very welcome.”
“I wish to God,” said Elis fervently, “that she was back in Shrewsbury this minute.”
“So do I, but better here than astray in between. And besides, she won’t go.”
“Does she know,” he asked humbly, “that I am here?”
“She does, and what you’re about, too.”
“Would she not—could you not persuade her?—to speak to me?”
“That she refuses to do. But she may think the more,” said Sister Magdalen encouragingly. “If I were you, I’d let her alone to think the while. She knows you’re here to fight for us, there’s matter for thought there. Now you’d best go to ground soon and keep in cover. Go and sharpen whatever blade they’ve found for you and keep yourself whole. These flurries never take long,” she said, resigned and tolerant, “but what comes after lasts a lifetime, yours and hers. You take care of Elis ap Cynan, and I’ll take care of Melicent.”
Hugh and his twenty men had skirted the Breidden hills before the hour of Prime, and left those great, hunched outcrops on the right as they drove on towards Westbury. A few remounts they got there, not enough to relieve all the tired beasts. Hugh had held back to a bearable pace for that very reason, and allowed a halt to give men and horses time to breathe. It was the first opportunity there had been even to speak a word, and now that it came no man had much to say. Not until the business on which they rode was tackled and done would tongues move freely again. Even Hugh, lying flat on his back for ease beside Cadfael under the budding trees, did not question him concerning his business in Wales.
“I’ll ride with you, if I can finish my business here,” Cadfael had said. Hugh had asked him nothing then, and did not ask him now. Perhaps because his mind was wholly engrossed in what had to be done to drive the Welsh of Powys back into Caus and beyond. Perhaps because he considered this other matter to be very much Cadfael’s business, and was willing to wait for enlightenment until it was offered, as at the right time it would be.
Cadfael braced his aching back against the bole of an oak just forming its tight leaf-buds, eased his chafed feet in his boots, and felt his sixty-one years. He felt all the older because all these troubled creatures pulled here and there through this tangle of love and guilt and anguish were so young and vulnerable. All but the victim, Gilbert Prestcote, dead in his helpless weakness—for whom Hugh would, because he must, take vengeance. There could be no clemency, there was no room for it. Hugh’s lord had been done to death, and Hugh would exact payment. In iron duty, he had no choice.