Haluin had been understandably silent along the road, needing all his breath and all his resolution for the effort of walking. Fed and at ease in the evening, he sat watching Cadfael in accepting silence still for a while.
“Brother,” he said at last, “I take it very kindly that you’ve come with me on this journey. With no other but you could I speak without conceal of that old grief, and before ever we see Shrewsbury again I may sorely need to speak of it. The worst of me you already know, and I will never say word in excuse. But in eighteen years I have never until now spoken her name aloud, and now to utter it is like food after starvation.”
“Speak or be silent as the need takes you,” said Cadfael, “and I’ll hear or be deaf according to your wish. But as for tonight you should take your rest, for you’ve come a good third part of the way, and tomorrow, I warn you, you’ll find some aches and pains you knew nothing of, from laboring so hard and so long.”
“I am tired,” admitted Haluin, with a sudden and singularly touching smile, as brief as it was sweet. “You think we cannot reach Hales tomorrow, then?”
“Don’t think of it! No, we’ll get as far as the Augustinian canons at Wombridge, and spend another night there. And you’ll have done well to get so far in the time, so don’t grudge the one day more.”
“As you think best,” said Haluin submissively, and lay down to sleep with the confiding simplicity of a child charmed and protected by his prayers.
The next day was less kind, for there was a thin, spasmodic rain that stung at times with sleet, and a colder wind from the northeast, from which the long, green, craggy bulk of the Wrekin gave them no shelter as the road skirted it to the north. But they reached the priory before dusk, though Haluin’s lips were fast clenched in determination by then, and the skin drawn tight and livid over his cheekbones with exhaustion, and Cadfael was glad to get him into the warmth, and go to work with oiled hands on the sinews of his arms and shoulders, and the thighs that had carried him so bravely all day long.
And the third day, early in the afternoon, they came to the manor of Hales.
The manor house lay a little aside from the village and the church, timber-built on the stone undercroft, in level, well-drained fields, with gentle wooded slopes beyond. Within its wooden fence, stable and barn and bakehouse were ranged along the pale, well maintained and neat. Brother Haluin stood in the open gateway, and looked at the place of his old service with a face fixed and still, only his eyes alive and full of pain.
“Four years,” he said, “I kept the manor roll here. Bertrand de Clary was my father’s overlord. I was sent here before I was fourteen, to be page to his lady. Will you believe, the man himself I never saw. Before I came here he was already in the Holy Land. This is but one of his manors, the only one in these parts, but his son was already installed in his place, and ruled the honor from Staffordshire. She always liked Hales best, she left her son to his lordship and settled here, and it was here I came. Better for her if I had never entered this house. Better far for Bertrade!”
“It’s too late,” said Cadfael mildly, “to do right whatever was done amiss then. This day is for doing aright what you have pledged yourself to do now, and for that it is not too late. You’ll be freer with her, maybe, if I wait for you without.”
“No,” said Haluin. “Come with me! I need your witness, I know it will be just.”
A tow-haired youth came out of the stable with a pitchfork in his hands, steaming gently in the chill air. At sight of two black Benedictine habits in the gateway he turned and came towards them, leisurely and amiable.
“If you’re wanting a bed and a meal. Brothers, come in, your cloth’s always welcome here. There’s good lying in the loft, and they’ll feed you in the kitchen if you’ll please to walk through.”
“I do remember,” said Haluin, his eyes still fixed upon a distant past, “your lady kept always a hospitable house for travelers. But I shall need no bed this night. I have an errand to the lady Adelais de Clary herself, if she will give me audience. A few minutes of her time is all I ask.”
The boy shrugged, staring them over with grey, unreadable Saxon eyes, and waved them towards the stone steps that led up to the hall door.
“Go in and ask for her woman Gerta, she’ll see if the lady’ll speak with you.” And he stood to watch them as they crossed the yard, before turning back to his labors among the horses.
A manservant was just coming up the steps from the kitchen into the passage as they entered the great doorway. He came to ask their business, and being told, sent off a kitchen boy to carry word to the lady’s woman of the chamber, who presently came out from the hall to see who these monastic guests might be. A woman of about forty years, very brisk and neat, plain in her dress and plain in her face, for she was pockmarked. But of her confidence in office there was no question. She looked them over somewhat superciliously, and listened to Haluin’s meekly uttered request without a responsive smile, in no hurry to open a door of which she clearly felt herself the privileged custodian.
“From the abbey at Shrewsbury, you come? And on the lord abbot’s business, I suppose?”
“On an errand the lord abbot has sanctioned,” said Haluin.
“It is not the same,” said Gerta sharply. “What other than abbey business can send a monk of Shrewsbury here? If this is some matter of your own, let my lady know with whom she is dealing.”
“Tell her,” said Haluin patiently, leaning heavily on his crutches, and with eyes lowered from the woman’s unwelcoming face, “that Brother Haluin, a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury abbey, humbly begs of her grace to receive him.”
The name meant nothing to her. Clearly she had not been in Adelais de Clary’s service, or certainly not in her confidence or even close enough to guess at her preoccupations, eighteen years ago. Some other woman, perhaps nearer her mistress’s years, had filled this intimate office then. Close body servants, grown into their mistress’s trust and into their own blood loyalty, carry a great treasury of secrets, often to their deaths. There must somewhere, Cadfael thought, watching in silence, be a woman who would have stiffened and opened her eyes wide at that name, even if she had not instantly known the changed and time-worn face.
“I will ask,” said the tirewoman, with a touch of condescension still, and went away through the hall to a leather-curtained doorway at the far end. Some minutes passed before she appeared again, drawing back the hangings, and without troubling to approach them, called from the doorway: “My lady says you may come.”
The solar they entered was small and dim, for the windward of the two windows was shuttered fast against the weather, and the tapestries that draped the walls were old, and in rich dark colors. There was no fireplace, but a stone hearth laid close to the most sheltered corner carried a charcoal brazier, and between that and the one window that gave light a woman was sitting at a little embroidery frame, on a cushioned stool. Against the light from the window she showed as a tall, erect shape, dark-clothed, while the glow of the brazier shone in copper highlights on her shadowed face. She had left her needle thrust into the stretched cloth. Her hands were clenched fast on the raised arms of the stool, and her eyes were on the doorway, into which Brother Haluin lurched painfully on his crutches, his one serviceable foot sore with use and bearing him wincingly at every step, the blocked toe of his left foot barely touching the floor as a meager aid to balance. Constant leaning into the crutches had hunched his shoulders and bent his straight back. Having heard his name, she must surely have expected something nearer to the lively, comely young man she had cast out all those years ago. What could she make now of this mangled wreckage?