“Brother Cadfael will speak on his own behalf,” said the abbot. “For God, I will speak as He give me grace.”
“I forgive freely,” said Cadfael, choosing words with more than his accustomed care, “whatever offense was done against my craft under great stress of mind. And that the means and the knowledge were there to tempt you, and I not there to dissuade, this I take to myself as much as ever I can charge them to you. I wish you peace!”
What Abbot Radulfus had to say upon God’s behalf took longer. There were some among the brothers, Cadfael thought, who would have been startled and incredulous if they could have heard, at finding their abbot’s formidable austerity could also hold so much measured and authoritative tenderness. A lightened conscience and a clean death were what Haluin desired. It was too late to exact penance from a dying man, and deathbed comfort cannot be priced, only given freely.
“A broken and a contrite heart,” said Radulfus, “is the only sacrifice required of you, and will not be despised.” And he gave absolution and the solemn blessing, and so left the sickroom, beckoning Cadfael with him. On Haluin’s face the ease of gratitude had darkened again into the indifference of exhaustion, and the fires were dead in eyes dulled and half closed between swoon and sleep.
In the outer room Rhun was waiting patiently, drawn somewhat aside to avoid hearing, even unwittingly, any word of that confession.
“Go in and sit with him,” said the abbot. “He may sleep now, there will be no ill dreams. If there should be any change in him, fetch Brother Edmund. And if Brother Cadfael should be needed, send to my lodging for him.”
In the paneled parlor in the abbot’s lodge they sat together, the only two people who would ever hear of the offense with which Haluin charged himself, or have the right in private to speak of his confession.
“I have been here only four years,” said Radulfus directly, “and know nothing of the circumstances in which Haluin came here. It seems one of his earliest duties here was to help you among the herbs, and there he acquired this knowledge he put to such ill use. Is it certain this draught he concocted could kill? Or may this truly have been a death from fever?”
“If the girl’s mother used it on her, she could hardly be mistaken,” said Cadfael ruefully. “Yes, I’ve known hyssop to kill. I was foolish to keep it among my stores, there are other herbs that could take its place. But in small doses, both herb and root, dried and powdered, are excellent for the yellow distemper, and useful with horehound against chest troubles, though the blue-flowered kind is milder and better for that. I’ve known women use it to procure abortion, in great doses that purge to the extreme. Small wonder if sometimes the poor girl dies.”
“And this was surely during his novitiate, for he cannot have been here long if this child was his, as he supposes. He can have been only a boy.”
“Barely eighteen, and the girl no more, if as old. It is some extenuation,” said Cadfael firmly, “if they were in the same household, seeing each other daily, of equal birth, for he comes of a good family, and as open to love as are most children. In fact,” said Cadfael, kindling, “what I wonder at is that his suit should have been rejected out of hand. He was an only son, there was a good manor would have been his if he had not taken vows. And he was a very pleasing youth, as I recall, lettered and gifted. Many a knight would have welcomed him as a match for his daughter.”
“It may be her father already had other plans for her,” said Radulfus. “He may have betrothed her to someone else in childhood. And her mother would hardly venture to countenance a match in her husband’s absence, if she went in such awe of him.”
“She need not, however, have rejected the boy utterly, if she had let him hope, he would have waited, surely, and not tried to force her hand by forestalling marriage. Though it may be I do him wrong there,” Cadfael relented. “It was not calculation, I fancy, that brought him into the girl’s bed, but too rash affection. Haluin would never make a schemer.”
“Well, for better or worse,” said Radulfus with a weary sigh, “it was done, and cannot be undone. He is not the first, and will not be the last young man to fall into that error, nor she the first nor the last poor child to suffer for it. At least she has kept her good name. Easy to see why he feared to confide, for her sake, even under the seal of confession. But it is long ago, eighteen years, his age when it befell. Let us at least secure him a peaceful ending.”
It was the general view that a peaceful ending was the best that could be hoped for for Brother Haluin, and that prayers for him ought not to presume to look towards any other outcome, all the more as his brief return to his senses rapidly lapsed again into a deeper unconsciousness, and for seven days, while the festival of the Nativity came and passed, he lay oblivious of the comings and goings of his brethren round his bed, ate nothing, uttered no sound but the hardly perceptible flutter of his breath. Yet that breath, however faint, was steady and even, and as often as drops of honeyed wine were presented to his lips, they were accepted, and the cords of his throat moved of themselves, docilely swallowing, while the broad, chilly brow and closed eyes never by the least quiver or contraction revealed awareness of what his body did.
“As if only his body is here,” said Brother Edmund, soberly pondering, “and his spirit gone elsewhere until the house is again furbished and clean and waiting to be lived in.”
A sound biblical analogy, Cadfael considered, for certainly Haluin had himself cast out the devils that inhabited him, and the dwelling they vacated might well lie empty for a while, all the more if there was to be that unlooked-for and improbable act of healing, after all. For however this prolonged withdrawal might resemble dying, Brother Haluin would not die. Then we had better keep a good watch, thought Cadfael, taking the parable to its fitting close, and make sure seven devils worse than the first never manage to get a foot in the door while he’s absent. And prayers for Haluin continued with unremitting fervor throughout the festivities of Christmas and the solemn opening of the new year.
The thaw was beginning by that time, and even then it was a slow thaw, wearing away each day, by slow degrees, the heavy wastes of snow from the great fall. The work on the roof was finished without further mishap, the scaffolding taken down, and the guest hall once again weatherproof. All that remained of the great upheaval was this still and silent witness in his isolated bed in the infirmary, declining either to live or die.
Then, in the night of the Epiphany, Brother Haluin opened his eyes and drew a long, slow breath like any other man awaking without alarm, and cast his wondering gaze round the narrow room until it rested upon Brother Cadfael, mute and attentive on the stool beside him.
“I am thirsty,” said Haluin trustingly, like a child, and lay passive on Cadfael’s arm to drink.
They half expected him to sink again into his unconscious state, but he remained languid but aware all that day, and in the night his sleep was natural sleep, shallow but tranquil. After that he turned his face to life, and did not again look over his shoulder. Once risen from the semblance of death he came back to the territory of pain, and its signature was on his drawn brow and set lips, but he bore it without complaint. His broken arm had knitted while he lay ignorant of his injuries, and caused him only the irritating aches of healing wounds, and it seemed both to Cadfael and Edmund, after a day or two of keeping close watch on him, that whatever had been shaken out of place within his head had healed as the outer wound had healed, medicined by stillness and repose. For his mind was clear. He remembered the icy roof, he remembered his fall, and once when he was alone with Cadfael he showed that he recalled very clearly his confession, for he said after a long while of silent thought: