Brother Cadfael 01: A Morbid Taste for Bones

"burying the deed along with the victim. Except that I will not rest until I know."
    "- and shed reflected glory upon Prior Robert, I was going to say. And I wish I knew which mind conceived the idea!"
    They had met for a few hurried minutes at Bened's smithy, where Cadfael had gone to borrow mattock and spade for the holy work now to be undertaken. Even a few of the men of Gwytherin had come forward and asked to have a share in breaking the sacred earth, for though they were still reluctant to lose their saint, if it was her will to leave them they had no wish to cross her. Prodigious things were happening, and they intended to be in receipt of her approval and blessing rather than run the risk of encountering her arrows.
    "It seems to me most of the glory is falling, rather, on Brother Columbanus of late," said Sioned shrewdly. "And the prior took it meekly, and never made any attempt to filch it back fro from him. That's the one thing that makes me believe he may be honest."
    She had said something that caused Cadfael to pause and look attentively at her, scrubbing dubiously at his nose.
    "You may well be right. And certainly this story is bound to go back to Shrewsbury with us, and spread through all our sister houses, when we come home with our triumph. Yes, Columbanus will certainly have made himself a great name for holiness and divine favour in the order."
    "They say an ambitious man can make a grand career in the cloister," she said. "Maybe he's busy laying the foundations, a great step up towards being prior himself when Robert becomes abbot. Or even abbot, when Robert supposes he's about to become abbot! For it's not his name they'll be buzzing round the shires as the visionary the saints use to make their wants known."
    "That," agreed Cadfael, "may not even have dawned on Robert yet, but when the awe of the occasion passes it will. And he's the one who's pledged to write a life of the saint, and complete it with the account of this pilgrimage. Columbanus may very well end up as an anonymous brother who happened to be charged with a message to the prior from his patroness. Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad. But I grant you, this lad comes of a thrusting Norman family that doesn't put even its younger sons into the Benedictine habit to spend their lives doing menial work like gardening."
    "And we're no further forward," said Sioned bitterly.
    "No. But we have not finished yet."
    "But as I see it, this is devised to be an ending, to close this whole episode in general amity, as if everything was resolved. But everything is not resolved! Somewhere in this land there is a man who stabbed my father in the back, and we're all being asked to draw a veil over that and lose sight of it in the great treaty of peace. But I want that man found, and Engelard vindicated, and my father avenged, and I won't rest, or let anyone else rest, until I get what I want. And now tell me what I am to do."
    "What I've already told you," said Cadfael. "Have all your household party and friends gathered at the chapel to watch the grave opened, and make sure that Peredur attends."
    "I've already sent Annest to beg him to come," said Sioned. "And then? What have I to say or do to Peredur?"
    "That silver cross you wear round your neck," said Cadfael. "Are you willing to part with it in exchange for one step ahead towards what you want to know?"
    "That and all the rest of the valuables I own. You know it."
    "Then this," said Cadfael, "is what you will do..."
    With prayers and psalms they carried their tools up to the tangled graveyard by the chapel, trimmed back the brambles and wild flowers and long grass from the little mound of Winifred's grave, and reverently broke the sod. By turns they laboured, all taking a share in the work for the merit to be acquired. And most of Gwytherin gathered round the place in the course of the day, all work left at a standstill in the fields and crofts, to watch the end of this contention. For Sioned had spoken truly. She and all her household servants were there among the rest, in mourning and massed to bring out Rhisiart's body for burial when the time came, but this funeral party had become, for the time being, no more than a side-issue, an incident in the story of Saint Winifred, and a closed incident at that.
    Cadwallon was there, Uncle Meurice was there, and Bened, and all the other neighbours. And there at his father's elbow, withdrawn and brooding,