Brother Cadfael 05: Leper of Saint Giles

seriously, stacking away jars of salves and bottles of lotion made from alkanet, anemone, mint, figwort, and the grains of oats and barley, most of them herbs of Venus and the moon, "a wedding is the crux of two lives, and therefore no mean matter." He added the fruits of mustard, which belongs rather to Mars, but provides formidable pastes and poultices to fight malignant ulcers. "Every man and woman who has faced the ordeal," he said thoughtfully, "must feel concern for those about to face it. Even those who have not, may speculate with sympathy."
    Matrimony was one joust he had never attempted, wide as his experience had been before he entered the cloister; but he had brushed fingertips with it once, and circumvented it more than once. He felt some astonishment, once he began remembering.
    "This baron has a famous name, but I know no more of him, except that he's in good odour, they say, with the king. I think I may once have known an old kinsman of the lady. But whether she's from the same line is more than I know."
    "I hope she may be beautiful," said Mark.
    "Prior Robert would be interested to hear you say so," said Cadfael dryly, and closed the cupboard door.
    "Beauty is a very healing thing," said Brother Mark, earnest and unabashed. "If she is young and lovely, if she smiles on them and inclines her head as she rides by, if she does not shrink at seeing them, she will do more for those people of mine out there than I can do with probing and poultising. Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out of the passing day, and put away to think of afterwards." He added, recoiling into deprecation: "Of course it need not be someone else's wedding feast. But how can we waste that, when it offers?"
    Cadfael flung an arm about Mark's still thin and waiflike shoulders, and hauled him away, out of the dimness within, to the gathering excitement and brightening light without. "Let's hope and pray," he said heartily, "that it may be the source of blessedness even to the pair caught up in it. By the sound of it, one of them is due here this moment. Come and let's see!"
    The noble bridegroom and his retinue approached in a shimmer of bright colours, with horn-calls and soft, continuous clamour of harness bells, a cortege stretching fifty paces, and fringed with running servants leading the pack ponies, and two couples of tall deerhounds on leashes. The sorry little straggle of outcasts shuffled forward eagerly the few paces they dared, to see the better those fine fabrics and splendid dyes they could never possess, and set up a muted, awed murmur of admiration as the procession drew level with their wattle fence.
    In front, on a tall black horse, his own accoutrements and his mount's very splendid in scarlet and gold, rode a broad-built, gross, fleshy man, inelegant but assured in the saddle, and accorded a station well ahead of all his train, so that his pre-eminence should be seen to be absolute. Behind him came three young squires abreast, keeping a close and wary watch on their lord, as though he might at any moment turn and subject them to some hazardous test. The same tension, just short of fear, passed down the hierarchies that followed, through valet, chamberlain, groom, falconer, down to the boys who were towed along by the hounds. Only the beasts, horse and hound alike, and the hawks on the falconer's frame, went sleek and complacent, in no awe of their lord.
    Brother Cadfael stood with Mark at the gate in the wattle fence, and gazed with sharpening attention. For though any one of the three young squires would have done very well for a bridegroom, it was only too plain that none of them was Huon de Domville. It had not entered Cadfael's head until now that this baron might be already past the prime, no young lover embarking on marriage in the proper years for that undertaking, but with more grey than black in his short, full beard, and only a curled fringe of grey hair and the glisten of a bald crown showing at the temple, where his elabourately twisted capuchon was tilted rakishly aside. A squat, muscular, powerful body still, but well past fifty if he was a day, and more likely nearing sixty. Cadfael hazarded that by now this one must already have used up at least one wife, and probably two. The bride, rumour said, was barely eighteen, fresh from her nurse. Well, these things happen. These things are done.
    Then, as the rider drew closer, Cadfael could not take his eyes from the face. A