Brother Cadfael 05: Leper of Saint Giles

gatehouse, and went to fetch the poppy syrup for Iveta from his workshop.
    This time they did not leave him alone with her for a moment. The maid Madlen, plainly Agnes's creature to the hilt, stood over them sharp-eyed and prick-eared, all he could give the girl was the reassurance of his continued partisanship by his very presence, and the ministrations he offered. At least they could exchange looks, and interpret what they saw. And he could ensure that she should sleep, and sleep long, while he pondered how best to help her. Also to help Joscelin Lucy? She would not be grateful for a partisanship that did not extend to her lover, for whose life she had been willing to barter all her own future happiness.
    Cadfael went to Vespers with the little fading cluster of blue still in his habit.
    Brother Mark had been vaguely but persistently troubled, all that day, by the feeling that his grasp on the whole body of his flock at the hospice had somehow been disrupted. It had begun at Prime, when all the household, except the one or two young children, came together in the church. It was not that he ever counted them. If any were sicker or more out of mood than normally, they could remain at rest, no one drove them, so the number need never be the same. Moreover, during even this brief office there were some who for good reason must ease their discomfort by movement, and therefore the whole mass shifted and changed a little. It was rather that he was haunted by a sense of unexpected bulk, a limitation of the light within the church, which at all times was dim and cramped. There were six or seven big men among his charges, but he knew the manner and gait of them all, the little halts and stoops that identified even the veiled ones among them.
    Once or twice during Prime he had thought he detected one lofty, shrouded head and covered face that had an alien look, but always he lost it again. Not until the end did it dawn on him that he was losing it because all his afflicted household was so disposing its people as to swallow up the intruder.
    Intruder seemed a hard word where the doors were open to all, yet had the newcomer been truly a leper, here arrived at one more halt in a lifetime's pilgrimage, he would have announced himself, and there would have been no need for this mysterious shifting and dissembling. Yet what whole man in his right mind would choose to hide here? He would have to be desperate.
    Mark had almost persuaded himself that he was dreaming. But when he doled out the bread and oatmeal and small ale at breakfast, though again he did not count - for who counts what is given to the unfortunate? - by the end of it he knew that his supplies were depleted beyond what he had expected. Someone among his children had drawn food for another mouth.
    He knew, of course, that the sheriff's men were beating the wood and gardens between Saint Giles and the town, and before noon the news of Huon de Domville's death had reached him. The isolation of the outcasts here never kept out the news. Whatever happened in town or abbey was known at once in the hospice, down to the very manner of the baron's death, and the outcry raised against the escaped squire as his murderer. But Brother Mark had work to do, and had not thought much about the rumours. There were all his morning medical duties first, and not until the last dressing was renewed and the last sore anointed did he give much consideration to the discrepancy that was troubling him. Even then there were other matters to be attended to, recording gifts made to the hospital, arranging for a party of the able-bodied to go gleaning for the winter wood-pile in the manor of Sutton, a right granted them by the late lord and continued by his son, helping to prepare the midday meal, checking the superior's accounts, and a dozen other things. Only in the afternoon was he at leisure to pursue some of the duties he had appropriated to himself of his own will, such as reading the office privately to one old man who was too ill to leave his bed, and giving a lesson to the boy Bran. Very easy lessons they usually turned out to be, more than half play, but for all that, the child was thirsty for letters, and drew in learning like mother's milk, as naturally as breathing.
    Mark had made a little desk for him, the appropriate size for his spindly eight years, and on this day he trimmed a leaf of old, cleaned vellum for his use, leaving the frayed strips he had removed on his own desk close