Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

bed, and sat up strongly. Something had kindled in the deeps of his haunted eyes, a yellow, crazed light too vivid to be merely a reflection from the candle's flame. "Sister Hilaria ..." he said, and now at last he had found a name that meant something to him, but something so terrible that Yves reached both hands to take him by the shoulders, and urge him to lie down again.
    "You mustn't fret - she is not lost, she is here, most reverently tended and coffined. It is forbidden to wish her back, she is with God." Surely they must have told him, but maybe he had not understood. Death could not be hidden away. He would grieve, naturally, but that is permitted. But you may not begrudge it that she has left us, Brother Cadfael had said.
    Brother Elyas uttered a dreadful, anguished sound, yet so quiet that the howl of the wind at the shutter almost drowned it. He clenched both hands into large, bony fists, and struck them against his breast.
    "Dead! Dead? In her youth, in her beauty - trusting me! Dead! Oh, stones of this house, fall and cover me, unhappy! Bury me out of the sight of men ..."
    Barely half of it was clear, the words crowded so thick on his tongue, choking him, and Yves in his alarm and dismay was hardly capable of listening, he cared only to allay this storm he had innocently provoked. He stretched an arm across Elyas's breast, and tried to soothe him back to his pillow, his young, whole strength pitted against this demented vigour.
    "Oh, hush, hush, you mustn't vex yourself so. Lie down, you're too weak to rise ... Oh, don't, you frighten me! Lie down!"
    Brother Elyas sat rigidly upright, staring through the wall, gripping both hands against his heart, whispering what might have been prayers, or self-reproaches, or feverish, garbled recollections of times past. Against that private obsession all the force Yves could exert had no influence. Elyas was no longer even aware of him. If he spoke to any, it was to God, or to some creature invisible.
    Yves turned and fled for help, closing the door behind him. Through the infirmary he ran full tilt, and out into the piled, whirling, howling snow of the court, across to the cloister and the warming-room, where surely they would be at this hour. He fell once, and plucked himself shivering out of a drift, halting to clear his eyes. The whole night was a rain of goosefeathers, but cold, cold, and the wind that flung them in his face cut like a knife. He stumbled and slithered to the door of the church, and there halted, hearing the chanting within. It was later than he had thought. Compline had already begun.
    He had been too well schooled in the courtesies and proper observancies, he could not for any cause burst in upon the office and bawl for help. He hung still for a few moments to get his breath and snake the snow from his hair and lashes. Compline was not long, surely he could go back and battle with his disordered charge until the office was over. Then there would be help in plenty. He had only to keep Brother Elyas quiet for a quarter of an hour.
    He turned, half-blinded as soon as he left cover, and battled his way back through the drifts, labouring hard with his short, sturdy legs, and lowering his head like a little fighting bull against the wind.
    The outer door of the infirmary stood open wide, but he was all too afraid that he had left it so in his haste. He blundered along the passage within, fending himself off from the walls with both hands as he shook off the snow that clung to his face. The door of the sickroom was also wide open. That brought him up with a jolt that jarred him to the heels.
    The room was empty, the coverings of the bed hung low to the floor. Brother Elyas's sandals, laid neatly side by side under the head of the bed, were gone. And so was Brother Elyas, just as he had risen from his sick-bed, clothed, habited but without cloak or covering, out into the night of the ninth of December, into such a blizzard as had raged the night he came by his all but mortal injuries, and Sister Hilaria by her death. The only name that had reached him in his solitary place.
    Yves charged back along the passage to the doorway, and out into the storm. And there were tracks, though he had not seen them when he entered, because he had not expected them to be there, nor would they last long. They were filling fast, but they showed, large feet tramping down the steps and across the court, not towards the church, no - straight for the gatehouse. And Brother