Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

continuing snow was rapidly obliterating, but there were still traces of someone who had set a straight course for the gatehouse. Mere dimples in the whiteness, but discernible. And the boy gone, too! What could have erupted there in the sickroom to spur Elyas into such unreasonable and perilous action, after his long apathy and submission? Certainly if he had taken it into his disordered head to do something drastic a half-grown lad would not have been able to stop him, and more than likely pride would not let Yves abandon a creature for whom he had assumed, however briefly, the responsibility. He was getting to know Yves fairly well by now.
    "You run to the guest-hall," he ordered the young brother briskly, "tell Hugh Beringar what's amiss, and make sure they are not within there. I'll go to Prior Leonard, and we'll have the whole household searched."
    Leonard took the news with concern and distress, and had every brother scouring the enclave at once, even to the grange court and the barns. Hugh Beringar came forth booted and cloaked, in resigned expectation of the worst, and was short with any who got in his way. With both the secular and the cloistral law directing, the search did not take long, and was fruitless.
    "My fault entire," Cadfael owned bitterly. "I entrusted the poor wretch to a boy hardly less wretched. I should have had more sense. Though how or why this can have arisen between them is more than I can see. But I should not have taken the least risk with either of them. And now my foolishness has lost them both, the most forlorn pair this house held, who should have been guarded at every step."
    Hugh was already busy disposing the men he had here at hand. "One to Ludlow, as far as the gate, where either they'll have passed, or you may have them kept safely if they arrive hereafter. And you go with him, but to the castle, have out ten men, and bring them down to the gate, where I'll come. Wake up Dinan, too, let him sweat, the boy's son to a man he must have known, and nephew to one he may well want to have dealings with soon. I won't risk men by sending them out in this beyond a mile or so, or in less than pairs, but our pair can't have got far." He turned on Cadfael just as vehemently, and clouted him hard between the shoulders. "And you, my heart, stop talking such arrogant foolery! The man seemed quiet and biddable, and the boy needed using, and could be trusted to the hilt, as you very well know. If they've miscarried, it's none of your blame. Don't arrogate to yourself God's own role of apportioning blame and praise, even when the blame lands on your own shoulders. That's a kind of arrogance, too. Now come on, and we'll see if we can't bring home the two of them out of this cold purgatory. But I tell you what I shall be telling my fellows at Ludlow - move out no more than an hour from home, keep touch, and turn back on the hour, as near as you can judge. I'm not losing more men into the snow this night. At dawn, if we've caught nothing before, we'll take up the search in earnest."
    With those orders they went forth into the blizzard, hunting in pairs, and obscurely comforted, in Cadfael's case at least, by the reflection that it was a pair they were hunting. One man alone can give up and subside into the cold and die, far more easily than two together, who will both brace and provoke each other, wrangle and support, give each other warmth and challenge each other's endurance. In extremes, not to be alone is the greatest aid to survival.
    He had taken Hugh's impatient reproof to heart, too, and it gave him reassurance no less. It was all too easy to turn honest anxiety over someone loved into an exaltation of a man's own part and duty as protector, a manner of usurpation of the station of God. To accuse oneself of falling short of infallibility is to arrogate to oneself the godhead thus implied. Well, thought Cadfael, willing to learn, a shade specious, perhaps, but I may need that very argument myself some day. Bear it in mind!
    Blundering blindly ahead with a burly young novice beside him, northwards across the Corve, Cadfael groped through a chill white mist, and knew that they were all wasting their time. They might probe the drifts as they would, but the weather had the laugh of them, covering everything in the same blank pall.
    They all drew in again resignedly to Bromfield when they judged the time to be spent and the work impossible. The porter had set fresh pine torches in the shelter of