Brother Cadfael 06: A Virgin In The Ice

said.
    "In his shoes, would not you?"
    "It seems to me so long ago," she said, wondering, "and I have changed so much. How is it that I could do so much harm, and mean none? At least I was thankful when they told me that that good brother from Pershore - how I wish I had listened to him! - had come back to look for us, and taken Sister Hilaria away with him. Were they still here when you came from Shrewsbury? Did she go on, or turn back to Worcester?"
    She had arrived at what was for her a simple question before he was ready, and the flat silence fell like a stone. She was very quick. The few seconds it took him to marshal words lasted too long. She had stiffened erect, and was staring at him steadily with apprehensive eyes.
    "What is it I do not know?"
    There was no way but forward, and plainly. "What will give you no comfort in the hearing, and me no joy in the telling," said Brother Cadfael simply. "On the night when your upland wolves sacked Druel's house, they had already done as much to a lonely hamlet nearer here, barely two miles from Ludlow. Between the two, on their way back to their lair, it seems that they encountered, by cruel ill-luck, the two after whom you ask. It was already evening when they left Druel's holding, and the night was wild, with high winds and blinding snow. It may be they went astray. It may be they tried to take shelter somewhere through the worst. They fell in the way of thieves and murderers."
    Her face was marble. Her hands gripped desperately at the arms of her chair, the knuckles bone-white. In a mere thread of a whisper she asked: "Dead?"
    "Brother Elyas was brought back here barely alive. Your brother was watching with him last night when they both went out into the snow, who can guess why? Sister Hilaria we found dead."
    There was no sound from her for a long moment, no tear, no exclamation, no protest. She sat containing whatever grief and guilt and hopeless anger possessed her, and would show none of it to the world. After a while she asked in a low and level voice: "Where is she?"
    "She is here, in the church, coffined and awaiting burial. In this iron frost we cannot break the ground, and it may be the sisters at Worcester will want to have her taken back to them when that is possible. Until then Father Prior will find her a tomb in the church."
    "Tell me," said Ermina with bleak but quiet urgency, "all that befell her. Better to know the whole of it than to guess."
    In simple and plain words he told her the manner of that death. At the end of it she stirred out of her long stillness, and asked: "Will you take me to her? I should like to see her again."
    Without a word and without hesitation he rose, and led the way. His readiness she accepted thankfully; he knew that he had gained with her. She would not be hemmed in, or sheltered from what was her due. In the chapel where Sister Hilaria lay in her new coffin, made in the brothers' own workshop and lined with lead, it was almost as cold as out in the frost, and the body had not suffered any flawing of its serene beauty. She was not yet covered. Ermina stood motionless by the trestles a long time, and then herself laid the white linen face-cloth back over the delicate face.
    "I loved her very much," she said, "and I have destroyed her. This is my work."
    "It is nothing of the kind," said Cadfael firmly. "You must not take to yourself more than your due. What you yourself did, that you may rue, and confess, and do penance for, to your soul's content, but you may not lift another man's sins from his shoulders, or usurp God's right to be the only judge. A man did this, ravisher and murderer, and he, and only he, must answer for it. Whatever action of any other creature may have thrown our sister in his way, he had command of the hands that killed and outraged her, he and no other. It's of him her blood will be required."
    For the first time she shook, and when she would have spoken she had not her voice under control, and was forced to wait and wrestle for clear speech.
    "But if I had not set my heart on that foolish marriage, if I had consented to go with Brother Elyas straight here to Bromfield, she would be living now ..."
    "Do we know that? Might not you, too, have fallen into such hands? Child, if men had not done as they did, any time these five centuries, of course things would have gone on differently, but need they have been better? There is no profit in ifs. We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil,