Brother Cadfael 07: The Sanctuary Sparrow

the cooling jar, and shook out a dose of the powdered oak mistletoe for her to take. She looked up at him over the cup with a sour grin.
    'Well, say it! Tell me my granddaughter has been shabbily used!'
    'There is no need for me to say it,' said Cadfael, standing back to study her the better and finding her hands steady, her breath even, and her countenance as hardy as ever, 'since you know it yourself.'
    'And too late to mend it. But I've allowed her the one day she wanted. I could have denied her even that. When I gave her the keys, years ago, you don't think they were the only ones? What, leave myself unfurnished? No, I can still poke into corners, if I choose. And I do, sometimes.'
    Cadfael was packing his dressings and unguents back into his scrip, but with an eye still intent on her. 'And do you mean to give up both bunches to Daniel's wife now? If you had meant mischief, you could have handed them to her before your granddaughter's face.'
    'My mischief is almost over,' said Juliana, suddenly sombre. 'All keys will be wrested from me soon, if I don't give them up willingly. But these I'll keep yet a day or two. I still have a use for them.'
    This was her house, her family. Whatever boiled within it, ripe for eruption, was hers to deal with. No outsider need come near.
    In the middle of the morning, when Susanna and Rannilt were both busy in the kitchen, and would certainly be occupied for some time, and the men were at work in the shop, Juliana sent the only remaining witness, Margery, to fetch her a measure of a strong wine she favoured for mulling from a vintner's a satisfactory distance away across the town. When she had the hall to herself, she rose, bearing down heavily on her stick, and felt beneath her full skirt for the keys she kept hidden in a bag-pocket there.
    Susanna's chamber door was open. A narrow rear door gave quick access here to the strip of yard which separated the kitchen from the house. Faintly Juliana could hear the voices of the two women, their words indistinguishable, their tones revealing. Susanna was cool, short and dry as always. The girl sounded anxious, grieved, solicitous. Juliana knew well enough about that truant day when the chit had come home hastily and in the dark. No one had told her, but she knew. The sharpness of her senses neither denied nor spared her anything. Shabbily used, and too late to mend! The girl had been listening, appalled, to the quarrel in the hall, and felt for the mistress who had shown her kindness. Young things are easily moved to generous indignation and sympathy. The old have no such easy grace.
    The store-room with its heavy vats of salted food, jars of oil, crocks of flour and oatmeal and dry goods, tubs of fat, bunches of dried herbs, shared the width of the hall with Susanna's chamber, and opened out of it. This door was locked. Juliana fitted the key Baldwin Peche had cut for her before ever she gave up the original, and opened the door and went in, into the myriad fat, spicy, aromatic, salt smells of the pantry.
    She was within for perhaps ten minutes, hardly more. She was ensconced in her cushioned corner under the staircase and the door locked again securely by the time Margery came back with her wine, and the spices needed to mull it to her liking for her indulgence at bedtime.
    'I have been telling this youngster,' said Brother Anselm, fitting together curved shards of wood with the adroit delicacy appropriate to the handling of beloved flesh wounded, 'that should he consider taking vows as a novice here, his tenure would be assured. A life of dedication to the music of worship - what better could he seek, gifted as he is? And the world would withdraw its hand from him, and leave him in peace.'
    Liliwin kept his fair head bent discreetly over the small mortar in which he was industriously grinding resins for the precentor's gum, and said never a word, but the colour rose in his neck and mounted his cheek and brow to the hair-line. What was offered might be a life secured and at peace, but it was not the life he wanted. Whatever went on inside that vulnerable and anxious head of his, there was not the ghost of a vocation for the monastic life there. Even if he escaped his present peril, even if he won his Rannilt and took her away with him, after more of the world's battering he might end as a small vagrant rogue, and she as what? His partner in some enforced thievery, picking pockets at fair and market in order to keep them both alive? Or