Brother Cadfael 07: The Sanctuary Sparrow

others while he found little cause to be merry himself. 'How old are you, Liliwin?'
    Half asleep and afraid to give way and sleep in earnest, he looked ever younger, dwindling into a swaddled child, reassuringly flushed now as the chill ebbed out of him. But he himself did not know the answer. He could only knit his fair brows and hazard doubtfully: 'I think I may be turned twenty. It could be more. The mummers may have said I was less than I was - children draw more alms.'
    So they would, and the boy was lightly built, spare and small. He might be as much as two and twenty, perhaps, surely no more.
    'Well, Liliwin, if you can sleep do so, it will be aid and comfort, and you have need of it. You need not watch, I shall be doing that.'
    Cadfael sat down in the abbot's stall, and trimmed the attendant candles, so that he might have a fair view of his charge. The quiet came in, on the heels of their silence, very consolingly. The night without might well have its disquiets, but here the vault of the choir was like linked hands sheltering their threatened and precarious peace. It was strange to Cadfael to see, after prolonged calm, two great tears welling from beneath Liliwin's closed eyelids, and rolling slowly over the jut of his gaunt cheek-bone, to fall into the brychan.
    'What is it? What troubles you?' For himself he had shivered, argued, burned, but not wept.
    'My rebec - I had it with me in the bushes, in a linen bag for my shoulder. When they flushed me out - I don't know how, a branch caught in the string, and plucked it away. And I dared not stop to grope for it in the dark ... And now I can't go forth! I've lost it!'
    'In the bushes, this side the bridge - across the highway from here?' It was a grief Cadfael could comprehend. 'You cannot go forth lad, no, not yet, true enough. But I can. I'll look for it. Those who hunted you would not go aside once they had you in view. Your rebec may be lying safe enough among the bushes. Go to sleep and leave grieving,' said Cadfael. 'It's too early to despair. For despair,' he said vigourously, 'it is always too early. Remember that, and keep up your heart.'
    One startled blue eye opened at him, he caught the gleam of the candles in it before it closed again. There was silence. Cadfael lay back in the abbot's stall, and resigned himself to a long watch. Before Prime he must rouse himself to remove the interloper to a less privileged place, or Prior Robert would be rigid with offence. Until then, let God and his saints take charge, there was nothing more mere man could do.
    As soon as the first light of dawn began to pluck colours out of the dark, on this clear May morning, Griffin, the locksmith's boy who slept in the shop as a watchman, got up from his pallet and went to draw water from the well in the rear yard. Griffin was always the first up, from either household of the two that shared the yard, and had usually kindled the fire and made all ready for the day's work before his master's journeyman came in from his home two streets away. On this day in particular Griffin took it for granted that all those who had kept it up late at the wedding would be in no condition to rise early about their work. Griffin himself had not been invited to the feast, though Mistress Susanna had sent Rannilt across to bring him a platter of meats and bread, a morsel of cake and a draught of small ale, and he had eaten his fill, and slept innocently through whatever uproar had followed at midnight.
    Griffin was thirteen years old, offspring of a maidservant and a passing tinker. He was well-grown, comely, of contented nature and good with his hands, but he was a simpleton. Baldwin Peche the locksmith preened himself on his goodness in giving house-room to such an innocent, but the truth was that Griffin, for all his dimness of wit, had a gift for picking up practical skills, and far more than earned his keep.
    The great wooden bucket, its old boards worn and fretted within and without from long use, came up out of the depths sparkling in the first slanting ray of the rising sun. Griffin filled his two pails, and was slinging the bucket back over the shaft when the gleam caught a flash of silver between two of the boards, lodged edgeways in the crevice. He balanced the bucket on the stone rim of the well, and leaned and fished out the shining thing, tugging it free between finger and thumb, and shaking off a frayed shred of blue cloth that came away with it. It lay in his palm shining, a