Brother Cadfael 08: The Devil's Novice

most disgusting tasks,' said Mark, 'though he is not inured to them as I am, and I know he suffers.'
    'That's needful,' said Cadfael simply. 'If he did not suffer he ought not to be here. Cold kindness is only half a man's duty who tends the sick. How do you find him with you - does he speak of himself ever?'
    'Never,' said Mark, and smiled, feeling no surprise that it should be so. 'He has nothing he wishes to say. Not yet.'
    'And there is nothing you wish to know of him?'
    'I'll listen willingly,' said Mark, 'to anything you think I should know of him. But what most matters I know already: that he is by nature honest and sweet clean through, whatever manner of wreck he and other people and ill circumstances may have made of his life. I only wish he were happier. I should like to hear him laugh.'
    'Not for your need, then,' said Cadfael, 'but in case of his, you had better know all of him that I know.' And forthwith he told it.
    'Now I understand,' said Mark at the end of it, 'why he would take his pallet up into the loft. He was afraid that in his sleep he might disturb and frighten those who have more than enough to bear already. I was in two minds about moving up there with him, but I thought better of it. I knew he must have his own good reasons.'
    'Good reasons for everything he does?' wondered Cadfael.
    'Reasons that seem good to him, at any rate. But they might not always be wise,' conceded Mark very seriously.
    Brother Mark said no word to Meriet about what he had learned, certainly made no move to join him in his self-exile in the loft over the barn, nor offered any comment on such a choice; but he did, on the following three nights, absent himself very quietly from his own bed when all was still, and go softly into the barn to listen for any sound from above. But there was nothing but the long, easy breathing of a man peacefully asleep, and the occasional sigh and rustle as Meriet turned without waking. Perhaps other, deeper sighs at times, seeking to heave away a heavy weight from a heart; but no outcry. At Saint Giles, Meriet went to bed tired out and to some consoling degree fulfilled, and slept without dreams.
    Among the many benefactors of the leper hospital, the crown was one of the greatest through its grants to the abbey and the abbey's dependencies. There were other lords of manors who allowed certain days for the gathering of wild fruits or dead wood, but in the nearby reaches of the Long Forest the lazar-house had the right to make forays for wood, both for fuel and fencing or other building uses, on four days in the year, one in October, one in November, one in December, whenever the weather allowed, and one in February or March to replenish stocks run down by the winter.
    Meriet had been at the hospice just three weeks when the third of December offered a suitably mild day for an expedition to the forest, with early sun and comfortably firm and dry earth underfoot. There had been several dry days, and might not be many more. It was ideal for picking up dead wood, without the extra weight of damp to carry, and even stacked coppice-wood was fair prize under the terms. Brother Mark snuffed the air and declared what was to all intents a holiday. They marshalled two light hand-carts, and a number of woven slings to bind faggots, put on board a large leather bucket of food, and collected all the inmates capable of keeping up with a leisurely progress into the forest. There were others who would have liked to come, but could not manage the way and had to wait at home.

From Saint Giles the highway led south, leaving aside to the left the way Brother Cadfael had taken to Aspley. Some way past that divide they kept on along the road, and wheeled right into the scattered copse-land which fringed the forest, following a good, broad ride which the carts could easily negotiate. The toeless boy went with them, riding one of the carts. His weight, after all, was negligible, and his joy beyond price. Where they halted in a clearing to collect fallen wood, they set him down in the smoothest stretch of grass, and let him play while they worked.
    Meriet had set out as grave as ever, but as the morning progressed, so did he emerge from his hiding-place into muted sunlight, like the day. He snuffed the forest air, and trod its sward, and seemed to expand, as a dried shoot does after the rain, drawing in sustenance from the earth on which he strode. There was no one more tireless in collecting the stouter boughs of