Brother Cadfael 08: The Devil's Novice

stack of cordwood, he was already rearing his head and doubling his fists grimly into the soil to raise himself. Mark held him with an arm about his body, for he was trembling still when he got to his feet.
    'Did you see? Did you see it?' he asked in a whisper. What remained of the half-burned stack was between them and their charges, no one had turned to look in their direction.
    'Yes, I saw. I know! We must get them away,' said Mark. 'Leave this pile as it is, touch nothing more, leave the charcoal. We must just load the wood and start them back for home. Are you fit to go? Can you be as always, and keep your face before them?'
    'I can,' said Meriet, stiffening, and scrubbed a sleeve over a forehead dewed with a chilly sweat. 'I will! But, Mark, if you saw what I saw - we must know ... '
    'We do know,' said Mark, 'you and I both. It's not for us now, this is the law's business, and we must let ill alone for them to see. Don't even look that way again. I saw, perhaps, more than you. I know what is there. What we must do is get our people home without spoiling their day. Now, come and see to loading the cart with me. Can you, yet?'
    For answer, Meriet braced his shoulders, heaved in a great breath, and withdrew himself resolutely from the thin arm that still encircled him. 'I'm ready!' he said, in a fair attempt at the cheerful, practical voice with which he had summoned them to the hearth, and was off across the level floor to plunge fiercely into the labour of hoisting logs into the cart.
    Mark followed him watchfully, and against all temptation contrived to obey his own order, and give no single glance to that which had been uncovered among the ashes. But he did, as they worked, cast a careful eye about the rim of the hearth, where he had also noticed certain circumstances which gave him cause for thought. What he had been about to say to Meriet when the rake fetched down its avalanche was never said.
    They loaded their haul, stacking the wood so high that there was no room for the toeless boy to ride on top on the return journey. Meriet carried him on his back, until the arms that clasped him round the neck fell slack with sleepiness, and he shifted his burden to one arm, so that the boy's tow-coloured head could nod securely on his shoulder. The load on his arm was light enough, and warm against his heart. What else he carried unseen, thought Mark watching him with reticent attention, weighed more heavily and struck cold as ice. But Meriet's calm continued rock-firm. The one moment of recoil was over, and there would be no more such lapses.
    At Saint Giles, Meriet carried the boy indoors, and returned to help haul the carts up the slight slope to the barn, where the wood would be stacked under the low eaves, to be sawn and split later as it was needed.
    'I am going now into Shrewsbury,' said Mark, having counted all his chicks safely into the coop, tired and elated from their successful foray.
    'Yes,' said Meriet, without turning from the neat stack he was building, end-outwards between two confining buttresses of wood. 'I know someone must.'
    'Stay here with them. I'll come back as soon as I can.'
    'I know,' said Meriet. 'I will. They're happy enough. It was a good day.'
    Brother Mark hesitated when he reached the abbey gatehouse, for his natural instinct was to take everything first to Brother Cadfael. It was plain that his errand now was to the officers of the king's law in the shire, and urgent, but on the other hand it was Cadfael who had confided Meriet to him, and he was certain in his own mind that the grisly discovery in the charcoal hearth was in some way connected with Meriet. The shock he had felt was genuine, but extreme, his wild recoil too intense to be anything but personal. He had not known, had not dreamed, what he was going to find, but past any doubt he knew it when he found it.
    While Mark was hovering irresolute in the arch of the gatehouse Brother Cadfael, who had been sent for before Vespers to an old man in the Foregate who had a bad chest ailment, came behind and clapped him briskly on the shoulder. Turning to find the clemency of heaven apparently presenting him with the answer to his problem, Mark clutched him gratefully by the sleeve, and begged him: 'Cadfael, come with me to Hugh Beringar. We've found something hideous in the Long Forest, business for him, surely. I was just by way of praying for you. Meriet was with me - this somehow touches Meriet ... '
    Cadfael fixed him with an