Brother Cadfael 09: Dead Man's Ransom

withdrew softly and with alacrity, drawing the door to after him, but not so quickly that he did not hear Sister Magdalen reply simply and practically: 'Why?'
    She never did or said quite what was expected of her, and it was a good question. It left Melicent in the delusion that this formidable woman knew little or nothing about her, and necessitated the entire retelling of the disastrous story, and in the retelling it might fall into truer proportion, and allow the girl to reconsider her situation with somewhat less desperate urgency. So, at any rate, Brother Cadfael hoped, as he trotted away through the garden to go and spend a pleasant half, hour with Brother Anselm, the precentor, in his carrel in the cloister, where he would certainly be compiling the sequence of music for the burial of Gilbert Prestcote.
    'I intend,' said Melicent, rather grandly because of the jolt the blunt question had given her, 'to take the veil, and I would like it to be among the Benedictine sisters of Polesworth.'
    'Sit down here beside me,' said Sister Magdalen comfortably, 'and tell me what has turned you to this withdrawal, and whether your family are in your confidence and approve your choice. You are very young, and have the world before you...'
    'I am done with the world,' said Melicent.
    'Child, as long as you live and breathe you will not have done with this world. We within the pale live in the same world as all poor souls without. Come, you have your reasons for wishing to enter the conventual life. Sit and tell me, let me hear them. You are young and fair and nobly born, and you wish to abandon marriage, children, position, honours, all... Why?'
    Melicent, yielding, sank beside her on the bench, hugged her slenderness in the warmth of the brazier, and let fall the barriers of her bitterness to loose the flood. What she had vouchsafed to the preoccupied ears of Sybilla was no more than the thread on which this confession was strung. All that heady dream of minstrels' love tales poured out of her.
    'Even if you are right in rejecting one man,' said Magdalen mildly, 'you may be most unjust in rejecting all. Let alone the possibility that you mistake even this Elis ap Cynan. For until it is proved he lies, you must bear in mind he may be telling truth.'
    'He said he would kill for me,' said Melicent, relentless, 'he went to where my father lay, and my father is dead. There was no other known to have gone near. As for me, I have no doubts. I wish I had never seen his face, and I pray I never may again.'
    'And you will not wait to make your peace with one betrayal, and still show your countenance to others who do not betray?'
    'At least I do know,' said Melicent bitterly, 'that God does not betray. And I am done with men.'
    'Child,' said Sister Magdalen, sighing, 'not until the day of your death will you have done with men. Bishops, abbots, priests, confessors, all are men, blood brothers to the commonest of sinful mankind. While you live, there is no way of escape from your part in humanity.'
    'I have finished, then, with love,' said Melicent, all the more vehemently because a morsel of her heart cried out to her that she lied.
    'Oh, my dear soul, love is the one thing with which you must never dispense. Without it, what use are you to us or to any? Granted there are ways and ways of loving,' said the nun come late to her celibacy, recalling what at the time she had hardly recognised as deserving the title, but knew now for one aspect of love, 'yet for all there is a warmth needed, and if that fire goes out it cannot be rekindled. Well,' she said, considering, 'if your stepmother approve your going with me, then you may come, and welcome. Come and be quiet with us for a while, and we shall see.'
    'Will you come with me to my mother then, and hear me ask her leave?'
    'I will,' said Sister Magdalen, and rose and plucked her habit about her ready to set forth.
    She told Brother Cadfael the gist of it when she stayed to attend Vespers before going back to the cloth, merchant's house in the town.
    'She'll be better out of here, away from the lad, but left with the image of him she already carries about with her. Time and truth are what the pair of them most need, and I'll see she takes no vows until this whole matter is resolved. The boy is better left to you, if you can keep an eye on him now and then.'
    'You don't believe,' said Cadfael with certainty, 'that he ever did violence to her father.'
    'Do I know? Is there man or woman who