Brother Cadfael 10: The Pilgrim of Hate

life. At this hour the court was empty. No, not quite empty. There was someone sitting on the stone steps that climbed to the door of the guest-hall, sitting there alone and quite composedly, with her face turned towards the gate, and as he watched she rose and came down the wide steps, and walked towards him with a swift, light step. Then he knew her for Melangell.
    In her at least there was nothing unfamiliar. The sight of her brought back colour and form and reality into the very stones of the wall at her back, and the cobbles under her feet. The elusive grey between-light could not blur the outlines of head and hand, or dim the brightness of her hair. Life came flooding back into Luc with a shock of pain, as feeling returns after a numbing wound. She came towards him with hands a little extended and face raised, and the faintest and most anxious of smiles on her lips and in her eyes. Then, as she hesitated for the first time, a few paces from him, he saw the dark stain of the bruise that marred her cheek.
    It was the bruise that shattered him. He shook from head to heels in a great convulsion of shame and grief, and blundered forward blindly into her arms, which reached gladly to receive him. On his knees, with his arms wound about her and his face buried in her breast, he burst into a storm of tears, as spontaneous and as healing as Saint Winifred's own miraculous spring.
    He was in perfect command of voice and face when they met after chapter in the abbot's parlour, abbot, prior, Brother Cadfael, Hugh Beringar, Olivier and Luc, to set right in all its details the account of Rainald Bossard's death, and all that had followed from it.
    "Unwittingly I deceived you, Father," said Cadfael, harking back to the interview which had sent him forth in such haste. "When you asked if we had entertained a murderer unawares, I answered truly that I did think so, but that we might yet have time to prevent a second death. I never realised until afterwards how you might interpret that, seeing we had just found the blood-stained shirt. But, see, the man who struck the blow might be spattered as to sleeve or collar, but he would not be marked by this great blot that covered breast and shoulder over the heart. No, that was rather the sign of one who had held a wounded man, a man wounded to death, in his arms as he died. Nor would the slayer, if his clothing was blood-stained, have kept and carried it with him, but burned or buried it, or somehow rid himself of it. But this shirt, though washed most carefully, still bore the outline of the stain clear to be seen, and it was carried as a sacred relic is carried, perhaps as a pledge to exact vengeance. So I knew that this same Luc whom we knew as Matthew, and in whose scrip the talisman was found, was not the murderer. But when I recalled all the words I had heard those two young men speak, and all the evidence of devoted attendance, the one on the other, then suddenly I saw that pairing in the utterly opposed way, as a pursuit. And I feared it must be to the death."
    The abbot looked at Luc, and asked simply: "Is that a true reading?"
    "Father, it is." Luc set forth with deliberation the progress of his own obsession, as though he discovered it and understood it only in speaking. "I was with my lord that night, close to the Old Minster it was, when four or five set on the clerk, and my lord ran, and we with him, to beat them off. And then they fled, but one turned back and struck. I saw it done, and it was done of intent! I had my lord in my arms, he had been good to me, and I loved him," said Luc with grimly measured moderation and burning eyes as he remembered. "He was dead in a mere moment, in the twinkling of an eye... And I had seen where the murderer fled, into the passage by the chapter house. I went after him, and I heard their voices in the sacristy, Bishop Henry had come from the chapter house after the council ended for the night, and there Ciaran had found him and fell on his knees to him, blurting out all. I lay in hiding, and heard every word. I think he even hoped for praise," said Luc with bitter deliberation.
    "Is it possible?" wondered Prior Robert, shocked to the heart. "Bishop Henry could not for one moment connive at or condone an act so evil."
    "No, he did not condone. But neither would he deliver over one of his own intimate servants as a murderer. To do him justice," said Luc, but with plain distaste, "his concern was not to cause further anger and