Brother Cadfael 10: The Pilgrim of Hate

respective and respectable ways with a quiet mind. "So I will! But to see them both set up where they would be... And good children both, that will take pains for me when I come to need, as I have for them."
    "And they're to marry here, tomorrow?" asked the apothecary's widow, visibly considering putting off her own departure for another day.
    "They are indeed, before Mass in the morning. So it seems I'll have none to take home but my sole self," said Dame Alice, dropping another proud tear or two, and wearing her reflected glory with admirable grace, "when I take to the road again. But the day after tomorrow there's a sturdy company leaving southward, and with them I'll go."
    "And duty well done, my dear soul," said Mistress Glover, embracing her friend in a massive arm, "duty very well done!"
    They were married in the privacy of the Lady Chapel, by Brother Paul, who was not only master of the novices, but the chief of their confessors, too, and already had Rhun under his care and instruction, and felt a fatherly interest in him, which the boy's affection very readily extended to embrace the sister. No one else was present but the family and their witnesses, and the bridal pair wore no festal garments, for they had none. Luc was in the serviceable brown cotte and hose he had slept in, out in the fields, and the same crumpled shirt, though newly washed and smoothed. Melangell was neat and modest in her homespun, proudly balancing her coronal of braided, deep-gold hair. They were pale as lilies, bright as stars, and solemn as the grave.
    After high and moving events, daily life must still go on. Cadfael went to his work that afternoon well content. With the meadow grasses in ripe seed and the harvest imminent he had preparations to make for two seasonal ailments which could be relied upon to recur every year. There were some who suffered with eruptions on their hands when working in the harvest, and others who took to sneezing and wheezing, with running eyes, and needed lotions to help them.
    He was busy bruising fresh leaves of dock and mandrake in a mortar for a soothing ointment, when he heard light, long-striding steps approaching along the gravel of the path, and then half of the sunlight from the wide-open door was cut off, as someone hesitated in the doorway. He turned with the mortar hugged to his chest, and the green-stained wooden pestle arrested in his hand, and there stood Olivier, dipping his tall head to evade the hanging bunches of herbs, and asking, in the mellow, confident voice of one assured of the answer, "May I come in?"
    He was in already, smiling, staring about him with a boy's candid curiosity, for he had never been here before. "I've been a truant, I know, but with two days to wait before Luc's marriage I thought best to get on with my errand to the sheriff of Stafford, being so close, and then come back here. I was back, as I said I'd be, in time to see them wedded. I thought you would have been there."
    "So I would, but I was called out to Saint Giles. Some poor soul of a beggar stumbled in there overnight covered with sores, they were afraid of a contagion, but it's no such matter. If he'd had treatment earlier it would have been an easy matter to cure him, but a week or so resting in the hospital will do him no harm. Our pair of youngsters here had no need of me. I'm a part of what's over and done with for them, you're a part of what's beginning."
    "Melangell told me where I should find you, however, you were missed. And here I am."
    "And as welcome as the day," said Cadfael, laying his mortar aside. Long, shapely hands gripped both his hands heartily, and Olivier stooped his olive cheek for the greeting kiss, as simply as for the parting kiss when they had separated at Bromfield. "Come, sit, let me offer you wine, my own making. You knew, then, that those two would marry?"
    "I saw them meet, when I brought him back here. Small doubt how it would end. Afterwards he told me his intent. When two are agreed, and know their own minds," said Olivier blithely, "everything else will give way. I shall see them both properly provided for the journey home, since I must go by a more roundabout way."
    When two are agreed, and know their own minds! Cadfael remembered confidences now a year and a half past. He poured wine carefully, his hand being a shade less steady than usual, and sat down beside his visitor, the young, wide shoulder firm and vital against his elderly and stiff one, the clear, elegant