Brother Cadfael 12: The Raven in the Foregate

limpid light blazed up in his trout-stream eyes.
    "I'll do, then?" he said, between simple pleasure and subtle impudence, flushed and exhilarated with his own energy; and added with unwary honesty: "I've hardly had a spade in my hands before."
    "Now that," said Cadfael, straight-faced, and eyeing with interest the form and trim of the hands that jutted a little too far from the outgrown sleeves, "that I never would have suspected."
    "I've worked mostly with -" Benet began in slight haste.
    " ... with horses. Yes, I know! Well, you match today's effort tomorrow, and tomorrow's the next day, and yes, you'll do."
    Cadfael went to Vespers with his mind's eye full of the jaunty figure of his new labourer, striding away to beat out the dented iron edge of the spade into even sharpness, and his ears were still stretched to catch the whistled tune, certainly not liturgical in character, to which Benet's large young feet in their scuffed shoes and borrowed pattens kept time.
    "Father Ailnoth was installed in his cure this morning," said Cadfael, coming fresh from the induction on the second day. "You didn't want to attend?"
    "I?" Benet straightened up over his spade in ingenuous surprise. "No, why should I? I've got my work here, he can take care of his without any help from me. I hardly knew the man until we set off to come here. Why, did all go well?"
    "Yes - oh, yes, all went well. His sermon was perhaps a little harsh on poor sinners," said Cadfael, doubtfully pondering. "No doubt he wanted to begin by showing his zeal at the outset. The rein can always be slackened later, when priest and people come to know each other better, and know where they stand. It's never easy for a younger man and a stranger to follow one old and accustomed. The old shoe comforts, the new pinches. But given time enough, the new comes to be the old, and fits as gently."
    It seemed that Benet had very quickly developed the ability to read between lines where his new master was concerned. He stood gazing earnestly at Cadfael with a slight frown, his curly head on one side, his smooth brown forehead creased in unaccustomed gravity, as if he had been brought up without warning against some unforeseen question, and was suddenly aware that he ought to have been giving thought to it long ago, if he had not been totally preoccupied with some other enterprise of his own.
    "Aunt Diota has been with him over three years," he said consideringly, "and she's never made any complaint of him, as far as I know. I only rubbed shoulders with him on the way here, and I was thankful to him for bringing me. Not a man a servant like me could be easy with, but I minded my tongue and did what he bade me, and he was fair enough in his dealings with me." Benet's buoyancy returned like a gust of the western wind, blowing doubts away. "Ah, here is he as raw in his new work as I am in mine, but he sets out to cudgel his way through, and I have the good sense to worm my way in gently. Let him alone, and he'll get his feet to the ground."
    He was right, of course, a new man comes unmeasured and uneasy into a place not yet mellowed to him, and must be given time to breathe, and listen to the breathing of others. But Cadfael went to his own work with fretting memories of a homily half frenetic dream, half judgement day, eloquently phrased, beginning with the pure air of a scarcely accessible heaven, and ending with the anatomy of a far-too-visual hell.
    " ... that hell which is an island, for ever circled by four seas, the guardian dragons of the condemned. The sea of bitterness, whose every wave burns more white-hot than the mainland fires of hell itself; the sea of rebellion, which at every stroke of swimmer or rower casts the fugitive back into the fire; the sea of despair, in which every barque founders, and every swimmer sinks like a stone. And last, the sea of penitence, composed of all the tears of all the damned, by which alone, for the very few, escape is possible, since a single tear of Our Lord over sinners once fell into the fiery flood, and permeated, cooled and calmed the entire ocean for such as reach the perfection of remorse ..."
    A narrow and terrifying mercy, thought Cadfael, stirring a balsam for the chests of the old, imperfect men in the infirmary, human and fallible like himself, and not long for this world. Hardly mercy at all!
    Chapter Three
    The first small cloud that showed in the serene sky of the Foregate came when Aelgar, who had always worked the