Brother Cadfael 12: The Raven in the Foregate

thought I might do, given a little polishing".
    Well, well! So far everything in harmony. But why, then, was the boy still here at all, if aid had been asked and given?
    Upon this incomplete picture the sudden death of Father Ailnoth intruded like a black blot in a half-written page, complicating everything, relating, apparently, to nothing, a bird of as ill omen dead as alive.
    Chapter Seven
    The hunt for Ninian Bachiler, as a proscribed agent of the empress Maud at large in Stephen's territory, was duly proclaimed in Shrewsbury, and the word went round in voluble gossip, all the more exuberantly as a relief from the former sensation of Ailnoth's death, concerning which no one in the Foregate had been voluble, unless in privacy. It was good to have a topic of conversation which departed at so marked a tangent from what really preoccupied the parishioners of Holy Cross. Since none of the gossips cared a pin how many dissident agents were at large in the county, none of the talk was any threat to the fugitive, much less to Mistress Hammet's dutiful nephew Benet, who came and went freely between abbey and parsonage.
    In the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of December, Cadfael was called out to the first sufferers from coughs and colds in the Foregate, and extended his visits to one elderly merchant in the town itself, a regular chest patient of his in the winter. He had left Ninian sawing and splitting wood from the pruning of the trees, and keeping cautious watch on a pot of herbs in oil of almonds, which had to warm on the edge of the brazier without simmering, to make a lotion for the frost-nipped hands too tender to endure the hog's fat base of the ointment. The boy could be trusted to abide by his instructions, and whatever he did he did with his might.
    Cadfael's errands had taken him rather less time than he had expected, and the weather was not such as to encourage him to linger. He re-entered at the gatehouse with more than an hour still in hand before Vespers, and made his way across the great court and out into the garden, rounding the box hedge into the alley that led to his herbarium. In the frost he had wrapped woollen cloths about his boots to give him a grip on the icy roads, and the same sensible precaution made his steps silent on the path. So it happened that he heard the voices before he himself was heard, rapid and soft and vehement from within his workshop. And one of the voices was Ninian's, a tone above its usual pitch by reason of some fierce but subdued excitement. And the other was a girl's, insistent and agitated. Curious that she, too, should convey this same foolhardy sense of enjoyment in the experience of danger and dread. A good match! And what other girl had had to do with this place and this youth, but Sanan Berni�s?
    "Oh, but he would!" she was saying emphatically. "He's there by now, he'll tell them everything, where to find you, how you sent to him - all! You must come now, quickly, before they come to take you."
    "Impossible by the gatehouse," said Ninian, "we should run into their arms. But I can't believe - why should he betray me? Surely he knows I'd never mention his name?"
    "He's been in dread," said the girl impatiently, "ever since your message came, but now you're cried publicly as a wanted man, he'll do anything to shake off his own danger. He's not evil - he does as other men do, protects his own life and lands, and his son's, too - he lost enough before ..."
    "So he did," said Ninian, penitent. "I never should have drawn him in. Wait, I must lift this aside, I can't leave it to boil. Cadfael ..."
    The shameless listener, who at least had heard one motion of consideration towards him and his art, in that last utterance, suddenly came to his senses, and to the awareness that in a matter of seconds these two would be issuing forth from the hut and taking to flight, by what ever road this resourceful girl had devised. Just as soon as Ninian had lifted the soothing oil from the heat and laid it carefully in a secure spot. Bless the boy, he deserved to reach Gloucester in safety! Cadfael made haste to dart round behind the barrier of the box hedge, and freeze into stillness there. He had not time to withdraw completely, but it is not certain, in any case, that he would have done so.
    They burst out of the workshop hand in hand, she leading, for she knew by what route she had entered here unobserved. Through the garden she drew him, over the rim of the slope, and down towards