Brother Cadfael 12: The Raven in the Foregate

Gloucester and marry there, openly and honourably.
    Except that they could not go, not yet, not until he was satisfied that all danger to Diota was past, and her living secure under the abbot's protection. And now that he lay alone, Ninian could see no present end to that difficulty. The morrow would lay Ailnoth's body to rest, but not the ugly shadow of his death. Even if the day passed without threat to Diota, that would not solve anything for the days yet to come.
    Ninian lay wakeful until past midnight, fretting at the threads that would not untangle for him. Over the watershed between the old year and the new he drifted at last into an uneasy sleep, and dreamed of fighting his way through interminable forest tracks overgrown with bramble and thorn towards a Sanan forever withdrawn from him, and leaving behind for him only a sweet, aromatic scent of herbs.
    Under the vast inverted keel of the choir, dimly lit for Matins, the solemn words of the Office of the Dead echoed and re-echoed as sounds never seemed to do by day, and the fine, sonorous voice of Brother Benedict the sacristan was magnified to fill the whole vault as he read the lessons in between the spoken psalms, and at every ending came the insistent versicle and response:
    "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. ..."
    "Et lux perpetua luceat eis. ..."
    And Brother Benedict, deep and splendid: "My soul is weary of my life ... I will speak in the bitterness of my soul, I will say unto God, Do not condemn me, show me wherefore thou contendest with me ..."
    Not much comfort in the book of Job, thought Cadfael, listening intently in his stall, but a great deal of fine poetry - could not that in itself be a kind of comfort, after all? Making even discomfort, degradation and death, everything Job complained of, a magnificent defiance?
    "O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave, that thou wouldst keep me secret until thy wrath be past ..."
    "My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me ... I have made my bed in the darkness, I have said to corruption, Thou art my father, to the worm, Thou art my mother. And where is now my hope?"
    "Cease, then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death ... land without order, where even the light is as darkness ..."
    Yet in the end the entreaty that was itself a reassurance rose again, one step advanced beyond hope towards certainty:
    "Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord ..."
    "And let light perpetual shine upon them."
    Stumbling up the night stairs back to bed after Lauds, half asleep, Cadfael still had that persistent appeal echoing in his mind, and by the time he slept again it had become almost a triumphant claim reaching up to take what it pleaded for. Rest eternal and light perpetual ... even for Ailnoth.
    Not only for Ailnoth, but for most of us, thought Cadfael, subsiding into sleep, it will be a long journey through purgatory, but no doubt even the most winding way gets there in the end.
    Chapter Eleven
    The first day of the new year, 1142, dawned grey and moist, but with a veiled light that suggested the sun might come through slowly, and abide for an hour or so in the middle of the day, before mist again closed in towards nightfall. Cadfael, who was often up well before Prime, awakened this morning only when the bell sounded, and made his way down the night stairs with the others still drowsy from so short a rest. After Prime he went to make sure that all was well in the workshop, and brought away with him fresh oil for the altar lamps. Cynric had already trimmed the candles, and gone out through the cloister to the graveyard, to see all neat and ready where the open grave waited under the precinct wall, covered decorously with planks. The body in its wooden coffin rested on a bier before the parish altar, decently draped. After the Mass it would be carried in procession from the north door, along the Foregate, and in at the great double gate just round the corner from the horse-fair ground, where the laity had access, instead of through the monastic court. A certain separateness must be preserved, for the sake of the quietude necessary to the Rule.
    There was a subdued bustle about the great court well before the hour for Mass, brothers hurrying to get their work ready for the rest of the day, or finish small things left undone the previous day. And the people of the Foregate began to gather