Brother Cadfael 13: The Rose Rent

trouble than he'll have sailing back into the same port, now the king holds it. A good, fast move, that was. If he can but maintain it now!"
    "We said a Mass in thanksgiving for his recovery," said Cadfael absently, and plucked out a leggy sow-thistle from among his mint. "How is it that weeds grow three times faster than the plants we nurse so tenderly? Three days ago that was not even there. If the kale shot up like that I should be pricking the plants out by tomorrow."
    "No doubt your prayers will stiffen Stephen's resolution," Hugh said, though with less than complete conviction. "Have they not given you a helper yet, here in the garden? It's high time, there's more than one's work here in this season."
    "So I urged at chapter this morning. What they'll offer me there's no knowing. Prior Robert has one or two among the younger ones he'd be glad to shuffle off his hands and into mine. Happily the ones he least approves tend to be those with more wit and spirit than the rest, not less. I may yet be lucky in my apprentice."
    He straightened his back, and stood looking out over the newly turned beds, and the pease-fields that sloped down to the Meole Brook, mentally casting an indulgent eye back over the most recent of his helpers here in the herbarium. Big, jaunty, comely Brother John, who had blundered into the cloister by mistake, and backed out of it, not without the connivance of friends, in Wales, to exchange the role of brother for that of husband and father; Brother Mark, entering here as an undersized and maltreated sixteen-year-old, shy and quiet, and grown into a clear, serene maturity of spirit that drew him away inevitably towards the priesthood. Cadfael still missed Brother Mark, attached now to the household chapel of the Bishop of Lichfield, and already a deacon. And after Mark, Brother Oswin, cheerful, confident and ham-fisted, gone now to do his year's service at the lazarhouse of Saint Giles at the edge of the town. What next, wondered Cadfael? Put a dozen young men into the same rusty black habits, shave their heads, fit them into a single horarium day after day and year after year, and still they will all be irremediably different, every one unique. Thank God!
    "Whatever they send you," said Hugh, keeping pace with him along the broad green path that circled the fish-ponds, "you'll have transformed by the time he leaves you. Why should they waste a simple, sweet saint like Rhun on you? He's made already, he came into the world made. You'll get the rough, the obdurate, the unstable to lick into shape. Not that it ever comes out the shape that was expected," he added, with a flashing grin and a slanted glance along his shoulder at his friend.
    "Rhun has taken upon himself the custody of Saint Winifred's altar," said Cadfael. "He has a proprietorial interest in the little lady. He makes the candles for her himself, and borrows essences from me to scent them for her. No, Rhun will find his own duties, and no one will stand in his way. He and she between them will see to that."
    They crossed the little foot-bridge over the leat that fed the pools and the mill, and emerged into the rose-garden. The trimmed bushes had made little growth as yet, but the first buds were swelling at last, the green sheaths parting to show a sliver of red or white. "They'll open fast now," said Cadfael contentedly. "All they needed was warmth. I'd begun to wonder whether the Widow Perle would get her rent on time this year, but if these are making up for lost time, so will her white ones be. A sad year, if there were no roses by the twenty-second day of June!"
    "The Widow Perle? Oh, yes, the Vestier girl!" said Hugh. "I remember! So it's due on the day of Saint Winifred's translation, is it? How many years is it now since she made the gift?"
    "This will be the fourth time we've paid her her annual rent. One white rose from that bush in her old garden, to be delivered to her on the day of Saint Winifred's translation -"
    "Supposed translation," said Hugh, grinning. "And you should blush when you name it."
    "So I do, but with my complexion who notices?" And he was indeed of a rosy russet colouring, confirmed by long years of outdoor living in both east and west, so engrained now that winters merely tarnished it a little, and summers regularly renewed the gloss.
    "She made modest demands," observed Hugh thoughtfully, as they came to the second plank-bridge that spanned the channel drawn off to service the guest-hall. "Most of