Brother Cadfael 13: The Rose Rent

sister."
    "Well... I'd best be off. God with you, Brother." Niall shouldered his bag of ornamental bronze rosettes and harness buckles for Mortimer's horse, and strode away along the Foregate, towards the track that led south-west from the bridge, a square, erect figure thrusting briskly into the pearly evening air cooling towards twilight. Cadfael stood looking after him until he turned the corner beyond the mill-pond and vanished from sight.
    Not a man for grand gestures or many words, Niall Bronzesmith, but Cadfael was bitterly and painfully aware of the gnawing frustration that eats away at the heart from within, when there is nothing to be done about the one thing in the world of any importance.
    Chapter Eleven
    Niall set out from Pulley on his return walk to Shrewsbury a little before midnight. Cecily would have had him stay, urging truly enough that if he did go back it would change nothing, and stating bluntly what Cadfael had refrained from stating, that while the woman herself was still safely out of reach there was hardly likely to be any further attack on the rose-bush, for any such attack was unnecessary. No one could deliver a rose into the hand of a woman who was missing. If someone was plotting to break the bargain and recover the house in the Foregate, as by now everyone seemed to be agreed, the thing was already done, without taking any further risk.
    Niall had said very little about the affair to his sister, and nothing at all about his own deep feelings, but she seemed to know by instinct. The talk of Shrewsbury found its way out here softened and distanced into a kind of folk-tale, hardly bearing at all on real life. The reality here was the demesne, its fields, its few labourers, the ditched coppice from which the children fended off the goats at pasture, the plough-oxen, and the enshrouding forest. The two little girls, listening round-eyed to the grown-ups' talk, must have thought of Judith Perle as of one of the enchanted ladies bewitched by evil magic in old nursery tales. Cecily's two shock-headed, berry-brown boys, at home in all the woodland skills, had only two or three times in their lives, thus far, set eyes on the distant towers of Shrewsbury castle. Three miles is not so far, but far enough when you have no need to cross it. John Stury came into the town perhaps twice a year to buy, and for the rest the little manor was self-supporting. Sometimes Niall was moved to feel that he must soon remove his daughter and take her back with him to the town, for fear he might lose her for ever. To a happy household, a peaceful, simple life and good company, truly, but to his own irrevocable loss and bereavement.
    She was asleep long before this hour, in her nest with the other three in the loft, he had laid her there himself, already drowsy. A fair creature, with a bright sheen of gold in her cloud of hair, like her mother before her, and a skin like creamy milk, that glowed in sunny weather with the same gilded gloss. Cecily's brood were reddish-dark, after their father, with lithe, lean bodies and black eyes. She was rounded and smooth and soft. Almost from birth she had been here with her cousins, it would be hard to take her away.
    "You'll have a dark walk home," said John, peering out from the doorway. In the summer night the smell of the forest was spicy and strong, heavy in the windless dark. "The moon won't be up for hours yet."
    "I don't mind it. I should know the way well enough by now."
    "I'll come out with you as far as the track," said Cecily, "and set you on your road. It's fine and warm still, and I'm wakeful."
    She walked beside him in silence as far as the gate in John's stockade, and out across the clearing of open grass to the edge of the trees, and there they halted.
    "One of these days," she said, as though she had been listening to all that he had been thinking, "you'll be taking the little one away from us. It's only right you should, though we shall grudge her to you. As well we're not so far away that we can't borrow her back now and then. It wouldn't do to leave it too long, Niall. I've had the gift of her, and been glad of it, but yours she is, yours and Avota's, when all's said, and best she should grow up knowing it and content with it."
    "She's young yet," said Niall defensively. "I dread to confuse her too soon."
    "She's young, but she's knowing. She begins to ask why you always leave her, and to wonder how you do, alone, and who cooks and washes for you. I reckon