Brother Cadfael 13: The Rose Rent

done me no violence, no lasting wrong. Better it should all be put away. You did not recognise him?" she asked, looking at him earnestly with her penetrating grey eyes, a little bruised with tiredness.
    "That was he who rode with you? No, I could not tell who he was. But if I could, I would still go with your wish. Provided it was not he," said Niall sharply, "who came back afoot to make sure of your silence. For yes, he meant killing!"
    "No, no, that was not he. He was gone, you heard him go. Besides, he would not. We had agreed, he knew I would keep my word. No, that other was some wretch living wild on the pickings of the roads. And we must warn Hugh Beringar so," she said, "when we go back. This place is very lonely. As well he should know there are masterless men abroad here."
    She had left the great waving sheaf of her hair loose on her shoulders, ready for the sleep she sorely needed. The large, high eyelids, iris-veined and translucent, hung heavily over the grey eyes. The sheen of candle-light over her tired pallor made her look like a woman fashioned in mother-of-pearl. He looked at her, and his heart ached.
    "How came it," she asked wonderingly, "that you were there when I so needed you? I had but to cry out, and you came. It was like the grace of God, an instant mercy."
    "I was on my way home from Pulley," said Niall, shaken and tongue-tied for a moment by the sudden sweet intensity of her voice, "and I saw - saw, heard, no, felt in my blood - when you passed by. I never thought to trouble you, only to see that you came safely wherever it was you wished to be."
    "You knew me?" she said, marvelling.
    "Yes. Yes, I knew you."
    "But not the man?"
    "No, not the man."
    "I think," she said, with abrupt and reviving resolution, "that you may, you of all people, that you should. I think I want to tell everything to you, you and Sister Magdalen - even what the world must not know, even what I have promised to keep hidden."
    "So you see," she said starkly, coming to the end of her story, which had taken but a few minutes to tell, "how shamelessly I am making use of you, Sister, in coming here. I have been lost and sought, hunted high and low, for three days, and tomorrow I must go back and face all those who have laboured and agonised for me, and tell them I have been here with you, that I fled all my troubles because they fell too heavily on me, and I took refuge without a word to any, here in this retreat, where you once offered me shelter from the world. Well, it will not be quite a lie, for I am here, if only for the half of this one night. But it shames me, so to use you. Yet I must go back tomorrow." Though it was already today, she recalled through a haze of weariness and relief. "I cannot leave them longer than need be in doubt and anxiety, now I'm free to return. Or God knows I would stay here, and how gladly!"
    "I see no need to fret over a scruple," said Sister Magdalen sensibly. "If this spares both you and this idiot youth you have forgiven, and shuts the mouths of gossips, then I find it as good a way of serving as any. And the need for quietness and counsel you can declare without ever a blush, for that's no lie. For that matter, you may come back again when you will, and stay as long as you will, as once I told you. But you're right, it is but fair to set their minds at rest and call off the hunt. Later, when you're rested, you shall go back and face them all, and say that you came to me when the world and the stupidity of men -saving present company, that's understood! -bore you down to despair. But creep back afoot, no, that you shan't. Would I let a woman go so poorly provided from a retreat with me? You shall have Mother Mariana's mule - poor soul, she's bedridden now, she'll do no more riding - and I'll ride with you, to give colour and body to all. I have an errand I can do to the lord abbot at the same time."
    "How if they ask how long I have been here?" asked Judith.
    "With me beside you? They won't ask. Or if they do, we shall not answer. Questions are as supple as willow wands," said Sister Magdalen, rising authoritatively to lead them to the beds prepared, "it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it."
    Chapter Twelve
    The brothers were just issuing from the church after High Mass, and the sun was climbing high into a pale blue sky, when Sister Magdalen's little cavalcade turned in at the abbey gatehouse. This was the eve of the translation of Saint