Brother Cadfael 15: The Confession of Brother Haluin

dark.
    "It's true, to arrive on the eve of the bridegroom's coming is very apt timing. I can but go with the burden of the day," said Haluin, "and hope to be led aright. These second marriages in old age, Cadfael, have sorry tangles to answer for. How can two babes playing together in the rushes of the floor know that they are aunt and nephew, and fruit forbidden? A pity that love should be spent to no end."
    "I am not sure," said Cadfael, "that love is ever spent for no end. Well, at least now you can be still and rest for a day or so, and all the better for it. That, at any rate, comes timely."
    And that was plainly the best use Haluin could make of this halt on the way home, since he had already tried himself very near the end of his endurance. Cadfael left him in peace, and went out to take a daylight look at this manor of Vivers. A cloudy day with a fitful wind, the air free of frost, and occasional fine drifts of rain in the air, but none that lasted long.

He walked the width of the enclave to the gate, to see the-full extent of the house. There were windows in the steep roof above the solar, probably two retiring rooms were available there. Haluin and companion had been accommodated considerately on the living floor. No doubt one of those upper chambers was being prepared at this moment for the expected bridegroom. The daily bustle about the courtyard seemed everywhere to be in hand without haste or confusion; things were well ordered here.
    Beyond the pale of the stockade the soft, undulating landscape extended in field and copse and sparsely treed upland, all the greens still bleached and dried with winter, but the black branches showed here and there the first nodules of the leaf buds of spring. Faint frills of snow outlined all the hollows and sheltered places, but a gleam of sun was breaking through the low cloud, and by noon all the remnant of last night's fall would be gone.
    Cadfael looked into the stables and the mews, and found both well supplied and proudly kept by servitors ready and willing to show them off to an interested visitor. In. a separate stall in the kennels a hound bitch lay curled in clean straw with her six pups around her, perhaps five weeks old. He could not resist going into the dim shed to take up one of the young ones, and the dam was complacent, and welcomed admiration of her brood. The soft warmth of the small body in his arms had a smell like new bread. He was just stooping to lay the pup back among its siblings when a clear, cool voice behind him said:
    "Are you the priest who is to marry me?"
    And there she was in the doorway, again a shadowy form against the light, so composed, so assured that she might easily be taken for a mature and stately woman of thirty, though the fresh, light voice belonged to her proper age.
    The girl Helisende Vivers, not yet decked out to receive her bridegroom, but in a plain housewifely gown of dark blue wool, and with a gently steaming pail of meat and meal for the hounds in one hand.
    "Are you the priest who is to marry me?"
    "No," said Cadfael, slowly straightening up from the wriggling litter and the crooning bitch. "That is Brother Haluin. I never studied for orders. I know myself better."
    "It's the lame man, then," she said with detached sympathy. "I am sorry he suffers such hardship. I hope they have made him comfortable, here in our house. You do know about my marriage - that Jean comes here today?"
    "Your brother has told us," said Cadfael, watching the features of her oval face emerge softly from shadow, every plaintive, ingenuous line testifying to her youth. "But there are things he could not tell us," he said, watching her intently, "except by hearsay. Only you can tell us whether this match has your consent, freely given, or no."
    Her brief silence at that did not suggest hesitation so much as a grave consideration of the man who raised the question. Her large eyes, dauntlessly honest, embraced and penetrated, quite unafraid of being penetrated in return. If she had judged him so alien to her needs and predicament as to be unacceptable, she would have closed the encounter there and then, civilly but without satisfying what would then have been there intrusive curiosity. But she did not.
    "If we do anything freely, once we are grown," she said, "then yes, this I do freely. There are rules that must be kept. There are others in the world with us who have rights and needs, and we are all bound. You may tell Brother Haluin - Father