Brother Cadfael 15: The Confession of Brother Haluin

without a lingering thought of blame or forgiveness. And that was the last and most ironic judgment on Adelais de Clary.
    "Shall we go to Vespers?" said Cadfael. "The bell has gone, they'll all be in their places by now, we can creep in unnoticed."
    From their chosen dim corner in the church Cadfael scanned the young, clear faces of the sisters, and lingered long upon Sister Benedicta, who had once been Bertrade de Clary. Beside him Haluin's low, happy voice intoned the responses and prayers, but what Cadfael was hearing in his own mind was the same voice bleeding words slowly and haltingly, in the darkness of the forester's hayloft, before dawn. There in her stall, serene, fulfilled, and content, stood the woman he had tried to describe. "She was not beautiful, as her mother was. She had not that dark radiance, but something more kindly. There was nothing dark or secret in her, but everything open and sunlit, like a flower. She was not afraid of anything - not then. She trusted everyone. She had never been betrayed - not then. Only once, and she died of it."
    But no, she had not died. And certainly at this moment, devout and dutiful, there was nothing dark or secret in her. The oval face shone serene, as she celebrated with joy the mercy of God, after years. Without any lingering regret; her contentment was without blemish. The vocation she had undertaken unblessed, and laboured at against the grain, perhaps, all these years, surely reached its true wholeness only now, in the revelation of grace. She would not have turned back now even for that first love. There was no need. There are seasons of love. Theirs had passed beyond the storms of spring and the heat of summer into the golden calm of the first autumn days, before the leaves begin to fall. Bertrade de Clary looked as Brother Haluin looked, confirmed and invulnerable in the peace of the spirit. Henceforth presence was unnecessary, and passion irrelevant. They were eased of the past, and both of them had work to do for the future, all the more eagerly and thoroughly for knowing, each of them, that the other lived and laboured in the same vineyard.
    In the morning, after Prime, their farewells made, they set out on the long journey home.
    The sisters were in chapter when Cadfael and Haluin took scrip and crutches and went out from the guest hall, but the girl Helisende went with them to the gate. It seemed to Cadfael that all these faces about him had been washed clear of every shadow and every doubt; they had all of them that stunned brightness, astonished by the good that had befallen them. Now it could be seen more clearly how like were father and daughter, so many of the marks of the years having been smoothed from Haluin's face.
    Helisende embraced him without words at parting, fervent but shy. However they had spent the previous day, whatever confidences had been exchanged, she could not so quickly know him of her own knowledge, only through her mother's eyes, but she knew of him that he was gentle and of pleasing person and address, and that his eruption into her life had freed her from a nightmare of guilt and loss, and she would always remember and think of him so, with pleasure and gratitude not so far distant from love. Profit enough, even if he never saw her again.
    "God keep you, Father!" said Helisende.
    It was the first and the last time that she gave him that title not as a priest but as a man, but it was a gift that would last him a lifetime.
    They halted for the night at Hargedon, where the canons of Hampton had a grange, in a countryside slowly being recovered out of the waste that had followed the Norman settlement. Only now, after sixty years, was ploughland being resurrected out of the scrub, and an occasional hamlet being raised where tracks crossed, or rivers provided water for a mill. The comparative security offered by the presence of the canons' steward and servants had drawn others to settle close by, and there were now assarts being hewn out of the neglected woods by enterprising younger sons. But still it was sparsely populated territory, level, lonely, and in the evening light melancholy. Yet with every laboured step taken westward across this mournful plain Brother Haluin's brightness increased, his pace quickened, and his colour flushed into eagerness.
    From the narrow unshuttered window in the loft he looked out westward into a night full of stars. Nearer to Shrewsbury, where the hills began to heave their fleeces towards the