Brother Cadfael 16: The Heretic's Apprentice

left the house door stood wide open, as it always had on such summer days. A woman was just coming up from the garden that stretched away beyond the house, with a basket of clothes in her arms, crisp washing just gathered from the hedge. She observed the stranger entering, and quickened her step to meet him.
    "Good day, sir! If you're wanting my husband..." She halted there, astonished, recognizing but not believing at first what she saw. Between eighteen and twenty-five a young man does not change so much as to be unrecognizable to his own family, however he may have filled out and matured during that time. It was simply that she had had no warning, no word to indicate that he was within five hundred miles of her.
    "Mistress Margaret," said Elave, "you've not forgotten me?"
    The voice completed what his face had begun. She flushed bright with acceptance and evident pleasure. "Dear, now, and it is you! Just for a moment there you had me struck out of my wits, thinking I was seeing visions, and you still half the world away, in some outlandish place. Well, now, and here you are safe and sound, after all that journeying. Glad I am to see you again, boy, and so will Girard and Jevan be. Who'd have thought you'd spring out of nowhere like this, all in a moment, and just in time for Saint Winifred's festival. Come within, come, let me put this laundry down and get you a draught to drink, and tell me how you've fared all this long time."
    She freed a hand to take him warmly by the arm and usher him within, to a bench by the unshuttered window of the hall, with such voluble goodwill that his silence passed unnoticed. She was a neat, brown-haired, bustling woman in her middle forties, healthy and hardworking and a good and discreet neighbour, and her shining housekeeping reflected her own strong-willed brightness.
    "Girard's away making up the wool clip. He'll be a day or so yet. His face will be a sight to see when he comes in and sees Uncle William sitting here at the table like in the old days. Where is he? Is he following you up now, or has he business below at the abbey?"
    Elave drew breath and said what had to be said. "He'll not be coming, mistress."
    "Not coming?" she said, astonished, turning sharply in the doorway of her larder.
    "Sorry I am to have no better word to bring you. Master William died in France, before we could embark for home. But I've brought him home, as I promised him I would. He lies at the abbey now, and tomorrow he's to be buried there, in the cemetery among the patrons of the house."
    She stood motionless, staring at him with pitcher and cup forgotten in her hands, and for a long moment she was silent.
    "It was what he wanted," said Elave. "He did what he set out to do, and he has what he wanted."
    "Not everyone can say as much," said Margaret slowly. "So Uncle William's gone! Business below at the abbey, did I say? And so he has, but not as I supposed. And you left to bring him over the sea alone! And Girard away, and who's to tell where at this moment? It will grieve him if he's not here to pay the last dues to a good man." She shook herself, and stirred out of her brief stillness, practical always. "Well, now, no fault of yours, you did well by him, and have no need to look back. Sit you down and be easy. You're home, at least. Done your wanderings for the time being, you can do with a rest."
    She brought him ale, and sat down beside him, considering without distress all that was now needful. A competent woman, she would have everything ordered and seemly whether her husband returned in time or not.
    "He was nearing eighty years old," she said, "by my reckoning. He had a good life, and was a good kinsman and a good neighbour, and he ended doing a blessed thing, and one that he wanted with all his heart, once that old preacher from Saint Osyth's put the thought in his mind. There," said Margaret, shaking her head with a sigh, "here am I harking back like a fool, and I never meant to. Time's short! I should have thought the abbot could have sent us word of the need as soon as you came in at the gatehouse."
    "He knew nothing of it until this morning at chapter. He's been here only four years, and we've been gone seven. But everything is in hand now."
    "Maybe it is, down there, but I must see to it that all's ready up here, for there'll be all the neighbours in to join us, and I hope you'll come back with us, after the funeral. Conan's here, that's lucky. I'll send him west to see if he can find