Brother Cadfael 16: The Heretic's Apprentice

maturity. The lamp showed his face arduously smiling, but it was more akin to a spasm of pain. "I don't understand you," he said. "Why must you meddle secretly? Could you not have asked me whatever you wanted to know?"
    His hand crept almost stealthily to the key. He drew back into the shadows by the door, and without taking his eyes from her, felt behind him with a grating fumble for the lock, and locked them in together.
    It seemed to Fortunata then that she would do well to be a little afraid, but all she could feel was a baffled sadness that chilled her to the heart. She heard her own voice saying: "Had Aldwin meddled secretly? Was that what ailed him?"
    Jevan braced his shoulders back against the door, and stood staring at her with stubborn forbearance, as though dealing with someone unaccountably turned idiot, but his consciously patient smile remained fixed and strained, like a convulsion of agony.
    "You are talking in riddles," he said. "What has this to do with Aldwin? I can't guess what strange fancy you've got into your head, but it is an illusion. If I choose to show the gem you gave me to a friend who would appreciate it, does that mislead you into thinking I have somehow misprised or misused it?"
    "Oh, no!" said Fortunata in the flat tone of helpless despair. "It will not do! Today you have been nowhere but here, not alone. If there had been no more than that, you would have taken book and all to show, you would have said what you were about. And you would not have followed me here! It was a mistake! You should have waited. I've found nothing. But by your coming I do know now there is something here to be found. Why else should you trouble what I did?" A sudden gust of rage took her at his immovable and self-deceiving attempt at condescension, which struggled and failed to diminish her. "Why do we keep pretending?" she cried. "What is the use? If I had known I would have given you the book, or taken your price for it if that was what you wanted. But now there's murder, murder, murder in between us, and there's no turning back or putting that away out of mind. And you know it as well as I. Why do we not speak openly? We cannot stay here forever, unable to go forward or back. Tell me, what are we to do now?"
    But that was what neither he nor she could answer. Her hands were tied like his, they were suspended in limbo together, and neither of them could cut the cord that fettered them. He would have to kill, she would have to denounce, before either of them could ever be free again, and neither of them could do it, and neither of them, in the end, would be able to refrain. There was no answer. He drew deep breath, and uttered something like a groan.
    "You meant that? You could forgive me for robbing you?"
    "Without a thought! What you took from me I can do without. But what you took from Aldwin there's no replacing, and no one who is not Aldwin has the right to forgive it."
    "How do you know," he demanded with abrupt ferocity, "that I ever did any harm to Aldwin?"
    "Because if you had not, you would have denied it here and now, in defiance of what I may believe I know. Oh, why, why? But for that I could have held my tongue. For you I would have! But what had Aldwin ever done, to come by such a death?"
    "He opened the box," said Jevan starkly, "and looked inside. No one else knew. When it was opened before us all he would have blabbed it out. Now you have it! An inquisitive fool who walked in my way, and he could have betrayed me, and I should have lost it... lost it forever... It was the box, the box that made me marvel. And he was before me, and had seen what afterward I saw... and coveted!"
    Long, heavy silences had broken the low, furious thread of this speech, as if for minutes at a time he forgot where he was, and what manner of audience he was addressing. Outside, the light was gently dimming. Within, the lamp began to burn lower. It seemed to Fortunata that they had been there together for a very long time.
    "I had only until Girard came home. I took it that very night, and put what I had in its place. I did not want to cheat you of all, I paid what I had... But then there was Aldwin. When could he ever keep to himself anything he knew? And my brother on his way home..."
    Another haunted silence, in which he began to stir from his post by the door, moving restlessly the length of the room, past where she sat almost forgotten, silent and still.
    "When he went running back after Elave, that day, I had