Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

Sulien stood fronting him with an inscrutable face, but betrayed himself for a second by moistening lips suddenly dry. 'Now?'

'Now.' The word fell too heavily, it needed leavening. 'He would take it kindly of you. He thought of your son,' said Cadfael, turning to Donata, 'for a short while as his son. He has not withdrawn that paternal goodwill. He would be glad to see and to know,' he said with emphasis, looking up again into Sulien's face, 'that all is well with you. There is nothing we want more than that.' And whatever might follow, that at least was true. Whether they could hope to have and keep what they wanted was another matter.

'Would an hour or two of delay be allowed me?' asked Sulien steadily. 'I must escort Pernel home to Withington. Perhaps I should do that first.' Meaning, for Cadfael, who knew how to interpret: It may be a long time before I come back from the abbey. Best to clear up all unfinished business.

'No need for that,' said Donata with authority. 'Pernel shall stay here with me over the night, if she will be so kind. I will send a boy over to Withington to let her father know that she is safe here with me. I have not so many young visitors that I can afford to part with her so soon. You go with Brother Cadfael, and we shall keep company very pleasantly together until you come back.'

That brought a certain wary gleam to Sulien's face and Pernel's. They exchanged the briefest of glances, and Pernel said at once: 'I should like that very much, if you'll really let me stay. Gunnild is there to take care of the children, and my mother, I'm sure, will spare me for a day.'

Was it possible, Cadfael wondered, that Donata, even in her own extremity, was taking thought for her younger son, and welcomed this first sign in him of interest in a suitable young woman? Mothers of strong nature, long familiar with their own slow deaths, may also wish to settle any unfinished business.

He had just realised what it was that most dismayed him about her. This wasting enemy that had greyed her hair and shrunk her to the bone had still not made her look old. She looked, rather, like a frail waif of a young girl, blighted, withered and starved in her April days, when the bud should just have been unfolding. Beside Pernel's radiance she was a blown wisp of vapour, the ghost of a child. Yet in this or any room she would still be the dominant.

'I'll go and saddle up, then,' said Sulien, almost as lightly as if he had been contemplating no more than a canter through the woods for a breath of air. He stooped to kiss his mother's fallen cheek, and she lifted a hand that felt like the flutter of a dead leaf's filigree skeleton as it touched his face. He said no farewells, to her or to Pernel. That might have spilled over into something betrayingly ominous. He went briskly out through the hall, and Cadfael made his own farewells as gracefully as he could, and hurried down to join him in the stables.

They mounted in the yard, and set out side by side without a word being spoken, until they were threading the belt of woodland.

'You will already have heard,' said Cadfael then, 'that Hugh Beringar and his levy came back today? Without losses!'

'Yes, we heard. I did grasp,' said Sulien, wryly smiling, 'whose voice it was summoning me. But it was well done to let the abbot stand for him. Where are we really bound? The abbey or the castle?'

'The abbey. So much was truth. Tell me, how much does she know?'

'My mother? Nothing. Nothing of murder, nothing of Gunnild, or Britric, or Ruald's purgatory. She does not know your plough team ever turned up a woman's body, on what was once our land. Eudo never said a word to her, nor has any other. You have seen her,' said Sulien simply. "There is not a soul about her who would let one more grief, however small, be added to her load. I should thank you for observing the same care.'

'If that can be sustained,' said Cadfael, 'it shall. But to tell the truth, I am not sure that you have done her any service. Have you ever considered that she may be stronger than any one of you? And that in the end, to worse sorrow, she may have to know?'

Sulien rode beside him in silence for a while, his head was raised, his eyes fixed steadily ahead, and his profile, seen clearly against the open sky with its heavy clouds, pale and set with the rigidity of a mask. Another