Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

would not be turned back from the way he had chosen. He left her. She had loved him out of all measure,' said Donata dispassionately, speaking pure truth, 'and in the same measure she hated him. And all these days and weeks my lord had contended for her right, but could not win it. He had never before been so often and so long in her company.'

    

A moment she paused, looking from face to face, presenting her own ruin with wide, illusionless eyes.

    

'You see me, gentlemen. Since that time I may, perhaps, have moved a few short paces nearer the grave, but the change is not so great. I was already what I am now. I had been so for some few years. Three at least, I think, since Eudo had shared my bed, for pity of me, yes, but himself in abstinence to starvation, and without complaint. Such beauty as I ever had was gone, withered away into this aching shell. He could not touch me without causing me pain. And himself worse pain, whether he touched or abstained. And she, you will remember if ever you saw her, she was most beautiful. What all men said, I say, also. Most beautiful, and enraged, and desperate. And famished, like him. I fear I distress you, gentlemen,' she said, seeing them all three held in frozen awe at her composure and her merciless candour, delivered without emphasis, even with sympathy. 'I hope not. I simply wish to make all things plain. It is necessary.'

    

'There is no need to labour further,' said Radulfus. "This is not hard to understand, but very hard to hear as it must be to tell.'

    

'No,' she said reassuringly, 'I feel no reluctance. Never fret for me. I owe truth to her, as well as to you. But enough, then. He loved her. She loved him. Let us make it brief. They loved, and I knew. No one else. I did not blame them. Neither did I forgive them. He was my lord, I had loved him five-and-twenty years, and there was no remission because I was an empty shell. He was mine, I would not endure to share him.

    

'And now,' she said, 'I must tell something that had happened more than a year earlier. At that time I was using the medicines you sent me, Brother Cadfael, to ease my pain when it grew too gross. And I grant you the syrup of poppies does help, for a time, but after a while the charm fails, the body grows accustomed, or the demon grows stronger within.'

    

'It is true,' said Cadfael soberly. 'I have seen it lose its hold. And beyond a certain strength treatment cannot go.'

    

"That I understood. Beyond that there is only one cure, and we are forbidden to resort to that. None the less,' said Donata inexorably, 'I did consider how to die. Mortal sin, Father, I knew it, yet I did consider. Oh, never look aside at Brother Cadfael, I would not have come to him for the means, I knew he would not give them to me if I did. Nor did I ever intend to give my life away easily. But I foresaw a time when the load would become more than even I could bear, and I wished to have some small thing about me, a little vial of deliverance, a promise of peace, perhaps never to use, only to keep as a talisman, the very touch of it consolation to me that at the worst... at the last extreme, there was left to me a way of escape. To know that was to go on enduring. Is that reproach to me, Father?'

    

Abbot Radulfus stirred abruptly out of a stillness so long sustained that he emerged from it with a sharp indrawn breath, as if himself stricken with a shadowy insight into her suffering.

    

'I am not sure that I have the right to pronounce. You are here, you have withstood that temptation. To overcome the lures of evil is all that can be required of mortals. But you make no mention of those other consolations open to the Christian soul. I know your priest to be a man of grace. Did you not allow him the opportunity to lift some part of your burden from you?'

    

'Father Eadmer is a good man and a kind,' said Donata with a thin, wry smile, 'and no doubt my soul has benefited from his prayers. But pain is here in the body, and has a very loud voice. Sometimes I could not hear my own voice say Amen! for the demon howling. Howbeit, rightly or wrongly, I did look about me for other aid.'

    

'Is this to the present purpose?' Hugh asked gently. 'For it cannot be pleasant to you, and God knows it must be tiring you out.'

    

'It is very much to the purpose. You will see. Bear with me, till I end what I have begun. I got my talisman,' she said. 'I will not tell you from whom. I was