Brother Cadfael 17: The Potter's Field

All of which they did before the day was over.

They were standing under the high wall of the graveyard, in the furthest corner where modest lay patrons found a place, and stewards and good servants of the abbey and, under a low mound still settling and greening, the nameless woman orphaned after death and received and given a home by Benedictine compassion.

Cadfael had gone with Ruald after Vespers, in the soft rain that was hardly more than a drifting dew on the face, chill and silent. The light would not last much longer. Vespers was already at its winter hour, and they were alone here in the shadow of the wall, in the wet grass, with the earthy smells of fading foliage and autumnal melancholy about them. A melancholy without pain, an indulgence of the spirit after the passing of bitterness and distress. And it did not seem strange that Ruald had shown no great surprise at learning that this translated waif was, after all, his wife, had accepted without wonder that Sulien had concocted, out of mistaken concern for an old friend, a false and foolish story to disprove her death. Nor had he rebelled against the probability that he would never know how she had died, or why she had been buried secretly and without rites, before she was brought to this better resting-place. Ruald's vow of obedience, like all his vows, was carried to the ultimate extreme of duty, into total acceptance. Whatever was, was best to him. He did not question.

'What is strange, Cadfael,' he said, brooding over the new turf that covered her, 'is that now I begin to see her face clearly again. When first I entered here I was like a man in fever, aware only of what I had longed for and gained. I could not recall how she looked, it was as if she and all my life aforetime had vanished out of the world.'

'It comes of staring into too intense a light,' said Cadfael, dispassionately, for he himself had never been dazzled. He had done what he had done in his right senses, made his choice, no easy choice, with deliberation, walked to his novitiate on broad bare feet treading solid earth, not been borne to it on clouds of bliss. 'A very fine experience in its way,' he said, 'but bad for the sight. If you stare too long you may go blind.'

'But now I see her clearly. Not as I last saw her, not angry or bitter. As she always used to be, all the years we were together. And young,' said Ruald, marvelling. 'Everything I knew and did, aforetime, comes back with her, I remember the croft, and the kiln, and where every small thing had its place in the house. It was a very pleasant place, looking down from the crest to the river, and beyond.'

'It still is,' said Cadfael. 'We've ploughed it, and brushed back the headland bushes, and you might miss the field flowers, and the moths at midsummer when the meadow grasses ripen. But there'll be the young green starting now along the furrows, and the birds in the headlands just the same. Yes, a very fair place.'

They had turned to walk back through the wet grass towards the chapter-house, and the dusk was a soft blue-green about them, clinging moist in the half-naked branches of the trees.

'She would never have had a place in this blessed ground,' said Ruald, out of the shadow of his cowl, 'but that she was found in land belonging to the abbey, and without any other sponsor to take care of her. As Saint Illtud drove his wife out into the night for no offence, as I, for no offence in her, deserted Generys, so in the end God has brought her back into the care of the Order, and provided her an enviable grave. Father Abbot received and blessed what I misused and misprized.'

'It may well be,' said Cadfael, 'that our justice sees as in a mirror image, left where right should be, evil reflected back as good, good as evil, your angel as her devil. But God's justice, if it makes no haste, makes no mistakes.'