Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

doorway and ruffled the pages over, turning back from John to Matthew. It's true that no one came in, but I think someone must have lifted the latch and set the door ajar, and then after all drawn back and closed it again, hearing the voices within and not wanting to interrupt. No mistake about the wind, everyone felt it. And then, you see, it halted where it did because there were some petals and fragments from the blackthorn I had been handling fallen into the spine there, shaken out of my sleeve or my hair when I closed the book. Such a slight obstruction was not enough to affect the taking of the sortes, when they were opening the book with ceremony, both hands parting the leaves and a finger pointing the line. But when the wind turned the leaves, the blackthorn flowers were enough to arrest the movement at that place. Yet even so, dare we call that chance? And now that I come to think back," said Cadfael, shaking his head between doubt and conviction, "that wind that blew in was gone before ever the page settled. I watched the last one turn, slowly, halting before it was smoothed down. The air above the altar was quite still. The candles were stark erect, never a tremor."
    Aline had sat throughout this colloquy listening attentively to every word, but contributing none of her own. There was about her something distant and mysterious, Cadfael thought, as if a part of her being was charmed away into some private and pleasant place, even while her blue eyes dwelt upon her husband and his friend with sharp intelligence, following the argument back and forth with a kind of indulgent and amused affection, appropriate to a matriarch, watching her children.
    "My lady," said Hugh, catching her eye and breaking into a resigned grin, "my lady, as usual, is making fun of both of us."
    "No," said Aline, suddenly serious, "it is only that the step from perfectly ordinary things into the miraculous seems to me so small, almost accidental, that I wonder why it astonishes you at all, or why you trouble to reason about it. If it were reasonable it could not be miraculous, could it?"
    In the abbot's parlour they found not only Radulfus, but Robert of Leicester waiting for them. As soon as the civil greetings were over the earl with his nicely-judged courtesy made to withdraw.
    "You have business here which is out of my writ and competence, and I would not wish to complicate the affair for you. The lord abbot here has been good enough to admit me to his confidence so far as is appropriate, since I was a witness of what happened this morning, but now you have cause to enquire further, as I understand. I have lost my small claim to the saint," said Robert Bossu, with a flashing smile and a shrug of his high shoulder, "and should be about taking my leave here."
    "My lord," said Hugh heartily, "the king's peace, such as it is and as we manage to maintain it, is very much your business, and your experience in it is longer than mine. If the lord abbot agrees, I hope you will stay and give us the benefit of your judgement. There's matter to assess concerning murder. Every man's business, having a life to keep or lose."
    "Stay with us!" said Radulfus. "Hugh is right, we need all the good counsel we can get."
    "And I have as much human curiosity in me as the next man," owned the earl, and willingly sat down again. The abbot tells me there is more to add to what we witnessed here this morning. I take it, sir, you have been informed, as far as the tale yet carries us?"
    "Cadfael has told me," said Hugh, "how the sortes went, and of Brother Jerome's confession. He assures me we both, from what he and I saw on the spot, can go beyond what Jerome himself knows."
    Cadfael settled himself beside Hugh on the cushioned bench against the abbot's dark panelling. Outside the window the light was still full and clear, for the days were drawing out. Spring was not far away when the spiny mounds of blackthorn along the headlands of the fields turned from black to white, like drifts of snow.
    "Brother Jerome has told truth, the whole truth as he knows it, but it is not the whole. You saw him, he was in no case and no mind to hold anything back, nor has he done so. Recall, Father, what he said, how he stood and waited. So he did, we found the place, just withdrawn into the bushes by the path, where he had trampled uneasily and flattened the grass. How he snatched up a fallen branch, when the young man came down the path, and struck him with it, and he fell