Brother Cadfael 20: Brother Cadfael's Penance

if he reached it within his life, he might not be received. The thread of belonging, once stretched to breaking point, may not be easily joined again. Cadfael made his petition in humility, if not quite in resignation, and remained on his knees a while with closed eyes, remembering things done well and things done less well, but remembering with the greatest gratitude and content the image of his son in the guise of a rustic youth, as once before, nursing his enemy in his lap in the miller's cart. Blessed paradox, for they were not enemies. They had done their worst to become so, and could not maintain it. Better not to question the unquestionable.
    He was rising from his knees, a little stiffly from the chill of the air and the hardness of the flagstones, when a light step sounded on the threshold, and the door was pushed a little wider open. The presence of women in the castle had already made some changes in the furnishings of the chapel, by the provision of an embroidered altar-cloth, and the addition of a green-cushioned prie-dieu for the empress's use. Now her gentlewoman came in with a heavy silver candlestick in either hand, and was crossing to the altar to install them when she saw Cadfael. She gave him a gentle inclination of her head, and smiled. Her hair was covered with a gauze net that cast a shimmer of silver over a coronal already immaculate in its own silver.
    "Good morning, brother," said Jovetta de Mentors, and would have passed on, but halted instead, and looked more closely. "I have seen you before, brother, have I not? You were at the meeting in Coventry."
    "I was, madam," said Cadfael.
    "I remember," she said, and sighed. "A pity nothing came of it. Was it some business consequent upon that meeting that has brought you so far from home? For I believe I heard you were of the abbey of Shrewsbury."
    "In a sense," said Cadfael, "yes, it was."
    "And have you sped?" She had moved to the altar, and set her candlesticks one at either end, and was stooping to find candles for them in a coffer beside the wall, and a sulphur spill to light them from the small constant lamp that glowed red before the central cross.
    "In part," he said, "yes, I have sped."
    "Only in part?"
    "There was another matter, not solved, no, but of less importance now than we thought it then. You will remember the young man who was accused of murder, there in Coventry?"
    He drew nearer to her, and she turned towards him a clear, pale face, and large, direct eyes of a deep blue. "Yes, I remember. He is cleared of that suspicion now. I talked with him when he came to Gloucester, and he told us that Philip FitzRobert was satisfied he was not the man, and had set him free. I was glad. I thought all was over when the empress brought him off safely, and I never knew until we were in Gloucester that Philip had seized him on the road. Then, days later, he came to raise the alarm over this castle. I knew," she said, "that there was no blame in him."
    She set the candles in their sockets, and the candlesticks upon the altar, stepping back a little to match the distances, with her head tilted. The sulphur match sputtered in the little red flame, and burned up steadily, casting a bright light over her thin, veined left hand. Carefully she lit her candles, and stood watching the flames grow tall, with the match still in her hand. On the middle finger she wore a ring, deeply cut in intaglio. Small though the jet stone was, the incised design took the light brilliantly, in fine detail. The little salamander in its nest of stylized flames faced the opposite way, but was unmistakable once its positive complement had been seen.
    Cadfael said never a word, but she was suddenly quite still, making no move to put the ring out of the light that burnished and irradiated it in every line. Then she turned to him, and her glance followed his, and again returned to his face.
    "I knew," she said again, "there was no blame in him. I was in no doubt at all. Neither, I think, were you. But I had cause. What was it made you so sure, even then?"
    He repeated, rehearsing them now with care, all the reasons why Brien de Soulis must have died at the hands of someone he knew and trusted, someone who could approach him closely without being in any way a suspect, as Yves Hugonin certainly could not, after his open hostility. Someone who could not possibly be a threat to him, a man wholly in his confidence.
    "Or a woman," said Jovetta de Montors.
    She said it quite gently