sent off a kitchen boy to carry word to the lady’s woman of the chamber, who
presently came out from the hall to see who these monastic guests might be. A
woman of about forty years, very brisk and neat, plain in her dress and plain
in her face, for she was pockmarked. But of her confidence in office there was
no question. She looked them over somewhat superciliously, and listened to
Haluin’s meekly uttered request without a responsive smile, in no hurry to open
a door of which she clearly felt herself the privileged custodian.
“From
the abbey at Shrewsbury, you come? And on the lord abbot’s business, I
suppose?”
“On
an errand the lord abbot has sanctioned,” said Haluin.
“It
is not the same,” said Gerta sharply. “What other than abbey business can send
a monk of Shrewsbury here? If this is some matter of your own, let my lady know
with whom she is dealing.”
“Tell
her,” said Haluin patiently, leaning heavily on his crutches, and with eyes
lowered from the woman’s unwelcoming face, “that Brother Haluin, a Benedictine
monk of Shrewsbury abbey, humbly begs of her grace to receive him.”
The
name meant nothing to her. Clearly she had not been in Adelais de Clary’s
service, or certainly not in her confidence or even close enough to guess at
her preoccupations, eighteen years ago. Some other woman, perhaps nearer her
mistress’s years, had filled this intimate office then. Close body servants,
grown into their mistress’s trust and into their own blood loyalty, carry a
great treasury of secrets, often to their deaths. There must somewhere, Cadfael
thought, watching in silence, be a woman who would have stiffened and opened
her eyes wide at that name, even if she had not instantly known the changed and
time-worn face.
“I
will ask,” said the tirewoman, with a touch of condescension still, and went
away through the hall to a leather-curtained doorway at the far end. Some
minutes passed before she appeared again, drawing back the hangings, and
without troubling to approach them, called from the doorway: “My lady says you
may come.”
The
solar they entered was small and dim, for the windward of the two windows was
shuttered fast against the weather, and the tapestries that draped the walls
were old, and in rich dark colors. There was no fireplace, but a stone hearth
laid close to the most sheltered corner carried a charcoal brazier, and between
that and the one window that gave light a woman was sitting at a little
embroidery frame, on a cushioned stool. Against the light from the window she
showed as a tall, erect shape, dark-clothed, while the glow of the brazier
shone in copper highlights on her shadowed face. She had left her needle thrust
into the stretched cloth. Her hands were clenched fast on the raised arms of
the stool, and her eyes were on the doorway, into which Brother Haluin lurched
painfully on his crutches, his one serviceable foot sore with use and bearing
him wincingly at every step, the blocked toe of his left foot barely touching
the floor as a meager aid to balance. Constant leaning into the crutches had
hunched his shoulders and bent his straight back. Having heard his name, she
must surely have expected something nearer to the lively, comely young man she
had cast out all those years ago. What could she make now of this mangled
wreckage?
He
was barely within the room when she rose abruptly to her feet, stiff as a
lance. Over their heads she spoke first to the waiting-woman, who had made to
follow them in.
“Leave
us!” said Adelais de Clary, and to Haluin, as the leather curtain swung heavily
into place between solar and hall: “What is this? What have they done to you?”
Chapter Four
SHE
MUST, CADFAEL RECKONED, growing used to the play of light and shadow within the
room, be within ten years of his own age, but she looked younger. The dark hair
that was coiled in heavy braids on either
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