The Heretic's Apprentice (6 page)

A moment was enough for the abbot. This dangerous line of talk was getting out of hand. He cut it short with decision.

‘The Holy Father has authority both to bind and to loose, and the same infallible will that can condemn can also with equal right absolve. There is here, it seems to me, no contradiction at all. Whatever views he may have held seven years ago, William of Lythwood died on pilgrimage, confessed and shriven, in a state of grace. There is no bar to his burial within this enclave, and he shall have what he has asked of us.'

As Cadfael came through the court after dinner, to return to his labours in the herb-garden, he encountered Elave. The young man was just coming down the steps from the guest-hall, in movement and countenance bright and vehement, like a tool honed for fine use. He was still roused and ready to be aggressive after the rough passage of his master's body to its desired resting-place, the bones of his face showed polished with tension, and his prow of a nose quested belligerently on the summer air.

‘You look ready to bite,' said Cadfael, coming by design face to face with him.

The boy looked back at him for a moment uncertain how to respond, where even this unalarming presence was still an unknown quantity. Then he grinned, and the sharp tension eased.

‘Not you, at any rate, Brother! If I showed my teeth, did I not have cause?'

‘Well, at least you know our abbot all the better for it. You have what you asked. But as well keep a lock on your lips until the other one is gone. One way to be sure of saying nothing that can be taken amiss is to say nothing at all. Another is to agree with whatever the prelates say. But I doubt that would have much appeal for you.'

‘It's like threading a way between archers in ambush,' said Elave, relaxing. ‘For a cloistered man, Brother, you say things aside from the ordinary yourself.'

‘We're none of us as ordinary as all that. What I feel, when the divines begin talking doctrine, is that God speaks all languages, and whatever is said to him or of him in any tongue will need no interpreter. And if it's devoutly meant, no apology. How is that hand of yours? No inflammation?'

Elave shifted the box he was carrying to his other arm, and showed the faded scar in his palm, still slightly puffed and pink round the healed punctures.

‘Come round with me to my workshop, if you've the time to spare,' Cadfael invited, ‘and let me dress that again for you. And that will be the last you need think of it.' He cast a glance at the box tucked under the young man's arm. ‘But you have errands to do in the town? You'll be off to visit William's kinsfolk.'

‘They'll need to know of his burying, tomorrow,' said Elave. ‘They'll be here. There was always a good feeling among them all, never bad blood. It was Girard's wife who kept the house for the whole family. I must go and tell them what's arranged. But there's no haste, I daresay once I'm up there it will be for the rest of the day and into the evening.'

They fell in amicably together, side by side, out of the court and through the rose garden, rounding the thick hedge. As soon as they entered the walled garden the sun-warmed scent of the herbs rose to enfold them in a cloud of fragrance, every step along the gravel path between the beds stirring wave on wave of sweetness.

‘Shame to go withindoors on such a day,' said Cadfael. ‘Sit down here in the sun, I'll bring the lotion out to you.'

Elave sat down willingly on the bench by the north wall, tilting his face up to the sun, and laid his burden down beside him. Cadfael eyed it with interest, but went first to bring out the cleansing lotion, and anoint the fading wound once again.

‘You'll feel no more of that now, it's clean enough. Young flesh heals well, and you've surely been through more risks crossing the world and back than you should be meeting here in Shrewsbury.' He stoppered the flask, and sat down beside his guest. ‘I suppose they won't even know yet, that you're back and their kinsman dead – the family there in the town?'

‘Not yet, no. There was barely time last night to get my master well bestowed, and what with the dispute in chapter this morning, I've had no chance yet to get word to them. You know them – his nephews? Girard sees to the flock and the sales, and fetches in the wool clips from the others he deals for. Jevan always managed the vellum making, even in William's day. Come to think of it, for all I know things may be changed there since we left.'

‘You'll find them all living,' said Cadfael reassuringly, ‘that I do know. Not that we see much of them down here in the Foregate. They come sometimes on festival days, but they have their own church at Saint Alkmund's.' He eyed the box Elave had laid down on the bench between them. ‘Something William was bringing back to them? May I look? Faith, I own I'm looking already, I can't take my eyes from it. That's a wonderful piece of carving. And old, surely.'

Elave looked down at it with the critical appreciation and indifferent detachment of one to whom it meant simply an errand to be discharged, something he would be glad to hand over and be rid of. But he took it up readily and placed it in Cadfael's hands to be examined closely.

‘I have to take it by way of a dowry for the girl. When he grew too ill to go on he thought of her, seeing he'd taken her into his household from the day she was born. So he gave me this to bring to Girard, to be used for her when she marries. It's a poor lookout for a girl with no dowry when it comes to getting a husband.'

‘I remember there was a little girl,' said Cadfael, turning the box in his hands with admiration. It was enough to excite the artist in any man. Fashioned from some dark eastern wood, about a foot long by eight inches wide and four deep, the lid flawlessly fitted, with a small, gilded lock. The under surface was plain, polished to a lustrous darkness almost black, the upper surface and the edges of the lid beautifully and intricately carved in a tracery of vine leaves and grapes, and in the centre of the lid a lozenge containing an ivory plaque, an aureoled head, full-face, with great Byzantine eyes. It was so old that the sharp edges had been slightly smoothed and rounded by handling, but the lines of the carving were still picked out in gold.

‘Fine work!' said Cadfael, handling it reverently. He balanced it in his hands, and it hung like a solid mass of wood, nothing shifting within. ‘You never wondered what was in it?'

Elave looked faintly surprised, and hoisted indifferent shoulders. ‘It was packed away, and I had other things to think about I've only this past half-hour got it out of the baggage-roll. No, I never did wonder. I took it he'd saved up some money for her. I'm just handing it over to Girard as I was told to do. It's the girl's, not mine.'

‘You don't know where he got it?'

‘Oh, yes, I know where he bought it. From a poor deacon in the market in Tripoli, just before we took ship for Cyprus and Thessalonika on our way home. There were Christian fugitives beginning to drift in then from beyond Edessa, turned out of their monasteries by mamluk raiders from Mosul. They came with next to nothing, they had to sell whatever they'd contrived to bring with them in order to live. William drove shrewd bargains among the merchants, but he dealt fairly with those poor souls. They said life was becoming hard and dangerous in those parts. The journey out we made the slow way, by land. William wanted to see the great collection of relics in Constantinople. But coming home we started by sea. There are plenty of Greek and Italian merchant ships plying as far as Thessalonika, some even all the way to Bari and Venice.'

‘There was a time,' mused Cadfael, drawn back through the years, ‘when I knew those seas very well. How did you fare for lodging on the way out, all those miles afoot?'

‘Now and then we went a piece in company, but mostly it was we two alone. The monks of Cluny have hospices all across France and down through Italy, even close by the emperor's city they have a house for pilgrims. And as soon as you reach the Holy Land the Knights of Saint John provide shelter everywhere. It's a great thing to have done,' said Elave, looking back in awe and wonder. ‘Along the way a man lives a day at a time, and looks no further ahead than the next day, and no further behind than the day just passed. Now I see it whole, and it is wonderful.'

‘But not all good,' said Cadfael. ‘That couldn't be, we couldn't ask it. Remember the cold and the rain and the hunger at times, and losses by thieves now and then, and a few knocks from those who prey on travellers – oh, never tell me you met none! And the weariness, and the times when William fell ill, the bad food, the sour water, the stones of the road. You've met all that. Every man who travels that far across the world has met it all.'

‘I do remember all that,' said Elave sturdily, ‘but it is still wonderful.'

‘Good! So it should be,' said Cadfael, sighing. ‘Lad, I should be glad to sit and talk with you about every step of the way, when your time's free. You go and deliver your box to Master Girard, and that's your duty done. And what will you do now? Go back to work for them as before?'

‘No, not that. It was for William I worked. They have their own clerk, I wouldn't wish to displace him, and they don't need two. Besides, I want more, and different. I'll take time to look about me. I've come back with more skills than when I went, I'd like to use them.' He rose, and tucked the carved box securely under his arm.

‘I've forgotten,' said Cadfael, following the gesture thoughtfully, ‘if indeed I ever knew – how did he come by the child? He had none of his own, and as far as I know, Girard has none, and the other brother has never married. Where did the girl come from? Some foundling he took in?'

‘You could say so. They had a serving maid, a simple soul, who fell foul of a small huckster at the fair one year, and brought forth a daughter. William gave houseroom to the pair of them, and Margaret cared for the baby like her own child, and when the mother died they simply kept the girl. A pretty little thing she was. She had more wit than her mother. It was William named her Fortunata, for he said she'd come into the world with nothing, not even a father, and still found herself a home and a family, and so she'd still fall on her feet lifelong. She was eleven, rising twelve,' said Elave, ‘when we set out, and grown into a skinny, awkward little thing all teeth and elbows. They say the prettiest pups make the ugliest dogs. She'll need a decent dowry to make up for her gawky looks.'

He stretched his long person, hoisted his box more firmly under his arm, dipped his fair head in a small, friendly reverence, and was off along the path, his haste to discharge all the final duties with which he had been entrusted tempered somewhat by a sense of the seven years since he had seen William's family, and the inevitable estrangement time must have brought about, until now scarcely realised. What had once been familiar was now alien, and it would take time to edge his way back to it. Cadfael watched him disappear round the corner of the box hedge, torn between sympathy and envy.

*

The house of Girard of Lythwood, like so many of the merchant burgages of Shrewsbury, was in the shape of an L, the short base directly on the street, and pierced by an arched entry leading through to the yard and garden behind. The base of the L was of only one storey, and provided the shop where Jevan, the younger brother, stored and sold his finished leaves and gatherings of vellum and the cured skins from which they were folded and cut to order. The upright of the L showed its gable end to the street, and consisted of a low undercroft and the living floor above, with a loft in the steep roof that provided extra sleeping quarters. The entire burgage was not large, space being valuable within so enclosed a town, in its tight noose of river. Outside the loop, in the suburbs of Frankwell on one side and the Foregate on the other, there was room to expand, but within the wall every inch of ground had to be used to the best advantage.

Elave halted before the house, and stood a moment to take in the strangeness of what he felt, a sudden warmth of homecoming, an almost panic reluctance to go in and declare himself, a mute wonder at the smallness of the house that had been his home for a number of years. In the overwhelming basilicas of Constantinople, as in the profound isolation of deserts, a man grows used to immensity.

He went in slowly through the narrow entry and into the yard. On his right the stables, the byre for the cow, the store shed and low coop for the chickens were just as he remembered them, and on his left the house door stood wide open, as it always had on such summer days. A woman was just coming up from the garden that stretched away beyond the house, with a basket of clothes in her arms, crisp washing just gathered from the hedge. She observed the stranger entering, and quickened her step to meet him.

‘Goodday, sir! If you're wanting my husband...' She halted there, astonished, recognising but not believing at first what she saw. Between eighteen and twenty-five a young man does not change so much as to be unrecognisable to his own family, however he may have filled out and matured during that time. It was simply that she had had no warning, no word to indicate that he was within five hundred miles of her.

‘Mistress Margaret,' said Elave, ‘you've not forgotten me?'

The voice completed what his face had begun. She flushed bright with acceptance and evident pleasure. ‘Dear, now, and it
is
you! Just for a moment there you had me struck out of my wits, thinking I was seeing visions, and you still half the world away, in some outlandish place. Well, now, and here you are safe and sound, after all that journeying. Glad I am to see you again, boy, and so will Girard and Jevan be. Who'd have thought you'd spring out of nowhere like this, all in a moment, and just in time for Saint Winifred's festival. Come within, come, let me put this laundry down and get you a draught to drink, and tell me how you've fared all this long time.'