The Raven in the Foregate (2 page)

“Of all of us,” said Cadfael piously, “that makes me
the best blessed at this coming feast. I’ll pray good joy to my abbot in his
mission, and to you in yours. My joy is assured.”

They had buried old Father Adam, seventeen years vicar
of the parish of Holy Cross in the Foregate of Shrewsbury, only one week before
Abbot Radulfus was summoned to the legatine council at Westminster. The
advowson of the living was vested in the abbey, and the great church of Saint
Peter and Saint Paul was equally the parish church of Holy Cross, the nave open
to the people living here outside the town gates, in this growing suburb which
almost considered itself a borough like the borough within the walls. The reeve
of the Foregate, Erwald the wheelwright, publicly if unofficially used the
title of provost, and abbey, church and town humoured his harmless flourish,
for the Monks’ Foregate was a relatively law-abiding, respectable district, and
gave barely any trouble to the properly constituted authorities of the town
itself. An occasional squabble between seculars and abbey, a brief tangle
between the high-spirited young of Foregate and town, what was there in that to
worry anyone beyond the day?

Father Adam had been there so long that all the young
had grown up under his easy-going shadow, and all the old had known him as one
of themselves, hardly set apart by his office. He had lived alone in his little
house up a narrow alley opposite the church, looking after himself, with only an
elderly freeman to take care of his glebe and his strip fields in the country
part of the parish, for Holy Cross spread wide outside the main street of the
Foregate. A big parish, a population made up equally of the craftsmen and
merchants of the suburb and the cottars and villagers in the countryside. It
was a matter of importance to them all what manner of priest they got in
succession to Father Adam. The old man himself, from whatever gentle purgatory
now contained him, would be keeping an anxious eye on his own.

Abbot Radulfus had presided at Adam’s funeral, and
Prior Robert at his most dignified and elegiac, tall and silvery and
consciously patrician, had pronounced his eulogy, perhaps with a slight touch
of condescension, for Adam had been barely literate, and a man of humble
origins and no pretentions. But it was Cynric, the verger of Holy Cross, who
had been with the priest through most of his years of office, who had best
spoken his epitaph, and that privately, over the trimming of the candles on the
parish altar, to Brother Cadfael, who had halted in passing through to say a
word of personal sympathy to the man who would surely miss the dead most
deeply.

“A sad, kind man,” said Cynric, his deep-sunk eyes
narrowed on the wick he was trimming, and his low voice as grainy and grudging
as ever, “a tired man, with a soft spot for sinners.”

It was rare enough for Cynric to utter thirteen words
together, except by way of the responses learned by heart in the holy office.
Thirteen words of his own had the force of prophecy. A sad man, because he had
been listening to and bearing with the perpetual failures of humankind for
seventeen years, a tired man because endless consoling and chiding and
forgiving takes it out of any man by the time he’s sixty, especially one with
neither malice nor anger in his own make-up. A kind man, because he had somehow
managed to preserve compassion and hope even against the tide of human
fallibility. Yes, Cynric had known him better than anyone. He had absorbed, in
the years of his service, something of the same qualities without the
authority.

“You’ll feel the want of him,” said Cadfael. “So shall
we all.”

“He’ll not be far,” said Cynric, and snipped the dead
wick with thumb and finger.

The verger was a man past fifty, but there was no
knowing by how many years, for he himself did not know the exact year of his
birth, though he knew the day and month. He was dark of hair and eyes, and
sallow-skinned, and went in a rusty black gown somewhat frayed at the hems from
long years of wear, and he lived in the tiny upper room over the north porch
where Father Adam robed and kept his church furnishings. A taciturn, grave,
durable man, built upon long, strong bones, but very meagre in flesh, as much
by reason of the hermit’s forgetfulness as any want of means. He came of a
country family of free folk, and had a brother somewhere north of the town with
a grown family, and very occasionally at feast or holiday he visited there, but
that happened very rarely now, his whole life being centred here in the great
church and the small upper room. So spare, silent and dark a form and face
might have aroused awe and avoidance, but did not, since what the darkness and
the silence covered was known to all, even the mischievous boys of the
Foregate, and inspired no fear or revulsion at all. A good man, with his own
preferences and peculiarities, and certainly no talker, but if you needed him,
he was there, and like his master, would not send you away empty.

Those who could not be easy with his mute company at
least respected him, and those who could included the most innocent and
guileless. Children and dogs would sit companionably on the steps of the north
porch with him in summer weather, and do all the talking necessary to such a
friendship, after their own fashion, while he listened. Many a mother in the
Foregate, content to see her young consorting so familiarly with a respectable
churchman, had wondered why Cynric had never married and had children of his
own, since plainly he had an affinity for them. It could not be because of his
office of verger, for there were still plenty of married priests scattered
through the parishes of the shire, and no one thought any wrong of them. The
new order of clerics without women was only just beginning to make headway
here, no one, not even bishops, had yet begun to look sidewise at those of the
old school who did not conform. Monks were monks, and had made their choice,
but surely the secular clergy could still be secular without reproach.

“He had no living kin?” asked Cadfael. For of all men
remaining behind, Cynric would know.

“None.”

“He was newly priest here,” said Cadfael, “when I came
first from Woodstock with Abbot Heribert—Prior Heribert he was then, for Abbot
Godefrid was still alive. You came, as I remember, a year or two later. You’re
a younger man than I. You and I between us could put together a history of cowl
and cassock here in the Foregate all this long while. It would make a very
handsome memorial to Father Adam. No falling out, no falling off. He had his
everlasting penitents, but that was his glory, that they always came back. They
could not do without him. And he kept his thread that drew them back, whether
they would or no.”

“So he did,” said Cynric, and clipped the last
blackened wick with a snap of his finger-nails, and straightened the
candlesticks on the parish altar, standing back a pace with narrowed lids to
check that they stood correct as soldiers on guard.

His throat creaked, forcing unwilling chords to flex,
when he used more words. The strings protested now. “Is there a man in mind?”

“No,” said Cadfael, “or Father Abbot would have told
you. He goes south by forced rides tomorrow to the legate’s council in
Westminster, and this presentation must wait his return, but he’s promised
haste. He knows the need. You may well get Brother Jerome now and again until
the abbot returns, but never doubt that Radulfus has the parish very much at
heart.”

To that Cynric nodded silent assent, for the relations
between cloister and parish here had been harmonious under three abbots in
succession, all the years of Father Adam’s incumbency, whereas in some churches
thus shared, as everyone knew, there was constant friction, the monastics
grudging the commonalty room in their enclave and entry to their privileged
buildings, and the secular priest putting up a fight for his rights to avoid
being elbowed out. Not so here. Perhaps it was the modest goodness of Father
Adam that had done the lion’s share in keeping the peace, and making the
relationship easy.

“He liked a sup now and again,” said Cadfael
meditatively. “I still have some of a wine he liked—distilled with herbs, good
for the blood and heart. Come and take a cup with me in the garden, some
afternoon, Cynric, and we’ll drink to him.”

“I will so,” said Cynric, and relaxed for one moment
into his rare, indulgent smile, the same by which children and dogs found him
out and approached him with confidence.

They crossed the chill tiles of the nave together, and
Cynric went out by the north porch, and up to his little dark room above.
Cadfael looked after him until the door had closed between. All these years
they had been within arm’s reach of each other, and on the best of terms, yet
never familiar. Who had ever been familiar with Cynric? Since the ties with his
mother loosened, and he turned his back on home, whatever and wherever that
home had been, perhaps only Father Adam had truly drawn near to him. Two
solitaries together make a very special matched pair, two in one. Yes, of all
the mourners for Father Adam, and they must be many, Cynric must now be the
most painfully bereaved.

They had lighted the fire in the warming room for the
first time when December came in, and in the relaxed half-hour between
Collations and Compline, when tongues were allowed considerable licence, there
was far more talk and speculation about the parish cure than about the legate’s
council in Westminster, to which Abbot Radulfus had just set out. Prior Robert
had withdrawn into the abbot’s lodging, as representing that dignitary in his
absence, which gave further freedom to the talkative, but his chaplain and
shadow, Brother Jerome, in his turn took upon himself the duty and privilege of
representing the prior, and Brother Richard, the sub-prior, was too easy-going,
not to say indolent, to assert himself with any vigour.

A meagre man in the flesh was Brother Jerome, but he
made up for it in zeal, though there were those who found that zeal too
narrowly channelled, and somewhat dehydrated of the milk of human tolerance.
Which rendered it understandable that he should consider Father Adam to have
been rather over-supplied with that commodity.

“Certainly a man of virtue himself” said Jerome, “I
would not for a moment take that from him, we all know he served devotedly. But
somewhat loose upon others who did offend. His discipline was too slack, and
his penances too light and too indulgently given. Who spares the sinner
condones the sin.”

“There’s been good order and neighbourliness in his
parish the length of his life here,” said Brother Ambrose the almoner, whose
office brought him into contact with the poorest of the poor throughout the
Foregate. “I know how they speak of him. He left a cure ready and fit for
another to step into, with the general goodwill open to whoever comes, because
the general goodwill was there to speed the one departed.”

“Children will always be glad of a weak master who
never uses the rod,” said Jerome sagely, “and rascals of a judge who lets them
off lightly. But the payment that falls due later will be fearful. Better they
should be brought up harshly against the wages of sin now, and lay up safety
for their souls hereafter.”

Brother Paul, master of the novices and the boys, who
very rarely laid a hand upon his pupils, and certainly only when they had well
deserved it, smiled and held his peace.

“In too much mercy is too little kindness,” pronounced
Jerome, conscious of his own eloquence, and mindful of his reputation as a
preacher. “The Rule itself decrees that where the child offends he must be
beaten, and these folk of the Foregate, what are they but children?”

They were called by the bell to Compline at that
moment, but in any case it was unlikely that any of them would have troubled to
argue with Jerome, whose much noise and small effect hardly challenged notice.
No doubt he would preach stern sermons at the parish Mass, on the two days
allotted to him, but there would be very few of the regular attenders there to
listen to him, and even those who did attend would let his homily in at one ear
and out at the other, knowing his office here could last but a few days.

For all that, Cadfael went to his bed that night very
thoughtful, and though he heard a few whispered exchanges in the dortoir,
himself kept silence, mindful of the rule that the words of Compline, the completion,
the perfecting of the day’s worship, should be the last words uttered before
sleep, that the mind should not be distracted from the ‘Opus Dei’. Nor was it.
For the words lingered with him between sleep and waking, the same words over
and over, faintly returning. By chance the psalm was the sixth. He took it with
him into slumber.

“Domine, ne in furore—O Lord, rebuke me not in thine
anger, neither chasten me in thy displeasure… Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I
am weak.”

Chapter Two

ON THE TENTH DAY OF DECEMBER, abbot Radulfus returned,
riding in at the gatehouse just as the daylight was fading, and the brethren
were within at Vespers. Thus the porter was the only witness of his arrival,
and of the embellished entourage he brought back with him, and not until the
next day at chapter did the brothers hear all that he had to tell, or as much
of it as concerned the abbey itself. But Brother Porter, the soul of discretion
when required, could also be the best-informed gossip in the enclave to his
special friends, and Cadfael learned something of what was toward that same
night, in one of the carrels in the cloister, immediately after Vespers.