Free Brother Cadfael 15: The Confession of Brother Haluin by Ellis Peters

indeed, but his will was good to perform it."
    His relationship with his patroness was a comfortable and easy one, and he did not hesitate to ask directly, "Will he indeed find the gentlewoman he's seeking at Elford?"
    "He well may," said Adelais, pacing evenly and serenely beside him. "Eighteen years is a long time, and I cannot enter into his mind. I was younger then, I kept a bigger household. There were cousins, some left without fortune. My lord kept a father's hand on all of his blood. In his absence and as his regent, so did I."
    They had reached the churchyard gate, and halted there. The morning was soft and green, but very still, and the cloud cover hung heavy and low.
    "There will be more snow yet," said the priest, "if it does not turn to rain." And he went on inconsequently: "Eighteen years! It may be that this monk in his time with you was drawn to one of these young cousins, after the way of the young, and her early death was greater grief to him than ever he ventured to let you know."
    "It may be so," said Adelais distantly, and drew up the hood of her cloak against a few infinitely fine spears of sleet that drifted on the still air and stung her cheek. "Good day, Father!"
    "I will pray," said the priest after her, "that his pilgrimage to her grave may bring comfort and benefit to him living, and to the lady dead."
    "Do so, Father," said Adelais without turning her head. "And do not fail to add a prayer for me and all the women of my house, that time may lie lightly on us when our day comes."
    Cadfael lay awake in the hayloft of the forester's holding in the royal forest of Chenet, listening to the measured breathing of his companion, too constant and too tense for sleep. It was the second night since they had left Hales. The first they had spent with a solitary cottar and his wife a mile or so beyond the hamlet of Weston, and the day between had been long, and this second-shelter in the early reaches of the forest came very warmly and gratefully. They had gone early to their beds in the loft, for Haluin, at whose insistence they had continued so far into the evening, was close to exhaustion. Sleep, Cadfael noted, came to him readily and peacefully, a restoring mercy to a soul very troubled and wrung when awake. There are many ways by which God tempers the burden. Haluin rose every morning refreshed and resolute.
    It was not yet light, there might still be an hour to dawn. There was no movement, no rustling of the dry hay from the corner where Haluin lay, but Cadfael knew he was awake now, and the stillness was good, for it meant that he lay in the languor of ease of body, wherever the wakeful mind within might have strayed.
    "Cadfael?" said a still, remote voice out of the darkness. "Are you awake?"
    "I am," he said as softly.
    "You have never asked me anything. Of the thing I did. Of her ..."
    "There is no need," said Cadfael. "What you wish to tell will be told without asking."
    "I was never free to speak of her," said Haluin, "until now. And now only to you, who know." There was a silence. He bled words slowly and arduously, as the shy and solitary do. After a while he resumed softly; "She was not beautiful, as her mother was. She had not that dark radiance, but something more kindly. There was nothing dark or secret in her, but everything open and sunlit, like a flower. She was not afraid of anything, not then. She trusted everyone. She had never been betrayed - not then. Only once, and she died of it."
    Another and longer silence, and this time the hay stirred briefly, like a sigh. Then he asked almost timidly: "Cadfael, you were half your life in the world - did you ever love a woman?"
    "Yes," said Cadfael, "I have loved."
    "Then you know how it was with us. For we did love, she and I. It hurts most of all," said Brother Haluin, looking back in resigned and wondering pain, "when you are young. There is nowhere to hide from it, no shield you can raise between. To see her every day... and to know that it