Free A Rare Benedictine by Ellis Peters Page B

offerings of food or old clothing,
like all the rest; but when it was opened it sent Brother Oswald, almost
incoherent with joy and wonder, running to Abbot Heribert to report what seemed
to be a miracle. For the basket was full of gold coin, to the value of more
than a hundred marks. Well used, it would ease all the worst needs of his
poorest petitioners, until the weather relented.
    “Surely,”
said Brother Oswald devoutly, “Our Lady has made her own will known. Is not
this the sign we have hoped for?”
    Certainly
it was for Cadfael, and earlier than he had dared to hope for it. He had the
message that needed no words. She had found him, and been welcomed with joy.
Since midnight Alard the silversmith had been a free man, and free man makes
free wife. Presented with such a woman as Elfgiva, he could give as gladly as
she, for what was gold, what was silver, by comparison?

 
----
    Eye Witness
     
    IT
WAS UNDOUBTEDLY INCONSIDERATE OF BROTHER AMBROSE to fall ill with a raging
quinsy just a few days before the yearly rents were due for collection, and
leave the rolls still uncopied, and the new entries still to be made. No one
knew the abbey rolls as Brother Ambrose did. He had been clerk to Brother
Matthew, the cellarer, for four years, during which time fresh grants to the
abbey had been flooding in richly, a new mill on the Tern, pastures, assarts,
messuages in the town, glebes in the countryside, a fishery up-river, even a
church or two, and there was no one who could match him at putting a finger on
the slippery tenant or the field-lawyer, or the householder who had always
three good stories to account for his inability to pay. And here was the
collection only a day away, and Brother Ambrose on his back in the infirmary,
croaking like a sick raven, and about as much use.
    Brother
Matthew’s chief steward, who always made the collection within the town and
suburbs of Shrewsbury in person, took it almost as a personal injury. He had
had to install as substitute a young lay clerk who had entered the abbey
service not four months previously. Not that he had found any cause to complain
of the young man’s work. He had copied industriously and neatly, and shown
great alertness and interest in his quick grasp of what he copied, making
round, respectful eyes at the value of the rent-roll.
    But
Master William Rede had been put out, and was bent on letting everyone know of
it. He was a querulous, argumentative man in his fifties, who, if you said
white to him, would inevitably say black, and bring documentary evidence to
back up his contention. He came to visit his old friend and helper in the abbey
infirmary, the day before the town collection was due, but whether to comfort
or reproach was matter for speculation. Brother Ambrose, still voiceless,
essayed speech and achieved only a painful wheeze, before Brother Cadfael, who
was anointing his patient’s throat afresh with goose-grease, and had a soothing
syrup of orpine standing by, laid a palm over the sufferer’s mouth and ordered
silence.
    “Now,
William,” he said tolerantly, “if you can’t comfort, don’t vex. This poor
soul’s got you on his conscience as it is, and you know, as well as I do, that
you have the whole matter at your finger-ends. You tell him so, and fetch up a
smile, or out you go.” And he wrapped a length of good Welsh flannel round the
glistening throat, and reached for the spoon that stood in the beaker of syrup.
Brother Ambrose opened his mouth with the devoted resignation of a little bird
waiting to be fed, and sucked in the dose with an expression of slightly
surprised appreciation.
    But
William Rede was not going to be done out of his grievance so easily. “Oh, no
fault of yours,” he owned grudgingly, “but very ill luck for me, as if I had
not enough on my hands in any event, with the rent-roll grown so long, and the
burden of scribe’s work for ever lengthening, as it does.