Free Sanctuary Sparrow by Ellis Peters Page A

lying in there, in a cloth bag, but I lost that down by the water. I don’t know what it is. I never saw a thing like it. But it’s no use that I can see.”
    “Did you find,” asked Cadfael, eyeing the wreckage, “a stick, with fine hairs stretched along it, that went with this queer thing?”
    The child yawned, halted, and abandoned his hold on his toy, letting it drop into the dust. “I hit Davey with that when he tripped me in the water, but it broke. I threw it away.” So he would, having proved its uselessness, just as he walked away from this discarded weapon, leaving it lying, and went off scrubbing at sleepy eyes with the knuckles of a grimy fist.
    Brother Cadfael picked up the sorry remnant and examined ruefully its stove-in ribs and trailing, tangled strings. No help for it, this was all that remained of the lost rebec. He took it back with him, only too well aware of the grief he was about to cause its luckless owner. Say that Liliwin came alive in the end out of his present trouble, still he must emerge penniless, and deprived now even of his chief means of livelihood. But there was more in it even than that. He knew it even before he presented the broken instrument to Liliwin’s appalled hands, and watched the anguish and despair mantle like bleak twilight over his face. The boy took the ruin in his hands and fondled it, rocked it in his arms, bowed his head to its splintered frame, and burst into tears. It was not the loss of a possession so much as the death of a sweetheart.
    Cadfael sat down apart, in the nearest carrel of the scriptorium, and kept decently silent until the storm passed, and Liliwin sat drained and motionless, hugging his broken darling, his thin shoulders hunched against the world.
    “There are men,” said Cadfael then mildly, “who understand such arts as repairing instruments of music. I am not one of them, but Brother Anselm, our precentor, is. Why should we not ask him to look at your fiddle and see what can be done to make it sing again?”
    “This?” Liliwin turned on him passionately, holding out the pathetic wreck in both hands. “Look at it—no better than firewood. How could anyone restore it?”
    “Do you know that? Do I? What’s lost by asking the man who may? And if this is past saving, Brother Anselm can make one new.”
    Bitter disbelief stared back at him. Why should he credit that anyone would go out of his way to do a kindness to sod espised and unprofitable a creature as himself? Those within here held that they owed him shelter and food, but nothing more, and even that as a duty. And no one without had ever offered him any benefit that cost more than a crust.
    “As if I could ever pay for a new one! Don’t mock me!”
    “You forget, we do not buy and sell, we have no use for money. But show Brother Anselm a good instrument damaged, and he’ll want to heal it. Show him a good musician lost for want of an instrument, and he’ll be anxious to provide him a new voice. Are you a good musician?”
    Liliwin said: “Yes!” with abrupt and spirited pride. In one respect, at least, he knew his worth.
    “Then show him you are, and he’ll give you your due.”
    “You mean it?” wondered Liliwin, shaken between hope and doubt. “You will truly ask him? If he would teach me, perhaps I could learn the art.” He faltered there, losing his momentary brightness with a suddenness that was all too eloquent. Whenever he took heart for the future, the bleak realisation came flooding over him afresh that he might have no future. Cadfael cast about hurriedly in his mind for some crumb of distraction to ward off the recurrent despair.
    “Never suppose that you’re friendless, that’s black ingratitude when you have forty days of grace, a fair-minded man like Hugh Beringar enquiring into your case, and one creature at least who stands by you stoutly and won’t hear a word against you.” Liliwin kindled a little at that, still doubtfully, but at least it had put