Free Brother Cadfael 08: The Devil's Novice by Ellis Peters Page B

though women were unclean!'
    'Well, if you've paid for your offences, so has he for his,' said Cadfael tolerantly. 'He has a sore throat will keep him quiet for a week yet, and for a man who likes the sound of his own sermons that's no mean revenge. But as for you, lad, you've a long way to go before you'll ever make a monk, and if you mean to go through with it, you'd better spend your penance here doing some hard thinking.'
    'Another sermon?' said Meriet into his crossed arms, and for the first time there was almost a smile in his voice, if a rueful one.
    'A word to the wise.' That caused him to check and hold his breath, lying utterly still for one moment, before he turned his head to bring one glittering, anxious eye to bear on Cadfael's face. The dark-brown hair coiled and curled agreeably in the nape of his summer-browned neck, and the neck itself had still the elegant, tender shaping of boyhood. Vulnerable still to all manner of wounds, on his own behalf, perhaps, but certainly on behalf of others all too fiercely loved. The girl with the red-gold hair?
    'They have not said anything?' demanded Meriet, tense with dismay. 'They don't mean to cast me out? He wouldn't do that - the abbot? He would have told me openly!' He turned with a fierce, lithe movement, drawing up his legs and rising on one hip, to seize Cadfael urgently by the wrist and stare into his eyes. 'What is it you know? What does he mean to do with me? I can't, I won't, give up now.'
    'You've put your own vocation in doubt,' said Cadfael bluntly, 'no other has had any hand in it. If it had rested with me, I'd have clapped your pretty trophy back in your hand, and told you to be off out of here, and find either her or another as like her as one girl is to another equally young and fair, and stop plaguing us who ask nothing more than a quiet life. But if you still want to throw your natural bent out of door, you have that chance. Either bend your stiff neck, or rear it, and be off!' There was more to it than that, and he knew it. The boy sat bolt unright, careless of his half-nakedness in a cell stony and chill, and held him by the wrist with strong, urgent fingers, staring earnestly into his eyes, probing beyond into his mind, and not afraid of him, or even wary.
    'I will bend it,' he said. 'You doubt if I can, but I can, I will. Brother Cadfael, if you have the abbot's ear, help me, tell him I have not changed, tell him I do want to be received. Say I will wait, if I must, and learn and be patient, but I will deserve! In the end he shall not be able to complain of me. Say so to him! He won't reject me.'
    'And the gold-haired girl?' said Cadfael, purposely brutal.
    Meriet wrenched himself away and flung himself down again on his breast. 'She is spoken for,' he said no less roughly, and would not say one word more of her.
    'There are others,' said Cadfael. 'Take thought now or never. Let me tell you, child, as one old enough to have a son past your age, and with a few regrets in his own life, if he had time to brood on them - there's many a young man has got his heart's dearest wish, only to curse the day he ever wished for it. By the grace and good sense of our abbot, you will have time to make certain before you're bound past freeing. Make good use of your time, for it won't return once you're pledged.'
    A pity, in a way, to frighten a young creature so, when he was already torn many ways, but he had ten days and nights of solitude before him now, a low diet, and time both for prayer and thought. Being alone would not oppress him, only the pressure of uncongenial numbers around him had done that. Here he would sleep without dreams, not starting up to cry out in the night. Or if he did, there would be no one to hear him and add to his trouble.
    'I'll come and bring the salve in the morning,' said Cadfael, taking up his lamp. 'No, wait!' He set it down again. 'If you lie so, you'll be cold in the night. Put on your shirt, the linen won't trouble you too much,