Monk's Hood Read Free

few specifics he had brewing.
The enclosure, thickly hedged and well trimmed, was beginning now to look
bleached and dry with the first moderate cold, all the leaves grown elderly and
lean and brown, the tenderest plants withdrawing into the warmth of the earth;
but the air still bore a lingering, aromatic fragrance compounded of all the
ghostly scents of summer, and inside the hut the spicy sweetness made the
senses swim. Cadfael regularly took his ponderings there for privacy. He was so
used to the drunken, heady air within that he barely noticed it, but at need he
could distinguish every ingredient that contributed to it, and trace it to its
source.
    So
King Stephen, after all, had not forgotten his lingering grudges, and Abbot
Heribert was to be the scapegoat for Shrewsbury’s offence in holding out
against his claims. Yethe was not by nature a vindictive man.
Perhaps it was rather that he felt a need to flatter and court the legate,
since the pope had recognised him as king of England, and given him papal
backing, no negligible weapon, in the contention with the Empress Maud, the
rival claimant to the throne. That determined lady would certainly not give up
so easily, she would be pressing her case strongly in Rome, and even popes may
change their allegiance. So Alberic of Ostia would be given every possible
latitude in pursuing his plans for the reform of the Church, and Heribert might
be but one sacrificial victim offered to his zeal on a platter.
    Another
curious theme intruded itself persistently into Cadfael’s musings. This matter
of the occasional guests of the abbey, so-called, the souls who chose to
abandon the working world, sometimes in their prime, and hand over their
inheritance to the abbey for a soft, shielded, inactive life in a house of
retirement, with food, clothing, firing, all provided without the lifting of a
finger! Did they dream of it for years while they were sweating over lambing
ewes, or toiling in the harvest, or working hard at a trade? A little
sub-paradise where meals dropped from the sky and there was nothing to do but
bask, in the summer, and toast by the fire with mulled ale in the winter? And
when they got to it, how long did the enchantment last? How soon did they
sicken of doing nothing, and needing to do nothing? In a man blind, lame, sick,
he could understand the act. But in those hale and busy, and used to exerting
body and mind? No, that he could not understand. There must be other motives.
Not all men could be deceived, or deceive themselves, into mistaking idleness
for blessedness. What else could provoke such an act? Want of an heir? An urge,
not yet understood, to the monastic life, without the immediate courage to go
all the way? Perhaps! In a man with a wife, well advanced in years and growing
aware of his end, it might be so. Many a man had taken the habit and the cowl
late, after children and grandchildren and the heat of a long day. The grace
house and the guest status might be a stage on the way. Or was it possible that
men divested themselvesof their life’s work at last out of
pure despite, against the world, against the unsatisfactory son, against the
burden of carrying their own souls?
    Brother
Cadfael shut the door upon the rich horehound reek of a mixture for coughs, and
went very soberly to High Mass.
    Abbot
Heribert departed by the London road, turning his back upon the town of
Shrewsbury, in the early morning of a somewhat grey day, the first time there
had been the nip of frost in the air as well as the pale sparkle in the grass.
He took with him his own clerk, Brother Emmanuel, and two lay grooms who had
served here longest; and he rode his own white mule. He put on a cheerful
countenance as he took leave, but for all that he cut a sad little figure as
the four riders dwindled along the road. No horseman now, if he ever had been
much of one, he used a high, cradling saddle, and sagged in it like a small