The Pilgram of Hate Read Free Page A

if I have displeased her, after
all? Well for me, who know what we have within there on the altar—and mea culpa
if I did wrongly! But what of the innocents who do not know, and come in good
faith, hoping for grace from her? What if I have been the means of their
deprivation and loss?”
    “I
see,” said Hugh with sympathy, “that Brother Mark had better make haste through
the degrees of ordination, and come quickly to lift the load from you. Unless,”
he added with a flashing sidelong smile, “Saint Winifred takes pity on you
first, and sends you a sign.”
    “I
still do not see,” mused Cadfael, “what else I could have done. It was an
ending that satisfied everyone, both here and there. The children were free to
marry and be happy, the village still had its saint, and she had her own people
round her. Robert had what he had gone to find—or thought he had, which is the
same thing. And Shrewsbury abbey has its festival, with every hope of a full
guest-hall, and glory and gain in good measure. If she would but just cast an
indulgent look this way, and wink her eye, to let me know I understood her
aright.”
    “And
you’ve never said word of this to anyone?”
    “Never
a word. But the whole village of Gwytherin knows it,” admitted Cadfael with a
remembering grin. “No one told, no one had to tell, but they knew. There wasn’t
a man missing when we took up the reliquary and set out for home. They helped
to carry it, whipped together a little chariot to bear it. Robert thought he
had them nicely tamed, even those who’d been most reluctant from the first. It
was a great joy to him. A simple soul at bottom! It would be great pity to undo
him now, when he’s busy writing his book about the saint’s life, and how he
brought her to Shrewsbury.”
    “I
would not have the heart to put him to such distress,” said Hugh. “Least said,
best for all. Thanks be to God, I have nothing to do with canon law, the common
law of a land almost without law costs me enough pains.” No need to say that
Cadfael could be sure of his secrecy, that was taken for granted on both sides.
“Well, you speak the lady’s own tongue, no doubt she understood you well enough,
with or without words. Who knows? When this festival of yours takes place—the
twenty-second day of June, you say?—she may take pity on you, and send you a
great miracle to set your mind at rest.”
    And
so she might, thought Cadfael an hour later, on his way to obey the summons of
the Vesper bell. Not that he had deserved so signal an honour, but there surely
must be one somewhere among the unceasing stream of pilgrims who did deserve
it, and could not with justice be rejected. He would be perfectly and humbly
and cheerfully content with that. What if she was eighty miles or so away, in
what was left of her body? It had been a miraculous body in this life, once
brutally dead and raised alive again, what limits of time or space could be set
about such a being? If it so pleased her she could be both quiet and content in
her grave with Rhisiart, lulled by bird-song in the hawthorn trees, and here
attentive and incorporeal, a little flame of spirit in the coffin of unworthy
Columbanus, who had killed not for her exaltation but for his own.
    Brother
Cadfael went to Vespers curiously relieved at having confided to his friend a
secret from before the time when they had first known each other, in the
beginning as potential antagonists stepping subtly to outwit each other, then
discovering how much they had in common, the old man—alone with himself Cadfael
admitted to being somewhat over the peak of a man’s prime—and the young one,
just setting out, exceedingly well-equipped in shrewdness and wit, to build his
fortune and win his wife. And both he had done, for he was now undisputed
sheriff of Shropshire, if under a powerless and captive king, and up there in
the town, near St Mary’s church, his wife and his