The Raven in the Foregate Read Free Page A

fight for his rights to avoid
being elbowed out. Not so here. Perhaps it was the modest goodness of Father
Adam that had done the lion’s share in keeping the peace, and making the
relationship easy.
    “He liked a sup now and again,” said Cadfael
meditatively. “I still have some of a wine he liked—distilled with herbs, good
for the blood and heart. Come and take a cup with me in the garden, some
afternoon, Cynric, and we’ll drink to him.”
    “I will so,” said Cynric, and relaxed for one moment
into his rare, indulgent smile, the same by which children and dogs found him
out and approached him with confidence.
    They crossed the chill tiles of the nave together, and
Cynric went out by the north porch, and up to his little dark room above.
Cadfael looked after him until the door had closed between. All these years
they had been within arm’s reach of each other, and on the best of terms, yet
never familiar. Who had ever been familiar with Cynric? Since the ties with his
mother loosened, and he turned his back on home, whatever and wherever that
home had been, perhaps only Father Adam had truly drawn near to him. Two
solitaries together make a very special matched pair, two in one. Yes, of all
the mourners for Father Adam, and they must be many, Cynric must now be the
most painfully bereaved.
     
    They had lighted the fire in the warming room for the
first time when December came in, and in the relaxed half-hour between
Collations and Compline, when tongues were allowed considerable licence, there
was far more talk and speculation about the parish cure than about the legate’s
council in Westminster, to which Abbot Radulfus had just set out. Prior Robert
had withdrawn into the abbot’s lodging, as representing that dignitary in his
absence, which gave further freedom to the talkative, but his chaplain and
shadow, Brother Jerome, in his turn took upon himself the duty and privilege of
representing the prior, and Brother Richard, the sub-prior, was too easy-going,
not to say indolent, to assert himself with any vigour.
    A meagre man in the flesh was Brother Jerome, but he
made up for it in zeal, though there were those who found that zeal too
narrowly channelled, and somewhat dehydrated of the milk of human tolerance.
Which rendered it understandable that he should consider Father Adam to have
been rather over-supplied with that commodity.
    “Certainly a man of virtue himself” said Jerome, “I
would not for a moment take that from him, we all know he served devotedly. But
somewhat loose upon others who did offend. His discipline was too slack, and
his penances too light and too indulgently given. Who spares the sinner
condones the sin.”
    “There’s been good order and neighbourliness in his
parish the length of his life here,” said Brother Ambrose the almoner, whose
office brought him into contact with the poorest of the poor throughout the
Foregate. “I know how they speak of him. He left a cure ready and fit for
another to step into, with the general goodwill open to whoever comes, because
the general goodwill was there to speed the one departed.”
    “Children will always be glad of a weak master who
never uses the rod,” said Jerome sagely, “and rascals of a judge who lets them
off lightly. But the payment that falls due later will be fearful. Better they
should be brought up harshly against the wages of sin now, and lay up safety
for their souls hereafter.”
    Brother Paul, master of the novices and the boys, who
very rarely laid a hand upon his pupils, and certainly only when they had well
deserved it, smiled and held his peace.
    “In too much mercy is too little kindness,” pronounced
Jerome, conscious of his own eloquence, and mindful of his reputation as a
preacher. “The Rule itself decrees that where the child offends he must be
beaten, and these folk of the Foregate, what are they but children?”
    They were called by the bell to Compline