Brother Cadfael 12: The Raven in the Foregate by Ellis Peters Page A

for you, and your brow, too."
    Prior Robert stood gazing beyond them, pondering what it was best to do. "Truly I wonder ... If Father Ailnoth went out at that hour, and in such haste, may not he also have fallen, somewhere, and so injured himself that he's lying helpless? The frost was already setting in ..."
    "It was," said Cadfael, remembering the glassy sheen on the steep slope of the Wyle, and the icy ring of his own steps on the bridge. "And sharply! And I would not say he was minding his steps when I saw him."
    "Some charitable errand ..." murmured Robert anxiously. "He would not spare himself ..."
    No, neither himself nor any other soul! But true enough, those hasty steps might well have lunged into slippery places.
    "If he has lain all night helpless in the cold," said Robert, "he may have caught his death. Brother Cadfael, do you tend to this lady, do whatever is needful, and I will go and speak to Father Abbot. For I think we had best call all the brothers and lay brothers together, and set in hand a hunt for Father Ailnoth, wherever he may be."
    In the dim, quiet shelter of the workshop in the garden Cadfael sat his charge down on the bench against the wall, and turned to his brazier, to uncover it for the day. All the winter he kept it thus turfed overnight, to be ready at short notice if needed, the rest of the year he let it out, since it could easily be rekindled. None of his brews within here required positive warmth, but there were many among them that would not take kindly to frost.
    The thick turves now damping it down were almost fresh, though neatly placed, and the fire beneath them live and comforting. Someone had been here during the night, and someone who knew how to lay his hand on the lamp and the tinder without disturbing anything else, and how to tend the fire to leave it much as he had found it. Young Benet had left few traces, but enough to set his signature to the nocturnal invasion. Even by night, it seemed, he practised very little dissembling where Cadfael was concerned, he was intent rather on leaving everything in order than on concealing his intrusion.
    Cadfael warmed water in a pan, and diluted a lotion of betony, comfrey and daisy to cleanse the broken bruise on her forehead and the scored grazes in both palms, scratches that ran obliquely from the wrist to the root of the forefinger and thumb, torn by the frozen and rutted ground. She submitted to his ministrations with resigned dignity, her eyes veiled.
    "That's a heavy fall you had," said Cadfael, wiping away the dried line of blood from her temple.
    "I was not minding myself," she said, so simply that he knew it for plain truth. "I am not of any importance."
    Her face, seen thus below him as he fingered her forehead, was a long oval, with fine, elongated features. Large, arched eyelids hid her eyes, her mouth was well shaped and generous but drooping with weariness. She braided her greying hair severely and coiled it behind her head. Now that she had told what she had come to tell, and laid it in other hands, she was calm and still under his handling.
    "You'll need to get some rest now," said Cadfael, "if you've been up fretting all night, and after this blow. Whatever needs to be done Father Abbot will do. There! I'll not cover it, better to have it open to the air, but as soon as you're dismissed go home and keep from the frost. Frost can fester." He made a leisurely business of putting away such things as he had used, to give her time to think and breathe. "Your nephew works here with me. But of course you know that. I remember you visited him here in the garden a few days ago. A good lad, your Benet."
    After a brief, deep silence she said: "So I have always found him." And for the first time, though pallidly and briefly, she smiled.
    "Hard-working and willing! I shall miss him if he goes, but he's worth a more testing employment."
    She said nothing to that. Her silence was marked, as though words hovered behind it ready for