The Devils Novice by Ellis Peters

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, and you can bear the
brychan over it.”
    “I’m
well enough,” said Meriet, submitting almost shamefacedly, and subsiding with a
sigh into his folded arms again. “I… I do thank you—brother!” he ended as an
awkward afterthought, and very dubiously, as if the form of address did no
justice to what was in his mind, though he knew it to be the approved one here.
    “That
came out of you doubtfully,” remarked Cadfael judicially, “like biting on a
sore tooth. There are other relationships. Are you still sure it’s a brother
you want to be?”
    “I must,” blurted Meriet, and turned his face morosely away.
    Now
why, wondered Cadfael, banging on the door of the cell for the porter to open