The Raven in the Foregate by Ellis Peters Page B

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 spilling, and were strongly held back.
She said no more, barring a sedate word of thanks, when he led her back to the
great court, where a buzzing murmur of voices like a disturbed hive met them
before ever they rounded the hedge. Abbot Radulfus was there, and had the
brothers already mustering about him, bright and quivering with curiosity,
their sleepiness almost forgotten.
    “We have cause to fear,” said Radulfus, wasting no
words,”that some accident has befallen Father Ailnoth. He went out from his
house towards the town last night, before