Brother Cadfael 10: The Pilgrim of Hate

Father Abbot will be home in good time to preside over her reception from Saint Giles. And we shall have a houseful of pilgrims to care for."
    They had brought the reliquary of the Welsh saint four years previously from Gwytherin, where she lay buried, and installed it on the altar of the church at the hospital of Saint Giles, at the very edge of Shrewsbury's Foregate suburb, where the sick, the infected, the deformed, the lepers, who might not venture within the walls, were housed and cared for. And thence they had borne her casket in splendour to her altar in the abbey church, to be an ornament and a wonder, a means of healing and blessing to all who came reverently and in need. This year they had undertaken to repeat that last journey, to bring her from Saint Giles in procession, and open her altar to all who came with prayers and offerings. Every year she had drawn many pilgrims. This year they would be legion.
    "A man might wonder," said Hugh, standing spread-footed among the flower beds just beginning to burn from the soft, shy colours of spring into the blaze of summer, "whether you were not rather preparing for a bridal."
    Hedges of hazel and may-blossom shed silver petals and dangled pale, silver-green catkins round the enclosure where they stood, cowslips were rearing in the grass of the meadow beyond, and irises were in tight, thrusting bud. Even the roses showed a harvest of buds, erect and ready to break and display the first colour. In the walled shelter of Cadfael's herb-garden there were fat globes of peonies, too, just cracking their green sheaths. Cadfael had medicinal uses for the seeds, and Brother Petrus, the abbot's cook, used them as spices in the kitchen.
    "A man might not be so far out, at that," said Cadfael, viewing the fruits of his labours complacently. "A perpetual and pure bridal. This Welsh girl was virgin until the day of her death."
    "And you have married her off since?"
    It was idly said, in revulsion from pondering matters of state. In such a garden a man could believe in peace, fruit-fulness and amity. But it encountered suddenly so profound and pregnant a silence that Hugh pricked up his ears, and turned his head almost stealthily to study his friend, even before the unguarded answer came. Unguarded either from absence of mind, or of design, there was no telling.
    "Not wedded," said Cadfael, "but certainly bedded. With a good man, too, and her honest champion. He deserved his reward."
    Hugh raised quizzical brows, and cast a glance over his shoulder towards the long roof of the great abbey church, where reputedly the lady in question slept in a sealed reliquary on her own altar. An elegant coffin just long enough to contain a small and holy Welshwoman, with the neat, compact bones of her race.
    "Hardly room within there for two," he said mildly.
    "Not two of our gross make, no, not there. There was space enough where we put them." He knew he was listened to, now, and heard with sharp intelligence, if not yet understood.
    "Are you telling me," wondered Hugh no less mildly, "that she is not there in that elaborate shrine of yours, where everyone else knows she is?"
    "Can I tell? Many a time I've wished it could be possible to be in two places at once. A thing too hard for me, but for a saint, perhaps, possible? Three nights and three days she was in there, that I do know. She may well have left a morsel of her holiness within, if only by way of thanks to us who took her out again, and put her back where I still, and always shall, believe she wished to be. But for all that," owned Cadfael, shaking his head, "there's a trailing fringe of doubt that nags at me. How if I read her wrong?"
    "Then your only resort is confession and penance," said Hugh lightly.
    "Not until Brother Mark is full-fledged a priest!" Young Mark was gone from his mother-house and from his flock at Saint Giles, gone to the household of the bishop of Lichfield, with Leoric Aspley's endowment to see him through his studies, and the goal of all his longings shining distant and clear before him, the priesthood for which God had designed him. "I'm saving for him," said Cadfael, "all those sins I feel, perhaps mistakenly, to be no sins. He was my right hand and a piece of my heart for three years, and knows me better than any man living. Barring, it may be, yourself?" he added, and slanted a guileless glance at his friend. "He will know the truth of me, and by his judgement and for his absolution I'll embrace any