Brother Cadfael 10: The Pilgrim of Hate

lifted clean out of them, in sweet odours and a shower of may-blossom. That was how he claimed the saint had already visited him, why should not Robert recall it and believe? Certainly he was gone. Why look for him? Would a modest brother of our house be running through the Welsh woods mother-naked?"
    "Are you telling me," asked Hugh cautiously, "That what you have there in the reliquary is not... Then the casket had not yet been sealed?" His eyebrows were tangling with his black forelock, but his voice was soft and unsurprised.
    "Well..." Cadfael twitched his blunt brown nose bashfully between finger and thumb. "Sealed it was, but there are ways of dealing with seals that leave them unblemished. It's one of the more dubious of my remembered skills, but for all that I was glad of it then."
    "And you put the lady back in the place that was hers, along with her champion?"
    "He was a decent, good man, and had spoken up for her nobly. She would not grudge him house-room. I have always thought," confided Cadfael, "that she was not displeased with us. She has shown her power in Gwytherin since that time, by many miracles, so I cannot believe she is angry. But what a little troubles me is that she has not so far chosen to favour us with any great mark of her patronage here, to keep Robert happy, and set my mind at rest. Oh, a few little things, but nothing of unmistakable note. How if I have displeased her, after all? Well for me, who know what we have within there on the altar - and mea culpa if I did wrongly! But what of the innocents who do not know, and come in good faith, hoping for grace from her? What if I have been the means of their deprivation and loss?"
    "I see," said Hugh with sympathy, "that Brother Mark had better make haste through the degrees of ordination, and come quickly to lift the load from you. Unless," he added with a flashing sidelong smile, "Saint Winifred takes pity on you first, and sends you a sign."
    "I still do not see," mused Cadfael, "what else I could have done. It was an ending that satisfied everyone, both here and there. The children were free to marry and be happy, the village still had its saint, and she had her own people round her. Robert had what he had gone to find - or thought he had, which is the same thing. And Shrewsbury abbey has its festival, with every hope of a full guest-hall, and glory and gain in good measure. If she would but just cast an indulgent look this way, and wink her eye, to let me know I understood her aright."
    "And you've never said word of this to anyone?"
    "Never a word. But the whole village of Gwytherin knows it," admitted Cadfael with a remembering grin. "No one told, no one had to tell, but they knew. There wasn't a man missing when we took up the reliquary and set out for home. They helped to carry it, whipped together a little chariot to bear it. Robert thought he had them nicely tamed, even those who'd been most reluctant from the first. It was a great joy to him. A simple soul at bottom! It would be great pity to undo him now, when he's busy writing his book about the saint's life, and how he brought her to Shrewsbury."
    "I would not have the heart to put him to such distress," said Hugh. "Least said, best for all. Thanks be to God, I have nothing to do with canon law, the common law of a land almost without law costs me enough pains." No need to say that Cadfael could be sure of his secrecy, that was taken for granted on both sides. "Well, you speak the lady's own tongue, no doubt she understood you well enough, with or without words. Who knows? When this festival of yours takes place - the twenty-second day of June, you say? - she may take pity on you, and send you a great miracle to set your mind at rest."
    And so she might, thought Cadfael an hour later, on his way to obey the summons of the Vesper bell. Not that he had deserved so signal an honour, but there surely must be one somewhere among the unceasing stream of pilgrims who did deserve it, and could not with justice be rejected. He would be perfectly and humbly and cheerfully content with that. What if she was eighty miles or so away, in what was left of her body? It had been a miraculous body in this life, once brutally dead and raised alive again, what limits of time or space could be set about such a being? If it so pleased her she could be both quiet and content in her grave with Rhisiart, lulled by bird-song in the hawthorn trees, and here attentive and incorporeal, a little flame of