The Confession of Brother Haluin Read Online Free PDF

among the herbs, and there he acquired this
knowledge he put to such ill use. Is it certain this draught he concocted could
kill? Or may this truly have been a death from fever?”
    “If
the girl’s mother used it on her, she could hardly be mistaken,” said Cadfael
ruefully. “Yes, I’ve known hyssop to kill. I was foolish to keep it among my
stores, there are other herbs that could take its place. But in small doses,
both herb and root, dried and powdered, are excellent for the yellow distemper,
and useful with horehound against chest troubles, though the blue-flowered kind
is milder and better for that. I’ve known women use it to procure abortion, in
great doses that purge to the extreme. Small wonder if sometimes the poor girl
dies.”
    “And
this was surely during his novitiate, for he cannot have been here long if this
child was his, as he supposes. He can have been only a boy.”
    “Barely
eighteen, and the girl no more, if as old. It is some extenuation,” said
Cadfael firmly, “if they were in the same household, seeing each other daily,
of equal birth, for he comes of a good family, and as open to love as are most
children. In fact,” said Cadfael, kindling, “what I wonder at is that his suit
should have been rejected out of hand. He was an only son, there was a good
manor would have been his if he had not taken vows. And he was a very pleasing
youth, as I recall, lettered and gifted. Many a knight would have welcomed him
as a match for his daughter.”
    “It
may be her father already had other plans for her,” said Radulfus. “He may have
betrothed her to someone else in childhood. And her mother would hardly venture
to countenance a match in her husband’s absence, if she went in such awe of
him.”
    “She
need not, however, have rejected the boy utterly, if she had let him hope, he
would have waited, surely, and not tried to force her hand by forestalling
marriage. Though it may be I do him wrong there,” Cadfael relented. “It was not
calculation, I fancy, that brought him into the girl’s bed, but too rash
affection. Haluin would never make a schemer.”
    “Well,
for better or worse,” said Radulfus with a weary sigh, “it was done, and cannot
be undone. He is not the first, and will not be the last young man to fall into
that error, nor she the first nor the last poor child to suffer for it. At
least she has kept her good name. Easy to see why he feared to confide, for her
sake, even under the seal of confession. But it is long ago, eighteen years,
his age when it befell. Let us at least secure him a peaceful ending.”
    It
was the general view that a peaceful ending was the best that could be hoped
for for Brother Haluin, and that prayers for him ought not to presume to look
towards any other outcome, all the more as his brief return to his senses
rapidly lapsed again into a deeper unconsciousness, and for seven days, while
the festival of the Nativity came and passed, he lay oblivious of the comings
and goings of his brethren round his bed, ate nothing, uttered no sound but the
hardly perceptible flutter of his breath. Yet that breath, however faint, was
steady and even, and as often as drops of honeyed wine were presented to his
lips, they were accepted, and the cords of his throat moved of themselves,
docilely swallowing, while the broad, chilly brow and closed eyes never by the
least quiver or contraction revealed awareness of what his body did.
    “As
if only his body is here,” said Brother Edmund, soberly pondering, “and his
spirit gone elsewhere until the house is again furbished and clean and waiting
to be lived in.”
    A
sound biblical analogy, Cadfael considered, for certainly Haluin had himself
cast out the devils that inhabited him, and the dwelling they vacated might
well lie empty for a while, all the more if there was to be that unlooked-for
and improbable act of healing, after all. For however this prolonged