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that would continue in daily use and daily respectful
notice, a permanent reminder of his munificence and piety. He took his time
about making his decision, and when he was satisfied of the best value he could
get for the least expenditure, he sent his law-man to Shrewsbury to confer with
abbot and prior, and conclude with due ceremony and many witnesses the charter
that conveyed to the custodian of the altar of St Mary, within the abbey
church, one of his free tenant farmers, the rent to provide light for Our
Lady’s altar throughout the year. He promised also, for the proper displaying
of his charity, the gift of a pair of fine silver candlesticks, which he
himself would bring and see installed on the altar at the coming Christmas
feast.
    Abbot
Heribert, who after a long life of repeated disillusionments still contrived to
think the best of everybody, was moved to tears by this penitential generosity.
Prior Robert, himself an aristocrat, refrained, out of Norman solidarity, from
casting doubt upon Hamo’s motive, but he elevated his eyebrows, all the same.
Brother Cadfael, who knew only the public reputation of the donor, and was
sceptical enough to suspend judgement until he encountered the source, said
nothing, and waited to observe and decide for himself. Not that he expected
much; he had been in the world fifty-five years, and learned to temper all his
expectations, bad or good.
    It
was with mild and detached interest that he observed the arrival of the party
from Lidyate, on the morning of Christmas Eve. A hard, cold Christmas it was
proving to be, that year of 1135, all bitter black frost and grudging snow,
thin and sharp as whips before a withering east wind. The weather had been
vicious all the year, and the harvest a disaster. In the villages people
shivered and starved, and Brother Oswald the almoner fretted and grieved the
more that the alms he had to distribute were not enough to keep all those
bodies and souls together. The sight of a cavalcade of three good riding
horses, ridden by travellers richly wrapped up from the cold, and followed by
two pack-ponies, brought all the wretched petitioners crowding and crying,
holding out hands blue with frost. All they got out of it was a single
perfunctory handful of small coin, and when they hampered his movements
FitzHamon used his whip as a matter of course to clear the way. Rumour, thought
Brother Cadfael, pausing on his way to the infirmary with his daily medicines
for the sick, had probably not done Hamo FitzHamon any injustice.
    Dismounting
in the great court, the knight of Lidyate was seen to be a big, over-fleshed,
top-heavy man with bushy hair and beard and eyebrows, all grey-streaked from
their former black, and stiff and bristling as wire. He might well have been a
very handsome man before indulgence purpled his face and pocked his skin and
sank his sharp black eyes deep into flabby sacks of flesh. He looked more than
his age, but still a man to be reckoned with.
    The
second horse carried his lady, pillion behind a groom. A small figure she made,
even swathed almost to invisibility in her woollens and furs, and she rode
snuggled comfortably against the groom’s broad back, her arms hugging him round
the waist. And a very well-looking young fellow he was, this groom, a strapping
lad barely twenty years old, with round, ruddy cheeks and merry, guileless
eyes, long in the legs, wide in the shoulders, everything a country youth
should be, and attentive to his duties into the bargain, for he was down from
the saddle in one lithe leap, and reaching up to take the lady by the waist,
every bit as heartily as she had been clasping him a moment before, and lift
her lightly down. Small, gloved hands rested on his shoulders a brief moment
longer than was necessary. His respectful support of her continued until she
was safe on the ground and sure of her footing; perhaps a few seconds more.
Hamo FitzHamon was occupied