Read Brother Cadfael 10: The Pilgrim of Hate for Free Online

lord is there in the empress's train, is he? And this knight who was killed was in d'Angers' service? That was a very ill thing, Hugh."
    "So Abbot Radulfus thinks," said Hugh sombrely.
    "In the dusk and in confusion - and all got clean away, even the one who used the knife. A foul thing, for surely that was no chance blow. The clerk Christian escaped out of their hands, yet one among them turned on the rescuer before he fled. It argues a deal of hate at being thwarted, to have ventured that last moment before running. And is it left so? And Winchester full of those who should most firmly stand for justice?"
    "Why, some among them would surely have been well enough pleased if that bold clerk had spilled his blood in the gutter, as well as the knight. Some may well have set the hunt on him."
    "Well for the empress's good name," said Cadfael, "that there was one at least of her men stout enough to respect an honest opponent, and stand by him to the death. And shame if that death goes unpaid for."
    "Old friend," said Hugh ruefully, rising to take his leave, "England has had to swallow many such a shame these last years. It grows customary to sigh and shrug and forget. At which, as I know, you are a very poor hand. And I have seen you overturn custom more than once, and been glad of it. But not even you can do much now for Rainald Bossard, bar praying for his soul. It is a very long way from here to Winchester."
    "It is not so far," said Cadfael, as much to himself as to his friend, "not by many a mile, as it was an hour since."
    He went to Vespers, and to supper in the refectory, and thereafter to Collations and Compline, and all with one remembered face before his mind's eye, so that he paid but fractured attention to the readings, and had difficulty in concentrating his thoughts on prayer. Though it might have been a kind of prayer he was offering throughout, in gratitude and praise and humility.
    So suave, so young, so dark and vital a face, startling in its beauty when he had first seen it over the girl's shoulder, the face of the young squire sent to bring away the Hugonin children to their uncle and guardian. A long, spare, wide-browed face, with a fine scimitar of a nose and a supple bow of a mouth, and the fierce, fearless, golden eyes of a hawk. A head capped closely with curving, blue-black hair, coiling crisply at his temples and clasping his cheeks like folded wings. So young and yet so formed a face, east and west at home in it, shaven clean like a Norman, olive-skinned like a Syrian, all his memories of the Holy Land in one human countenance. The favourite squire of Laurence d'Angers, come home with him from the Crusade. Olivier de Bretagne.
    If his lord was there in the south with his following, in the empress's retinue, where else would Olivier be? The abbot might even have rubbed shoulders with him, unbeknown, or seen him ride past at his lord's elbow, and for one absent moment admired his beauty. Few such faces blaze out of the humble mass of our ordinariness, thought Cadfael, the finger of God cannot choose but mark them out for notice, and his officers here will be the first to recognise and own them.
    And this Rainald Bossard who is dead, an honourable man doing right by an honourable opponent, was Olivier's comrade, owning the same lord and pledged to the same service. His death will be grief to Olivier. Grief to Olivier is grief to me, a wrong done to Olivier is a wrong done to me. As far away as Winchester may be, here am I left mourning in that dark street where a man died for a generous act, in which, by the same token, he did not fail, for the clerk Christian lived on to return to his lady, the queen, with his errand faithfully done.
    The gentle rustlings and stirrings of the dortoir sighed into silence outside the frail partitions of Cadfael's cell long before he rose from his knees, and shook off his sandals. The little lamp by the night stairs cast only the faintest gleam across the beams of the roof,