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night, and without leave. And never regretted! What Cadfael did not
regret, he found grave difficulty in remembering to confess. Hugh had been a
puzzle to him then, an ambiguous young man who might be either friend or enemy.
Proof upon proof since then sealed him friend, the closest and dearest.
    In
the silence of this night after the apple-gathering, Cadfael lay awake and
thought seriously, not about Hugh Beringar, but about Brother Meriet, who had
recoiled with desperate revulsion from the image of a stabbed man lying dead in
the grass. An illusion! The injured novice lay sleeping in his bed now, no more
than three or four cells from Meriet, uneasily, perhaps, with his ribs swathed
and sore, but there was not a sound from where he lay, he must be fathoms deep.
Did Meriet sleep half as well? And where had he seen, or why had he so vividly
imagined, a dead man in his blood?
    The
quiet, with more than an hour still to pass before midnight, was absolute. Even
the restless sleepers had subsided into peace. The boys, by the abbot’s orders
separated from their elders, slept in a small room at the end of the dortoir,
and Brother Paul occupied the cell that shielded their private place. Abbot
Radulfus knew and understood the unforseen dangers that lurked in ambush for
celibate souls, however innocent.
    Brother
Cadfael slept without quite sleeping, much as he had done many a time in camp
and on the battlefield, or wrapped in his sea-cloak on deck, under the stars of
the Midland Sea. He had talked himself back into the east and the past, alerted
to danger, even where no danger could possibly be.
    The
scream came rendingly, shredding the darkness and the silence, as if two
demoniac hands had torn apart by force the slumbers of all present here, and
the very fabric of the night. It rose into the roof, and fluttered ululating
against the beams of the ceiling, starting echoes wild as bats. There were
words in it, but no distinguishable word, it gabbled and stormed like a
malediction, broken by sobbing pauses to draw in breath.
    Cadfael
was out of his bed before it rose to its highest shriek, and groping into the
passage in the direction from which it came. Every soul was awake by then, he
heard a babble of terrified voices and a frantic gabbling of prayers, and Prior
Robert, slow and sleepy, demanding querulously who dared so disturb the peace. Beyond
where Brother Paul slept, children’s voices joined in the cacophony; the two
youngest boys had been startled awake and were wailing their terror, and no
wonder. Never had their sleep here been so rudely shattered, and the youngest
was no more than seven years old. Paul was out of his cell and flying to
comfort them. The clamour and complaint continued, loud and painful, by turns
threatening and threatened. Saints converse in tongues with God. With whom did
this fierce, violent voice converse, against whom did it contend, and in what
language of pain, anger and defiance?
    Cadfael
had taken his candle out with him, and made for the lamp by the night-stairs to
kindle it, thrusting his way through the quaking darkness and shoving aside
certain aimless, agitated bodies that blundered about in the passage, blocking
the way. The din of shouting, cursing and lamenting, still in the incoherent
tongue of sleep, battered at his ears all the way, and the children howled
piteously in their small room. He reached the lamp, and his taper flared and
burned up steadily, lighting staring faces, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, and the
lofty beams of the roof above. He knew already where to look for the disturber
of the peace. He elbowed aside those who blundered between, and carried his
candle into Meriet’s cell. Less confident souls came timidly after, circling
and staring, afraid to approach too near. Brother Meriet sat bolt upright in
his bed, quivering and babbling, hands clenched into fists in his blanket, head
reared back and eyes tight-closed. There