Read Online The Raven in the Foregate by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online Page A

question in her mind did she ask, in a clear, firm voice: “Are you Brother
Cadfael’s new helper here?”
    “Yes, my lady,” said the dutiful labourer bashfully,
shuffling his feet and somehow even contriving a blush that sat rather oddly on
so positive and cheerful a countenance.
    She looked at the trimmed hedge and the newly weeded
and manured flower beds, and again at him, and for a dazzling instant he
thought she smiled, but in the flicker of an eyelash she was solemn again.
    “I came to ask Brother Cadfael for some herbs for my
kitchen forcemeats. Do you know were I shall find him?”
    “He’s in his workshop within,” said Benet. “Please to
walk through into the walled garden there.”
    “I remember the way,” she said, and inclined her head
to him graciously, as noble to simple, and swept away from him through the open
gate into the walled enclosure of the herbarium.
    It was almost time for Vespers, and Benet could well
have quit his labours and gone to make himself ready, but he prolonged his
sweeping quite unnecessarily, gathering the brushings into a pile of
supererogatory neatness, scattering them a little and massing them again, in
order to get another close glimpse of her when she came blithely back with a
bunch of dried herbs loosely wrapped in a cloth and carried carefully in her
hands. She passed him this time without a glance, or seemed to do so, but still
he had the feeling that those wide and wide-set eyes with their startling
blueness took him in methodically in passing. The hood had slipped back a
little from her head, and showed him a coiled braid of hair of an indefinable
spring colour, like the young fronds of bracken when they are just unfolding, a
soft light brown with tones of green in the shadows. Or hazel withies, perhaps!
Hazel eyes are no great rarity, but how many women can boast of hazel hair?
    She was gone, the hem of her cloak whisking round the
box hedge and out of his sight. Benet forsook his broom in haste, left his pile
of brushings lying, and went to pick Brother Cadfael’s brains.
    “Who was that lady?” he asked, point-blank.
    “Is that a proper question for a postulant like you to
be asking?” said Cadfael placidly, and went on cleaning and putting away his
pestle and mortar.
    Benet made a derisive noise, and interposed his sturdy
person to confront Cadfael eye to eye, with no pretence whatsoever to notions
of celibacy. “Come, you know her, or at least she knows you. Who is she?”
    “She spoke to you?” Cadfael wondered, interested.
    “Only to ask me where she would find you. Yes, she
spoke to me!” he said, elated. “Yes, she stopped and looked me up and down, the
creature, as though she found herself in need of a page, and thought I might do,
given a little polishing. Would I do for a lady’s page, Cadfael?”
    “What’s certain,” said Cadfael tolerantly, “is that
you’ll never do for a monk. But no, I wouldn’t say a lady’s service is your
right place, either.” He did not add: “Unless on level terms!” but that was
what was in his mind. At this moment the boy had shed all pretence of being a
poor widow’s penniless kinsman, untutored and awkward. That was no great
surprise. There had been little effort spent on the imposture here in the
garden for a week past, though the boy could reassume it at a moment’s notice
with others, and was still the rustic simpleton in Prior Robert’s patronising
presence.
    “Cadfael…” Benet took him cajolingly by the shoulders
and held him, tilting his curly head coaxingly, with a wilfully engaging
intimacy. Given the occasion, he was well aware he could charm the birds from
the trees. Nor did he have any difficulty in weighing up elder sympathisers who
must once have shared much the same propensities. “Cadfael, I may never speak
to her again, I may never see her again-but I can try! Who is she?”
    “Her name,” said Cadfael, capitulating rather from