Brother Cadfael 20: Brother Cadfael's Penance by Ellis Peters

Author:Ellis Peters [Unknown]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2013-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Philip came back slowly to his place at the table, and sat down, and finding his book left open and unregarded, quietly closed it. He leaned his head between long hands, and fixed his unnerving eyes again on Cadfael's face.

"Yes," he said, rather to himself than to Cadfael, "yes, there is the matter of your son Olivier. Let us not forget Olivier." But his voice was not reassuring. "Let us see if the man I have known, I thought well, is the same as the son you have known. Never has he spoken of a father to me."

"He knows no more than his mother told him, when he was a child. I have told him nothing. Of his father he knows only a too kindly legend, coloured too brightly by affection."

"If I question too close, refuse me answers. But I feel a need to know. A son of the cloister?"

"No," said Cadfael, "a son of the Crusade. His mother lived and died in Antioch. I never knew I had left her a son until I met with him here in England, and he named her, mentioned times, left me in no doubt at all. The cloister came later."

"The Crusade!" Philip echoed. His eyes burned up into gold. He narrowed their brightness curiously upon Cadfael's grizzled tonsure and lined and weathered face. "The Crusade that made a Christian kingdom in Jerusalem? You were there? Of all battles, surely the worthiest."

"The easiest to justify, perhaps," Cadfael agreed ruefully. "I would not say more than that."

The bright, piercing gaze continued to weigh and measure and wonder, with a sudden personal passion, staring through Cadfael into far distances, beyond the fabled Midland Sea, into the legendary Frankish kingdoms of Outremer. Ever since the fall of Edessa Christendom had been uneasy in its hopes and fears for Jerusalem, and popes and abbots were stirring in their sleep to consider their beleaguered capital, and raise their voices like clarions calling to the defence of the Church. Philip was not yet so old but he could quicken to the sound of the trumpet.

"How did it come that you encountered him here, all unknown? And once only?"

"Twice, and by God's grace there will be a third time," said Cadfael stoutly. He told, very briefly, of the circumstances of both those meetings.

"And still he does not know you for his sire? You never told him?"

"There is no need for him to know. No shame there, but no pride, either. His course is nobly set, why cause any tremor to deflect or shake it?"

"You ask nothing, want nothing of him?" The perilous bitterness was back in Philip's voice, husky with the pain of all he had hoped for from his own father, and failed to receive. Too fierce a love, perverted into too fierce a hate, corroded all his reflections on the anguished relationship between fathers and sons, too close and too separate, and never in balance.

"He owes me nothing," said Cadfael. "Nothing but such friendship and liking as we have deserved of each other by free will and earned trust, not by blood.

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