The Pilgram of Hate Read Online Free

the other. At the very feet, as it were, of the
bishop-legate. As black a sacrilege as if he had been butchered on the steps of
the altar. It was not one man’s death, it was a bitter symbol of the
abandonment of law and the rejection of hope and reconciliation. So Radulfus
had seen it, and so he recorded it in the offices of his house. There was a
solemn acknowledgement due to the dead man, a memorial lodged in heaven.
    “We
are asked,” said Prior Robert, “to offer thanks for the just endeavour and
prayers for the soul of one Rainald Bossard, a knight in the service of the
Empress Maud.”
    “One
of the enemy,” said a young novice doubtfully, talking it over in the cloisters
afterwards. So used were they, in this shire, to thinking of the king’s cause
as their own, since it had been his writ which had run here now in orderly
fashion for four years, and kept off the worst of the chaos that troubled so
much of England elsewhere.
    “Not
so,” said Brother Paul, the master of the novices, gently chiding. “No good and
honourable man is an enemy, though he may take the opposing side in this
dissension.”
    “The
fealty of this world is not for us, but we must bear it ever in mind as a true
value, as binding on those who owe it as our vows are on us. The claims of
these two cousins are both in some sort valid. It is no reproach to have kept
faith, whether with king or empress. And this was surely a worthy man, or
Father Abbot would not thus have recommended him to our prayers.”
    Brother
Anselm, thoughtfully revolving the syllables of the name, and tapping the
resultant rhythm on the stone of the bench on which he sat, repeated to himself
softly: “Rainald Bossard, Rainald Bossard…”
    The
repeated iambic stayed in Brother Cadfael’s ear and wormed its way into his
mind. A name that meant nothing yet to anyone here, had neither form nor face,
no age, no character; nothing but a name, which is either a soul without a body
or a body without a soul. It went with him into his cell in the dortoir, as he
made his last prayers and shook off his sandals before lying down to sleep. It
may even have kept a rhythm in his sleeping mind, without the need of a dream
to house it, for the first he knew of the thunderstorm was a silent
double-gleam of lightning that spelled out the same iambic, and caused him to
start awake with eyes still closed, and listen for the answering thunder. It
did not come for so long that he thought he had dreamed it, and then he heard
it, very distant, very quiet, and yet curiously ominous. Beyond his closed
eyelids the quiet lightnings flared and died, and the echoes answered so late
and so softly, from so far away…
    As
far, perhaps, as that fabled city of Winchester, where momentous matters had
been decided, a place Cadfael had never seen, and probably never would see. A
threat from a town so distant could shake no foundations here, and no hearts,
any more than such far-off thunders could bring down the walls of Shrewsbury.
Yet the continuing murmur of disquiet was still in his ears as he fell asleep.

 
     
     
    Chapter Two
     
    ABBOT
RADULFUS RODE BACK into his abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul on the third
day of June, escorted by his chaplain and secretary, Brother Vitalis, and
welcomed home by all the fifty-three brothers, seven novices and six schoolboys
of his house, as well as all the lay stewards and servants.
    The
abbot was a long, lean, hard man in his fifties, with a gaunt, ascetic face and
a shrewd, scholar’s eye, so vigorous and able of body that he dismounted and
went straight to preside at High Mass, before retiring to remove the stains of
travel or take any refreshment after his long ride. Nor did he forget to offer
the prayer he had enjoined upon his flock, for the repose of the soul of
Rainald Bossard, slain in Winchester on the evening of Wednesday, the ninth day
of April of this year of Our Lord 1141. Eight weeks