An Excellent Mystery by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online Page B

to admit him to
the work of copying or study or colouring of manuscripts, he had a pleasant
voice but little musical training; the tasks that fell to him were the
unskilled and strenuous, and he delighted in them. There was no one who could
fail to reflect the same delight in watching him stretch and lift and stride,
dig and hew and carry, he who had lately dragged his own light weight along
with crippled effort and constant pain. His elders beheld his beauty and vigour
with fond admiration, and gave thanks to the saint who had healed him.
    Beauty
is a perilous gift, but Rhun had never given a thought to his own face, and
would have been astonished to be told that he possessed so rare an endowment.
Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart
ache that beholds and has lost it.
    Brother
Urien had lost more than his youth, and had not lost his youth long enough to
have grown resigned to its passing. He was thirty-seven years old, and had come
into the cloister barely a year past, after a ruinous marriage that had left
him contorted in mind and spirit. The woman had wrung and left him, and he was
not a mild man, but of strong and passionate appetites and imperious will.
Desperation had driven him into the cloister, and there he found no remedy.
Deprivation and rage bite just as deeply within as without.
    They
were working side by side over the first summer apples, at the end of August,
up in the dimness of the loft over the barn, laying out the fruit in wooden
trays to keep as long as it would. The hot weather had brought on the ripening
by at least ten days. The light in there was faintly golden, and heady with
motes of dust, they moved as through a shimmering mist. Rhun’s flaxen head, as
yet unshorn, might have been a fair girl’s, the curve of his cheek as he
stooped over the shelves was suave as a rose-leaf, and the curling lashes that
shadowed his eyes were long and lustrous. Brother Urien watched him sidewise,
and his heart turned in him, shrunken and wrung with pain.
    Rhun
had been thinking of Fidelis, how he would have enjoyed the expedition to the
Gaye, and he noticed nothing amiss when his neighbour’s hand brushed his as
they laid out the apples, or their shoulders touched briefly by chance. But it
was not by chance when the outstretched hand, instead of brushing and removing,
slid long fingers over his hand and held it, stroking from fingertips to wrist,
and there lingering in a palpable caress.
    By
all the symbols of his innocence he should not have understood, not yet, not
until much more had passed. But he did understand. His very candour and purity
made him wise. He did not snatch his hand away, but withdrew it very gently and
kindly, and turned his fair head to look Urien full in the face with wide,
wide-set eyes of the clearest blue-grey, with such comprehension and pity that
the wound burned unbearably deep, corrosive with rage and shame. Urien took his
hand away and turned aside from him.
    Revulsion
and shock might have left a morsel of hope that one emotion could yet, with
care, be changed gradually into another, since at least he would have known he
had made a sharp impression. But this open-eyed understanding and pity repelled
him beyond hope. How dared a green, simple virgin, who had never become aware
of his body but through his lameness and physical pain, recognise the fire when
it scorched him, and respond only with compassion? No fear, no blame, and no
uncertainty. Nor would he complain to confessor or superior. Brother Urien went
away with grief and desire burning in his bowels, and the remembered face of
the woman clear and cruel before his mind’s eyes. Prayer was no cure for the
memory of her.
    Rhun
brought away from that encounter, only a moment long and accomplished in
silence, his first awareness of the tyranny of the body. Troubles from which he
was secure could torture another man. His heart ached a little