One Corpse Too Many (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #2)

by Ellis Peters

Such ill news as there is, is ill indeed, and presently we’ll go pray for the souls of those quitting this world. But all of us quit it at last, by whatever way, that’s not the worst of evils.

Beringar was still staring down very sombrely at the dead. They were almost of an age, surely no more than a year between them. Every man burying his twin sees his own burial.

“But the east was also made up of men and women, and you a young crusader. I cannot but wonder,” said Beringar dreamily.

“Oh, pleasant to have, and useful, I know. But once you have enough of it for your needs, the rest of it is trash. Can you eat it, wear it, ride it, keep off the rain and the cold with it, read it, play music on it, make love to it?”

I do not like the way I see England going, thought Cadfael with anxious foreboding, and above all I do not like what is about to happen,

Why should not the poor rejoice for once at the king’s cost, even if that cost was handed on down the hierarchies until it fell at last upon the poor themselves?

As between Stephen and Maud, Cadfael felt no allegiance; but these young creatures, though two of them held for Maud and two for Stephen, surely belonged to a future and an England delivered from the wounds of civil war, beyond this present anarchy.

for every untimely death, every man cut down in his vigour and strength without time for repentance and reparation, is one corpse too many.

God disposes all. From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man’s scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace.”