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

by Ellis Peters

lissome

Evidently the boy was of a mettle to fight back against whatever fears and qualms possessed him, and had the good sense to fortify himself with the things of the flesh for the struggles of the spirit.

tisane

“my monarch is neither Stephen nor Maud, and in all my life and all my fighting I’ve fought for only one king.

The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight.

Cadfael, watching, was glad he had managed to mould some form back into features once handsome, but in death fallen into a total collapse of terror. At least she was not viewing that hardly human disintegration.

Her brother was the prisoner who screamed that he was allowed to survive as he was thrown over the battlements.

At the sound of approaching footsteps he looked round, and came out in haste from among his plants, in a great wave of fragrance, which clung about him and distilled from the folds of his coarse tunic like the miraculous sweetness conferred upon some otherwise unimpressive-looking saint.

All the things of the wild have their proper uses, only misuse makes them evil.”

Energy and lethargy, generosity and spite, shrewd action and incomprehensible inaction, would always alternate and startle in King Stephen. But somewhere within that tall, comely, simple-minded person there was a gram of nobility hidden.

lambent

Glowing, gleaming or flickering

cotte,

A short garment

Ganymede?”

exudation

caltrop,

A device meant to stop horses and vehicles

scrip,

liefer

sententiously,

Matins

Morning Prayer

dortoir,

Prime,

Vespers.

Evening Prayet

saturnine

Gloomy, dark and mysterious

haulms.

pease-fields

Pea

I tell you, Brother Cadfael, we breed fine women here in Salop.”

Not complete darkness yet, simply the departure of the sun, afterglow and all, leaving a faint greenish radiance along the west; not complete dawn, but a promising confirmation of the first elusive beams.

scrip.

crupper

So it always is, he thought, to relieve another you must burden yourself.

reconnoitering

The trouble with me, he thought unhappily, is that I have been about the world long enough to know that God’s plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.

Incapable Of making mistakes

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.”