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

by Ellis Peters

“Child, dear,” said Cadfael comfortably, “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.

Energy and lethargy, generosity and spite, shrewd action and incomprehensible inaction, would always alternate and startle in King Stephen.

And to look like a hero, and be none, that’s hard on a man.”

The king was diverted for a moment from the gravity of the cause that now lay in his hands, to smile at the flushed and eager child with all the good-humour and charm his nature was meant to dispense, if he had not made an ambitious and hotly contested bid for a throne, and learned the rough ways that go with such contests.

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.

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.”