Brother Cadfael's Penance (Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, #20)

by Ellis Peters

Old men, thought Cadfael, believe in that new beginning, but experience only the ending. It may be that God is reminding me that I am approaching my November. Well, why regret it? November has beauty, has seen the harvest into the barns, even laid by next year’s seed. No need to fret about not being allowed to stay and sow it, someone else will do that. So go contentedly into the earth with the moist, gentle, skeletal leaves, worn to cobweb fragility, like the skins of very old men, that bruise and stain at the mere brushing of the breeze, and flower into brown blotches as the leaves into rotting gold.

‘I would not presume to deprive any man of the right to bear arms,’ said the bishop firmly. ‘I can, with full justification, take measures to regulate their use within these walls and during these grave discussions. In going about the town, certainly swords may be worn as customary, a man might well feel incomplete without his sword.’

‘There are griefs everywhere,’ said Cadfael, ‘within as without. There are few hiding-places. It is the nature of this world.’

‘And yet it is by blood,’ said Philip softly, ‘that you conceive you owe him so much, even to a life. Brother, I think you are telling me something I have learned to know all too well, though it took me years to master it. We are born of the fathers we deserve, and they engender the sons they deserve. We are our own penance and theirs. The first murderous warfare in the world, we are told, was between two brothers, but the longest and the bitterest is between fathers and sons. Now you offer me the father for the son, and you are offering me nothing that I want or need, in a currency I cannot spend. How could I ease my anger on you? I respect you, I like you, there are even things you might ask of me that I would give you with goodwill. But I will not give you Olivier.’

How easy it is to be persuaded into believing that God puts words into the office of the day of intent, for the appropriate mouth to utter them. The sortes by another way. But I, thought Philip, between regret and defiance, do not believe it. All this chaotic world fumbles along by chance.

and there was no certainty he would live to enter there again, since no man can know the day or the hour when his life shall be required of him.

You do what you must do, and pay for it. So in the end all things are simple.