THE CONFESSION OF BROTHER HALUIN
Ellis Peters
The Fifteenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael
EBook Design Group [EDG] digital edition
v2 HTML – January 26, 2003
CONTENTS
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter One
^ »
The worst of the winter came early, that year of1142. After the prolonged autumn of mild, moist, elegiac days,December came in with heavy skies and dark, brief days that saggedupon the rooftrees and lay like oppressive hands upon the heart. Inthe scriptorium there was barely light enough at noon to form theletters, and the colors could not be used with any certainty, sincethe unrelenting and untimely dusk sapped all their brightness. Theweather-wise had predicted heavy snows, and in midmonth they came,not with blizzard winds, but in a blinding, silent fall thatcontinued for several days and nights, smoothing out everyundulation, blanching all color out of the world, burying the sheepin the hills and the hovels in the valleys, smothering all sound,climbing every wall, turning roofs into ranges of white, impassablemountains, and the very air between earth and sky into an opaque,drifting whirlpool of flakes large as lilies. When the fall finallyceased, and the heavy swags of cloud lifted, the Foregate lay halfburied, so nearly smoothed out into one white level that there werescarcely any shadows except where the tall buildings of the abbeysoared out of the pure pallor, and the eerie, reflected light madeday even of night, where only a week before the ominous gloom hadmade night of day.