It's going to be a cold, cold world without the warm heart and healing
hands of Brother Cadfael, the 12th-century Benedictine monk who was
brought to life by Sir Derek Jacobi on a PBS ''Mystery!''
series. Based on the historical novels of Ellis Peters, ''Cadfael'' will
begin its fourth, and final, season on Thursday at 9 P.M. with ''The
Holy Thief,'' followed by ''The Pilgrim of Hate'' on Jan. 14 and ''The
Potters Field'' on Jan. 21.
Or perhaps it's the grim and gory stuff viewers are really going to
miss -- because if you've been following Cadfael's career as the
resident apothecary and herbalist of Shrewsbury Abbey, you might have
noticed that the monk's gentle arts run largely to fishing murder
victims out of muddy rivers, boiling bodies down to their bones to learn
how they died, rubbing unguents on the pustulent boils of plague
sufferers, sewing up the gaping wounds of hacked-up soldiers and
otherwise tending to the ghastly things that happened to people back in
the Middle Ages.
''This was back in the days of pre-forensic science,'' Sir Derek
said, speaking of the primitive medical arts of the 12th century, ''and
Brother Cadfael has nothing to help him but his own innate skills and
the knowledge he acquires on the apothecary table.''
Before he became an actor -- celebrated on the English stage in such
classical roles as Macbeth, Richard III and Cyrano de Bergerac and on
television for his memorable star turn in ''I, Claudius'' -- Sir Derek
studied history at Cambridge University. Those early studies, he said,
gave him a feeling for the harshness of the period in which the Cadfael
stories are set.
''It was during the first of our three civil wars, an era of English
history that is not very well known,'' he said. ''People are only now
beginning to realize how very dark a period it was.''
Against the brutal conditions of medieval life in Shrewsbury, Brother
Cadfael's gentle character might take on the aura of a saint -- were the
actor who plays him not so scrupulous about acknowledging the monk's
earlier life as a soldier, a sailor and a lover.
''I think Cadfael is basically a humanitarian creature,'' Sir Derek
said, ''but he has also lived a full secular life, much of it as a
warrior, a man who kills people. When he was in the world, he found
himself embroiled in horrid, painful, untimely death, and I think he
brings all that worldliness into the abbey with him. It is what gives
him his ironic attitude toward the superstitions and religious
fanaticism of the age. I also think it makes him more sympathetic to
human frailty.''
That rugged side of Brother Cadfael was a bit of a stretch for the
actor. ''The Cadfael in Ellis Peters's novels was older, rounder, more
lined and weatherbeaten, more lived-in than I am,'' Sir Derek
said. ''And her books had such a tremendous following, I was afraid that
the readers would expect to see someone that I wasn't.''
As it turned out, neither Ellis Peters (the pen name of Dame Edith
Pargeter, a noted historian who wrote the first of the 20 novels in the
Cadfael Chronicles at the age of 65 and who died at 82 in 1995), nor her
legion of fans (in the 26 countries where 12 million copies of her books
have been sold) were the least bit disappointed in Sir Derek. In
fact, they swept him right up into their cult rituals, which include
pilgrimages to Shrewsbury, a Shropshire town on the Welsh border that
annually attracts more than 50,000 of the faithful to its 11th-century
abbey, medieval herb gardens, monastic library and scriptorium on a
Cadfael-themed ''Shrewsbury Quest.''
''I get lots of presents,'' said Sir Derek, of the books on
herbal remedies that find their way into his house in London and his
cottage in France, where he keeps his own small gardens. ''I'm not very
good on herbs,'' he admitted, a bit wistfully, although he has had
better luck with the Cadfael Rose.
As he enthusiastically described it, this specially bred specimen has
''thick pink petals and a wonderful perfume,'' and, unlike the series
that blooms its last this season, it flowers all year round.