The Rose Rent

Chapter One

By reason of the prolonged cold, which lingered far into April, and had scarcely mellowed when the month of May began, everything came laggard and reluctant that spring of 1142. The birds kept close about the roofs, finding warmer places to roost. The bees slept late, depleted their stores, and had to be fed, but neither was there any early burst of blossom for them to make fruitful. In the gardens there was no point in planting seed that would rot or be eaten in soil too chilly to engender life.

The affairs of men, stricken with the same petrifying chill, seemed to have subsided into hibernation. Faction held its breath. King Stephen, after the first exhilaration of liberation from his prison, and the Easter journey north to draw together the frayed strings of his influence, had fallen ill in the south, so ill that the rumour of his death had spread throughout England, and his cousin and rival, the Empress Maud, had cautiously moved her headquarters to Oxford, and settled down there to wait patiently and vainly for him to make truth of rumour, which he stubbornly declined to do. He had still business to settle with the lady, and his constitution was more than a match for even this virulent fever. By the end of May he was on his way manfully back to health. By the early days of June the long sub-frost broke. The biting wind changed to a temperate breeze, the sun came out over the earth like a warm hand stroking, the seed stirred in the ground and put forth green blades, and a foam of flowers, all the more exuberant for having been so long restrained, burst forth in gold and purple and white over garden and meadow. The belated sowing began in jubilant haste. And King Stephen, like a giant breaking loose from some crippling enchantment, surged out of his convalescence into vigorous action, and bearing down on the port of Wareham, the most easterly still available to his enemies, seized both town and castle with hardly a graze to show for it.

“And is making north again now towards Cirencester,” reported Hugh Beringar, elated by the news, “to pick off the empress’s outposts one by one, if only he can keep up this storm of energy.” It was the one fatal flaw in the king’s military make-up that he could not sustain action for long if he failed to get instant results, but would abandon a siege after three days, and go off to start another elsewhere, squandering for no gain the energy devoted to both. “We may see a tidy end to it yet!”

Brother Cadfael, preoccupied with his own narrower concerns, continued to survey the vegetable patch outside the wall of his herb-garden, digging an experimental toe into soil grown darker and kinder after a mild morning shower. “By rights,” he said thoughtfully, “carrots should have been in more than a month ago, and the first radishes will be fibrous and shrunken as old leather, but we might get something with more juices in it from now on. Lucky the fruit-blossom held back until the bees began to wake up, but even so it will be a thin crop this year. Everything’s four weeks behind, but the seasons have a way of catching up, somehow. Wareham, you were saying? What of Wareham?”

“Why, that Stephen has taken it, town and castle and harbour and all. So Robert of Gloucester, who went out by that gate barely ten days earlier, has it slammed in his face now. Did I not tell you? The word came three days since. It seems there was a meeting back in April, in Devizes, between the empress and her brother, and they made it up between them that it was high time the lady’s husband should pay a little heed to her affairs, and come over in person to help her get her hands on Stephen’s crown. They sent envoys over to Normandy to meet with Geoffrey, but he sent back to say he was well disposed, no question, but the men sent out to him were unknown to him, name or reputation, and he would be uneasy in dealing with any but the Earl of Gloucester himself. If Robert will not come, says Geoffrey, no use sending me any other.”

Cadfael was momentarily distracted from his laggard crops. “And Robert let himself be persuaded?” he said, marvelling.

“Very reluctantly. He feared to leave his sister to the loyalties of some who were all but ready to desert her after the Westminster shambles, and I doubt if he has any great hopes of getting anything out of the Count of Anjou. But yes, he let himself be persuaded. And he’s sailed from Wareham, with less trouble than he’ll have sailing back into the same port, now the king holds it. A good, fast move, that was. If he can but maintain it now!”

“We said a Mass in thanksgiving for his recovery,” said Cadfael absently, and plucked out a leggy sow-thistle from among his mint. “How is it that weeds grow three times faster than the plants we nurse so tenderly? Three days ago that was not even there. If the kale shot up like that I should be pricking the plants out by tomorrow.”

“No doubt your prayers will stiffen Stephen’s resolution,” Hugh said, though with less than complete conviction. “Have they not given you a helper yet, here in the garden? It’s high time, there’s more than one’s work here in this season.”

“So I urged at chapter this morning. What they’ll offer me there’s no knowing. Prior Robert has one or two among the younger ones he’d be glad to shuffle off his hands and into mine. Happily the ones he least approves tend to be those with more wit and spirit than the rest, not less. I may yet be lucky in my apprentice.”

He straightened his back, and stood looking out over the newly turned beds, and the pease-fields that sloped down to the Meole Brook, mentally casting an indulgent eye back over the most recent of his helpers here in the herbarium. Big, jaunty, comely Brother John, who had blundered into the cloister by mistake, and backed out of it, not without the connivance of friends, in Wales, to exchange the role of brother for that of husband and father; Brother Mark, entering here as an undersized and maltreated sixteen-year-old, shy and quiet, and grown into a clear, serene maturity of spirit that drew him away inevitably towards the priesthood. Cadfael still missed Brother Mark, attached now to the household chapel of the Bishop of Lichfield, and already a deacon. And after Mark, Brother Oswin, cheerful, confident and ham-fisted, gone now to do his year’s service at the lazarhouse of Saint Giles at the edge of the town. What next, wondered Cadfael? Put a dozen young men into the same rusty black habits, shave their heads, fit them into a single horarium day after day and year after year, and still they will all be irremediably different, every one unique. Thank God!

“Whatever they send you,” said Hugh, keeping pace with him along the broad green path that circled the fish-ponds, “you’ll have transformed by the time he leaves you. Why should they waste a simple, sweet saint like Rhun on you? He’s made already, he came into the world made. You’ll get the rough, the obdurate, the unstable to lick into shape. Not that it ever comes out the shape that was expected,” he added, with a flashing grin and a slanted glance along his shoulder at his friend.

“Rhun has taken upon himself the custody of Saint Winifred’s altar,” said Cadfael. “He has a proprietorial interest in the little lady. He makes the candles for her himself, and borrows essences from me to scent them for her. No, Rhun will find his own duties, and no one will stand in his way. He and she between them will see to that.”

They crossed the little foot-bridge over the leat that fed the pools and the mill, and emerged into the rose-garden. The trimmed bushes had made little growth as yet, but the first buds were swelling at last, the green sheaths parting to show a sliver of red or white. “They’ll open fast now,” said Cadfael contentedly. “All they needed was warmth. I’d begun to wonder whether the Widow Perle would get her rent on time this year, but if these are making up for lost time, so will her white ones be. A sad year, if there were no roses by the twenty-second day of June!”

“The Widow Perle? Oh, yes, the Vestier girl!” said Hugh. “I remember! So it’s due on the day of Saint Winifred’s translation, is it? How many years is it now since she made the gift?”

“This will be the fourth time we’ve paid her her annual rent. One white rose from that bush in her old garden, to be delivered to her on the day of Saint Winifred’s translation...”

“Supposed translation,” said Hugh, grinning. “And you should blush when you name it.”

“So I do, but with my complexion who notices?” And he was indeed of a rosy russet colouring, confirmed by long years of outdoor living in both east and west, so engrained now that winters merely tarnished it a little, and summers regularly renewed the gloss.

“She made modest demands,” observed Hugh thoughtfully, as they came to the second plank-bridge that spanned the channel drawn off to service the guest-hall. “Most of our solid merchants up in the town value property a good deal higher than roses.”

“She had already lost what she most valued,” said Cadfael. “Husband and child both, within twenty days. He died, and she miscarried. She could not bear to go on living, alone, in the house where they had been happy together. But it was because she valued it that she wanted it spent for God, not hoarded up with the rest of a property large enough to provide handsomely even without it for herself and all her kinsfolk and workfolk. It pays for the lighting and draping of Our Lady’s altar the whole year round. It’s what she chose. But just the one link she kept - one rose a year. He was a very comely man, Edred Perle,” said Cadfael, shaking his head mildly over the vulnerability of beauty, “I saw him pared away to the bone in a searing fever, and had no art to cool him. A man remembers that.”

“You’ve seen many such,” said Hugh reasonably, “here and on the fields of Syria, long ago.”

“So I have! So I have! Did ever you hear me say I’d forgotten any one of them? But a young, handsome man, shrivelled away before his time, before even his prime, and his girl left without even his child to keep him in mind

A sad enough case, you’ll allow.”

“She’s young,” said Hugh with indifferent practicality, his mind being on other things. “She should marry again.”

“So think a good many of our merchant fathers in the town,” agreed Cadfael with a wry smile,”the lady being as wealthy as she is, and sole mistress of the Vestiers’ clothier business. But after what she lost, I doubt if she’ll look at a grey old skinflint like Godfrey Fuller, who’s buried two wives already and made a profit out of both of them, and has his eye on a third fortune with the next. Or a fancy young fellow in search of an easy living!”

“Such as?” invited Hugh, amused.

“Two or three I could name. William Hynde’s youngster, for one, if my gossips tell me truth. And the lad who’s foreman of her own weavers is a very well-looking young man, and fancies his chance with her. Even her neighbour the saddler is looking for a wife, I’m told, and thinks she might very well do.”

Hugh burst into affectionate laughter, and clapped him boisterously on the shoulders as they emerged into the great court, and the quiet, purposeful bustle before Mass. “How many eyes and ears have you in every street in Shrewsbury? I wish my own intelligencers knew half as much of what goes on. A pity your influence falls short of Normandy. I might get some inkling then of what Robert and Geoffrey are up to there. Though I think,” he said, growing grave again as he turned back to his own preoccupations, “Geoffrey is far more concerned with getting possession of Normandy than with wasting his time on England. From all accounts he’s making fast inroads there, he’s not likely to draw off now. Far more like to inveigle Robert into helping him than offering much help to Robert.

“He certainly shows very little interest in his wife,” agreed Cadfael drily, “or her ambitions. Well, we shall see if Robert can sway him. Are you coming in to Mass this morning?”

“No, I’m away to Maesbury tomorrow for a week or two. They should have been shearing before this, but they put it off for a while because of the cold. They’ll be hard at it now. I’ll leave Aline and Giles there for the summer. But I’ll be back and forth, in case of need.”

“A summer without Aline, and without my godson,” said Cadfael reprovingly, “is no prospect to spring on me without preamble, like this. Are you not ashamed?”

“Not a whit! For I came, among other errands, to bid you to supper with us tonight, before we leave early in the morning. Abbot Radulfus has given his leave and blessing. Go, pray for fair weather and a smooth ride for us,” said Hugh heartily, and gave his friend a vigorous shove towards the corner of the cloister and the south door of the church.

It was purely by chance, or a symbol of that strange compulsion that brings the substance hard on the heels of the recollection, that the sparse company of worshippers in the parish part of the church at the monastic Mass that day should include the Widow Perle. There were always a few of the laity there on their knees beyond the parish altar, some who had missed their parish Mass for varying reasons, some who were old and solitary and filled up their lonely time with supererogatory worship, some who had special pleas to make, and sought an extra opportunity of approaching grace. Some, even, who had other business in the Foregate, and welcomed a haven meantime for thought and quietness, which was the case of the Widow Perle.

From his stall in the choir Brother Cadfael could just see the suave line of her head, shoulder and arm, beyond the bulk of the parish altar. It was strange that so quiet and unobtrusive a woman should nevertheless be so instantly recognisable even in this fragmentary glimpse. It might have been the way she carried her straight and slender shoulders, or the great mass of her brown hair weighing down the head so reverently inclined over clasped hands, hidden from his sight by the altar. She was barely twenty-five years old, and had enjoyed only three years of a happy marriage, but she went about her deprived and solitary life without fuss or complaint, cared scrupulously for a business which gave her no personal pleasure, and faced the prospect of perpetual loneliness with a calm countenance and a surprising supply of practical energy. In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.

A blessing, at any rate, thought Cadfael, that she is not utterly alone, she has her mother’s sister to keep the house for her now she lives, as it were, over her shop, and her cousin for a conscientious foreman and manager, to take the weight of the business off her shoulders. And one rose every year for the rent of the house and garden in the Foregate, where her man died. The only gesture of passion and grief and loss she ever made, to give away voluntarily her most valuable property, the house where she had been happy, and yet ask for that one reminder, and nothing more.

She was not a beautiful woman, Judith Perle, born Judith Vestier, and sole heiress to the biggest clothiers’ business in the town. But she had a bodily dignity that would draw the eye even in a market crowd, above the common height for a woman, slender and erect, and with a carriage and walk of notable grace. The great coils of her shining light-brown hair, the colour of seasoned oak timber, crowned a pale face that tapered from wide and lofty brow to pointed chin, by way of strong cheekbones and hollow cheeks, and an eloquent, mobile mouth too wide for beauty, but elegantly shaped. Her eyes were of a deep grey, and very clear and wide, neither confiding nor hiding anything. Cadfael had been eye to eye with her, four years ago now, across her husband’s death-bed, and she had neither lowered her lids nor turned her glance aside, but stared unwaveringly as her life’s happiness slipped irresistibly away through her fingers. Two weeks later she had miscarried, and lost even her child. Edred had left her nothing.

Hugh is right, thought Cadfael, forcing his mind back to the liturgy. She is young, she should marry again.

The June light, now approaching the middle hours of the day, and radiant with sunshine, fell in long golden shafts across the body of the choir and into the ranks of the brothers and obedientiaries opposite, gilding half a face here and throwing its other half into exaggerated shade, there causing dazzled eyes in a blanched face to blink away the brightness. The vault above received the diffused reflections in a soft, muted glow, plucking into relief the curved leaves of the stone bosses. Music and light seemed to mate only there in the zenith. Summer trod hesitantly into the church at last, after prolonged hibernation.

It seemed that brother Cadfael was not the only one whose mind was wandering when it should have been fixed. Brother Anselm the precentor, absorbed into his singing, lifted a rapt face into the sun, his eyes closed, since he knew every note without study or thought. But beside him Brother Eluric, custodian of Saint Mary’s altar in the Lady Chapel, responded only absently, his head turned aside, towards the parish altar and the soft murmur of responses from beyond.

Brother Eluric was a child of the cloister, not long a full brother, and entrusted with his particular charge by reason of his undoubted deserving, tempered by the reserve that was felt about admitting child oblates to full office, at least until they had been mature for a number of years. An unreasonable reserve, Cadfael had always felt, seeing that the child oblates were regarded as the perfect innocents, equivalent to the angels, while the conversi, those who came voluntarily and in maturity to the monastic life, were the fighting saints, those who had endured and mastered their imperfections. So Saint Anselm had classified them, and ordered them never to attempt reciprocal reproaches, never to feel envy. But still the conversi were preferred for the responsible offices, perhaps as having experience of the deceits and complexities and temptations of the world around them. But the care of an altar, its light, its draperies, the special prayers belonging to it, this could well be the charge of an innocent.

Brother Eluric was past twenty now, the most learned and devout of his contemporaries, a tall, well-made young man, black-haired and black-eyed. He had been in the cloister since he was three years old, and knew nothing outside it. Unacquainted with sin, he was all the more haunted by it, as by some unknown monster, and assiduous in confession, he picked to pieces his own infinitesimal failings, with the mortal penitence due to deadly sins. A curious thing, that so over-conscientious a youth should be paying so little heed to the holy office. His chin was on his shoulder, his lips still, forgetting the words of the psalm. He was gazing, in fact, precisely where Cadfael had been gazing only moments earlier. But from Eluric’s stall there would be more of her to see, Cadfael reflected, the averted face, the linked hands, the folds of linen over her breast.

The contemplation, it seemed, gave him no joy, but only a brittle, quivering tension, taut as a drawn bow. When he recollected himself and tore his gaze away, it was with a wrench that shook him from head to foot.

Well, well! said Cadfael to himself, enlightened. And in eight days more he has to carry the rose rent to her. That task they should have allotted to some old hardened sinner like me, who would view and enjoy, and return untroubled and untroubling, not this vulnerable boy who surely can never else have been alone in a room with a woman since his mother let him be taken out of her arms. And a pity she ever did!

And this poor girl, the very image to wring him most painfully, grave, sad, with a piteous past and yet composed and calm like the Blessed Virgin herself. And he coming to her bearing a white rose, their hands perhaps touching as he delivers it. And now I recall that Anselm says he’s something of a poet. Well, what follies we commit without evil intent!

It was far too late now to devote his mind to its proper business of prayer and praise. He contented himself with hoping that by the time the brothers emerged from the choir after service the lady would be gone.

By the mercy of God, she was.

But she was gone, it seemed, no further than Cadfael’s workshop in the herb-garden, where he found her waiting patiently outside the open door when he came to decant the lotion he had left cooling before Mass. Her brow was smooth and her voice mild, and everything about her practical and sensible. The fire that burned Eluric was unknown to her. At Cadfael’s invitation she followed him in, under the gently swaying bunches of herbs that rustled overhead from the beams.

“You once made me an ointment, Brother Cadfael, if you remember. For a rash on the hands. There’s one of my carders breaks out in little pustules, handling the new fleeces. But not every season - that’s strange too. This year she has trouble with it again.”

“I remember it,” said Cadfael. “It was three years ago. Yes, I know the receipt. I can make some fresh for you in a matter of minutes, if you’ve leisure to wait?”

It seemed that she had. She sat down on the wooden bench against the timber wall, and drew her dark skirts close about her feet, very erect and still in the corner of the hut, as Cadfael reached for pestle and mortar, and the little scale with its brass weights.

“And how are you faring now?” he asked, busy with hog’s fat and herbal oils. “Up there in the town?”

“Well enough,” she said composedly. “The business gives me plenty to do, and the wool clip has turned out better than I feared. I can’t complain. Isn’t it strange,” she went on, warming, “that wool should bring up this rash for Branwen, when you use the fat from wool to doctor skin diseases for many people?”

“Such contrary cases do happen,” he said. “There are plants some people cannot handle without coming to grief. No one knows the reason. We learn by observing. You had good results with this salve, I remember.”

“Oh, yes, her hands healed very quickly. But I think perhaps I should keep her from carding, and teach her weaving. When the wool is washed and dyed and spun, perhaps she could handle it more safely. She’s a good girl, she would soon learn.”

It seemed to Cadfael, working away with his back turned to her, that she was talking to fill the silence while she thought, and thought of something far removed from what she was saying. It was no great surprise when she said suddenly, and in a very different voice, abrupt and resolute: “Brother Cadfael, I have thoughts of taking the veil. Serious thoughts! The world is not so desirable that I should hesitate to leave it, nor my condition so hopeful that I dare look for a better time to come. The business can do very well without me; Cousin Miles runs it very profitably, and values it more than I do. Oh, I do my duty well enough, as I was always taught to do, but he could do it every bit as well without me. Why should I hesitate?”

Cadfael turned to face her, the mortar balanced on his palm. “Have you said as much to your aunt and your cousin?”

“I have mentioned it.”

“And what do they say to it?”

“Nothing. It’s left to me. Miles will neither commend nor advise, he brushes it aside. I think he doesn’t take me seriously. My aunt - you know her a little? She’s widowed like me, and for ever lamenting it, even after years. She talks of the peace of the cloister, and release from the cares of the world. But she always talks so, though I know she’s well content with her comfortable life if the truth were told. I live, Brother Cadfael, I do my work, but I am not content. It would be something settled and stable, to take to the cloister.”

“And wrong,” said Cadfael firmly. “Wrong, at least, for you.”

“Why would it be so wrong?” she challenged. The hood had slipped back from her head, the great braid of light-brown hair, silver-lit like veined oak, glowed faintly in the subdued light.

“No one should take to the cloistered life as a second-best, and that is what you would be doing. It must be embraced out of genuine desire, or not at all. It is not enough to wish to escape from the world without, you must be on fire for the world within.”

“Was it so with you?” she asked, and suddenly she smiled, and her austere face kindled into warmth for a moment.

He considered that in silence for a brief, cautious while. “I came late to it, and it may be that my fire burned somewhat dully,” he said honestly at length, “but it gave light enough to show me the road to what I wanted. I was running towards, not away.”

She looked him full in the face with her daunting, direct eyes, and said with abrupt, bleak deliberation: “Have you never thought, Brother Cadfael, that a woman may have more cause to run away than ever you had? More perils to run from, and fewer alternatives than flight?”

“That is truth,” admitted Cadfael, stirring vigorously. “But you, as I know, are better placed than many to hold your own, as well as having more courage than a good many of us men. You are your own mistress, your kin depend on you, and not you on them. There is no overlord to claim the right to order your future, no one can force you into another marriage - yes, I have heard there are many would be only too pleased if they could, but they have no power over you. No father living, no elder kinsman to influence you. No matter how men may pester you or affairs weary you, you know you are more than equal to them. And as for what you have lost,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation as to whether he should tread so near, “it is lost only to this world. Waiting is not easy, but no harder, believe me, among the vexations and distractions of the world than in the solitude and silence of the cloister. I have seen men make that mistake, for as reasonable cause, and suffer all the more with the double deprivation. Do not you take that risk. Never unless you are sure of what you want, and want it with all your heart and soul.”

It was as much as he dared say, as much as and perhaps more than he had any right to say. She heard him out without turning her eyes away. He felt their clear stare heavy upon him all the time he was smoothing his ointment into its jar for her, and tying down the lid of the pot for safe carriage.

“Sister Magdalen, from the Benedictine cell at Godric’s Ford,” he said, “is coming to Shrewsbury in two days’ time, to fetch away Brother Edmund’s niece, who wants to join the sisterhood there. As for the girl’s motives, I know nothing of them, but if Sister Magdalen is accepting her as a novice it must be from conviction, and moreover, the child will be carefully watched, and get no further than her novitiate unless Magdalen is satisfied of her vocation. Will you speak with her about this? I think you already know something of her.”

“I do.” Judith’s voice was soft, and yet there was a shade of quiet amusement in the tone. “Her own motives, I think, when she entered Godric’s Ford, were scarcely what you are demanding.”

That was something he could not well deny. Sister Magdalen had formerly been, for many years, the constant mistress of a certain nobleman, and on his death had looked about her with single-minded resolution for another field in which to employ her undoubted talents. No question but the choice of the cloister had been coolly and practically made. What redeemed it was the vigour and loyalty she had devoted to it since the day of her entry, and would maintain, without question, until the day of her death.

“In no way that I know of,” admitted Cadfael, “is Sister Magdalen anything but unique. You are right, she entered the cell seeking not a vocation, but a career, and a career she is making, and a notable one, too. Mother Mariana is old and bedridden now; the weight of the cell falls all on Magdalen, and I know no shoulders better fitted to carry it. And I do not think she would say to you, as I said, that there is but one good reason for taking the veil, true longing for the life of the spirit. The more reason you could and should listen to her advice and weigh it carefully, before you take so grave a step. And bear in mind, you are young, she had said goodbye to her prime.”

“And I have buried mine,” said Judith very firmly, and as one stating truth, without self-pity.

“Well, if it comes to second-bests,” said Cadfael, “they can be found outside the cloister as well as within. Managing the business your fathers built up, providing employment for so many people, is itself a sufficient justification for a life, for want of better.”

“It does not put me to any great test,” she said indifferently. “Ah, well, I said only that I had been thinking of quitting the world. Nothing is done, as yet. And whether or no, I shall be glad to talk with Sister Magdalen, for I do value her wit, and know better than to discard unconsidered whatever she may say. Let me know when she comes, and I will send and bid her to my house, or go to her wherever she is lodged.”

She rose to take the jar of ointment from him. Standing, she was the breadth of two fingers taller than he, but thin and slender-boned. The coils of her hair would have seemed over-heavy if she had not carried her head so nobly.

“Your roses are budding well,” she said, as he went out with her along the gravel path from the workshop. “However late they come, they always bloom equally in the end.”

It could have been a metaphor for the quality of a life, he thought, as they had been discussing it. But he did not say so. Better leave her to the shrewd and penetrating wisdom of Sister Magdalen. “And yours?” he said. “There’ll be a choice of blooms when Saint Winifred’s feast comes round. You should have the best and freshest for your fee.”

The most fleeting of smiles crossed her face, and left her sombre again, her eyes on the path. “Yes,” she said, and nothing more, though it seemed there should have been more. Was it possible that she had noted and been troubled by the same trouble that haunted Eluric? Three times he had carried the rose rent to her, a matter of how long in her presence? Two minutes annually? Three, perhaps? But no man’s shadow clouded Judith Perle’s eyes, no living man’s. She might, none the less, have become somehow aware, thought Cadfael, not of a young man’s physical entrance into her house and presence, but of the nearness of pain.

“I’m going there now,” she said, stirring out of her preoccupation. “I’ve lost the buckle of a good girdle, I should like to have a new one made, to match the rosettes that decorate the leather, and the end-tag. Enamel inlay on the bronze. It was a present Edred once made to me. Niall Bronzesmith will be able to copy the design. He’s a fine craftsman. I’m glad the abbey has such a good tenant for the house.”

“A decent, quiet man,” agreed Cadfael, “and keeps the garden well tended. You’ll find your rose-bush in very good heart.”

To that she made no reply, only thanked him simply for his services as they entered the great court together, and there separated, she to continue along the Foregate to the large house beyond the abbey forge, where she had spent the few years of her married life, he to the lavatorium to wash his hands before dinner. But he turned at the corner of the cloister to look after her, and watched until she passed through the arch of the gatehouse and vanished from his sight. She had a walk that might be very becoming in an abbess, but to his mind it looked just as well on the capable heiress of the chief clothier in the town. He went on to the refectory convinced that he was right in dissuading her from the conventual life. If she looked upon it as a refuge now, the time might come when it would seem to her a prison, and none the less constricting because she would have entered it willingly.