OneCorpse Too Many

Ellis Peters

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Brother Cadfael was working in the small kitchen garden by the abbot’sfishponds when the boy was first brought to him. It was hot August noon, and ifhe had had his proper quota of helpers they would all have been snoring in theshade at this hour, instead of sweating in the sun; but one of his regularassistants, not yet out of his novitiate, had thought better of the monasticvocation and taken himself off to join his elder brother in arms on KingStephen’s side, in the civil war for the crown of England, and the otherhad taken fright at the approach of the royal army because his family were ofthe Empress Maud’s faction, and their manor in Cheshire seemed a farsafer place to be than Shrewsbury under siege. Cadfael was left to doeverything alone, but he had in his time laboured under far hotter suns thanthis, and was doggedly determined not to let his domain run wild, whether theoutside world fell into chaos or no.

In this early summer of 1138 the fratricidal strife, hitherto somewhatdesultory, was already two years old, but never before had it approachedShrewsbury so closely. Now its threat hung over castle and town like the shadowof death. But for all that, Brother Cadfael’s mind was firmly upon lifeand growth, rather than destruction and war, and certainly he had no suspicionthat another manner of killing, simple murder, furtive and unlicensed even inthese anarchic times, was soon to disrupt the calm of his chosen life.