since the principle here involved is at question among the masters of our orderat this time. You, Brother Prior and Brother Sub-Prior, as bearing the dailyweight of the household and family, Brother Paul as master of the boys andnovices, Brother Edmund as an obedientiary and a child of the cloister frominfancy, to advise upon the one hand, and Brother Cadfael, as a conversus cometo the life at a ripe age and after wide venturings, to speak his mind upon theother.”

So, thought Brother Cadfael, mute and passive on his stool in the corner ofthe abbot’s bare, wood-scented parlour, I am to be the devil’s lawman, thevoice of the outer world. Mellowed through seventeen years or so of a vocation,but still sharpish in the cloistered ear. Well, we serve according to ourskills, and in the degrees allotted to us, and this may be as good a way asany. He was more than a little sleepy, for he had been outdoors between theorchards of the Gaye and his own herb garden within the pale ever sincemorning, between the obligatory sessions of office and prayer, and was slightlydrunk with the rich air of a fine, fat September, and ready for his bed as soonas Compline was over. But not yet so sleepy that he could not prick a ready earwhen Abbot Radulfus declared himself in need of counsel, or even desirous ofhearing counsel he yet would not hesitate to reject if his own incisive mindpointed him in another direction.

“Brother Paul,” said the abbot, casting an authoritative eye round thecircle, “has received requests to accept into our house two new devotionaries,in God’s time to receive the habit and the tonsure. The one we have to considerhere is from a good family, and his sire a patron of our church. Of what age,Brother Paul, did you report him?”

“He is an infant, not yet five years old,” said Paul.

“And that is the ground of my hesitation. We have now only four boys oftender age among us, two of them not committed to the cloistral life, but here