Brother Cadfael, studying this formidable personage from hisretired corner, and his long years of secular and monasticexperience of all sorts and conditions of men, reflected that thesub-prior would probably make a very good preacher at the HighCross, and exact donations from a great many guilty consciences;for he was voluble enough, even capable of passion in the serviceof Ramsey. But over his chances of shifting young SulienBlount’s mind, as against the fine girl he was shortly tomarry, Cadfael shook his head. If he could do it, he was amiracle-worker, and on his way to sainthood. There wereuncomfortable saints in Cadfael’s hagiology, whom hepersonally would have consigned to a less reverend status, butwhose aggravating rectitude he could not deny. On the whole, hecould even feel a little sorry for Sub-Prior Herluin, who was aboutto blunt all his weapons against the impregnable shield of love.Try and get Sulien Blount away from Pernel Otmere now! He hadlearned to know the pair of them too well to be in doubt.

He found that he was not, so far, greatly attracted to Sub-PriorHerluin, though he could respect the man’s toughness on thislong journey afoot, and his determination to replenishRamsey’s plundered coffers and rebuild its ruined halls. Theywere a pair very oddly assorted, these itinerant brothers from theFens. The sub-prior was a big man, long-boned, wide-shouldered,carrying flesh once ample, perhaps even excessive, but shrunken anda little flabby now. Certainly no reproach to him; he had shared,it seemed, the short commons on which the unfortunate fen-dwellershad had to survive during this harvestless year of oppression. Hisuncovered head showed a pale tonsure encircled with grizzled,springy hair more brown than grey, and a long, lantern face,austere of feature, deep-set and stern of eye, with a long straightstroke of a mouth, almost lipless in repose, as though totallystranger to smiling. Such lines as his countenance had acquired,during a lifetime Cadfael judged at about fifty years, all boreheavily downward, repressed and forbidding.