up under his easy-going shadow, and all the old had known him asone of themselves, hardly set apart by his office. He had livedalone in his little house up a narrow alley opposite the church,looking after himself, with only an elderly freeman to take care ofhis glebe and his strip fields in the country part of the parish,for Holy Cross spread wide outside the main street of the Foregate.A big parish, a population made up equally of the craftsmen andmerchants of the suburb and the cottars and villagers in thecountryside. It was a matter of importance to them all what mannerof priest they got in succession to Father Adam. The old manhimself, from whatever gentle purgatory now contained him, would bekeeping an anxious eye on his own.

Abbot Radulfus had presided at Adam’s funeral, and PriorRobert at his most dignified and elegiac, tall and silvery andconsciously patrician, had pronounced his eulogy, perhaps with aslight touch of condescension, for Adam had been barely literate,and a man of humble origins and no pretentions. But it was Cynric,the verger of Holy Cross, who had been with the priest through mostof his years of office, who had best spoken his epitaph, and thatprivately, over the trimming of the candles on the parish altar, toBrother Cadfael, who had halted in passing through to say a word ofpersonal sympathy to the man who would surely miss the dead mostdeeply.

“A sad, kind man,” said Cynric, his deep-sunk eyesnarrowed on the wick he was trimming, and his low voice as grainyand grudging as ever, “a tired man, with a soft spot forsinners.”

It was rare enough for Cynric to utter thirteen words together,except by way of the responses learned by heart in the holy office.Thirteen words of his own had the force of prophecy. A sad man,because he had been listening to and bearing with the perpetualfailures of humankind for seventeen years, a tired man becauseendless consoling and chiding and forgiving takes it out of any manby the time he’s sixty, especially one with neither malicenor anger in his own make-up. A kind man, because he had somehowmanaged to preserve compassion and hope even against the tide ofhuman fallibility. Yes, Cynric had known him better than anyone. Hehad absorbed, in the years of his service, something of the samequalities without the authority.