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

He straightened his back, and stood looking out over the newlyturned beds, and the pease-fields that sloped down to the MeoleBrook, mentally casting an indulgent eye back over the most recentof his helpers here in the herbarium. Big, jaunty, comely BrotherJohn, who had blundered into the cloister by mistake, and backedout of it, not without the connivance of friends, in Wales, toexchange the role of brother for that of husband and father;Brother Mark, entering here as an undersized and maltreatedsixteen-year-old, shy and quiet, and grown into a clear, serenematurity of spirit that drew him away inevitably towards thepriesthood. Cadfael still missed Brother Mark, attached now to thehousehold 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 SaintGiles at the edge of the town. What next, wondered Cadfael? Put adozen young men into the same rusty black habits, shave theirheads, fit them into a single horarium day after day and year afteryear, and still they will all be irremediably different, every oneunique. Thank God!

“Whatever they send you,” said Hugh, keeping pacewith him along the broad green path that circled the fish-ponds,“you’ll have transformed by the time he leaves you. Whyshould they waste a simple, sweet saint like Rhun on you?He’s made already, he came into the world made. You’llget the rough, the obdurate, the unstable to lick into shape. Notthat it ever comes out the shape that was expected,” headded, with a flashing grin and a slanted glance along his shoulderat his friend.