“And you shall have my voice,” Radulfus assured him. “But first, since nonehere can provide us news… ?” He looked inquiringly round the chapterhouse,and found only shaken heads. “Very well, we must inquire among our guests. Thenames, the youth of the parties, the presence of the nun, may yield us someuseful word.”

Nevertheless, Cadfael, filing out from chapter among the rest, could notbelieve that anything would come of such inquiry. He had spent much of histime, in recent days, helping Brother Edmund house and doctor the exhaustedtravellers, and never a word had been said of any such trio encountered on theway. Travellers’ tales enough there had been, freely spilled for the listening,but none of a Benedictine sister and two noble children loose on the roads withnever a man to guard them.

And the uncle, it seemed, was the empress’s man, as Gilbert Prestcote wasthe king’s man, to the hilt and bitterness between the factions was flaring uplike a torch in tinder over the sack of Worcester. The omens were not good.Abbot Radulfus would lend his own persuasions to the envoy’s, and this veryday, too, but what countenance the two of them would get for Laurence d’Angers wasa dubious speculation.

The sheriff received his petitioners courteously and gravely in his ownapartment in the castle, and listened with an impassive face to the storyHerward had to tell. A sombre man, black-browed and black-bearded, and his naturalcast of countenance rather forbidding than reassuring, but for all that afair-minded man in his stern fashion, and one who stood by his word and his