“See that brother working in the garden there? The thickset fellow whorolls from one leg to the other like a sailor? You wouldn’t think to lookat him, would you, that he went on crusade when he was young? He was withGodfrey de Bouillon at Antioch, when the Saracens surrendered it. And he tookto the seas as a captain when the king of Jerusalem ruled all the coast of theHoly Land, and served against the corsairs ten years! Hard to believe it now,eh?”

Brother Cadfael himself found nothing strange in his wide-ranging career,and had forgotten nothing and regretted nothing. He saw no contradiction in thedelight he had taken in battle and adventure and the keen pleasure he now foundin quietude. Spiced, to be truthful, with more than a little mischief when hecould get it, as he liked his victuals well-flavoured, but quietude all thesame, a ship becalmed and enjoying it. And probably the youngsters who eyed himwith such curiosity also whispered that in a life such as he had led there musthave been some encounters with women, and not all purely chivalrous, and whatsort of grounding was that for the conventual life?

They were right about the women. Quite apart from Richildis, who had notunnaturally tired of waiting for his return after ten years, and married asolid yeoman with good prospects in the shire, and no intention of flying offto the wars, he remembered other ladies, in more lands than one, with whom hehad enjoyed encounters pleasurable to both parties, and no harm to either.Bianca, drawing water at the stone well-head in Venice—the Greekboat-girl Arianna—Mariam, the Saracen widow who sold spices and fruit inAntioch, and who found him man enough to replace for a while the man she hadlost. The light encounters and the grave, not one of them had left any hard