loving to those her neighbours bore. She is not yet past all hope of bearing children of her own. Who knows but with another man, she might yet conceive.'

    

'And you would be glad for her?' said Cadfael, so softly as not to break this thread.

    

'I would be glad. I would be wholly glad. Why should she continue barren, because I am fulfilled? Or bound, where I am free? I never thought of that when the longing came on me.'

    

'And do you believe she told you truth, the last time, saying that she had a lover?'

    

'Yes,' said Ruald, simply and without hesitation, 'I do believe. Not that she might not lie to me then, for I was crass and did her bitter offence, as now I understand, even by visiting her then I offended. I believe because of the ring. You remember it? The ring that Sulien brought back with him when he came from Ramsey.'

    

'I remember it,' said Cadfael.

    

The dormitory bell was just ringing to rouse the brothers for Prime. In some remote corner of their consciousness it sounded very faintly and distantly, and neither of them heeded it.

    

'It never left her finger, from the time I put it there. I would not have thought it could be eased over her knuckle, after so long. The first time that I visited her with Brother Paul I know she was wearing it as she always did. But the second time... I had forgotten, but now I understand. It was not on her finger when I saw her the last time. She had stripped her marriage to me from her finger with the ring, and given it to someone else, as she stripped me from her life, and offered it to him. Yes, I believe Generys had a lover. One worth the loving, she said. With all my heart I hope he has proved so to her.'

    

Chapter Ten

    

Throughout the ceremonies and services and readings of Saint Winifred's day a morsel of Cadfael's mind, persistent and unrepentant, occupied itself, much against his will, with matters which had nothing to do with the genuine adoration he had for his own special saint, whom he thought of always as she had been when her first brief life was so brutally ended: a girl of about seventeen, fresh, beautiful and radiant, brimming over with kindness and sweetness as the waters of her well brimmed always sparkling and pure, defying frost, radiating health of body and soul. He would have liked his mind to be wholly filled with her all this day, but obstinately it turned to Ruald's ring, and the pale circle on the finger from which Generys had ripped it, abandoning him as he had abandoned her.

    

It became ever more clear that there had indeed been another man. With him she had departed, to settle, it seemed in Peterborough, or somewhere in that region, perhaps a place even more exposed to the atrocities of de Mandeville's barbarians. And when the reign of murder and terror began, she and her man had taken up their new, shallow roots, turned what valuables they had into money, and removed further from the threat, leaving the ring for young Sulien to find, and bring home with him for Ruald's deliverance. That, at least, was surely what Ruald believed. Every word he had spoken before the altar that morning bore the stamp of sincerity. So now much depended on the matter of forty miles or so between Cambridge and Peterborough. Not such a short distance, after all, but if all went well with the king's business, and he thought fit soon to dispense with a force that could be better employed keeping an eye on the Earl of Chester, a passage by way of Peterborough would not greatly lengthen the way home.

    

And if the answer was yes, confirming every word of Sulien's story, then Generys was indeed still living, and not abandoned to loneliness, and the dead woman of the Potter's Field was still left adrift and without a name. But in that case, why should Sulien have stirred himself so resolutely to prove Britric, who was nothing to him, as innocent as Ruald? How could he have known, and why should he even have conceived the possibility, that the pedlar was innocent? Or that the woman Gunnild was alive, or even might be alive?

    

And if the answer was no, and Sulien had never spent the night with the silversmith in Peterborough, never begged the ring of him, but made up his story in defence of Ruald out of whole cloth, and backed it with a ring he had had in his possession all along, then surely he had been weaving a rope for his own neck while he was so busy unpicking someone else's bonds.

    

But as