Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

linctus to take every three hours. But that I must mix. A few minutes only. Sit by the brazier, it grows cold here in the evening."
    She thanked him, but did not sit. The array of mysterious containers fascinated her. She continued to prowl and gaze, restless but silent, a feline presence at his back as he selected from among his flasks cinquefoil and hore-hound, mint and a trace of poppy, and measured them into a green glass bottle. Her hand, slender and long-fingered, stroked along the jars with their Latin inscriptions.
    "You need nothing for yourself?" he asked. "To ward off his infection?"
    "I never take cold," she said, with scorn for the weaknesses of R� of Pertuis and all his kind.
    "Is he a good master?" Cadfael asked directly.
    "He feeds and clothes me," she said promptly, proof against surprise.
    "No more than that? He would owe that to his groom or his scullion. You, I hear, are the prop of his reputation."
    She turned to face him as he filled his bottle to the neck with a honeyed syrup, and stoppered it. Thus eye to eye she showed as experienced and illusionless, not bruised but wary of bruises, and prepared to evade or return them at need; and yet even younger than he had taken her to be, surely no more than eighteen.
    "He is a very good poet and minstrel, never think other wise. What I know, he taught me. What I had from God, yes, that is mine; but he showed me its use. If there ever was a debt, that and food and clothing would still have paid it, but there is none. He owes me nothing. The price for me he paid when he bought me."
    He turned to stare her in the face, and judge how literally she meant the words she had chosen; and she smiled at him. "Bought, not hired. I am R�'s slave, and better his by far than tied to the one he bought me from. Did you not know it still goes on?"
    "Bishop Wulstan preached against it years back," said Cadfael, "and did his best to shame it out of England, if not out of the world. But though he drove the dealers into cover, yes, I know it still goes on. They trade out of Bristol. Very quietly, but yes, it's known. But that's mainly a matter of shipping Welsh slaves into Ireland, money seldom passes for humankind here."
    "My mother," said the girl, "goes to prove the traffic is both ways. In a bad season, with food short, her father sold her, one daughter too many to feed, to a Bristol trader, who sold her again to the lord of a half-waste manor near Gloucester. He used her as his bedmate till she died, but it was not in his bed I was got. She knew how to keep the one by a man she liked, and how to be rid of her master's brood," said the girl with ruthless simplicity. "But I was born a slave. There's no appeal."
    "There could be escape," said Cadfael, though admitting difficulties.
    "Escape to what? Another worse bondage? With R� at least I am not mauled, I am valued after a fashion, I can sing, and play, if it's another who calls the tune. I own nothing, not even what I wear on my body. Where should I go? What should I do? In whom should I trust? No, I am not a fool. Go I would, if I could see a place for me anywhere, as I am. But risk being brought back, once having fled him? That would be quite another servitude, harder by far than now. He would want me chained. No, I can wait. Things can change," she said, and shrugged thin, straight shoulders, a litle wide and bony for a girl. "R� is not a bad man, as men go. I have known worse. I can wait."
    There was good sense in that, considering her present circumstances. Her Proven� master, apparently, made no demands on her body, and the use he made of her voice provided her considerable pleasure. It is essentially pleasure to exercise the gifts of God. He clothed, warmed and fed her. If she had no love for him, she had no hate, either, she even conceded, very fairly, that his teaching had given her a means to independent life, if ever she could discover a place of safety in which to practise it. And at her age she could afford a few years of waiting. R� himself was in search of a powerful patron. In the court of some susbtantial honour she might make a very comfortable place for herself.
    But still, Cadfael reflected ruefully at the end of these practical musings, still as a slave.
    "I expected you to tell me now," said the girl, eyeing him curiously, "that there is one place where I could take refuge and not be pursued. R� would never dare follow me into a nunnery."
    "God forbid!" prayed Cadfael with blunt