He was of a type Adelia had always found to be dangerous; it denounced eccentric old women as witches and hauled adulterers before the courts, its voice inciting violence against other races, other beliefs.

The question was how dangerous.

Was it you? Adelia wondered, watching him. Do you prowl Wandlebury Ring? Do you truly wash in the blood of children?

Well, she wasn’t going to ask him yet, not until she had reason, but in the meantime, he remained a fitting candidate.

He didn’t recognize her. Neither did Prioress Joan, who passed them on her way to the gates. She was dressed for riding and had a gyrfalcon on her wrist, encouraging the customers as she went with a “Tallyho.”

The woman’s confident, bullying manner had led Adelia to expect that the house of which she was the head would prove to be the acme of organization. Instead, slackness was apparent: weeds grew around the church; there were missing tiles on its roof. The nuns’ habits were patched, the white linen beneath the black wimples showed mostly dirty; their manners were coarse.

Shuffling behind the line entering the church, she wondered where the money gained from Little Saint Peter was going. Not, so far, to the greater glory of God. Nor on comfort for the pilgrims: no one assisted the sick; there were no benches for the lame while they waited; no refreshment. The only suggestion for overnight accommodation was a curling list of the town’s inns pinned to the church gate.

Not that the supplicants shuffling with her seemed to care. A woman on crutches boasted of visits to the glories of Canterbury, Winchester, Walsingham, Bury Saint Edmunds, and Saint Albans as she displayed her badges to those around her, but she was tolerant of the shabbiness here: “I got hopes of this un,” she said. “He’m a young saint yet, but he was crucified by Jews; Jesus’ll listen to him, I’ll be bound.”

An English saint, one who’d shared the same fate, and at the same hands, as the Son of God. Who had breathed the air they breathed now. Despite herself, Adelia found herself praying that he would.

She was inside the church now. A clerk sat at a table by the doors, taking down the deposition of a pale-faced woman who was telling him she felt better for having touched the reliquary.

This was too tame for Roger of Acton, who came bounding up. “You were strengthened? You felt the Holy Spirit? Your sins washed away? Your infirmity gone?”

“Yes,” the woman said, and then more excitedly: “Yes.”

“Another miracle!” She was dragged outside to be displayed to the waiting line. “A cure, my people! Let us praise God and his little saint.”

The church smelled of wood and straw. The chalk outline of a maze on the nave suggested that someone had attempted to draw the labyrinth of Jerusalem on the stones, but only a few of the pilgrims were obeying the nun trying to make them walk it. The rest were pushing toward a side chapel where the reliquary lay hidden from Adelia’s view by those in front of her.

While she waited she looked around. A fine stone plaque on one wall declaring that “in the Year of Our Lord 1138, King Stephen confirmed the gift which William le Moyne, goldsmith, made to the nuns of the cell newly founded in the town of Cambridge for the soul of the late King Henry.”

It probably explained the poverty, Adelia thought. Stephen’s war with his cousin Matilda had ended in triumph for Matilda, or, rather, Henry II, her son. The present king would not be happy to endow a house confirmed by the man his mother had fought for thirteen years.

A list of prioresses declared that Joan had taken up her position only two years previously. The church’s general disrepair showed she lacked enthusiasm for it. Her more secular interest was suggested by the painting of a horse with the subscription: “Braveheart. A.D. 1151-A.D. 1169. Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant.” A bridle and bit hung from the wooden fingertips of a statue to Saint Mary.

The couple in front had now reached the reliquary. They dropped to their knees, allowing Adelia to see it for the first time.

She caught her breath. Here in a white blaze of candles was transcendence to forgive all the grossness that had gone before. Not just the glowing reliquary but the young nun at its head who knelt, still as stone, her face tragic, her hands steepled in prayer, brought to life a scene from the Gospels: a mother, her dead child; together they made a scene of tender grace.

Adelia’s neck prickled. She was suddenly ravished by the wish to believe. Here, surely, in this place was radiant truth to sweep doubt up to Heaven for God to laugh at.

The couple was praying. Their son was in Syria -she’d heard them talking of him. Together, as if they’d been practicing, they whispered, “Oh holy child, if you’d mention our boy to the Lord and send him home safe, we’d be grateful evermore.”

Let me believe, God, Adelia thought. A plea as pure and simple as this must prevail. Only let me believe. I am lonely for belief.

Holding each other, the man and woman moved away. Adelia knelt. The nun smiled at her. She was the shy little one who had accompanied the prioress to Canterbury and back, but now timidity had been transfigured into compassion. Her eyes were loving. “Little Saint Peter will hear you, my sister.”

The reliquary was shaped like a coffin and had been placed on top of a carved stone tomb so that it should be on eye level with those who knelt to it. This, then, was where the convent’s money had gone-into a long, jewel-encrusted casket on which a master goldsmith had wrought domestic and agricultural scenes depicting the life of a boy, his martyrdom by fiends, and his ascension to Paradise borne upward by Saint Mary.

Inset along one side was mother-of-pearl so thin that it acted as a window. Peering into it, Adelia could see only the bones of a hand that had been propped up on a small velvet pillow to assume the attitude of benediction.

“You may kiss his knuckle, if you wish.” The nun pointed to a monstrance lying on a cushion on top of the reliquary. It resembled a Saxon brooch and had a knobbled, tiny bone set in gold among precious stones.

It was the trapezium bone of the right hand. The glory faded. Adelia returned to herself. “Another penny to view the whole skeleton,” she said.

The nun’s white brow-she was beautiful-furrowed. Then she leaned forward, removed the monstrance, and lifted the reliquary’s lid. As she did so, her sleeve crumpled to show an arm blackened with bruises.

Adelia, shocked, looked at her; they beat this gentle, lovely girl. The nun smiled and smoothed her sleeve down. “God is good,” she said.

Adelia hoped He was. Without asking permission, she picked up one of the candles and directed its flame toward the bones.

Bless him, they were so small. Prioress Joan had magnified her saint in her mind; the reliquary was too large; the skeleton was lost in it. She was reminded of a little boy dressed in clothes too big for him.

Tears prickled Adelia’s eyes even as they took in the fact that the only distortion of the hands and feet was from the missing trapezoid. No nails had been hammered into these extremities, neither was the rib cage or spine punctured. The wound from a spear that Prior Geoffrey had described to Simon had more likely been due to the process of mortification swelling the body beyond what the skin could bear. The stomach had split open.

But there, around the pelvic bones, were the same sharp, irregular chippings she had seen on the other children. She had to stop herself from putting her hand into the reliquary to lift them out for examination, but she was almost sure; the boy had been repeatedly stabbed with that distinctive blade of a kind she had never seen before.

“Hey, missus.” The line behind her was becoming restive.