“So do I.” The young nun was ill beyond what she should be.

“Confession has not eased that child’s sense of sin,” Prior Geoffrey said. “It can be the cross of those who are holy-minded, like her, that they fear God too much. For Veronica, the blood of our Lord is still moist.”

Having seen him, complaining, up steps that were slippery from the rain, Adelia went back down the row to Odilia’s cell. The infirmaress lay as she had for days, her twiggy, soil-engrained hands plucking at her blanket in an effort to throw it off.

Adelia covered her, wiped away some of the unction trickling down her forehead, and tried to feed her Gyltha’s calf’s-foot jelly. The old woman compressed her lips. “It will give you strength,” Adelia pleaded. It was no good; Odilia’s soul wanted free of the empty, exhausted body.

It felt like desertion to leave her, but Gyltha and the Matildas had gone for the night, though reluctantly, and with only the prioress and herself to do it, Adelia had to see the other sisters fed.

Walburga, she who had been Ulf’s “Sister Fatty” and was now much thinner, said, “The Lord has forgiven me; the Lord be praised.”

“I thought he might. Here, open your mouth.”

But after a few spoonfuls, the nun again showed concern. “Who’ll be a-feeding our anchorites now? ’Tis wicked to eat if they be starving.”

“I’ll speak to Prior Geoffrey. Open up. One for the Father. Good girl. One for the Holy Ghost…”

Sister Agatha, next door, had another bout of sickness after taking three spoonfuls. “Don’t you worry,” she said, wiping her mouth, “I’ll be better tomorrow. How’s the others doing? I want the truth now.”

Adelia liked Agatha, the nun who had been brave enough, or drunk enough, to provoke Brother Gilbert at the Grantchester feast. “Most are better,” she said, and then, in response to Agatha’s quizzical look, “but Sister Odilia and Sister Veronica are still not as well as I’d like.”

“Oh, not Odilia.” Agatha said, urgently, “Good old stick, she is. Mary, Mother of God, intercede for her.”

And Veronica? No intercession for her? The omission was strange; it had been evident when other nuns asked after their sisters in Christ; only Walburga, who was about the same age, had inquired for her.

Perhaps the girl’s beauty and youth were resented, as was the fact that she was the prioress’s obvious favorite.

Favorite, indeed, Adelia thought. There had been agony in Joan’s face that spoke of great love when she looked on Veronica’s suffering. Being sensitive to the existence of love in all its forms now, Adelia found herself sincerely pitying the woman and wondered if the energy she put into her hunting was a way of redirecting a passion for which, as a nun, and especially one in authority, she must be clawed by guilt.

Had Sister Veronica been aware of being an object of desire? Probably not. As Prior Geoffrey said, there was an otherworldliness to the girl that spoke of a spiritual life the rest of the convent lacked.

The other nuns must know of it, though. The young nun didn’t complain, but the bruises on her skin suggested she’d been physically bullied.

When he’d finished in the upper cells, Adelia made the prior wash his hands in the brandy. The procedure bemused him. “Usually, I take it internally. However, I no longer question anything you would have me do.”

She lit him to the gate, where a groom waited for him with their two horses. “A heathenish place, this,” he said, lingering. “Perhaps it is the architecture or the barbarous monks who built it, but I am always more conscious of the Horned One than of sanctity when I am in it, and for once I am not referring to Prioress Joan. The arrangement of those cells alone…” He grimaced. “I am reluctant to leave you here-and with so little help.”

“I have Gyltha and the Matildas,” Adelia told him, “and the Safeguard, of course.”

“Gyltha is with you? Why did I not see her? Then there’s no need for worry; that woman can dispel the forces of darkness single handed.”

He gave her his blessing. The groom took the chrismatory box from him, put it in a saddlebag, heaved him up on his horse, and they were gone.

It had stopped raining, but the moon, which should have been full, was heavily clouded. Adelia stood for a minute or two after they had disappeared, listening to the sound of hooves diminishing into the blackness.

She hadn’t told the prior that Gyltha did not stay at night and that it was at night when she became afraid.

“Heathenish,” she said out loud. “Even the prior feels it.” She went back into the cloister but left the gates open; it was nothing outside the convent that frightened her, it was the convent itself; there was no air to it, nothing of God’s light, no windows even in the chapel, just arrow slits set into walls of heavy, unadorned stone that reflected the savagery they had been built to withstand.

But it has gotten in, Adelia thought. The hideously ancient, hogback tomb in the chapel was carved with wolves and dragons biting each other. Scrollwork on the altar circled a figure with arms upheld, Lazarus perhaps, though candlelight gave it a demonic quality. The foliage surrounding the arches of the cells imitated the encroaching forest that tangled buttresses in ivy and creepers.

At night, sitting by a nun’s cot, she, who did not credit the devil, found herself listening for him and being answered by the shriek of an owl. For Adelia, as for Prior Geoffrey, the twenty gaping holes, ten below, ten above, in which the nuns were stacked, reinforced the barbarity. Called to another cell, she had to urge herself to brave the wicked, black steps and narrow ledge that led to it.

By day, when Gyltha and the Matildas returned, bringing with them noise and common sense, she allowed herself an hour or two’s rest in the prioress’s quarters, but even then the two rows of cells infiltrated her exhausted dozes with reproach, as if they were graves of troglodyte dead.

Tonight, when she walked the length of the cloister to look in on Sister Veronica, the light of her lantern flickered the ugly heads of the pillars’ capitals into life. They grimaced at her. She was glad of the dog by her side.

Veronica lay tossing in her cot, apologizing to God for not dying. “Forgive me, Lord, that I am not with you. Suspend Thy wrath at my transgressions, Dear Master, for I would come to You if I could…”

“Nonsense,” Adelia told her. “God is perfectly happy with you and wants you to live. Open your mouth and have some nice calf’s-foot jelly.”

But Veronica, like Odilia, would not eat. Eventually, Adelia gave her half an opium pill and sat with her until it took effect. It was the barest cell of the twenty, its only ornament a cross that, like all the nuns’ wall crucifixes, was woven from withies.

Somewhere out in the marsh, a bittern boomed. Water dripped on the stones outside with a regularity that made Adelia’s nerves twitch. She heard retching from Sister Agatha’s cell farther along the cloister, and went to her.

Emptying the chamber pot meant leaving the cloister. A shift of cloud allowed some moonlight on her return, and Adelia saw the figure of a man by one of the walk’s pillars.

She closed her eyes against it, then opened them and went forward.

It was a trick of shadow and the glistening of rain. There was nobody there. She put her hand on the pillar to lean against it for a moment, breathing hard; the figure had been wearing horns. Safeguard appeared to have noticed nothing, but then he rarely did.

I am very tired, she thought.

Prioress Joan cried out sharply from Odilia’s cell…

WHEN THEY’D SAID THE PRAYERS, Adelia and the prioress wrapped the infirmaress’s body in a sheet and carried it between them to the chapel. They laid it on a makeshift catafalque of two tables covered by a cloth and lit candles to stand at the head and the foot.