Listlessly, Adelia watched it. Ulf, beside her, showed equal indifference.

He is damaged, Adelia thought, as I am; we have been to places beyond experience and are stained by them. Perhaps I can bear it, but can he? He especially has been betrayed.

With that, energy came back to her. Painfully, she got to her feet and walked round the rim of the depression to where Veronica knelt, her hands steepled high so that the growing dawn light shone on them, her graceful head lowered in prayer, as Adelia had first seen it.

“Is there another exit?” Adelia asked.

The nun didn’t move. Her lips stilled for a moment before she resumed the whispered paternoster.

Adelia kicked her. “Is there another exit?”

There was a rasp of protest from Hugh.

Ulf’s gaze, which had followed Adelia, transferred to the nun. His treble rang out across Wandlebury Hill. “It was her.” He was pointing to Veronica. “Wicked, wicked female, she is.”

Hugh, shocked, whispered, “Hush, lad.”

Tears were plopping down Ulf’s ugly little face, but it had regained intelligence and intent and bitter anger. “’Twas her. As put stuff over my face, as took me. She’s in with un.”

“I know she is,” Adelia said. “She threw me down the shaft.”

The nun’s eyes stared up at her, beseeching. “The devil was too strong for me,” she said. “He tortured me-you saw him. I never wanted to do it.” Her eyes shifted and glowed red as they reflected the dawn behind Adelia’s back.

Hugh and Ulf, too, had turned suddenly to the east. Adelia spun round. The sky had flamed into savagery like an entire hemisphere alight and advancing to overwhelm them all. And there, as if he had conjured it, was the devil himself outlined in black against it, naked and running like a stag.

Rowley, fifty yards away, hared to intercept it. The figure capered for a second and changed direction. The watchers heard Rowley’s howl: “Hugh. He’s getting away. Hugh.”

The huntsman knelt, whispering to his hounds. He unleashed them. With the ease of rocking horses, they began the chase toward the sunrise.

The devil ran-God, how he ran-but now the hounds were outlined against the same stretch of sky.

There was a moment that stayed with those who saw it like a detail of hell on an illuminated manuscript, black on red gold, the dogs in mid-leap and the man with hands upraised as if he would climb the air, before the pack fell on Sir Joscelin of Grantchester and tore him to pieces.

Fifteen

Adelia and Ulf were helped onto one of the horses that Rowley and the huntsman had ridden to the hill. Hugh hoisted the nun onto the other. Taking the reins, the men picked their way down the hill, avoiding rough patches so that Adelia should not be jounced about.

They went in silence.

In his free hand, Rowley carried a bag made out of his cloak. The object in it was round and attracted attention from the hounds until Hugh called them off. After a first glance, Adelia avoided looking at it.

The rain that the dawn had threatened began when they reached the road. Peasants on their way to work put up their hoods, glancing from under them at the little procession with its following of redjowled dogs.

Passing an area of bog, Rowley pulled the horse up and spoke to Hugh, who squelched off the road and came back with a handful of bog moss.

“Is this the muck you put on wounds?”

Adelia nodded, squeezed some of the water out of the sphagnum moss, then applied it to her arm.

It would be nonsensical to die of putrefaction now, though at the moment she had no feeling left in which to wonder why that should be so.

“Better put some on your eye as well,” Rowley said, and she realized that there was yet another pain and that her left eye was closing.

The nun’s horse had drawn level. Adelia saw without interest that the girl sat with her face hidden by the cloak Hugh had wrapped her in for decency’s sake.

Rowley saw her look. “May we go on now?” he asked, as if she had demanded the delay. He pulled on the reins without waiting for a reply.

Adelia roused herself. “I haven’t thanked you,” she told him, and felt the pressure of Ulf’s hand on her shoulders. “We thank you…” There weren’t words for it.

She might have dislodged a stone from a dam.

“What in hell did you think you were doing? Do you know what you put me through?”

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“Sorry? Is that an apology? Are you apologizing? Have you any conception…? Let me tell you it was God’s mercy I left the assize early. I set out for Old Benjamin’s because I was sorry for you in your misery. Misery? Mary of God, what was it for me when I found you gone?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. Somewhere, deep in the impassivity of exhaustion that encased her, a tiny shift, a bubble of movement.

“Matilda B. said you’d likely gone to church to pray. But I knew, oh, I knew. She was waiting for the bloody river to tell her something, I said. It’s told her. She’s gone after the bastard like the witless female she is.”

The bubble grew and was joined by others. She heard Ulf snuffling, like he did when he was amused. “You see…” she said.

But Rowley was remorseless, his wrongs too great. He’d heard Hugh’s horn blowing on the other bank and had waded the bloody river to get to him. Immediately, the huntsman had suggested tracking Adelia by Safeguard’s scent.

“Hugh said Prior Geoffrey attached the bloody animal to you for that very purpose, having worried for your safety in an alien town and no other canine leaving a scent so rank. I always wondered why you went everywhere with the cur, but at least it had the sense to leave a trail, which was more than you did”

Bless him, so cross. Adelia looked down at the tax inspector and breathed in the magic of the man.

He’d made a dash into Old Benjamin’s house and up to Adelia’s room, he said. Grabbed the mat the Safeguard slept on and came down again to shove it under Hugh’s hounds’ noses. He’d acquired the horses by snatching them from under passing, innocent, protesting riders.

Galloping along the towpath…following the scent along the Cam, then the Granta. Nearly losing it across country…“And would have if that dog of yours hadn’t stank the heavens out. And years off my life with it, you shatterbrained harpy. Do you know what I’ve suffered?”

Ulf was now openly guffawing. Adelia, hardly able to breathe, thanking Almighty God for such a man. “I do love you, Rowley Picot,” she managed.

“That’s neither here nor there,” he’d said. “And it’s not funny.”

She began drifting off to sleep and was kept in the saddle only by the pressure of Ulf’s hands on her shoulders-for him to clasp her round the body was too painful.

Later, she was to remember passing through Barnwell priory’s great gates and thinking of the last time she and Simon and Mansur had entered them in a peddler’s cart, as ignorant as babes unborn of what faced them. They’ll know now, Simon. Everybody will know.

After that, the dozes deepened into a long unconsciousness in which she was only vaguely aware of Rowley’s voice like the rap of a drum issuing explanation, orders, and Prior Geoffrey’s, appalled but also giving instruction. They were overlooking the most important thing, and Adelia woke up long enough to voice it-“I want a bath”-before relapsing to sleep.

“…AND IN THE NAME OF GOD, stay there,” Rowley told her. A door slammed.

She and Ulf were alone on a bed in a room, and she was looking up at the timber beams and purlins of a ceiling she’d seen before. Candles-candles? Wasn’t it day? Yes, but shutters were closed against rain that beat on them.

“Where are we?”