And then what? The gentlest and most angelic of the sisters…? “So far to walk on this dark night, Master Simon, may I not punt you home? Yes, yes, there is room. I am alone, glad of your company.”

Adelia thought of the Cam’s willow-dark stretches and a slim figure with wrists strong as steel stabbing a pole into the water, pressing it down on a man as on a speared fish while he floundered and drowned.

“He told her to kill Simon and steal his wallet,” Adelia said. “She did what he told her; she was enslaved to him. In the pit I had to take Ulf from her. I think she was going to kill him so that he couldn’t give her away.”

“Don’t I know?” Gyltha asked, even as her hands made pushing notions against the knowledge. “Ain’t Ulf told me what she did? And me knowing what both would have done to the boy if the good Lord hadn’t sent you to stop ’em. What they did to the others…” Her eyes went into slits and she stood up. “Let’s you and me go next door and stick a pillow on her face.”

“No. Everyone must know what she did, what he did.”

Rakshasa had escaped justice. His terrible end…Adelia shut her mind to avoid the vision against the sunrise…had not been justice. Eliminating that creature from the earth it sullied had not weighted its side of the scales against the pile of little bodies it had left in its passage from the Holy Land.

Even if they had captured it, dragged it to the assize, put it on trial, and executed it, the scales would have remained unbalanced for those whose children had been torn from them, but at least people would have known what it had done and seen it pay. The Jews would have been publicly exonerated. Most important, the law that brought order from chaos, that separated civilized humanity from the animals, would have been upheld.

While Gyltha helped her to dress, Adelia examined her conscience to see whether her objection against capital punishment had been abandoned. No, it had not; it was a principle. The mad must be restrained, certainly, yet not judicially killed. Rakshasa had escaped legal exposure: His collaborator must not. Her actions had to be recounted in full common view so that some equilibrium was brought into the world.

“She has to stand trial,” Adelia said.

“You think she’s a-going to?”

A knock on the door was Prior Geoffrey’s. “My dear girl, my poor, dear girl. I thank the Lord for your courage and deliverance.”

She brushed his prayers aside. “Prior, the nun…She was his accomplice in everything. As much a killer as he was, she murdered Simon of Naples without a thought. You do believe that?”

“I fear I must. I have listened to Ulf’s account, which, though confused by whatever soporific she gave him, leaves no doubt that she abducted him to that place where he was put in danger of his life. I have also heard what Sir Rowley and the hunter had to tell. This very evening I visited that hole with them…”

“You’ve been to Wandlebury?”

“I have,” the prior said wearily. “And never was I so close to hell. Oh, dear, the equipment we found there. One can only rejoice that Sir Joscelin’s soul will burn for eternity. Joscelin…” The emphasis was to help him believe it. “A local boy. I had marked him as a future sheriff of the county.” A spark of indignation enlivened the prior’s tired eyes. “I even accepted a donation toward our new chapel from those heinous hands.”

“Jews’ money,” Adelia said. “He owed it to the Jews.”

He sighed. “I suppose it was. Well, at least our friends in the tower have been absolved.”

“And is the town to be made aware that they are absolved?” Adelia jerked an inelegant thumb toward the room in which the nun was housed. “She will be put on trial?” She was getting restive; there was a reservation, a fogginess, in some of the prior’s answers.

He went to the window and opened the shutter a crack. “They said it would rain. The dawn was a true shepherd’s warning, apparently. Well, the gardens need it after a dry spring.” He closed the shutter. “Yes, an announcement declaring the Jews’ innocence shall be trumpeted in full assize-thank heaven it is still in progress. But as for the…female…I have asked for a convocation of all those concerned to get to the truth of the matter. They are gathering now.”

“A convocation? Why not a trial?” And why at nighttime?

As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, “I expected it to meet at the castle, but the clerk of the assize deemed that an inquiry be better held here so that the legal processes should not be confused. And after all, it is here that the children are buried. Well, we shall see, we shall see.”

Such a good man, her first friend in England and she had not thanked him. “My lord, I owe you my life. If it hadn’t been for your gift of the dog, bless him…Did you see what was done to him?”

“I saw.” Prior Geoffrey shook his head, then smiled a little. “I ordered his remnants gathered and given to Hugh, whom Brother Gilbert suspects of secretly burying his hounds in the priory graveyard when no one is by. The Safeguard may well lie with human beings who are less faithful.”

It had been a small grief among all the rest but a grief nevertheless; Adelia was comforted.

“However,” the prior went on, “as you and I know, you also owe your life to someone with more right to it, and, in part, I am here for him.”

But her mind had reverted to the nun. They’re going to let her go. None of us saw her kill: not Ulf, not Rowley, not me. She’s a nun; the Church fears a scandal. They’re going to let her go.

“I won’t have it, Prior,” she said.

Prior Geoffrey’s mouth had been shaping words that obviously pleased him; now it stopped, open. He blinked. “A somewhat hasty decision, Adelia.”

“People must know what was done. She must be brought to trial, even if she is adjudged too mad for sentence. For the children’s sake, for Simon’s, for mine; I found their lair and was near killed for it. I will have justice-and it must be seen to be done.” Not from blood-lust, nor even revenge, but because, without a completion, the nightmares of too many people would be left open-ended.

Then something the prior had said caught up with her. “I beg your pardon, my lord?”

Prior Geoffrey sighed and began again. “Before he was forced to return to the assize-the king has arrived, you know-he approached me. For lack of anyone else, he seems to regard me as in loco parentis…”

“The king?” Adelia wasn’t keeping up.

The prior sighed once more. “Sir Rowley Picot. Sir Rowley has asked me to approach you with a request-indeed, his manner suggested it to be a foregone conclusion-for your hand in marriage.”

It was all one with this extraordinary day. She had gone down into the pit and been raised from it. A man had been torn to death. Next door was a murderess. She had lost her virginity, gloriously lost it, and the man who had taken it now reverted to etiquette, using the good offices of a surrogate father to request her hand.

“I should add,” Prior Geoffrey said, “that the proposal is made at some cost. At the assize, the king offered Sir Rowley the bishopric of Saint Albans, and with my own ears I heard Picot reject the position on the grounds that he wished to remain free to marry.”

He wants me as much as that?

“King Henry was not pleased,” the prior went on. “He has a particular wish to appoint our good tax collector to the see of Saint Albans, nor is he used to being thwarted. But Sir Rowley was not to be moved.”

Now it was Adelia’s mouth that remained paused over the answer she had known she must make, unable to make it.

With the rush of love came fear that she would accept because she so very much wanted to, because this morning Rowley had soothed away the mental damage done and purified it. Which, of course, was the danger in itself. He has made such sacrifice for me. Isn’t it right, and beautiful, that I make similar sacrifice for him?