Read 11 - The Lammas Feast for Free Online Page A

That way, Bristol money remains in Bristol pockets and doesn’t find its way into those of strangers.)
    I knew Robin Avenel well by sight and had once, four years earlier, had some dealings with him. He had fancied himself in love with a young woman whom I fancied myself. Not that I ever stood a chance with someone so far above me socially as Cicely Ford; but I had resented the fact that this cherubic-faced little dandy, with his prancing gait and the roving eye, had dared even to aspire to Cicely’s affection.
    There was the usual congestion in Broad Street, with the customary procession of carts and pedestrians going in and out by Saint John’s Arch and the Frome Gate, and I almost missed the sight of Robin Avenel opening his door to usher out a guest. I also very nearly missed seeing the guest’s face because a smallholder, returning home with the remains of the vegetables he had failed to sell at market, stopped alongside me, blocking my view. The line of traffic passing through the Frome Gate had come to a halt as it so often did at that time of day. Then the smallholder suddenly dropped the reins on his horse’s neck and jumped down from his seat to answer a call of nature in the drain in the middle of the road. I could now see plainly that the visitor taking his leave of Robin Avenel was the same man who had previously visited Jasper Fairbrother; the man who had disembarked that morning from the Breton ship in Saint Nicholas Backs.
    As soon as I pushed open the cottage door and heard a strange voice, I knew we had a visitor. Happily, it didn’t speak with the self-assertive tones of Richard Manifold, but in soft, feminine cadences that still had the power to make me shiver with pleasure.
    Cicely Ford! Now here was a true coincidence. I had been thinking of her as I walked along Broad Street and through the Frome Gate, only to find her seated at my table, drinking a cup of Adela’s elderberry wine, her left arm cradling Adam. He, needless to say, was behaving perfectly, peaceful and quiet, even though awake. All his life, he has known how to please women and earn their adoration. Many’s the time I’ve wished that I could learn the trick.
    Cicely Ford was a lay sister at the Magdalen Nunnery, which stood on the rising ground a little way north-west of Saint James’s Priory and opposite the church of Saint Michael-on-the-Mount-Without. The nunnery had been founded three centuries earlier by the wife of Sir Robert Fitzhardinge as a house of retreat and a seminary for young women, and dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalen. When Cicely Ford had entered the community four years before, following the deaths of her betrothed and his elder brother, it had been her intention to join the order. But in the end, for reasons I had never discovered, she had abandoned this idea and stayed on as a lay sister, helping to instruct the merchants’ daughters who attended the seminary, or waiting on any rich woman who felt she would benefit from a few days’ peace and quiet in retreat, away from the company of her nearest and dearest.
    It was a very small cell of the Augustinian Order, and until Marion Baldock had joined their number, as Sister Jerome, the previous year, there had been no more than three nuns in residence for quite some time, leading an unexciting and blameless existence; a far cry from the preceding century, when stories of their daring and courage in taking food to the beleaguered villagers of Bedminster during the Black Death had made the community famous throughout the city and beyond.
    As I entered the cottage, Cicely turned her head and smiled at me. Her corn-coloured hair was strained back beneath a grey veil, but the severity of the style in no way detracted from the beauty of her almost perfect oval face, which, with its soft, creamy skin, was as flower-like as ever. Her blue eyes lit with pleasure at seeing me.
    She murmured, ‘Roger!’ and held out one small hand which I gallantly kissed. I avoided