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if you will.’
    ‘I?’
    ‘You know arms, Sir Josse,’ she said gently. ‘More than any soul, man or woman, in this community.’
    He had been rather afraid that was what she meant. ‘My lady, I––’ He began again. ‘It is a time since I was a man of war and, even then, no expert on weaponry.’ Her watchful eyes held disappointment. ‘But I shall do my best, nevertheless.’ He tried to look confident.
    ‘Your best,’ said the Abbess, ‘is all that anyone may ask of you. And now’ – she got to her feet as she spoke and, instantly, he did too – ‘I think it is time that I joined my sisters and retired.’
    He stood back as she preceded him out of the room, and closed the door after them. They walked in silence across the cloister and, as she turned to the right to go around the church towards the dormitory, he went left towards the rear gate and the path down to the Vale. He had slept down there with the lay brothers before and Brother Saul, he knew, had prepared a place for him tonight.
    ‘Goodnight, Sir Josse,’ came the Abbess’s soft voice out of the darkness. ‘May God bless your sleep.’
    On such a night, with the memory of a skilled assassin’s ruthless work fresh in his mind, the blessing was very welcome.

3

    The burial rites for the dead man took up a large proportion of the morning.
    Father Gilbert, the priest of the community, was in sombre mood, and he spoke at length of the sinful state of a world in which a man could lie dead and unclaimed – unnoticed, was the silent accusation – for weeks. Watching the Abbess, on her knees at the front of the church, Josse felt a stab of sympathy. She will take the blame on those shoulders of hers, he thought, and she will embark on some private and surely unnecessary penance until she finds it in her heart to forgive herself for something that wasn’t her fault.
    How could he help?
    Trying to ignore the effects on his own knees of the hard, cold floor of the church – his joints, he was quite sure, were no longer smooth and unworn like those of the dead man – he put Father Gilbert’s stern voice out of his mind and concentrated on the problem in hand. Then, remembering where he was, he sent up a swift prayer of apology for having ignored such an obvious opportunity, and humbly asked God to help him help the Abbess.
    The answer came – at least, an answer of sorts – as they rose to walk with the coffin out to the burial ground.
    I must find out who he was, Josse told himself, staring at the coffin. And, with the good Lord’s help, who killed him. I will set off down to the Vale as soon as this business is over, and find out everything I can about visitors to the Holy Water shrine over the past couple of months.
    That, it seemed to him, was the best starting point.
    The fact that it might also be a great help in proceeding with his own little puzzle – who was Galbertius Sidonius, and why was Prince John searching for him? – was something that Josse tried not to dwell on.
    It was not difficult to encourage the monks and the lay brothers down in the Vale to talk; it was, in fact difficult to make them stop.
    Although violent death was, sadly, no rarer an occurrence in the sacred environs of the Vale than anywhere else in late twelfth-century England, it was still sufficiently exceptional to get the monks all squawking and clucking away like hens round a split grain sack. Josse wasted quite a lot of time on the likes of Brother Micah, who claimed to have heard a saturnine figure dressed all in black creeping about the Vale (‘And just how did you know he was dressed in black if you only heard him?’ Brother Erse, the carpenter, astutely asked him), and Brother Adrian, who said anybody who went around naked was an affront and just asking for trouble. This time it was Brother Saul who quashed him, quietly telling him that it was far more likely that the murderer had stripped his victim after having killed him, so as to help disguise the