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leave I would wish to hear what the young man may say for himself.”
    The abbot agreed to that willingly. “Come, then, into the church. And you, good people, may disperse in peace.” So they did, still with some reluctance at not getting their hands immediately on their prey. Only Daniel, instead of withdrawing, stepped forward hastily to arrest the abbot’s attention, his manner now anxious and ingratiating, his grievance put away in favour of a different errand.
    “Father Abbot, if you please! It’s true we all ran wild last night, finding my poor father laid flat as he was, and bleeding. Truly we did believe him murdered, and cried it too soon, but even now there’s no knowing how badly he’s hurt. And my old grandmother, when she heard it, fell in a seizure, as she has once before, and though she’s better of it now, she’s none too well. And from the last fit she had, she puts more faith in Brother Cadfael’s remedies than in all the physicians. And she bid me ask if he may come back with me and medicine her, for he knows what’s needed when this breathlessness takes her, and the pains in her breast.”
    The abbot looked round for Cadfael, who had come forth from the shadow of the cloister at hearing this plea. There was no denying he felt a distinct quiver of anticipation. After the night he had spent beside Liliwin, he could not help being consumed with curiosity as to what had really happened at Daniel Aurifaber’s wedding supper.
    “You may go with him, Brother Cadfael, and do what you can for the woman. Take whatever time you need.”
    “I will, Father,” said Cadfael heartily, and went off briskly into the garden, to fetch what he thought might be required from his workshop.
    The goldsmith’s burgage was situated on the street leading to the gateway of the castle, where the neck of land narrowed, so that the rear plots of the houses on either side the street ran down to the town wall, while the great rondel of Shrewsbury lay snug to the south-west in the loop of the Severn. It was one of the largest plots in the town, as its owner was thought to be one of the wealthiest men; a right-angled house with a wing on the street, and the hall and main dwelling running lengthwise behind. Aurifaber, ever on the lookout for another means of making money, had divided off the wing and let it as a shop and dwelling to the locksmith Baldwin Peche, a middle-aged widower without children, who found it convenient and adequate to his needs. A narrow passage led through between the two shops to the open yard behind, with its well, and the separate kitchens, byres and privies. Rumour said of Walter Aurifaber that he even had his cesspit stone-lined, which many considered to be arrogating to himself the privileges of minor nobility. Beyond the yard the ground fell away gradually in a long vegetable-garden and fowl-run to the town wall, and the family holding extended even beyond, through an arched doorway to an open stretch of smooth grass going down to the riverside.
    Cadfael had paid several visits to the house at the old woman’s insistence, for she was now turned eighty years old, and held that her gifts to the abbey entitled her to medical care in this world, as well as purchasing sanctity for the next. At eighty there is always something ailing the body, and Dame Juliana was given to ulcers of the leg if she suffered any slight wound or scratch, and stirred very little from her own chamber, which was one of the two over the hall. If she had presided at Daniel’s wedding supper, as clearly she had, it must have been with her walking-stick ready to hand—unluckily for Liliwin! She was known to be willing to lash out with it readily if anything displeased her.
    The only person on whom she doted, people said, was this young sprig of a grandson of hers, and even he had never yet found a way to get her to loose her purse-strings. Her son Walter was made in her own image, as parsimonious as the dame, but either surer