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servants, injured young men in a state of near nudity must be a horrifying prospect.
    'Well, we can't let him die,' she said tartly. 'You must return to the abbey and fetch help.'
    'And leave you alone with him?' Godefe's voice rose in distress.
    'You know the way back, I've never been on this path before,' Miriel snapped. 'He is hardly going to ravish me, is he? If you are concerned for my modesty, then know that after nursing my grandfather, there is no part of a man's body that is a mystery to me.'
    Godefe made a shocked little sound in her throat.
    Miriel unpinned her cloak and tucked it around the young man. 'Give me yours too,' she commanded. 'We have to keep him warm.'
    Dominated by Miriel's more forceful personality, Godefe unfastened her cloak and handed it down. 'Who can he be?' she whispered. 'What is he doing here?'
    'We'll never know if he dies.' Miriel gestured pointedly in the direction they had come. 'Ask Mother Hillary for her litter and make haste.'
    Huge-eyed and white-faced with anxiety, the nun reined the mule about and clopped off through the mist.
    Miriel tucked the second cloak around the first, drawing Godefe's hood up around the young man's face. The dark wool made him look paler than ever. She too wondered from whence he came. Travellers on the marshes were few. Those they received in St Catherine's guest house were usually on their way from Lynn to Cambridge and Lincoln and they did not come from this direction. All that lay beyond the sheep pasture were mud flats and the grey North Sea.
    Frowning, Miriel reached beneath the hood of the cloak and touched his hair. Then she licked her fingertips and her memory of the sea was fulfilled in the taste of the salt. He must have fallen overboard from a fishing vessel or Lynn trader, she thought. Perhaps he was a poor sailor, which would explain the sparse state of his clothing.
    She took one of his frozen hands to chafe in her own. 'The palm was work-blistered as she had expected, but there were narrow bands of white skin at the base of some fingers, suggesting that rings had recently been worn. There were also scratches on the backs of his hands as if he had been fighting his way through thick undergrowth. Pin-pricks of dark bronze stubble outlined his jaw and rimmed his mouth. There was bruising on one cheekbone, fading to yellow. Miriel touched the mark, but he neither moved nor made a sound.
    Whoever you are,' she murmured, 'you are going to create unholy stir at St Catherine's.' The thought made her smile with relish.
     

    The church bell which Nicholas had heard as he collapsed, was still tolling as he opened his eyes. For a moment he thought that he had died and gone to hell, for he was naked and his limbs felt as if they were on fire. By smoky candle-light a black-robed demon was embalming him with a pungent lotion that stung like nettle burn.
    He yelled a protest, but it emerged as little more than a croak, and when he tried to move, his limbs would not obey his will.
    The demon turned its head. A face, double-chinned and whiskery, loomed over his own and he inhaled a waft of garlicky breath.
    'He's waking at last,' it announced.
    More of the demons crowded around him. One of them made a disapproving sound and covered his loins with a linen towel. 'Will he live?'
    'Too early to tell,' said the first demon. 'I have rubbed his body with warming herbs and now he must be well wrapped to help them do their work. If he survives the night, then his chances will improve.'
    So he wasn't dead, and these were not demons. 'Where am I?' he asked weakly.
    'In the convent of St Catherine's-in-the-Marsh,' said the looming face. 'You were discovered lying on the sheep pasture by two of the sisters.'
    Nicholas nodded. He seemed to remember a young woman's voice saying something about his creating an unholy stir at St Catherine's. That must be where his notion of demons had originated. The dark robes were habits and he was obviously lying on a bed in the convent's