'And he has surrendered them? That would go down very bitterly with such a man as Geoffrey de Mandeville,' she said, marvelling. 'My lord never trusted him. An arrogant, overbearing man, he said. He has turned his coat often enough before, it may very well be true he had plans to turn it yet again. It's well that he was brought to bay in time.'
'So it might have been, but once he was stripped of his lands they turned him loose, and he's made off into his own country and gathered the scum of the region about him. He's sacked Cambridge. Looted everything worth looting, churches and all, before setting light to the city.'
'Cambridge?' said the lady, shocked and incredulous. 'Dare he attack a city like Cambridge? The king must surely move against him. He cannot be left to pillage and burn as he pleases.'
'It will not be easy,' said Hugh ruefully. 'The man knows the Fen country like the lines of his hand, it's no simple matter to bring him to a pitched battle in such country.'
She leaned to retrieve the spindle as a movement of her foot set it rolling. The hand with which she recoiled the yarn was languid and translucent, and the eyelids half-lowered over her hollow eyes were marble-white, and veined like the petals of a snowdrop. If she felt pain, she betrayed none, but she moved with infinite care and effort. Her lips had the strong set of reticence and durability.
'My son is there among the fens,' she said quietly. 'My younger son. You'll remember, he chose to take the cowl, in September of last year, and entered Ramsey Abbey.'
'Yes, I remember. When he brought back your lord's body for burial, in March, I did wonder if he might have thought better of it by then. I wouldn't have said your Sulien was meant for a monk, from all I'd seen of him he had a good, sound appetite for living in the world. I thought six months of it might have changed his mind for him. But no, he went back, once that duty was done.'
She looked up at him for a moment in silence, the arched lids rolling back from still lustrous eyes. The faintest of smiles touched her lips and again faded. 'I hoped he might stay, once he was home again. But no, he went back. It seems there's no arguing with a vocation.'
It sounded like a muted echo of Ruald's inexorable departure from world and wife and marriage, and it was still ringing in Hugh's ears as he took his leave of Eudo in the darkening courtyard, and mounted and rode thoughtfully home. From Cambridge to Ramsey is barely twenty miles, he was reckoning as he went. Twenty miles, to the north-west, a little further removed from London and the head of Stephen's strength. A little deeper into the almost impenetrable world of the Fens, and with winter approaching. Let a mad wolf like de Mandeville once establish a base, islanded somewhere in those watery wastes, and it will take all Stephen's forces ever to flush him out again.
Brother Cadfael went up to the Potter's Field several times while the ploughing continued, but there were no more such unexpected finds to be made. The ploughman and his ox-herd had proceeded with caution at every turn under the bank, wary of further shocks, but the furrows opened one after another smooth and dark and innocent. The word kept coming to mind. Earth, Ruald had said, is innocent. Only the use we make of it can mar it. Yes, earth and many other things, knowledge, skill, strength, all innocent until use mars them. Cadfael considered in absence, in the cool, autumnal beauty of this great field, sweeping gently down from its ridge of bush and bramble and tree, hemmed on either side by its virgin headlands, the man who had once laboured here many years, and had uttered that vindication of the soil on which he laboured,
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