and from which he dug his clay. Utterly open, decent and of gentle habit, a good workman and an honest citizen, so everyone who knew him would have said. But how well can man ever know his fellow-man? There were already plenty of very different opinions being expressed concerning Ruald, sometime potter, now a Benedictine monk of Shrewsbury. It had not taken long to change their tune.

    

For the story of the woman found buried in the Potter's Field had soon become common knowledge, and the talk of the district, and where should gossip look first but to the woman who had lived there fifteen years, and vanished without a word to anyone at the end of it? And where for the guilty man but to her husband, who had forsaken her for a cowl?

    

The woman herself, whoever she might be, was already reburied, by the abbot's grace, in a modest corner of the graveyard, with all the rites due to her but the gift of a name. Parochially, the situation of the whole demesne of Longner was peculiar, for it had belonged earlier to the bishops of Chester, who had bestowed all their local properties, if close enough, as outer and isolated dependencies of the parish of Saint Chad in Shrewsbury. But since no one knew whether this woman was a parishioner or a passing stranger, Radulfus had found it simpler and more hospitable to give her a place in abbey ground, and be done with one problem, at least, of the many she had brought with her.

    

But if she was finally at rest, no one else was.

    

'You've made no move to take him in charge,' said Cadfael to Hugh, in the privacy of his workshop in the herb garden, at the close of a long day. 'Nor even to question him hard.'

    

'No need yet,' said Hugh. 'He's safe enough where he is, if ever I should need him. He'll not move. You've seen for yourself, he accepts all as, at worst, a just punishment laid on him by God - oh, not necessarily for murder, simply for all the faults he finds newly in himself - or at best as a test of his faith and patience. If we all turned on him as guilty he would bear it meekly and with gratitude. Nothing would induce him to avoid. No, rather I'll go on piecing together all his comings and goings since he entered here. If ever it reaches the case where I have cause to suspect him in good earnest, I know where to find him.'

    

'And as yet you've found no such cause?'

    

'No more than I had the first day, and no less. And no other woman gone from where she should be. The place, the possible time, the contention between them, the anger, all speak against Ruald, and urge that this was Generys. But Generys was well alive after he was here within the enclave, and I have found no occasion when he could have met with her again, except with Brother Paul, as both have told us. Yet is it impossible that he should, just once, have been on some errand alone, and gone to her, against all orders, for I'm sure Radulfus wanted an end to the bitterness. The frame,' said Hugh, irritated and weary, 'is all too full of Ruald and Generys, and I can find no other to fit into it.'

    

'But you do not believe it,' Cadfael deduced, and smiled.

    

'I neither believe nor disbelieve. I go on looking. Ruald will keep. If tongues are wagging busily against him, he's safe within from anything worse. And if they wag unjustly, he may take it as Christian chastisement, and wait patiently for his deliverance.'

    

Chapter Four

    

On the eighth day of October the morning began in a grey drizzle, hardly perceptible on the face, but wetting after a while. The working folk of the Foregate went about their business hooded in sacking, and the young man trudging along the highway past the horse-fair ground had his cowl grawn well forward over his forehead, and looked very much like any other of those obliged to go out this labouring morning despite the weather. The fact that he wore the Benedictine habit excited no attention. He was taken for one of the resident brothers