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copper neck and brandished his long, narrow
white blaze at strange surroundings, shifting white-sandalled forefeet
delicately on the cobbles.
    Cadfael
saw the encounter clearly. The horse tossed its farrow, beautiful head,
stretched neck and nostril, and whinnied softly. The.young man blanched white
as the blazoned forehead, and jerked strongly back in his careful stride, and
brief sunlight found the green in his eyes. Then he remembered himself and
passed hurriedly on, following his fellows into the cloister.
    In
the night, an hour before Matins, the dortoir was shaken by a great, wild cry
of: “Barbary… Barbary…” and then a single long, piercing whistle, before
Brother Cadfael reached Meriet’s cell, smoothed an urgent hand over brow and
cheek and pursed lips, and eased him back, still sleeping, to his pillow. The
edge of the dream, if it was a dream, was abruptly blunted, the sounds melted
into silence. Cadfael was ready to frown and hush away the startled brothers
when they came, and even Prior Robert hesitated to break so perilous a sleep,
especially at the cost of inconveniencing everyone else’s including his own.
Cadfael sat by the bed long after all was silence and darkness again. He did
not know quite what he had been expecting, but he was glad he had been ready
for it. As for the morrow, it would come, for better or worse.

 
     
     
    Chapter Four
     
    MERIET
AROSE FOR PRIME HEAVY-EYED and sombre, but seemingly quite innocent of what had
happened during the night, and was saved from the immediate impact of the
brothers seething dread, disquiet and displeasure by being summoned forth,
immediately when the office was over, to speak with the deputy-sheriff in the
stables. Hugh had the torn and weathered harness spread on a bench in the yard,
and a groom was walking the horse called Russet appreciatively about the
cobbles to be viewed clearly in the mellow morning light.
    “I
hardly need to ask,” said Hugh pleasantly, smiling at the way the white-fired
brow lifted and the wide nostrils dilated at sight of the approaching figure,
even in such unfamiliar garb. “No question but he knows you again, I
must needs conclude that you know him just as well.” And as Meriet volunteered
nothing, but continued to wait to be asked: “Is this the horse Peter Clemence
was riding when he left your father’s house?”
    “Yes
my lord, the same.” He moistened his lips and kept his eyes lowered, but for
one spark of a glance for the horse; he did not ask anything.
    “Was
that the only occasion when you had to do with him? He comes to you readily.
Fondle him if you will, he’s asking for your recognition.”
    “It
was I stabled and groomed and tended him, that night,” said Meriet, low-voiced
and hesitant. “And I saddled him in the morning. I never had his like to care
for until then. I… I am good with horses.”
    “So
I see. Then you have also handled his gear.” It had been rich and fine, the
saddle inlaid with coloured leathers, the bridle ornamented with silver-work
now dinted and soiled. “All this you recognise?”
    Meriet
said: “Yes. This was his.” And at last he did ask, almost fearfully: “Where did
you find Barbary?”
    “Was
that his name? His master told you? A matter of twenty miles and more north of
here, on the peat-hags near Whitchurch. Very well, young sir, that’s all I need
from you. You can go back to your duties now.”
    Round
the water-troughs in the lavatorium, over their ablutions, Meriet’s fellows
were making the most of his absence. Those who went in dread of him as a soul
possessed, those who resented his holding himself apart, those who felt his
silence to be nothing short of disdain for them, all raised their voices
clamorously to air their collective grievance. Prior Robert was not there, but
his clerk and shadow, Brother Jerome, was, and with ears pricked and willing to
listen.
    “Brother,
you heard him youself! He