“Thirteen years when God and his saints slept.” Since her arrival in England, Adelia had heard that phrase used about the civil war a score of times. People still blanched at the memory. Yet on the accession of Henry II, it had stopped. In twenty years it had never restarted. England had become a peaceful country.

The Plantagenet was a more subtle man than she’d classified him; perhaps he should be reconsidered.

They turned the last corner of the approach and emerged onto the apron before the castle.

The simple motte and bailey the Conqueror had built to guard the river crossing had gone, its wooden palisade replaced by curtain walls, its keep grown into the accommodation, church, stables, mews, barracks, women’s quarters, kitchens, laundry, vegetable and herb gardens, dairy, tiltyards, and gallows and lockup necessary for a sheriff administering a sizable, prosperous town. At one end, scaffolding and platforms clad the growing tower that would replace the one that had burned down.

Outside the gates, two sentries leaned on their spears and talked to Agnes where she sat, knitting, on a stool outside her beehive. Somebody else was sitting on the ground, resting his head against the castle wall.

Adelia groaned. “Is the man ubiquitous?”

At the sight of the newcomers, Roger of Acton leaped to his feet, picked up a wooden board on a stick that had been lying beside him, and began shouting. The chalked message read: “Pray for Littel Saint Peter, who was crucafid by the Jews.”

Yesterday he’d favored the pilgrims to Saint Radegund’s; today, it appeared, the bishop was coming to visit the sheriff and Acton was ready to waylay him.

Again, there was no recognition of Adelia, nor, despite Mansur’s singularity, of the two men with her. He doesn’t see people, she thought, only fodder for hell. She noticed that the man’s dirty soutane was of worsted.

If he was disappointed that he didn’t yet have the bishop to hector, he made do. “They did scourge the poor child till the blood flowed,” he yelled at them. “They kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus the false prophet. They tormented him in divers ways and then crucified him…”

Simon went up to the soldiers and asked to see the sheriff. They were from Salerno, he said. He had to raise his voice to be heard.

The elder of the guards was unimpressed. “Where’s that when it’s at home?” He turned to the yelling clerk. “Shut up, will you?”

“Prior Geoffrey has asked us to attend on the sheriff.”

“What? I can’t hear you over that crazy bastard.”

The younger sentry pricked up. “Here, is this the darky doctor as cured the prior?”

“The same.”

Roger of Acton had spotted Mansur now and come up close; his breath was rank. “Saracen, do you acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ?”

The older sentry cuffed him round the ear. “Shut up.” He turned back to Simon. “And that?”

“Milady’s dog.”

Ulf had, with difficulty, been left behind, but Gyltha had insisted that the Safeguard must go with Adelia everywhere. “He is no protection,” Adelia had protested. “When I was facing those damned crusaders, he skulked behind me. He’s a skulker.”

“Protection ain’t his job,” Gyltha had said. “He’s a safeguard.”

“Reckon as they can go in, eh, Rob?” The sentry winked at the woman in the entrance to her withy hut. “All right by you, Agnes?”

Even so, the guard captain was fetched, and was satisfied that the three were not concealing weapons before they were allowed through the wicket. Acton had to be restrained from going in with them. “Kill the Jews,” he was shouting, “kill the crucifiers.”

The reason for precaution became apparent as they were ushered into the bailey; fifty or so Jews were taking exercise in it, enjoying the sun. The men were mainly walking and talking; women were gossiping in one corner or playing games with their children. As with all Jews in a Christian country, they were dressed like anyone else, though one or two of the men wore the conelike Judenhut on their heads.

But what distinguished this particular group as the Jews was their shabbiness. Adelia was startled by it. In Salerno there were poor Jews, just as there were poor Sicilians, Greeks, Moslems, but their poverty was disguised by the alms flowing from their richer brethren. In fact, it was held, somewhat sniffily, by the Christians of Salerno that “the Jews have no beggars.” Charity was a precept of all the great religions; in Judaism, “Give unto Him of what is His, seeing that thou and what thou hast are

His” was law. Grace was bestowed on the giver rather than the receiver.

Adelia remembered one old man who’d driven her foster mother’s sister to distraction by his refusal to say thank you for the meals he’d taken in her kitchen. “Do I eat what is yours?” he used to ask. “I eat what is God’s.”

The sheriff’s charity to his unwanted guests, it appeared, was not so munificent. They were thin. The castle kitchen, Adelia thought, was unlikely to accord with the dietary laws, and therefore its meals would in many cases remain uneaten. The clothes in which these people had to hurry from their homes the year before were beginning to tatter.

Some of the women looked up expectantly as she and the others crossed the bailey. Their men were too deep in discussion to notice.

With the younger soldier from the gate leading the way, the three passed over the moat bridge, under the portcullis, and across another court.

The hall was cool, vast, and busy. Trestle tables stretched down its length, covered with documents, rolls, and tallies. Clerks poring over them occasionally broke off to run to the dais, where a large man sat in a large chair at another table on which other documents, rolls, and tallies were growing at a rate threatening to topple them.

Adelia was unacquainted with the role of sheriff, but Simon had said that as far as each shire was concerned, this was the man of greatest importance next to the king, the royal agent of the county who, with the diocesan bishop, wielded most of its justice and alone was responsible for the collection of its taxes, the keeping of its peace, pursuing its villains, ensuring there was no Sunday trading, seeing to it that everybody paid church tithes and the Church paid its dues to the Crown, arranging executions, appropriating the hanged one’s chattels for the king, as well as that of waifs, fugitives, outlaws, ensuring that treasure trove went into the royal coffers-and twice a year delivering the resultant money and its accounting to the king’s Exchequer at Winchester, where, Simon said, a penny’s discrepancy could lose him his place.

“With all that, why does anyone want the job in the first place?” Adelia inquired.

“He takes a percentage,” Simon said.

To judge from the quality of the clothes the Sheriff of Hertfordshire was wearing and the amount of gold and jewels adorning his fingers, the percentage was a big one, but at the moment, it was doubtful whether Sheriff Baldwin thought it enough. “Harassed” hardly described him; “distracted” did.

He stared with manic vacancy at the soldier who announced his visitors. “Can’t they see I’m busy? Don’t they know the justices in eyre are coming?”

A tall and bulky man, who’d been bending over some papers at the sheriff’s side, straightened up. “I think, my lord, these people may be helpful in the matter of the Jews,” Sir Rowley said.

He winked at Adelia. She looked back at him without favor. Another as ubiquitous as Roger of Acton. And perhaps more sinister.

Yesterday a note had arrived for Simon from Prior Geoffrey, warning him against the king’s tax collector: “The man was in the town on two occasions at least when a child disappeared. May the good Lord forgive me if I cast doubt where none is deserved, but it behooves us to be circumspect until we are sure of our ground.”