“Are you sure it wasn’t ’You… You…’? And who was he looking at when he said it?”

In the silence, there was only the murmurings from the child on the floor: “Pretty bird, white stripe, pretty dickie.”

The last rays of the evening sun coming through the window shone on the long-fingered, blue-veined hands of the abbot clasped tightly on the table-the hands of a tense old man. His face, like those of the other monks, was invisible under his cowl.

At a glance from Adelia, Gyltha leaned down to pick up Allie and her birdcage. “That pretty dickie do need some air,” she said, and carried them both outside.

In the room the silence went on, inflating like a bubble to the point where it must burst.

Brother Titus broke it with a scream. “Stop it. Stop it. It was me. He was looking at me. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, it was me. I’d been at the wine in the crypt, I was drunk.” He began banging his head on the table.

The other monks didn’t move.

“And you left a candle burning?” Rowley was remorseless.

“It fell over. It caught the screen. I didn’t notice…” He turned to the abbot. He had blood on his forehead where it had hit the wood. “Dear God… how to be forgiven… All this time… I’ve been in hell with the devil… I have scourged myself til the blood ran. I wanted… but it was too massive, everything gone… Aloysius… I couldn’t believe… I couldn’t… Father, forgive me.”

He buried his head into the abbot’s shoulder, blubbering like an enormous naughty toddler seeking its mother.

And Sigward cradled him like a mother. “I know, my son, I know.”

Yes, thought Adelia suddenly. You did, didn’t you?

She got up and left the room. Mansur followed her out; this was business for the Christian Church.

They went into the courtyard, where Allie was dithering over her birdcage. “Shall I, Gyltha, shall I?”

“Up to you,” Gyltha told her.

Allie took a deep breath. “I think I will, then.” She untied the cage’s wicker door and opened it. The chaffinch fluttered out, perched on the wellhead for a moment, and then flew off.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Allie asked, the tears falling.

Adelia grabbed her and kissed her. “I love you, Almeisan. So much.”

After a while, they heard the inn’s front door open and the shuffle of Titus’s feet as his brother monks helped him home.

Rowley came stamping out into the courtyard. “Well, that’s that.”

“Is it? What will you do about it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing, probably. It was an accident, what’s done is done. Quieta non movere.”

So sleeping dogs are to be left to lie, are they? Adelia thought. She said, “The abbot knew.”

“Suspected, perhaps.”

“And said nothing.”

He flared up. “In the name of God, Adelia, what would you have me do? You’ve just seen a man destroyed. Isn’t that enough?”

Yes, she had, and was sorry for it, but other men were being allowed to carry a blame of which they were guiltless.

Kindly old Abbot Sigward… she would never feel the same for him again.

“ Mother Church is all that stands between us and the devil,” the bishop of Saint Albans said. “If she loses respect, we are all damned.”

He turned to look at his daughter. “And what are you crying for?” The residue of his anger at other people gave the question irritability rather than the concern he probably felt.

Adelia rose immediately to stand between them. “She’s crying because she let her bird go.”

“Why? I thought she favored the thing.”

“She did, but she couldn’t bear to see it caged. She wanted it to be free.”

“Oh, God, she’s going to grow up like you.” He untied his horse’s reins from the rail, mounted, and rode off.

And that, thought Adelia, is the crux of everything wrong between us.

Indoors, she was met by Hilda. The landlady’s face was vicious. “See what you done to my dear abbot? You and that darky happy now?”

Adelia’d had enough. From the very first, the protestations by this woman that Eustace was responsible for the fire had been because, in her heart of hearts, she’d known he wasn’t. “Your dear abbot deserved it,” she hissed back and, ushering Gyltha and Allie before her, went upstairs to bed… and dreamed.

This time the queen was being walled up in a cave by unseen hands so that the layers of stones rose one upon the other, as if by themselves, while the woman behind them pleaded with Adelia to stop them until the last stone went into place and her voice was silenced.

Adelia woke up saying, “All right, all right, I’m coming to you.”

She took Mansur, Gyltha, and Allie with her. Making sure that nobody watched them, they toiled up the Tor from the burrow under the abbey wall and followed the trail of bruised grass and snapped twigs left by the descent down it the day before. Gyltha carried provisions, Mansur an iron bar and a lantern, Adelia a knife stolen from the inn’s kitchen, and Allie a frog and various beetles she picked up on the way.

Despite the trail, it would have been easy to miss the cave with its curtaining of branches if it hadn’t been for a pile of mule manure hardening in the sun outside it.

The removal of the withy screen caused Gyltha to hold her nose and protest at the stink. “Me and you’ll stay outside, miss,” she told Allie, but Adelia felt this was too hard; what child could resist a secret cave? Besides, Eustace’s bones had been reunited and covered with a patched cloak belonging to Ollie, the most silent member of the tithing.

Allie was enchanted by the place. She knelt with her mother to send up a prayer for Eustace’s soul, listening to and asking questions about the circumstances of his death, but then, since there was more wildlife outside the cave than in it, eventually joined Gyltha in order to explore the hillside while Adelia and Mansur got to work on dismantling the wall.

It wasn’t easy. It curved slightly outward, and whoever had built it in the first place had shaped the stones so that they would fit against one another almost with the tightness of tongue and groove, while Eustace’s father, however frightened he’d been of the demon, had put it up again in exactly the same way.

It took a quarter of an hour to lever out the first stone and, though removal became easier after that, it was an hour before there was a hole big enough to squeeze through.

In none of that time did Mansur or Adelia look inside; the lantern’s beam had been only enough to play on their work-and there was a stillness in the interior that made the idea of peeking somehow disrespectful.

The air coming from the hole they made was surprisingly fresh-no corruption here, nor was it completely black inside; they were aware merely of dimness.

“A saint’s tomb?” asked Mansur.

Adelia shrugged, refusing to be seduced by the undoubted air of sanctity here-the Arab had felt the same about the abbey. She picked up the lantern, and Mansur helped her climb through the hole.

She was in what was, or had been, a cell-a large, hollow cairn built within the hill. The earthquake of twenty years ago had caused it to shift, bringing damage. Where the beautifully packed stones of the wall and roof should have begun descending to complete the shape of a circular beehive, they had fallen down to reveal rough rock behind them.

Cracks had opened not only in the ceiling but in the hillside above it so that thin beams of sun, green from infiltrating ferns and moss, pierced the dimness here and there like spears of sunlight through tiny arrow slits.

In the center was a pool so still that it might have been a mirror. Mansur’s struggle to get his long body through the gap sent a shiver over its surface.

Beyond it, from the fallen stones of the opposite wall, dangled a skull.

Oh, God, please, Adelia thought, not another murder.

Here was Eustace’s father’s demon.

The skull had been cleaved nearly down to the forehead and was held together only by a circlet of metal like a woman’s headband, though this had been dislodged slightly so that it was worn at a rakish angle, as if Death was trying to be jolly. It stared, grinning, down at the pool where its perfect reflection grinned back up at it, making two demons.