He was exalted. Sitting on the punt’s middle thwart, facing the bishop of Saint Albans, he unburdened himself of his sin almost joyously, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in English, as if fearing that Adelia, his nemesis, sitting in the stern behind Rowley, would not understand him.

Hilda-he’d insisted she should accompany them-crouched in the bottom of the punt, quiet now, her head on his knee like an exhausted dog’s.

His story-and it was as much story as confession-was of a cleaving. Of a young man hacked in two. Of an earthquake that had not only opened rifts in the ground but had separated the Sigward, lord of great estates, from the Sigward who’d become a lowly monk of Glastonbury Abbey and then its abbot.

He spoke of them as two different people. “Lord Sigward was a man assured of his righteousness,” he said. “He gave to the poor, he built churches and oratories so that God should be reminded of his virtue. He ruled his little kingdom justly with a Bible in his hands, knowing he obeyed its precepts. He bathed in the admiration of his neighbors. His servants had cause to love him…” Absentmindedly, Abbot Sigward patted Hilda’s shoulder. “At least those he kept by him, for he was quick to punish and rid himself of the ones who did not.”

Wishing she didn’t have to listen, Adelia kept her eyes on the river, trailing her fingers and watching their wake in the water. A moorhen hurried her chicks away from the ripple.

“Lord Sigward chose his wife carefully, but she was a disappointment; he did not understand why she was afraid of him. She bore him a son, and she died doing it. No matter, Lord Sigward had his heir and held a great feast so that he could boast of him to Somerset’s nobility. But the boy, too, was a disappointment; he was weak, like his mother. He cowered when his father spoke to him; he failed in the tiltyard, he was an inept huntsman. Like some clerk, he preferred books to pursuing the manly arts.”

Adelia glanced at Rowley’s rigid back; he’d averted his face from the man opposite him, as he would have done in the privacy of a confessional. There had been no moment to warn him before they set off. When the abbot, crossing himself, had spoken the formula-“Hear and bless me, Father, for I have greatly sinned”-she’d seen her lover draw away as if in protest.

He always hated hearing confessions. “Who am I to pronounce on sin?” Like Thomas à Becket before him, he’d been appointed by his king, not the Church, and had been made a priest literally overnight-ordained one day, installed into the bishop’s chair the next.

The punt surged and slowed as Godwyn dug its pole effortlessly into the riverbed and lifted it again, his face without expression. The words issuing from the mouth of the man who’d been his master might have been no more than the chirp of the buntings hidden in the reeds.

“When the boy was sixteen, it seemed necessary to Lord Sigward that he should regain the admiration of the county and get credit with Almighty God by sending his son on crusade. He fitted him out lavishly with weapons, equipment, gave him a fine destrier to ride… which was too big for him.” For the first time the abbot’s voice had faltered, then, with an indrawn breath, it regained its rhythm. “A farewell feast for the county to wish the son well and praise the father who, though wallowing in his pride, also resented the boy’s obvious happiness in leaving him.”

A dragonfly skimmed the water and landed on the punt’s gunwale like an iridescent jewel before taking off again.

“Four years went by without a word. Other fathers received news of their offspring from those returning from the Holy Land, sometimes that they were alive and well, sometimes that they were dead. The Lord Sigward, however, heard nothing and began to think that his boy, too, had died, perhaps in the battle for the fortress of Ascalon, where so many Christian knights were slaughtered during its recapture from the Saracen. If so, it would be an excuse for him to hold another feast, this time a valedictory one-what honor to Lord Sigward that his child had given his life in the attempt to return the Holy Land to God.”

Adelia watched a kingfisher that had been perching on an alder twig suddenly turn into a rainbowed arrow as it dived into the water, coming up with a frog in its beak.

It was getting hot. Abbot Sigward threw back his cowl to let the air play on his tonsured head. The exaltation was still with him, but his fingers were showing white where he clasped them in his lap-he was coming to the crux.

Adelia tried to distance the clear voice ringing over the marshes into that of just another storyteller in a market. Twenty years ago, she told herself. They have been dead these twenty years. This man is not the same man who kitted them.

But he was.

It had been the evening before the Feast of Saint Stephen 1154, the abbot said, a blustery night.

Christmas festivities were over. Lord Sigward, being the kindly master he was, had already allowed his servants to set off on their annual visit to the villages they came from.

“Apart from Hilda”-the abbot patted the head of the woman crouching beside him-“who refused to leave him, and Godwyn”-he smiled up at the man poling the punt-“who refused to leave her, there was no one in the house.”

So Lord Sigward was dining alone in his hall when Godwyn, acting as a doorkeeper, heard a loud knocking and went to answer it. Two young men were ushered in, and Lord Sigward found himself being embraced by his son, whose dripping rain cloak put wet marks on the silk of his father’s robe. Laughing and exclaiming, the boy introduced his magnificently tall friend. “We have been on the road from Outremer for three months, Father, and we are very, very hungry.”

Immediately, Lord Sigward felt anger; if his son had sent word ahead, he could have invited his neighbors to welcome the boy as a hero. He kept his patience, however, and called for Hilda to bring food and drink.

As he watched the young men eat, he became angrier.

“He should have been pleased,” the abbot said. “His son had become the man he’d wished him to be. The years in the Holy Land had given the boy belief in himself. He looked Lord Sigward in the eye. He was no longer afraid; he was Lord Sigward’s equal-and Lord Sigward resented it.”

Also, there was a sweetness in the son’s smile when it was directed at the friend that was missing when he addressed the father.

Both youths had pale, cruciform patches on their tunics where the crusader’s cross had been stripped off. When Lord Sigward inquired why this was so, he was able to find justification for his anger with the two of them. “They denigrated the sanctity of crusade, they poured scorn on the holy purpose of driving the Saracen from the land Jesus had walked on. They had seen too much death, they said; Islam was merely being inflamed. What purpose in killing Muslim men, women, and children if each corpse added a hundred living people to the number hating Christianity? Was that following the teaching of Our Lord?”

Too furious to speak, Lord Sigward had left the hall and retired to his chamber. He couldn’t sleep for thinking of the shame his son’s impiety would cast on his name. In the middle of the night, he got up and went to the boy’s room to argue with him.

“He found his son and the friend in bed together,” the abbot said. “They were naked and performing a homosexual act.”

Hubris had descended on Lord Sigward then. Quietly, he closed the door on the two lovers and went to fetch an ax.

The abbot said, “He… No, I must not think of myself in the third person… Me. I was that butcher. With the ax in my hand, I burst in on those two boys and hacked them to death where they lay in each other’s arms. I struck and struck and went on striking long after both were dead.”

The river was beginning to straggle through reeds now, and the punt nudged aside yellow water lilies as it went. Sandpipers called from the banks, a descant to the implacable human voice.