As the year 1139 comes to an end, evil is abroad in Salop. The
interminable civil war between King Stephen and Empress
Maud has sent
civilians streaming out of Worcester and a large gang of bandits is
roaming the countryside burning, murdering, and looting.
Amidst all this chaos and killing, the Benedictine monks of Shrewsbury
are disturbed to learn that eighteen-year-old Ermina Hugonin and her
thirteen-year-old
brother Yves have gone missing while fleeing to
Shrewsbury from Worcester. Neither has anyone seen Ermina’s
governess, Sister Hilaria. When Brother Cadfael is called to
Bromfield Priory to tend a brother from Pershore found nearly dead and
frozen, no doubt a victim of the bandits, he takes the opportunity to
look for the children and the nun. On the afternoon that he finds
Yves and the body of a young woman frozen in a brook, he is joined at
Bromfield by Hugh Beringar, under-sheriff of the shire, and together
they continue the search for Ermina and the hiding place of the bandits.
Cadfael and Hugh’s search is
complicated when Brother Elyas, whose body
is recovering from his wounds but whose mind is sorely troubled, runs
out into the snow and Yves follows him. Ermina is found shortly
after, but it is obvious that she is not being completely honest with
Cadfael. Although Hugh and Cadfael discover the bandit
stronghold, where they suspect Yves is being held, there is no sign of
Elyas.
The complicated twists of the plot fairly match Cadfael’s confused
search for meaning in the clues to the affair, which do not seem to
make sense even when the bandits are found and defeated. It
requires a startling deception perpetrated by Ermina to settle the
murder of Sister Hilaria; even in the midst of wholesale murder, a
single man can be a killer.
In a story filled with unexpected twists, Ellis Peters has one final
surprise for Brother Cadfael and the reader at the very end of the
book. It is scarcely anticipated earlier in the plot, but it is
wholly satisfying to Cadfael and to those who have followed the old
crusader’s adventures.