Brother Cadfael asks Hugh if he will spend the night before in prayer: “Don’t cry young lovers, whatever you do,Īnother wonderful passage in the book is an exchange between Brother Cadfael and Hugh Beringar, one of King Stephen’s soldiers about to engage in a duel to the death with his enemy, Adam Courcelle. “Ah well,” Brother Cadfael muses, “these things are for the young.” (See my review of the first book in the series about Brother Cadfael’s proclivity for fixing up people, in which I give you the lyrics for “Hello Young Lovers.”) These lyrics include the apt stanza: They had not the least idea, as yet, that they were in love.”
Even their voices had grown somehow alike, as if they matched tones without understanding that they did it. “And talk they did… Each of them took up the thread from the other, as though handed it in a fixed and formal ceremony, like a favour in a dance.
There is a lovely passage when two young people suddenly experience a difference in their regard for one another:
(The characters muse on the topsy-turvy morality of war that allows Stephen to collude in the killing of the 94, but be horrified by the killing of an additional man.)Īs in the previous book, Brother Cadfael does not let his detective duties deter him from matchmaking. Brother Cadfael is determined to get to the bottom of it, and the King agrees. Someone apparently tried to cover up a murder by adding an extra body to the pile. Brother Cadfael offers to help bury the bodies, and discovers one extra. Meanwhile, Shrewsbury Castle falls to King Stephen, and the remaining 94 defenders are hanged. In particular, he wants to find the only daughter of Adeney – Godith – to hold for ransom in exchange for her father. King Stephen holds Shrewsbury under siege, and he is seeking to attract followers from the camps of his main opponents, William FitzAlan and Fulke Adeney. This book takes place in the summer of 1138, during the war of succession for the crown of England between King Stephen and his cousin the Empress Maude. Or tries to: it seems there’s always a murder to be solved in 12th Century England, and Brother Cadfael is the man to do it. This is the second book in the Brother Cadfael mystery series, featuring an older Benedictine Monk who retired to the Abbey at Shrewsbury after a wild and eventful youth, and now spends his time peacefully in the Abbey’s herbarium.
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