“Since you ask what I think,” said Cadfael, “I think my child, that if you carry scars on the fingers of this hand lifelong, you should wear them like jewels.”
Her lips parted in a startled smile. She shook her head over the persistent tremor of doubt. “But you must never tell Philip,” she said with sudden urgency, holding him by the sleeve with her good hand. “As I never shall. Let him believe me as innocent as he is himself …” She frowned over the word, which did not seem to her quite what she had wanted, but she could not find one fitter for her purpose. If it was not innocence she meant - for of what was she guilty? - was it simplicity, clarity, purity? None of them would do. Perhaps Brother Cadfael would understand, none the less. “I felt somehow mired,” she said. “He should never set foot in intrigue, it is not for him.”
Brother Cadfael gave her his promise, and walked back through the town in a muse, reflecting on the complexity of women. She was perfectly right. Philip, for all his two years advantage, his intelligence, and his new and masterful maturity, would always be the younger, and the simpler, and - yes, she had the just word, after all! - the more innocent. In Cadfael’s experience, it made for very good marriage prospects, where the woman was fully aware of her responsibilities.
On the thirtieth of September, just two months after Saint Peter’s Fair, the Empress Maud and her half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed near Arundel and entered into the castle there. But Earl Ranulf of Chester sat cannily in his own palatine, minded his own business, and stirred neither hand nor foot in her cause.