'You ...' His voice was hoarse. 'You are sure?'

'Yes.' She was standing back now.

For a moment he stood there in the sunlight, quite still, though he felt as if he might be swaying. 'Come, little Adam,' he said quietly. And when the small boy approached, he reached down with his hands and felt his head, then his face. He would have liked to lift him, feel him, press him to him. But he could not do this. 'So, Adam,' he said gently, 'be a good boy, do as your mother tells you and accept another Adam's blessing.' Resting his hand on the boy's head, he recited a brief prayer.

He wanted so much to give the boy something. He wondered what. Then, suddenly remembering, he drew out the cedarwood crucifix that, so long ago, his mother had given him and, with a single pull, broke the leather string that secured it round his neck and handed it to the boy. 'My mother gave me this, Adam,' he said. 'They say a crusader brought it from the Holy Land. Keep it always.' He turned to Mary with a shrug. 'It is all that I have.'

They went, then, and soon afterwards he and Luke made their way back towards the abbey.

They did not speak, except once, halfway along the path through the woods.

'Does the boy look like me?'

'Yes.'

Of all the times, during the long years of his blind existence, it was on those sunny afternoons as he sat quietly meditating in the carrels in the sheltered north wall of the abbey cloister, that Brother Adam appeared most serene. It seemed to the younger monks that, being obviously very close to God, Brother Adam was in a silent communion that it would be impious to interrupt. And sometimes he was. But sometimes, also, as he smelled the grass and the daisies in the cloister, and felt the warm sun coming from over the frater, it was another thought that filled his mind with a joy and delight which, if it led him down even to perdition, he could not help.

I have a son. Dear God, I have a son.

One afternoon, when he was all alone with no one to see, he even took out a small knife he had been using earlier in the day, and discreetly carved a little letter 'A' in the stone beside him.

'A' for Adam. And sometimes, he thought, if his punishment was to be cast out of God's garden into some darker place, then still, perhaps, for the sake of his son, he would do it all again.

So, for many years, Brother Adam lived with his secret, in the abbey of Beaulieu.

LYMINGTON

1480

Friday. Fish market day in Lymington. On Wednesdays and Fridays, at eight o'clock in the morning, for one hour, the fishermen set out their stalls.