Publisher's Synopsis
"It is the year of Our Lord 1120. Beyond the gates of the Abbey of the Virgin Mary and Edward King and Martyr at Shaftesbury, a hunting party led by the Abbess Cecily happens upon a man in the forest. Filthy, and weakened by loss of blood, he cannot explain how he came to be there, and the cause of his inability to speak is soon discovered: his tongue has been cut out! Whose wish to keep him silent might have spurred such an outrage? What secret need be so mercilessly hidden? Despite her own troubles-a distressing tremor of the hands, the terrifying specter of impending blindness, and her connection to the unsettling arrival of lepers at the abbey-it falls to Dame Averilla, assistant to the infirmaress, to unearth the treasonous longings that lie beneath the heartless mutilation of an innocent serf"--
