My Lord, the Hermit

by Veronica Heley

  The old Countess was a busy woman, for it was no sinecure to be in charge of the domestic affairs of such a great castle. In consequence, the care of the younger ladies fell on the capable shoulders of the Lady Floria, a stout, heavily-breathing woman with vivid colouring, who was reputed to be a natural sister of the Countess.

  Today Floria had directed the servants to bring the arras out into the garden, so that the young ladies might work on it there. Joyeuse complained that she had been working on it ever since she was a child, and there was some truth in this. Floria said that another year would see the work completed, and that Satan found work for idle hands to do. The pages and squires had no intention of working. Some sailed makeshift wooden boats on the canals, some begged pins of the Lady Floria, and fished in the pools. But needles and fishing-rods were laid by when Midge and Herkom presented themselves, for Herkom was carrying a wicker basket before him, and grinning, as if on a pleasurable errand.

  Midge bowed low before the ladies. ‘You see this lump of flesh and bones, this Herkom, here? Let your imagination play upon him, and upon that which he is holding. What does it suggest to you?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Joanna, laughing. ‘Save that it obviously is not what it appears to be, which is a somewhat ancient wicker basket.’

  ‘Very true, lady. You have seen it at once. This,’ and he struck the basket with his fist, ‘this is the head of that fearsome, frightening fiend – the Dragon – the Great Worm of Wessex.’

  The ladies laughed and applauded, while the pages and squires voiced their disbelief.

  ‘Truly it will be so,’ said Midge. ‘My lady,’ and here he addressed the Countess, ‘if you will but say the word, this wicker basket shall be transformed into the head of the Great Worm, and our lumpish Herkom here, this man of brawn and folly, shall bear it on his shoulders to frighten the wits out of all who look on him.’

  Herkom grinned ever more broadly, and balanced the basket on his shoulders, so that his head was hidden.

  ‘It still looks like a basket to me,’ said the younger of Lady Elizabeth’s daughters.

  ‘It will look like a beast when it is covered with reeds and painted,’ retorted Midge.

  ‘I collect that you wish to take our young ladies away from their tasks,’ said the Countess. ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘To the best purpose in the world, my lady. To the end that Sanity shall reign in a world run mad with Folly. While other men commit the folly of slaughtering each other and maiming animals, yet shall we, here in this castle, proclaim the rule of Sanity by thumbing our nose at Folly. I would have us stage a pageant to mark the occasion of the marriage of the Lady Joanna to our dear Lord Julian.’

  ‘A pageant?’ The Countess was thoughtful. ‘Well, and why not?’

  ‘Why not indeed, lady? The Count our lord and master called me to his bedside this morning early, and commanded me to divert him and his court. And there was I, bereft of ideas! I was in fear of my life, for does not Folly receive short shrift – not to mention the rope – when it is dumb? Then this fool here, this lumpish ox, Herkom, reminded me that many years ago we constructed a masque for a wedding feast. He found us this basket, and heigho, lady! We are at a standstill, for before we had servants in plenty to aid us, whereas now we must go on bended knee to request help.’

  ‘I will help.’ Joanna sprang to her feet, and ran to Herkom, lifting the basket from his head, and setting it over her own. It came down beyond her shoulders. She burst out laughing, and so did the others. The young men crowded around to take the basket from her, and vie for the honour of trying it on.

  ‘And shall I be the dragon?’ asked Julian.

  ‘Nay, my lord. For you must be St George, who rescues the princess from the Great Worm. You must wear splendid armour, and come in brandishing your sword, to slay the dragon and the Turkish knight.’

  ‘What part shall I take?’ said the page Amory, bouncing up from beneath their feet. ‘I want to be a knight, too.’

  ‘And so you shall be in due course,’ said Midge. ‘But for now you shall be the doctor who cures the brave St George of his wounds, and revives the dragon in the last act.’

  ‘And Joyeuse shall be the princess!’ cried Joanna, dragging her cousin forward.

  ‘Why, no,’ said Midge, hand to chin. ‘That part is yours.’

  ‘Oh, but why? Joyeuse is much prettier, and would play the part beautifully.’

  ‘Midge is right,’ said the Countess. ‘Joanna must be the Princess, and Julian play St George. That is what it is all about. Yes, Midge: you have my permission to take what materials you wish. Floria, will you supervise the costumes? It will do no harm to set aside the work of the arras for a while, and it will keep our minds off what thinking cannot mend.’

  What thinking cannot mend. Joanna put her hand to her throat, and went to walk in the herb garden by herself.

  He had been dreaming again. His name was not Keren. His name was an ancient one, his family noble, and he himself young and confident. He acquitted himself well in battle and tourney. He was one of those upon whom Fortune had smiled. Although his father had died when he was but a boy, his estates had been well administered in his minority, and he had finished his education with a year’s travel abroad in the company of his foster-brother Keren.

  Two years previously he had married a pretty young heiress, of whom he was very fond, and the only sorrow in his life so far was that they had had to be parted for so much of their married life. Mariana had retired to one of the manors which had been part of her dowry, while he had been in France, fighting for the King. Now he was journeying back to her side.

  He outstripped his companions, calling back to them that he would announce his return himself. They laughed with him, and waved him on. Keren had had a fever for some days, and could not ride fast.

  The nineteen-year-old boy had galloped over well-remembered roads. There was the squat tower of the Norman church, built more than a century ago. Over there was the orchard, and beyond it the waving green of the hops from which they made their home-brewed beer. A flurry and squawk of hens, and he was sliding to the ground in the courtyard, throwing the reins of his horse to a servant. They were all exclaiming at his early return, flocking around him, and he was pushing them aside, asking after his wife, thrusting through them, running up the wooden stairs from the hall and throwing open the door into the bedchamber. …

  And then he woke up. He always woke up at that point.

  He groaned. The stone was dry in his mouth. He spat it out, and let it lie in the dust under him.

  Had the devil really entered into him? Why could he not remember what he had done? The blood. Blood, everywhere. On his hands and face and down his tunic. The blood trickling down, blinding him.

  He put his hands to his forehead and felt the scar, tracing it up into the white lock of hair. He could remember waking, lying on the floor of the bedchamber, with the blood running down into his eyes, and blood everywhere … and his wife, his little love, his Mariana, lying on the bed with a great wound across her back and shoulder, and the women all around her, screaming. …

  Screaming. He had not screamed. He had not spoken. He simply had not been able to believe what was happening. He had tried to stand, and they had come and bound his arms and set chains on his limbs because they said he had been possessed by the devil.

  He could remember waking. He could remember the blood. He could remember the way the bedclothes had been dragged to the floor and the blood on them, and the gaping wound in Mariana’s back, and the circle of her mouth, blood at the corner.

  He could not remember how it had happened

  He had opened the door. He had wakened.

  In between those two actions he had drawn his sword and cut his wife down. He could not believe it had happened. But it had. They told him, as he lay in his dark cell, bound and shackled for fear of the devil in him, what he had done. They could not believe it, either, but their eyes told him that they were afraid he
would go berserk again and kill more of them. He was a marked man; he was marked not only by the silver streak in his hair which had turned from black to white with the healing of the wound on his brow, but he was marked in the minds of everyone who knew him.

  He was not brought to trial in the King’s courts. In that, they were merciful to him. His wife had lived long enough to bear him a son and to testify that her husband had tripped and fallen as he burst into the room, and that as he rose to his feet his face had been disfigured with a terrible ferocity, and that he had not seemed to recognize her as he rushed on her with upraised sword. They had brought him to her as she lay on her death-bed. The linen they had bound around her body was stained with her blood, and her hands were restless on the coverlet. She had asked to see him, they said. But she had not recognized him when he was brought before her. She had been mumbling, cursing … And then she died.

  There were long periods after that in which he had not known what was happening to him. Fever took him, and left him so weak that it was no longer thought necessary to keep him in chains, though he was watched day and night. At some time during that period he was taken in a litter to the nearby abbey, and there he gradually recovered some measure of health, although he still suffered from severe headaches.

  By spring he was thought well enough to be judged. He was not brought before a tribunal, but judged by his family and the abbot. Some madness had overtaken him, they said, and for this he must be exorcized. Then, they said, he must submit himself to the judgment of Holy Church, for he had killed unlawfully. To all this he had submitted. He had not cared what became of him. He could not understand how it was that Fortune had turned her face from him so completely. Wife, wealth and health, all had gone. Even his foster-brother had gone, for Keren had died soon after their return. It did not seem right that Keren should die, and he, who had murdered his wife, should live. When it was suggested that he take another name, he had chosen Keren’s. It seemed fitting.

  So he had taken the oath required of him, and had left his estates in the care of his mother and cousin, in trust for the baby son he had never seen. His mother had pinned a cloak of homespun over his homespun tunic, and he had gone out to the blacksmith’s and the blacksmith had taken his master’s sword, the sword which had killed Mariana, and from that sword he had beaten a bar of iron, which had been cut into lengths, and forged into links and two cuffs. And the blacksmith had riveted the cuffs around his master’s ankles, and he had gone out into the open, with all his family, and the clergy, and his retainers watching, walking awkwardly, feeling the bite of the chain dragging at the skin of his ankles, feeling every piece of grit under feet that had never before gone unshod. And every eye had looked at him with curiosity and he felt the shame of it beating upon him. He had bowed his head, and passed jingling from among them, following at the tail of Father Hilarion’s horse, out of the courtyard of the abbey, and away down the road along which he had ridden so blithely six months previously. …

  Away down the road to suffer sores on his feet, to suffer hunger and thirst and the sting of Father Hilarion’s contempt, to labour like any peasant under sun and lash of winter storm.

  And he had survived. He had built himself a shelter, and dug a garden, and excavated the foundations of the church. And survived. He had learned to swing his legs as he walked, so that the chain did not drag. He had learned to accept that the church which he had thought must be peculiarly his, was not his at all. He had fought temptations of many different kinds, and in nearly every case he had won.

  It must have been about the second or third year that he began to notice that people were making the sign to avert the Evil Eye when they passed him. This worried him. He was not a devil. It seemed that the unpardonable thing he had done had set him apart from man, and that his chain and stilled tongue were the outward sign of this, warning man to beware of him, as of a dangerous animal. There was no one by to consult, for this was at a time when Father Ambrose had been on the far side of his wide parish.

  So the hermit had gone down into the woods one night, and cut himself two lengths of wood, which he tied together in the form of a cross, and set up on the chapel wall. It was a crude affair, that cross, bound together with strips of bark from the ash tree. But it showed passers-by that he did not worship the devil. The very next day a carpenter and his young apprentice stopped at the spring, and seeing the crude nature of the cross, took it down to work on it. They were on their way to take service with the Count, to work on his new chapel. By the end of the day, a properly jointed and glued cross had been laid back in Keren’s hands.

  A week later the apprentice returned with two more lads from the carpenters’ shop below. They wanted to try their hands at some carving and other woodwork, they said. They had to produce some pieces of work of suitable standard before they could finish their apprenticeship, and they would practise on Keren’s cross, and on making a wooden altar.

  A shepherd came by, and paused to watch the boys at work. His leg was giving him trouble, from an ulcer. Father Hilarion had told him he ought to have the leg amputated. Keren had learned a little of the lore of herbs from his mother, and because the apprentices were doing his work, he felt he ought to help the shepherd. So the shepherd had been healed, and others had come, asking for help. And each time some man or woman or child had come, Keren had seen the fear of him in their eyes, fighting with their hope of relief from pain. And he had learned that the thing they most feared about him was his unnatural silence. He had learned that if he smiled, and laughed aloud for them, they lost their fear, and came trustingly to his hand. But if he made no sound, they submitted their bodies to him with dread. And so he had learned to laugh and smile again, and in this laughter learned once more the meaning of joy, so that his later years had not been so hard, and he had thought himself content with his lot … until the girl came.

  ‘I will not kill myself,’ he said. ‘I have taken one life unlawfully, and that is enough. Father Ambrose says that God does not try us beyond our strength. I wish he were here to guide me. I cannot go on much longer.’ He laid his head on the stone Joanna set in place.

  ‘Joanna,’ he said.

  Joanna and Joyeuse walked in the herb garden, where there was no one to overhear their confidences. Although they were so different in looks and character, yet they were fond of each other. Joyeuse admired Joanna’s hardiness, and Joanna had a protective feeling for the delicate Joyeuse.

  ‘You should have been the Princess,’ said Joanna, hugging her cousin. ‘You are much prettier.’

  ‘I suppose my time will come. My father planned for me to marry the son of one of the King’s Justiciars. I have not seen him, but I have heard that he is rich, and not ill-made. Doubtless there will be some sort of rejoicings when I marry.’

  ‘But it is all wrong that I should be the Princess. Look at me! I’m too big and clumsy and I’ve got freckles, and my nose is all bumpy, and my hair not long enough. There’s usually a tear in my gown, and I can’t bear to spend hours sitting still while the women brush out my hair. I should have been a boy, just as my father said.’ She checked a sigh. She had spent more time in the saddle as a child than at her needlework, for her mother had died when she was small, and her father had been so disappointed that she was not a boy that he had given little heed to her upbringing.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ said Joyeuse shyly. ‘I know I’m considered pretty, but I don’t think you realize how lovely you’re looking nowadays. It often happens, I believe, that a girl begins to come into her own about eighteen. Another six months, and you will have all the troubadours singing your praises.’

  ‘Heaven forfend! I, beautiful!’ She laughed. Then she remembered that her tirewoman had told her that her arms were beautiful, and she looked down at them in confusion. Were they beautiful? Was she changing? There was a pool in the middle of the herb garden. She bent over it, holding back her plaits so that she could see her reflection. She saw what she had always seen, an ov
al face framed in brown hair, a rosy complexion, strongly marked eyebrows and a full mouth.

  ‘I am well enough, I suppose. But I am no beauty.’ She made a face at her reflection, and when it responded, she dashed her hand into the water, to break it up. The reddened skin on the inside of her forearm caught her eye, and she was still, her hand in the water, gazing at … what?

  ‘You look beautiful now,’ said Joyeuse.

  Joanna coloured and turned away.

  He had been content enough until the girl came. He had not wanted to be taken from his task to attend to her, but Midge and Herkom had insisted. They said she had saved the boy Amory from a wild boar. Well, he had healed her, and as usual, he had felt drained of strength afterwards. He had known how it would be. He would not be able to fit another stone into the wall that day. Healing with herbs was easy, and required no effort, but the concentration required for bone-setting was quite another thing.

  He had not looked at her while he had been healing her. Then, when it was all over, he had raised his eyes and seen a face without pretence, a strong face, with full lips and creamy skin marked here and there with golden freckles. Her eyes had looked straight at him without coquetry or dismay. Lips that parted, eyes that widened … the same thought twisting from eye to eye and returning, binding them together.

  He had not known it could be like that.

  It had not been like that with Mariana, who had been so pretty and had hung on his arm and laughed up at him on the day he had ridden away, so many years ago.

  Her name was Joanna. She was dressed in the finest of blue woollen gowns, there was a belt tipped with gold around her waist, and her shoes were of softest leather. Her horse was mettlesome and its trappings costly. She must be an heiress of some kind, and she was – he remembered, now – a ward of the Count’s. She was young. Her throat had been a wide column of white, lifting her proud head high. One of her plaits had become loosened, and a tress of hair had clung and shone on her breast.