The Hunter’s Tale

by Margaret Frazer

  ‘Except maybe you were afraid of Sir William learning you’d been away together?“ Frevisse asked.

  ‘I don’t want to hear or ever think about that day again,“ Philippa said, her face still to Miles’ shoulder. Lady Anneys, her own head bowed over her hands now clenched together in her lap, nodded sharp agreement. Hugh made no answer at all except to turn his head away from all of them. Only Miles met Frevisse’s gaze and said steadily, ”It was murder. We would have said if we’d heard or seen anything, Sir William or no.“

  Hugh turned back. “That’s one thing. We none of us heard anything. There was no shouting.”

  ‘And Sir Ralph was a famous shouter,“ Miles said dryly.

  ‘The crowner asked the same thing,“ Hugh said, ”but whoever it was must have taken him by surprise. They must have been lying in wait and taken him by surprise.“

  Philippa stepped back from Miles. “I’d best go home now.”

  Miles moved as if to see her out, but Lady Anneys said, “Let Hugh go with her, Miles. He’d be expected to and for now we might do best not to bother giving anyone other thoughts.”

  Hugh and Miles exchanged looks and matching wry smiles before Miles nodded. Philippa, missing none of that, smiled much the same, curtsied to Frevisse and Lady Anneys while Hugh bowed, and then left easily with him, except as they went out the door she pushed his arm and said, “He told you about us?”

  Miles, as if abruptly weary, sank down on the joint stool Hugh had left. Lady Anneys rose and went to him, leaned down, and kissed his forehead before laying a hand on his shoulder and saying quietly, “Heed me in this, Miles. Don’t lose or ruin what there is between you and Philippa. You can only guess at how much hurt there’ll be for her if she marries someone she doesn’t want, but I know, and I say that whatever she loses from Sir William is nothing when set against it.”

  Miles stood abruptly up and without a word or even a bow went out of the room.

  Lady Anneys watched him go, then turned back to the window, sat again on the chest, and said, “I would never be so young again for all the world.”

  ‘Nor I,“ Frevisse agreed. She went to sit at the chest’s other end. There were heartaches of one kind and another all through life but those of one’s young years, even looked back on, seemed to cut with a sharper edge than almost any later ones, simply—or not so simply—because one had not yet learned any defense against them. And that, in time, like all things, they passed. But slowly, feeling her way through the thought as it came to her, Frevisse said, ”I would never have thought, seeing Philippa in the garden this afternoon, that she was as deeply upset as she showed here about what she’d overheard between her father and uncle.“

  Lady Anneys looked out the window into the dusty side-yard where the broad-trunked, thickly green-leaved elm tree spread its branches to half-hide the back of the stable and byre and slowly said, “We’ve all learned not to show our thoughts or what we feel. We hide almost everything from one another. Around men like Sir Ralph and Sir William, that’s safest, but sometimes we even hide ourselves from ourselves, I think.”

  She was calm rather than bitter about it. But she was calm about most things, Frevisse had found. Except now Frevisse was coming to think it was not so much calm as the smoothness of old, old scars over deep wounds. The kind of scars that ache when the weather is wrong and sometimes hurt with shadow of their old pain. Gently, and again because she could not be sure she would have such another chance, she said, “Neither you nor anyone else cares at all that your husband is dead, do they?”

  Lady Anneys paused before answering, then said, “If by ‘cares,’ you mean ‘grieves,’ no. No one grieves for him. His death lessened, not increased, our grief here.”

  ‘No one even cares that his murderer goes unknown.“

  Again the pause. Then, “Whether we care or not makes no difference. His murderer is long gone from here and there’s an end of it.”

  ‘And you’re content with that?“

  ‘I’m content because of that.“

  From the hall came the sounds of the tables being set up for supper and servants’ voices. The girls and Sister Johane would come in from the garden soon, or Hugh come back from seeing Philippa away, and Frevisse considered quickly asking who else had left the clearing the day Sir Ralph died and what Lady Anneys might have noticed about anyone when they came back there after his death. But those questions were too open; Lady Anneys would understand too readily why she asked; and unable to think of anything else to say, Frevisse let the silence lie between them, looking out the window at the elm tree’s leaves hanging unmoving in the still, hot air.

  It was Lady Anneys who stirred and spoke first, answering something that had not been asked. “My husband was murdered. My son died by mischance. But that mischance came because of all the wrongs and ugliness my husband made while he lived. Those are deaths and griefs enough. I only want it all to be done with and forgotten and the rest of us left free to go on with our lives. I want to remember Tom and forget my husband as completely as if he had never lived.”

  And could there be worse epitaph than that for anyone, Frevisse thought. To be so hated that someone wished to forget that you had ever been at all.

  Chapter 19

  Hugh awoke too early, when only the first bird was twittering outside the loft’s small window, and lay in the darkness too long with only his thoughts and the even sound of Miles’ breathing for company. When finally the black square of the window lightened to the dark blue of dawn’s beginning and there were the sounds of the servants who slept in the kitchen below him getting up, he could no longer bear it and rolled off his bed, gathered up his clothes from on and around the stool where he had tossed them as he undressed last night, and groped his way to the ladder-steep stairs.

  Miles mumbled a question. Hugh answered, “Out,” and creaked down the steps into the passage between hall and kitchen. Bevis, lying on an old blanket put along the wall for him there, raised his great head but did not bother to rise. Hugh touched him briefly, silently letting him know everything was well, and went along the passage to let himself out the rear door into his mother’s garden. He stopped there to dress. The birds were in full choir now and the world was brightening from blue shadows into colors. By the time he went, fully dressed, out the garden gate in the already warm half-light of dawn, he could hear Helinor in the kitchen threatening Alson over something and, from above, at the far end of the hall, Lucy complaining to Ursula in their room that Ursula’s bad dreams had kept her awake in the night.

  With no particular purpose except to be away from all that household busyness beginning the day, he went to the kennel where the hounds, strewn in long-legged sprawls around the yard, lifted their heads to look at him, but only Bane rose and ambled to the fence. Degory, burrowed into sleep with an arm around Skyre’s neck on a heap of straw in a corner of the yard, stirred less readily and asked, not fully awake, “What is it?”

  ‘Nothing. I just came to see the hounds.“ He stroked Bane’s long head. ”I don’t see them enough anymore.“

  Yawning, Degory sat up with straw in his hair. Skyre sat up, too, and licked his face.

  ‘Is she doing better?“ Hugh asked.

  Degory climbed to his feet, scratching. “Better, but I doubt she’ll ever be right.” He ambled to the fence much the way Bane had. “We’re going to be short on lymers without her.”

  ‘Not if she breeds true. I’m thinking to try her with Makarie when the time comes.“

  ‘Aye, that might do. How is it with Baude? Are you going to bring her back here to whelp?“

  ‘I mean to, yes.“

  ‘I’ve her place ready for her. She can’t be long off it now.“

  They made comfortable dog-talk for a time, daylight growing around them and the manor coming well awake. The hounds roused and wandered around their yard, came to be petted, wandered off again. “What about old Bevis, then?” Degory asked. “Still following Master Miles everywhere?”


  ‘Except into the loft to sleep with us.“

  ‘Odd, that,“ Degory said on a yawn. ”Him being so much Sir Ralph’s dog but taking to Master Miles like this.“

  Hugh kept back from saying that it showed Sir Ralph had not been worth even a dog’s loyalty, but offered, “Come to that, it’s just as odd that Miles has taken to him.”

  ‘That’s true enough. Master Miles never much cared for dogs that I ever saw.“

  ‘Maybe he’ll be one of us yet. What do you say? Are you and the pack up to some hunting tomorrow?“

  ‘That we are!“ Degory exclaimed, then added hopefully, ”A hart maybe?“

  ‘I can’t take any men off the harvest to make a hart-hunt. It will have to be hare again, but I’m thinking we’ll go all the way off to Beech Heath. We haven’t coursed there since spring and Miles said he saw signs of hare in plenty of late.“

  ‘They’ll be fat and lazy by this time,“ Degory said happily. ”Ready for the hounds to tickle them up they’ll be. We’ll have to be off early though, to be ahead of the heat. Is it staying this hot?“

  ‘Gefori says there’ll be rain in a day or two.“

  ”Too much for the harvest?“

  ‘He doesn’t know.“

  ‘St. Peter bless us,“ Degory said. He slipped the latch on the gate and came out of the yard, pushed several hopeful muzzles back inside, and fastened the gate. ”I’m to breakfast. You?“

  ‘No. I’ll linger here a time. You go on.“

  Degory left and Hugh stayed where he was, a hand out to stroke heads and receive licks. The sun edged into sight over the horizon, sharpening the day to long-thrown shadows and molten gold. Hugh wished he felt that bright about the day. His heart had lightened with talk of hounds and hunting and the thought that tomorrow he’d not be bound to the manor by one duty and another but away and rid of everything save the needs of the hunt. But that was tomorrow. There was still today and then the days after tomorrow and him tethered here at the manor for most of them. Tom had had everything in hand and ready for the harvest, and the reeve saw to most of the rest, so that presently there was too little to keep himself fully busy here, just duties enough that he wasn’t free to go about such hound and hunting work as he could have otherwise.

  Dissatisfied with almost everything, he left the kennel and, vaguely minded to go to Mass, circled the stable and saw, when he reached the road toward the church, that the two nuns were ahead of him, bound the same way, their black gowns and veils dull against the morning’s late summer green-and-gold. Hugh wondered, not for the first time, if Ursula would choose that life. He hoped not. He couldn’t imagine her a nun, shut up for the rest of her life. But then he could not imagine her married, either. She was just his little sister.

  On the other hand, the sooner a husband was found for Lucy, the better. Tom had said something once about asking Master Wyck if he knew anyone in Banbury who might be suitable. That was likely the best way to go about it and he would, once the harvest was done and he had talked with Mother about it.

  By then this trouble with Master Selenger and Sir William might be settled, too—another thing off his mind.

  Ahead of him the nuns went into the church. A few village folk were going in, too, and Father Leonel would be making ready to begin the Mass, and in his mind Hugh could see it all, familiar all of his life. The short, windowless nave; the chancel hardly big enough to hold the altar; the small sheen of candlelight on the silver altar goods given by the widow who had held Woodrim before Sir Ralph bought it; the green altar cloth that Hugh could remember his mother embroidering with vines and wheatsheaves when he was small; the small, plain-glassed window high in the east gable end of the roof letting in so very little light that gray shadows filled all the rest of the church. And suddenly Hugh knew he could not go in there, to the shadows and the prayers, and already in the churchyard, halfway between gate and door, he turned aside, onto the little dirt path that curved through the churchyard and around the church.

  He would sit awhile with Tom, he thought.

  They had made Tom’s grave on the other side of the church and just outside the chancel, as near to the altar as could be without being buried inside, and the heaped earth of his grave-mound was still raw under the turfs of green grass laid over it at his burial’s end.

  Sir Ralph was buried across the churchyard, almost against the churchyard wall, the hump of his grave already well-settled, its green turfs melded together by the summer’s rains. He had made no provision in his will for where he should be buried. It had been Lady Anneys’ choice and she had pointed there, a place that would be easily lost among the other graves and grass if no one bothered to mark it with more than the plain wooden crosses that marked the village folk’s graves. Those, being wood, decayed and the graves were lost along with them as folk who might remember died in their turn. No one had known whose bones were dug up when Sir Ralph’s grave was made; their bones were simply added to the other bones piled in the small charnel house screened by yew trees at the far corner of the yard, where someday Sir Ralph’s bones would go and maybe sooner than some because no one was minded to mark his grave with even a wooden cross, let alone visit or remember it.

  Hugh meant somehow to find the money to lay a stone grave-slab over Tom, though. Even if it were only flat to the ground and carved with no more than a cross, it would be something, would mean Tom would maybe sleep undisturbed in his grave until Judgment Day.

  Hugh had no clear thought why he was going to Tom’s grave. To pray for him maybe, or just to be somewhere no one else was; but as he came around the church’s corner, he saw Miles at the churchyard’s far end, standing near the yews around the charnel house. Miles had his back to him and Hugh paused. He knew Miles came here sometimes— possibly more often than Hugh knew—to where his mother was buried.

  ‘There’s not much I remember of her,“ Miles had said once. ”She had black hair, very long. She’d let it down at bedtime and hold me on her lap and wrap it around me and tickle my ear until I curled up laughing. I remember walking somewhere with her, too. On a sunny day. Picking flowers out of the wayside grass to make a flower crown. Not much else.“

  Not much at all but enough that he still came to her grave, and Hugh’s half-thought to leave before Miles knew he was there; but Bevis lying beside Miles raised his head to look at Hugh, and Miles turned around like someone not wanting to be taken unaware from behind.

  But seeing Hugh, he waved and started toward him and Hugh waited where he was, beside Tom’s grave. Father Leonel had begun the Mass, his old voice faint from inside the church, and Miles, joining Hugh, cocked his head, listening, and asked, “You came too late to go in?”

  ‘Found I didn’t want to, once I was here.“

  ‘You were out and about early, gone when I awoke. Where’ve you been?“

  ‘To see the hounds. I’m thinking to have a hare-hunt at Beech Heath tomorrow, to give them a run and bring in some fresh meat. Bevis ought to come. Will you?“ Before Miles could answer, Hugh felt bound to add, ”I’m going to ask Sir William if he wants to join us.“

  ‘Why?“ Miles asked, more rude than curious.

  ‘Because we can’t afford to have him angry at us.“

  ‘What about our being angry at him?“

  ‘We can’t afford that either. Not when there’s no point to it.“

  ‘There wasn’t any point to Tom’s death either.“

  ‘That wasn’t meant, Miles. I was there. I know.“

  ‘Tom is dead, whether it was meant or not,“ Miles said bitterly.

  Hugh abruptly sank down on an old grave’s low green mound across the path from Tom’s unweathered one, drew up his legs, wrapped his arms around his knees, bent forward to press his forehead onto them, and said miserably, his eyes tightly shut to close out the world, “God’s mercy. I’m so tired.” He didn’t mean “tired.” He meant “in pain” but he didn’t know how to talk about pain, or about the fear or the wariness or the darkness in him. W
hen Sir Ralph was alive, he had known what the pain was for, had known from where all of it—the pain, the fear, the wariness, the darkness—came. Now Sir Ralph was gone and all of those things should have gone, too. But they hadn’t. They were all still with him.

  The difference was that he no longer knew the reason for them.

  And he was afraid to find out.

  Miles sat down beside him on the grave-mound, briefly touched his shoulder, and said with the rare gentleness that was always a surprise from him, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

  Without lifting his head, Hugh rolled it from side to side, refusing Miles’ guilt. “You didn’t do it. It’s me. Everything is wrong since Tom died and I doubt I can ever make it better.”

  ‘You’re doing well at it,“ Miles said. ”Give it time.“

  ‘I’d rather give it away. All of it.“

  ‘Not until you’ve married Lucy and Ursula off, and by then your own wife, whoever she is, won’t let you.“