The Hermit of Eyton Forest

by Ellis Peters

  “Whichever is pleasing to Annet,” said Hyacinth. “It’s she will be calling me by it from this on lifelong.”

  “I might have something to say to that,” grunted Eilmund from his corner on the other side of the hearth. “You mind your impudence, or I’ll make you sweat for my good will.” But he sounded remarkably complacent about it, as though they had already arrived at an understanding to which this admonitory growl was merely a gruff counterpoint.

  “It was Hyacinth first pleased me,” said Annet. She had kept herself out of the circle until now, like a dutiful daughter, attentive with cup and pitcher, but wanting and needing no voice in the men’s affairs. Not from modesty or submission Cadfael judged, but because she already had what she wanted, and was assured no one, sheriff nor father nor overlord, had either the power or the will to wrest it from her. “You stay Hyacinth,” she said serenely, “and let Brand go.”

  She was wise, there was no sense in going back, none even in looking back. Brand had been a villein and landless in Northamptonshire, Hyacinth would be a craftsman and free in Shrewsbury.

  “In a year and a day,” said Hyacinth, “from the day I find a master to take me, I’ll come and ask for your good will, Master Eilmund. Not before!”

  “And if I think you’ve earned it,” said Eilmund, “you shall have it.”

  *

  They rode home together in the deepening dusk, as they had so often ridden together since first they encountered in wary contention, wit against wit, and came to a gratifying stand at the end of the match, fast friends. The night was still and mild, the morning would be misty again, the lush valley fields a translucent blue sea. The forest smelled of autumn, ripe, moist earth, bursting fungus, the sweet, rich rot of leaves.

  “I have transgressed against my vocation,” said Cadfael, at once solaced and saddened by the season and the hour. “I know it. I undertook the monastic life, but now I am not sure I could support it without you, without these stolen excursions outside the walls. For so they are. True, I am often sent upon legitimate labours here without, but also I steal, I take more than is my due by right. Worse, Hugh, I do not repent me! Do you suppose there is room within the bounds of grace for one who has set his hand to the plough, and every little while abandons his furrow to turn back among the sheep and lambs?”

  “I think the sheep and lambs might think so,” said Hugh, gravely smiling. “He would have their prayers. Even the black sheep and the grey, like some you’ve argued for against God and me in your time.”

  “There are very few all black,” said Cadfael. “Dappled, perhaps, like this great rangy beast you choose to ride. Most of us have a few mottles about us. As well, maybe, it makes for a more tolerant judgement of the rest of God’s creatures. But I have sinned, and most of all in relishing my sin. I shall do penance by biding dutifully within the walls through the winter, unless I’m sent forth, and then I’ll make haste with my task and hurry back.”

  “Until the next waif stumbles across your path. And when is this penance to begin?”

  “As soon as this matter is fittingly ended.”

  “Why, these are oracular utterances!” said Hugh, laughing. “And when will that be?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Cadfael. “If God wills, tomorrow.”

  Chapter 14

  ON HIS WAY DOWN the court to the stables, leading his horse, and with the better part of an hour left before Compline, Cadfael saw Dame Dionisia coming from the abbot’s lodging, and walking with sober step and decorously covered head towards the guest hall. Her back was as erect as ever, her gait as firm and proud, but somewhat slower than was her wont, and the draped head was lowered, with eyes on the ground rather than fixed challengingly into the distance before her. Not a word would ever be said concerning her confession, but Cadfael doubted if she had left anything out. She was not one to do things by halves. There would be no more attempts to extract Richard from the abbot’s care. Dionisia had suffered too profound a reverse to take any such risks again until time had dimmed the recollection of sudden unshriven death coming to meet her.

  It seemed she meant to stay overnight, perhaps to make her peace tomorrow, in her own arbitrary fashion, with a grandson by this time fast asleep in his bed, blessedly unmarried still, and back where he preferred to be. The boys would sleep well tonight, absolved of their sins and with their lost member restored. Matter for devout thanksgiving. And as for the dead man in the mortuary chapel, bearing a name which it seemed could hardly be his name, he cast no shadow on the world of the children.

  Cadfael led his horse into the stable yard, lighted by two torches at the gate, unsaddled him and rubbed him down. There was no sound within there but a small sighing of the breeze that had sprung up with evening, and the occasional easy shift and stir of hooves in the stalls. He stabled his beast and hung up his harness, and turned to depart.

  There was someone standing in the gateway, compact and still. “Good even, Brother!” said Rafe of Coventry.

  “Is it you?” said Cadfael. “And were you looking for me? I’m sorry to have kept you up late, and you with a journey to make in the morning.”

  “I saw you come down the court. You made an offer,” said the quiet voice. “If it is still open I should like to take advantage of it. I find it is not so easy to dress a wound neatly with one hand.”

  “Come!” said Cadfael. “Let’s go to my hut in the garden, we can be private there.”

  It was deep dusk, but not yet dark. The late roses in the garden loomed spikily on overgrown stems, half their leaves shed, ghostly floating pallors in the dimness. Within the walls of the herb garden, high and sheltering, warmth lingered. “Wait,” said Cadfael, “till I make light.”

  It took him a few minutes to get a spark he could blow gently into flame, and set to the wick of his lamp. Rafe waited without murmur or movement until the light burned up steadily, and then came into the hut and looked about him with interest at the array of jars and flasks, the scales and mortars, and the rustling bunches of herbs overhead, stirring headily in the draught from the doorway. Silently he stripped off his coat, and drew down his shirt from the shoulder until he could withdraw his arm from the sleeve. Cadfael brought the lamp, and set it where the light would best illuminate the stained and crumpled bandage that covered the wound. Rafe sat patient and attentive on the bench against the wall, steadily eyeing the weathered face that stooped over him.

  “Brother,” he said deliberately, “I think I owe you a name.”

  “I have a name for you,” said Cadfael. “Rafe is enough.”

  “For you, perhaps. Not for me. Where I take help, generously given, there I repay with truth. My name is Rafe de Genville…”

  “Hold still now,” said Cadfael. “This is stuck fast, and will hurt.”

  The soiled dressing came away with a wrench, but if it did indeed hurt, de Genville suffered it as indifferently as he did the foregoing pain. The gash was long, running down from the shoulder into the upper arm, but not deep; but the flesh was so sliced that the lips gaped, and a single hand had not been able to clamp them together. “Keep still! We can better this, you’ll have an ugly scar else. But you’ll need help when it’s dressed again.”

  “Once away from here I can get help, and who’s to know how I got the gash? But you do know, Brother. He drew blood, you said. There is not very much you do not know, but perhaps a little I can still tell you. My name is Rafe de Genville, I am a vassal, and God knows a friend to Brian FitzCount, and a liege man to my overlord’s lady, the empress. I will not suffer gross wrong to be done to either, while I have my life. Well, he’ll draw no more blood, neither from any of the king’s party nor oversea, in the service of Geoffrey of Anjou—which I think was his final intent, when the time seemed right.”

  Cadfael folded a new dressing closely about the long gash. “Lend your right hand here, and hold this firmly, it shuts the wound fast. You’ll get no more bleeding, or very little, and it should heal closed. But rest it as best you can
on the road.”

  “I will so.” The bandage rolled firmly over the shoulder and round the arm, flat and neat. “You have a skilled hand, Brother. If I could I would take you with me as a prize of war.”

  “They’ll have need of all the surgeons and physicians they can get in Oxford, I fear,” Cadfael acknowledged ruefully.

  “Ah, not there, not this tide. There’ll be no breaking into Oxford until the earl brings up his army. I doubt it even then. No, I go back to Brian at Wallingford first, to restore him what is his.”

  Cadfael secured the bandage above the elbow, and held the sleeve of the shirt carefully as Rafe thrust his arm back into it. It was done. Cadfael sat down beside him, face to face, eye to eye. The silence that came down upon them was like the night, mild, tranquil, gently melancholy. “It was a fair fight,” said Rafe after a long pause, looking into and through Cadfael’s eyes to see again the bare stony chapel in the forest. “I laid by my sword, seeing he had none. His dagger he’d kept.”

  “And used,” said Cadfael, “on the man who had seen him in his own shape at Thame, and might have called his vocation in question. As the son did, after Cuthred was dead, and never knew he was looking at his father’s murderer.”

  “Ah, so that was it! I wondered.”

  “And did you find what you came for?”

  “I came for him,” said Rafe grimly. “But, yes, I understand you. Yes, I found it, in the reliquary on the altar. Not all in coin. Gems go into a small compass, and are easily carried. Her own jewels, that she valued. And valued even more the man to whom she sent them.”

  “They said that there was also a letter.”

  “There is a letter. I have it. You saw the breviary?”

  “I saw it. A prince’s book.”

  “An empress’s. There is a secret fold in the binding, where a fine, small leaf can be hidden. When they were apart, the breviary went back and forth between them by trusted messenger. God he knows what she may not have written to him now, at the lowest ebb of fortune, separated from him by a few miles that might as well be the width of the world, and with the king’s army gripping her and her few to strangulation. In the extreme of despair, who regards wisdom, who puts a guard on tongue or pen? I have not sought to know. He shall have it and read it for whose heart’s consolation it was meant. One other has read it, and might have made use of it,” said Rafe harshly, “but he is of no account now.”

  His voice had gathered a great tide of passion that yet could not disrupt its steely control, though it caused his disciplined body to quiver like an arrow in flight, vibrating to the force of his devoted love and implacable hate. The letter he carried, with its broken seal as testimony to a cold and loathsome treachery, he would never unfold, the matter within was sacred as the confessional, between the woman who had written and the man to whom it was written. Cuthred had trespassed even into this holy ground, but Cuthred was dead. It did not seem to Cadfael that the penalty was too great for the wrong committed.

  “Tell me, Brother,” said Rafe de Genville, the wave of passion subsiding into his customary calm, “was this sin?”

  “What do you need from me?” said Cadfael. “Ask your confessor when you come safely to Wallingford. All I know is, time has been when I would have done as you have done.”

  Whether de Genville’s secret would be preserved inviolate was a question never asked, the answer being already clearly understood between them. “This is better than by morning,” said Rafe, rising. “Your order of hours tomorrow need not be broken, and I can be away early, and leave my place cleansed and furbished and ready for another guest, and travel the lighter because I do not go without a fair witness. I’ll say my farewell here. God be with you, Brother!”

  “And go with you,” said Cadfael.

  He was gone, out into the gathering darkness, his step firm and even on the gravel path, silent when he reached the grass beyond. And sharp upon the last slight sound of his going, the bell rang distantly for Compline.

  *

  Cadfael went down into the stables before Prime, in a morning dry and sunny but chill, a good day for riding. The bright chestnut with the white brow was gone from his stall. It seemed empty and quiet there, but for the cheerful chirpings of chatter and laughter from the last stall, where Richard had come down early to pet and make much of his pony for carrying him so bravely, with Edwin, happily restored to grace and to the company of his playmate, in loyal attendance. They were making a merry noise like a brood of young swallows, until they heard Cadfael come, and then they fell to a very prim and seemly quietness until they peeped out and saw that he was neither Brother Jerome nor Prior Robert. By way of apology they favoured him with broad and bountiful smiles, and went back to the pony’s stall to caress and admire him.

  Cadfael could not but wonder if Dame Dionisia had already visited her grandson, and gone as far as such a matriarch could be expected to go to reestablish her standing with him. There would certainly be no self-abasement. Something of a self-justifying homily, rather: “Richard, I have been considering your future with the abbot, and I have consented to leave you in his care for the present. I was grossly deceived in Cuthred, he was not a priest, as he pretended. That episode is over, we had all better forget it.” And she would surely end with something like: “If I let you remain here, sir, take care that I get good reports of you. Be obedient to your masters and attend to your books…” And on leaving him, a kiss perhaps a little kinder than usual, or at least a little more warily respectful, seeing all he could relate against her if he cared to. But Richard triumphant, released from all anxieties for himself and others who mattered to him, bore no grudge against anyone in the world.

  By this hour Rafe de Genville, vassal and friend of Brian FitzCount and loyal servitor of the Empress Maud, must be well away from Shrewsbury on his long ride south. So quiet, unobtrusive and unremarkable a man, he had hardly been noticed even while he remained here, his stay would soon be forgotten.

  *

  “He is gone,” said Cadfael. “I would not slough off the burden of choice on to you, though I think I know what you would have done. But I have done it for you. He is gone, and I let him go.”

  They were sitting together, as so often they had sat at the last ebb of a crisis, weary but eased, on the seat against the north wall of the herbarium, where the warmth of noonday lingered and the light wind was shut out. In another week or two it would be too cold and bleak for comfort here. This prolonged mild autumn could not last much longer, the weather-wise were beginning to sniff the air and foretell the first hard frost, and plentiful snow to come in December.

  “I have not forgotten,” said Hugh, “that this is the tomorrow when you promised me a fitting ending. So he is gone! And you let him go! Another he, not Bosiet. You were aching for him to tire of his vengeance and depart, more likely to urge him away than try to prevent. Say on, I’m listening.”

  He was always a good listener, not given to exclamation or needless questions, he could sit gazing meditatively across the dishevelled garden in receptive silence, and never trouble his companion with a glance, and never miss a word, nor need many of them for understanding.

  “I am in need of the confessional, if you will be my priest,” said Cadfael.

  “And keep your confidences as tightly sealed—I know! My answer is yes. I never yet found you in need of absolution from me. Who is this he who is gone?”

  “His name,” said Cadfael, “is Rafe de Genville, though here he called himself Rafe of Coventry, a falconer to the earl of Warwick.”

  “The quiet elder with the chestnut horse? I never saw him but the once, I think,” said Hugh. “He was one guest here who had nothing to ask of me, and I was grateful for it, having my hands full of Bosiets. And what had Rafe of Coventry done, that either you or I should hesitate to let him go?”

  “He had killed Cuthred. In fair fight. He laid his sword by, because Cuthred had none. Dagger against dagger he fought and killed him.” Hugh had said no word,
only turned his head towards his friend for a moment, studied with penetrating attention the set of Cadfael’s face, and waited. “For good reason,” said Cadfael. “You’ll not have forgotten the tale we heard of the empress’s messenger sent out of Oxford, just as King Stephen shut his iron ring round the castle. Sent forth with money and jewels and a letter for Brian FitzCount, cut off from her in Wallingford. And how they found his horse straying in the woods along the road, with blood-stained harness and empty saddlebags. The body they never found. The Thames runs close. There’s room in the woods for a grave. So the lord of Wallingford was robbed of the empress’s treasure. He has beggared himself for her long ago, ungrudging, and his garrison must eat. And the letter meant for him was stolen along with all the rest. And Rafe de Genville is vassal and devoted friend to Brian FitzCount, and loyal liegeman to the empress, and was not minded to let that crime go unavenged.

  “What traces he found along the way to bring him into these parts I never asked, and he never told me, but bring him they did. The day he came I met with him in the stables, and by chance it came out that we had Drogo Bosiet lying dead in the mortuary chapel. I recall that I had not mentioned the name, but perhaps if I had he would still have done what he did, since names can be changed. He went straightway to look at this dead man, but at a glance he lost all interest in him. He was looking for someone, a guest here, a stranger, a traveller, but it was not Bosiet. In a young fellow of twenty, like Hyacinth, he had no interest at all. It was a man of his own years and estate he was seeking. Dame Dionisia’s holy man he must surely have heard about, but dismissed him as priest and pilgrim, vouched for and above suspicion. Until he heard, as we all did, young Richard bellow that the hermit was no priest but a cheat. I looked for Rafe afterwards, and he and his horse were gone. It was an impostor and cheat he was looking for. And he found him, Hugh, that night at the hermitage. Found him, fought him, killed him. And took back all that he had stolen, jewels and coin from the casket on the altar, and the breviary that belonged to the empress, and was used to carry letters between her and FitzCount when they were apart. You’ll recall that Cuthred’s dagger was bloodied. I have dressed Rafe de Genville’s wound, I have received his confidence as I have now delivered you mine, and I have wished him godspeed back to Wallingford.”