Ellis Peters - The Hermit of Eyton Forest

“Good even, Brother!” Matched in height and pace, they fell naturally into step together as they turned towards the south porch. “I hope to be held excused,” said Rafe, “for coming to church booted and spurred and dusty from riding, but I came late, and had no time to make myself seemly.”

“Most welcome, however you come,” said Cadfael. “Not everyone who lodges with us shows his face in the church. I’ve had small chance to see you these two days, I’ve been out and about myself. Have you had successful dealing in these parts?”

“Better, at least, than one of your guests,” said Rafe, casting a side glance at the narrow door that led towards the mortuary chapel. “But no, I would not say I’ve found quite what I needed. Not yet!”

“His son is here now,” said Cadfael, following the glance. “This morning he came.”

“I have seen him,” said Rafe. “He came back from the town just before Vespers. By the look and the sound of him he’s done none too well, either, with whatever he’s about. I suppose it’s a man he’s after?”

“It is. The young man I told you of,” said Cadfael drily, and studied his companion sidelong as they crossed the lighted parish altar. “Yes, I remember. Then he’s come back empty-handed, no poor wretch tethered to his stirrup leather.” But Rafe remained tolerantly indifferent to young men, and indeed to the Bosiet clan. His thoughts were somewhere else. At the alms box beside the altar he stopped, on impulse, and dug a hand into the pouch slung at his waist, to draw out a handful of coins. One of them slipped through his fingers, but he did not immediately stoop to pick it up, but dropped three of its fellows into the box before he turned to look for the stray. By which time Cadfael had lifted it from the tiled floor, and had it in his open palm. If they had not been standing where the altar candles gave a clear light he would have noticed nothing strange about it. A silver penny like other silver pennies, the universal coin. Yet not quite like any he had seen before in the alms boxes. It was bright and untarnished, but indifferently struck, and it felt light in the hand. Clumsily arrayed round the short cross on the reverse, the moneyer’s name appeared to be Sigebert, a minter Cadfael never remembered to have heard of in the midlands. And when he turned it, the crude head was not Stephen’s familiar profile, nor dead King Henry’s, but unmistakably a woman’s, coifed and coroneted. It hardly needed the name sprawled round the rim: “Matilda Dom. Ang.” The empress’s formal name and title. It seemed her mintage was short-weight.

He looked up to find Rafe watching him steadily, and with a small private smile that held more irony than simple amusement. There was a moment of silence while they eyed each other. Then: “Yes,” said Rafe, “you are right. It would have been noted after I was gone. But it has a value, even here. Your beggars will not reject it because it was struck in Oxford.”

“And no long time ago,” said Cadfael.

“No long time ago.”

“My besetting sin,” said Cadfael ruefully, “is curiosity.” He held out the coin, and Rafe took it as gravely, and with deliberation dropped it after its fellows into the alms box. “But I am not loose-mouthed. Nor do I hold any honest man’s allegiance against him. A pity there should have to be factions, and decent men fighting one another, and all of them convinced they have the right of it. Come and go freely for me.”

“And does your curiosity not extend,” wondered Rafe softly, the wry smile perceptible in his voice, “to wondering what such a man is doing here, so far from the battle? Come, I am sure you have guessed at what I am. Perhaps you think I felt it the wiser part to get out of Oxford before it was too late?”

“No,” said Cadfael positively, “that never did and never would enter my mind. Not of you! And why should so discreet a man as that venture north into king’s country?”

“No, granted that argues very little wisdom,” agreed Rafe. “What would you guess then?”

“I can think of one possibility,” said Cadfael gravely and quietly. “We heard here of one man who did not take flight of his own will out of Oxford, while there was time, but was sent. On his lady’s business, and with that about him well worth stealing. And that he did not get far, for his horse was found straying and blood-stained, all that he had carried gone, and the man himself vanished from the face of the earth.” Rafe was watching him attentively, his face unreadable as ever, the lingering smile sombre but untroubled. “Such a man as you seem to me,” said Cadfael, “might well have come so far north from Oxford looking for Renaud Bourchier’s murderer.”

Their eyes held, mutually accepting, even approving, what they saw. Slowly and with absolute finality Rafe of Coventry said: “No.” He stirred and sighed, breaking the spell of the brief but profound silence that followed. “I am sorry, Brother, but no, you have not read me right. I am not looking for Bourchier’s murderer. It was a good thought, almost I wish it had been true. But it is not.”

And with that he moved on towards the south door, and out into the early twilight in the cloister, and Brother Cadfael followed in silence, asking and offering nothing more. He knew truth when he heard it.

IT WAS ABOUT THE SAME HOUR that Cadfael and Rafe of Coventry emerged from the church after Vespers, when Hyacinth stole out from Eilmund’s cottage, and made his way through the deepest cover towards the river. He had been all that day pinned close within doors, for there had again been men of the garrison sweeping through the forest, and though their passage was rapid and cursory, for the aim was to carry the search further afield, and though they knew Eilmund, and felt no compulsion to investigate his holding a second time, they were still liable to look in on him in neighbourly fashion as they passed, and ask him casually if anything of note had come to his attention. Hyacinth did not take kindly to being shut within doors, nor, indeed, to hiding. By the evening he was chafing at his confinement, but by then the hunters were on their way back, abandoning the chase until the morrow, and he was free to do a little hunting of his own. For all the wariness and fear he felt on his own account, and admitted with his infallible and fiery honesty, he could not rest for thinking of Richard, who had come running to warn him, so gallantly and thoughtlessly. But for that the boy would never have placed himself in danger. But why should there be danger to him in his own woods, among his own people? In a troubled England there were lawless men living wild, no doubt of that, but this shire had gone almost untouched by the war for more than four years now, and seemed to enjoy a degree of peace and order unmatched further south, and the town was barely seven miles distant, and the sheriff active and young, and even, so far as a sheriff can be, popular with his people. And the more Hyacinth thought about it, the more clear did it seem to him that the only threat to Richard that he had ever heard of was Dame Dionisia’s threat to marry him off to the two manors she coveted. For that she had persisted in every device she could think of. Hyacinth had been her instrument once, and could not forget it. She must be the force behind the boy’s disappearance.

True, the sheriff had descended on Eaton, searched every corner, and found no trace, and no one, in a household devoted to the boy, able to cast the least suspicion on Dionisia’s indignant innocence. She had no other property where she could hide either boy or pony. And though Fulke Astley might be willing to connive, feeling that he had as good a chance of securing Eaton as she had of getting her hands on his daughter’s inheritance, yet Wroxeter also had been searched thoroughly, and without success.