Ellis Peters - The Hermit of Eyton Forest

“You shall have company,” she promised, seizing on one complaint to which she could provide a complaisant answer. “I’ll send your bride to keep you company. I want you to get to know her better now, for after today she’ll return to Wroxeter with her father, and you, Richard,” she said warningly and with a sharpening eye on him, “will return with me to your own manor, to take your proper place. And I shall expect you to conduct yourself properly there, and not go hankering after that school, now that you’re married and a man of substance. Eaton is yours, and that is where you should be, and I expect you to maintain that, if anyone—anyone—should call it in question. Do you understand me, sir?” He understood her very well. He was to be cajoled, intimidated, bullied into declaring, even to Brother Paul and Father Abbot if need be, that he had run home to his grandmother of his own will, and of his own will submitted to the marriage they had planned for him. He hugged his secret knowledge gleefully to his heart as he said submissively: “Yes, madam!”

“Good! And now I’ll send in Hiltrude to you, and see that you behave well to her. You will have to get used to her, and she to you, so you may as well begin now.” And she relented so far as to kiss him again on leaving him, though it resembled a slap as much as a kiss. She went out in a dusty swirl of long green skirts, and he heard the bolt shot again after her. And what had he got out of all that, except the fact that his pony was in the stable here, and if only he could get to it he might make his escape even now. But presently in came Hiltrude, as his grandmother had threatened, and all his resentment and dislike of the girl, undeserved though it was, boiled up within him into childish anger.

She still seemed to him to belong at least to the generation of the mother he could hardly remember, but she was not really utterly plain, she had a clear, pale skin and large, guarded brown eyes, and if her hair was straight and of a mousey brown colour, she had a great mass of it, plaited in a thick braid that hung to her waist. She did not look ill-natured, but she did look bitterly resigned and wretched. She stood for a moment with her back to the door, staring thoughtfully at the boy curled up glumly on his bed. “So they’ve sent you to be my guard dog,” said Richard unpleasantly. Hiltrude crossed the room and sat down on the sill of the shuttered window, and looked at him without favour. “I know you don’t like me,” she said, not sadly but with quite unexpected vigour. “Small reason why you should, and for that matter, I don’t like you. But it seems we’re both bound, no help for it now. Why, why did you ever give way? I only said I would, at last, because I was so sure you were safe enough there at the abbey, and they’d never let it come to this. And then you have to fall into their hands like a fool, and let them break you down. And here we both are, and may God help us!” She relented of the note of exasperation in her own voice, and ended with weary kindness: “It’s not your fault, you’re only a child, what could you do? And it isn’t that I dislike you, I don’t even know you, it’s just that I didn’t want you, I don’t want you, any more than you want me.”

Richard was staring at her, by this time, with mouth and eyes wide open, struck dumb with astonishment at finding her, as it were, not a token embarrassment, a millstone round his neck, but a real person with a great deal to say for herself, and by no means a fool. Slowly he uncoiled his slim legs and set his feet to the floor, to feel solid substance under him. Slowly he repeated, in a small, shocked voice: “You never wanted to marry me?”

“A baby like you?” she said, careless of offence. “No, I never did.”

“Then why did you ever agree to do it?” He was too indignant over her capitulation to resent the reflection on his years. “If you’d said no, and kept saying it, we should both have been saved.”

“Because my father is a man very hard to say no to, and had begun to tell me that I was getting too old to have another suitor, and if I didn’t take you I should be forced to enter a sisterhood and stay a maid until I died. And that I wanted even less. And I thought the abbot would keep fast hold of you, and nothing would ever be allowed to come of it. And now here we are, and what are we to do about it?”

Himself surprised at feeling an almost sympathetic curiosity about this woman who had sloughed a skin before his eyes, and emerged as vivid and real as himself, Richard asked almost shyly: “What do you want? If you could have your way, what would you like to have?”

“I would like,” said Hiltrude, her brown eyes suddenly burning with anger and loss, “a young man named Evrard, who keeps my father’s manor roll and is his steward at Wroxeter, and who likes me, too, whether you think that likely or not. But he’s a younger son and has no land, and where there’s no land to marry to his own my father has no interest. There’s an uncle who may well leave his manor to Evrard, being fond of him and childless, but land now is what my father wants, not someday and maybe land.” The fire burned down. She turned her head aside. “Why do I tell you this? You can’t understand, and it’s not your fault. There’s nothing you can do to better it.”

Richard was beginning to think that there might be something very pertinent he could do for her, if she in her turn would do something for him. Cautiously he asked: “What are they doing now, your father and my grandmother? She said you’d be going back to Wroxeter after today. What are they planning? And has Father Abbot been looking for me all this time since I left?”

“You didn’t know? Not only the abbot, but the sheriff and all his men are looking for you. They’ve searched Eaton and Wroxeter, and are beating every bush in the forest. My father was afraid they might reach here by today, but she thought not. They were wondering whether to move you back to Eaton in the night, since it’s been searched already, but Dame Dionisia felt sure the officers had several days” work left before they’d reach Leighton, and in any case, she said, if a proper watch was set there’d be ample time to put you over the river with an escort and send you down to shelter at Buildwas. Better, she said, than moving you back towards Shrewsbury yet.”

“Where are they now?” asked Richard intently. “My grandmother?”

“She’s ridden back to Eaton to have everything there looking just as it should. Her hermit went back to his cell in the night. It wouldn’t do if anyone knew he’d been away.”

“And your father?”

“He’s out and about among his tenants here, but he’ll not be far away. He took his clerk with him. There’ll be dues unpaid that he wants collected, I daresay.” She was indifferent to her father’s movements, but she did feel some curiosity as to what was going on in this child’s head, to sharpen his voice into such hopeful purpose, and brighten his disconsolate eye. “Why? What is there in that for you? Or for me!” she added bitterly.

“There might,” said Richard, beginning to glitter, “be something I can do for you, something good, if you’ll do something for me in return. If they’re both out of the house, help me to get away while they’re gone. My pony’s there in the stable, she told me as much. If I could get to him and slip away, you could bolt the door again, and no one would know I was gone until evening.” She shook her head decisively. “And who would get the blame? I wouldn’t put it off on to one of the servants, and I’ve no great appetite for it myself. The troubles I already have are enough for me, I thank you!” But she added warily, seeing that his hopeful fire was by no means quenched: “But I would be willing to think out the best means, if I thought it would solve anything for me. But how can it? For a fair deliverance I’d venture anything Father could say or do. But what’s the use, when we’re tied together as we are, and no way out?” Richard bounded up from his bed and darted across the room to settle confidingly beside her on the broad sill. Close to her ear he said breathlessly: “If I tell you a secret, will you swear to keep it until I’m safely away, and help me to get out of here? I promise you, I promise you it will be worth your while.”