Ellis Peters - The Hermit of Eyton Forest

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.