Hermit of Eyton Forest (29 page)

“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.”

Cadfael
sat back with a deep and grateful sigh, and leaned his head against the rough
stones of the wall, and there was a long but tranquil silence between them.
Hugh stirred at last, and asked: “How did you come to know what he was about?
There must have been more than that first encounter, to draw you into his
secrets. He said little, he hunted alone. What more happened, to bring you so
close to him?”

“I
was with him when he dropped some coins into our alms box. One of them fell to
the flags, and I picked it up. A silver penny of the empress, minted recently
in Oxford. He made no secret of it. Did I not wonder, he said, what the
empress’s liegeman was doing so far from the battle? And I drew a bow at a very
long venture, and said he might well be looking for the murderer who robbed and
slew Renaud Bourchier on the road to Wallingford.”

“And
he owned it?” said Hugh.

“No.
He said no, it was not so. It was a good thought, he said, almost he wished it
had been true, but it was not so. And he told truth. Every word he ever said to
me was truth, and I knew it. No, Cuthred was not a murderer, not then, never
until Drogo Bosiet walked into his cell to enquire after a runaway villein, and
came face to face with a man he had seen, talked with, played chess with, at
Thame some weeks before, in a very different guise. A man who bore arms and
showed knightly, but went the roads on foot, for there was no horse belonging
to him in the stable at Thame, none that came with him, none that departed with
him. And this was early in October. All this Aymer told us, after his father
had been silenced.”

“I
begin,” said Hugh slowly, “to read your riddle.” He narrowed his eyes upon
distance, through the half-naked branches of the trees that showed above the
southern wall of the garden. “When did you ever question so far astray without
a purpose? I should have known when you asked about the horse. A rider without
a horse at Thame and a horse without a rider wandering the woods by the
Wallingford road make sense when put together. No!” he said in shocked and
outraged protest, staring aghast at the image he had raised. “Where have you
brought me? Is this truth, or have I shot wild? Bourchier himself?” The first
tremor of the evening chill shook the harvested and sleepy herbs with a colder
wind, and Hugh shook with them in a convulsion of incredulous distaste. “What
could be worth so monstrous a treason? This was fouler than murder.”

“So
thought Rafe de Genville. And he has taken vengeance for it in measure
accordingly. And he is gone, and I wished him godspeed in his going.”

“So
would I have done. So I do!” said Hugh, and stared across the garden with lips
curled in fastidious disdain, contemplating the enormity of the chosen and
deliberate dishonour. “There is nothing, there can be nothing, worth purchasing
at such a price.”

“Renaud
Bourchier thought otherwise, having other values. He gained his life and
liberty first,” said Cadfael, checking off the score on his fingers, and
shaking his head over every item. “By sending him out of Oxford before the ring
of steel shut fast, she released him to make off into safer pastures. Not that
I believe he had even the excuse of being a simple coward. Quite coldly, I
fancy, he preferred to remove himself from the risk of death or capture, which
have come closer to her armies there in Oxford than ever they came before.
Coldly and practically he severed all his ties of fealty, and retired into
obscurity to look round for the next opportunity. Second, with the theft of the
treasure she entrusted to him he had ample means to live, wherever he might go.
And third, and worst of all, he had a powerful weapon, one which could be used
to secure him new soldier service, and lands, and favour, a new and profitable
career to replace the one he had discarded. The letter the empress had written
to Brian FitzCount.”

“In
the breviary that vanished,” said Hugh. “I knew no way of accounting for that,
though the book had a value even for itself.”

“It
had a greater value for what was in it. Rafe told me. A fine leaf of vellum can
be folded into the binding. Only consider, Hugh, her situation when she wrote.
The town lost, only the castle left, and the king’s armies closing round her.
And Brian who had been her right hand, her shield and sword, second only to her
brother, separated from her by those few miles that could as well have been an
ocean. God knows if those gossips are right,” said Cadfael, “who declare that
those two are lovers, but surely it is truth that they love! And now at this
extreme, in peril of starvation, failure, imprisonment, loss, even death,
perhaps never to meet again, may she not have cried out to him the last truth,
without conceal, things that should not be set down, things no other on earth
should ever see? Such a letter might be of immense value to a man without
scruples, who had a new career to make, and needed the favour of princes. She
has a husband years younger than herself, who has no great love for her, nor
she for him, one who would not spare a man to come to her aid this summer.
Suppose that some day it should be convenient to Geoffrey to repudiate his
older wife, and make a second profitable marriage? In the hands of such as
Bourchier her letter, her own hand, might provide him the pretext, and for
princes the means can always be found. The informer might stand to gain place,
command, even lands in Normandy. Geoffrey has castles newly conquered there to
bestow on those who prove useful to him. I don’t say the count of Anjou is such
a man, but I do say so calculating a traitor as Bourchier would reckon it a
possibility, and keep the letter to be used as chance offered. What knowledge,
what suspicion, brought Rafe de Genville to doubt that death by the Wallingford
road I do not know, I never asked. Certain it is that once the spark was lit,
nothing would have prevented him from pursuing and exacting the penalty due,
not from some supposed murderer—he told me truth there—but from the thief and
traitor, Renaud Bourchier himself.”

The
wind was rising now, the sky clearing, the broken fragments of cloud that
remained scudding away before the wind. For the first time the prolonged autumn
hinted at winter.

“I
would have done as Rafe did,” said Hugh with finality, and rose abruptly to
shake off the residue of loathing.

“When
I bore arms, so would I. It grows chilly,” said Cadfael, rising after him.

“Shall
we go in?”

Late
November would soon be tearing away with frost and gales the rest of the
quivering leaves. The deserted hermitage in the woods of Eyton would provide
winter cover for the small beasts of the forest, and the garden, running wild
again, would shelter the slumbering urchins in their nests through the winter
sleep. Doubtful if Dame Dionisia would ever set up another hermit in that cell.
The wild things would occupy it in innocence.

“Well,”
said Cadfael, leading the way into his workshop, “that’s over. Late but at
last, whatever she may have written to him, her letter is on the way to the man
for whose heart’s comfort it was intended. And I am glad! Whatever the rights
or wrongs of their affection, in the teeth of danger and despair love is
entitled to speak its mind, and all others should be blind and deaf. Except
God, who can read both the lines and between the lines, and who in the end, in
matters of passion as in matters of justice, will have the last word.”

About
the Author

ELLIS PETERS is
the
nom-de-crime
of English novelist Edith Pargeter, author of scores of
books under her own name. She is the recipient of the Silver Dagger Award,
conferred by the Crime Writers Association in Britain, as well as the coveted
Edgar, awarded by the Mystery Writers of America. Miss Pargeter is also well
known as a translator of poetry and prose from the Czech and has been awarded
the Gold Medal and Ribbon of the Czechoslovak Society for Foreign Relations for
her services to Czech literature. She passed away in 1995, at the age of 82, at
home in her beloved Shropshire.