My Lord, the Hermit Read online

She lifted her bowed head. ‘Do you pray, Midge?’

  ‘Aye, lady. When I am in the mood for folly.’

  ‘Pray for me, then. You said I feared nothing, but I have just learned the meaning of fear.’

  She spurred her horse forward across the drawbridge. Midge crossed himself, looked back at the dark ridge behind them, and then rode after her. The drawbridge of the castle was pulled up, and the portcullis lowered. Lights flickered at windows in the great keep, and shadowy figures bustled about the courtyard, carrying dishes from the kitchens to the hall for the evening meal.

  The ladies of the Count’s household slept in the upper storeys of the keep, in rooms leading either out of that occupied by the Count’s mother, or of those occupied by the Lady Floria, an elderly relation. Joanna had been allocated a bed in the room shared by the unmarried daughters of the Count. Joyeuse and her much younger sister Maid slept in the big bed with the red curtains. Joanna slept in a smaller bed without curtains, and the woman who acted as tirewoman to all three girls slept in a truckle bed beside the wall.

  Usually Joanna’s toilet was sketchy; she was washed, had shrugged on her clothes, plaited her hair and was out of the room before her cousins arose. Today she sat on by the fire, pulling a comb through her hair.

  Joyeuse was a pale, willowy girl, with pale, straight hair. She was very proud of her long locks, and would often wear her hair loose, and set a wreath of flowers on her head.

  ‘Are you unwell, cousin?’ Joyeuse asked, as she laid the hand mirror aside.

  Joanna shook her head. ‘I wish I had hair like yours.’

  ‘It would be well enough,’ said the tirewoman, ‘if you let me dress it for you.’

  Joanna shrugged herself into her dress with furious energy. The right sleeve was still caught up with Keren’s brooch. She fingered it, remembering. The skin lay new and reddened over her grazed arm, but there was no pain, no swelling.

  ‘May I help?’ The tirewoman laced Joanna’s dress at the sides.

  ‘I like the sleeve caught up like this, but it looks odd, don’t you think?’

  ‘My lady has beautiful arms.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Joanna held them out and looked at them. They were well covered, and strong, like everything about her. Hair, skin, limbs; all bore testimony of good health, but Joanna didn’t think they were particularly beautiful. Her arms were just arms to her. Yet Keren had held her arm as if. …

  ‘My lady has something on her mind today?’ The tirewoman had plaited blue ribbons into Joanna’s hair. She held up the mirror, that Joanna might see the effect.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Joanna, with a guilty start. ‘Are we to hunt today? I do not usually take so long to dress.’

  The tirewoman slipped a length of the same blue ribbon through the neck of Joanna’s dress, and under the sleeve, gathering it up to the shoulder.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ said Joanna. ‘Though I prefer the brooch. If only there were two of them, I could wear one on each side.’

  ‘It is good to see you taking an interest in your appearance at last. It is indeed a pretty brooch. Did my Lord Julian give it to you? I could ask the jeweller if he could copy it. Then you could wear two, one at either shoulder.’

  A page scratched at the door. The Count wished to see her at once.

  The Count’s wife had died some years previously, and the domestic affairs of the castle were in the hands of his widowed mother. Both mother and son were stout and short of temper. Joanna wondered how they had come to produce such well-favoured children as Julian and Joyeuse. Joanna dutifully made her way to the solar, where she found not only the Count and his mother, but also Father Hilarion.

  She dipped into a curtsy. ‘My lord, my lady. Father. I trust you slept well. Do we hunt again today?’

  ‘No, not for several days. You were slightly hurt yesterday, they tell me. You must let Father Hilarion see your arm.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Joanna, putting her arms behind her. ‘It is gone, now. You wished to speak with me?’

  ‘Yes. We do not wish you to go beyond the bounds of the castle at present. I know you like to ride out every day, but for the time being you will keep to the meadows around the castle. There has been some trouble with Sir Bevil. Three of our horses, which were turned out to grass, have been found with tails, ears and lips cut off.’ The Count’s colour rose, as he remembered his wrongs. ‘The fool! Does he think to make me change my mind by such petty acts of vandalism?’ He took out a handkerchief, and mopped his brow. The Countess said ‘Tut!’ in sympathy. The sound of the Count’s heavy breathing filled the room.

  ‘I dare say Joanna knows nothing of the matter,’ said the Countess. Addressing her great niece, she went on, ‘We had entered into certain, very tentative, arrangements with Sir Bevil, with a view to Julian’s marrying his daughter. Nothing was settled, I assure you. Nothing at all. The man has no right to complain. …’

  ‘Complain!’ said the Count, shooting out both hands.

  ‘Well, perhaps more than complain,’ conceded his mother. Turning to Joanna, she continued. ‘It is quite out of the question, now, of course. For one thing, the man supports the rebel Barons in their fight against the King.’ John had died recently, but the revolt which had started in his lifetime, and which had called foreign troops to England, had not yet died down. The country was fairly divided between those who fought for the existing monarchy, and those who backed the claims of French Louis to the throne. The Count favoured the infant son of King John, and Sir Bevil favoured French intervention. Neither was altruistic in his motive, and there was more behind the breaking of the match between Julian and the lady Blanche than was apparent at first sight.

  ‘… the man is a brute,’ said the Countess. ‘Uncivilized. Our change of plan – not that we could really call our first thoughts anything as definite as “a plan” – anyway, his recent behaviour proves that we were right to break off the match.’

  Joanna bowed her head. She thought she knew what was coming.

  ‘I have decided,’ said the Count, ‘that you will marry Julian, as soon as he reaches his eighteenth birthday. I will knight him, and you will be married the following day. Great rejoicings, in so far as the times and money permit. And so forth. My mother and the Lady Floria will arrange banquets and suchlike festivities.’

  ‘So soon?’ murmured Joanna.

  ‘Two months,’ nodded the Countess.

  ‘I … is there need of such haste?’

  ‘Have you anything against my son?’ demanded the Count.

  ‘Nothing, my lord.’ And it was the truth. She knew nothing to his discredit, save that he seemed a mere boy to her.

  Father Hilarion moved forward. ‘You have a particular dislike of matrimony?’

  ‘I do not know, Father. I have never considered the matter, before.’

  ‘Nonsense, Father,’ said the Countess. ‘The girl is not at all religious. You will never make a nun out of her. Look at the way she has done her hair and gathered up her sleeves to display her arms. She is ripe for marriage, take it from me.’

  Joanna would have protested, but the Countess swept on. ‘Come, child; what other fate is there for a girl, except the cloister? Now let Father Hilarion look at your arm.’

  Father Hilarion drew Joanna to stand by the lancet window which overlooked the valley. He was a Dominican, tall, black-robed and hatchet-faced. His close-cropped hair was pale, and he was always cleanly shaven and well tonsured. His hands were white and heavily veined. He was something of a scholar, and reputed to mortify his flesh with hair-shirt and scourge.

  He took her hand in his, and held it to his breast. His fingers were bony, and gripped where Keren’s had caressed.

  ‘You do not attend Mass every day, as you should, my daughter. Why do you fight the Lord? If it be His will that you renounce the world and enter a convent, will you not find great joy therein? Greater far than in this sinful life of court and castle.’

  ‘I do not think I have
a vocation.’ She tried to pull her arm away, and once more he lifted it, pressing it against himself.

  ‘You have not looked within yourself. You have not listened to the still voice of conscience.’

  ‘I listen to my heart, which tells me that the chilly cloister would give me rheumatism. I consider my body, and see it is made for bearing children.’

  ‘To overcome such ignoble impulses is part of the way to the Truth.’ Again she tried to pull her hand away, and this time he recollected himself, and looked down at her arm. ‘This is healing well. What instructions did the hermit give you?’

  ‘Instructions? He did not speak. He bathed it in the spring, and the swelling went down. We shared his bread, I rested awhile, and then we came back.’

  ‘Ah. He spoke to offer you food?’

  ‘No. I thought he had taken a vow of silence. He kept a pebble in his mouth, all the time, except when he was actually eating.’ She looked up at Father Hilarion with doubt. Why did he ask these questions? It was almost as if he were trying to catch her out … or perhaps to catch the hermit out in breaking his oath? He was flushed. He was standing too close to her. She did not like it. She smiled at him, though she did not feel like smiling. Instinct warned her to propitiate him. ‘Thank you for looking at my arm. It was kind of you.’

  ‘It was remiss of me not to have done something about it yesterday. I will make up an ointment to put on the grazed place. You should not have been exposed to such a bad influence.’

  ‘Keren? A bad influence? Surely not.’

  ‘Remember the nature of his crime!’

  ‘I know nothing of it.’ Her breath came fast. ‘Why, what did he do?’

  ‘Murder,’ said the priest. ‘He murdered his wife.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  FOR the fifth night in succession, the man they called Keren lay gazing up at the stars. His dog had curled herself into a circle beside him, and his hand lay on the dog’s back. Now and then the hermit changed his position slightly, digging his shoulders further into the bracken bed, or shifting a leg, so that the metal cuff did not bite into his ankle. Now and then he closed his eyes and dozed for a few minutes, only to wake again and resume his vigil. He had thought that he had learned to accept. Now he knew that he had learned nothing. For nine years he had laboured without complaint. Twice had he broken his vow of silence to comfort the dying, and twice he had confessed his fault to Father Hilarion and been whipped for it. He had not told Father Hilarion of the other times he had broken his vow, for those lapses had been sanctioned by Father Ambrose, who had desired the hermit to speak, to make his confession; so that he might then receive the Sacrament.

  Now the hermit was contemplating a far greater sin. He was considering suicide.

  When the stars began to pale, he rose, wrapped his cloak around him, and went to sink his head in the spring. Then he made his way, clumsily, heavily, up the hill to the church. The dog did not stir at his going; she would find him when she woke.

  The earth lay dark around him. Only in the east was there any sign of the coming day. The church was a ghostly glimmer, full of old resentments and angers. He touched the stones as he pressed through the doorway. This large boulder – so ill-fitting – had been lifted into place by Father Ambrose. Those sharp stones there had been wedged into place by a villein who was used to making dry-walls in the country to the north. These patches of flint facing had been put together from stones dug up by a shepherd boy. These three large, well-dressed stones at the corner he had put in himself.

  There was no light inside the church yet. He went in, moving with the certainty of one who performed such actions every day of his life. He could only see the cross if he bent down, and got it between him and the sky. He knelt. All his movements were slow. His belt was on his hips again. He tightened it. He had eaten nothing for two days now, and drunk only water. He had ceased to tend his garden, or to cook. Someone had left him a loaf of bread three days ago – or was it four? He could not remember. That was gone, shared with a passing traveller. He had thought Midge would send him some bread, or Herkom would come up to spend some time with him. Neither had been. He had heard that Sir Bevil of Frierstone was out with his men, burning crops and maiming animals in the name of some rebellion or other. A rebellion against the King, they said. Keren knew little of politics nowadays. Perhaps Midge and Herkom had been prevented from coming by Sir Bevil’s activities. It did not matter.

  His cloak slipped from his shoulders. He had nothing to pin it with, now. Midge had been right in thinking the sacrifice of his brooch great, but he had made it, he had been impelled to make it. His mother had pinned that brooch on his shoulder on that last day, before he had gone away from his home and all that he had loved for ever. …

  He flung himself on his face, his arms outstretched to touch the altar. No altar should be there, and yet an altar existed. No cross should be there, and yet a cross had not only been carved but also painted. The church was not consecrated, and yet Mass was frequently said within its half-completed walls. The church should have been his to build, but – and this was the final bitterness – the church was being built by the labour of many hands. It was a hotchpotch, a barbaric, clumsy structure totally unlike anything of which he would have been capable, left to himself. He had thought it would be some solace to create a church with his own hands, that he would be able to make it beautiful, and in the beauty that he created, to feel some ease from his guilt. But it had not worked out that way. Every man, woman and child who passed seemed to take pride in adding a stone here, a stone there. They often did it in the wrong way, and yet he could not take their stones out and replace them in more orderly fashion, for were they not also expiating sins by helping to build the church?

  ‘Make the walls wide enough for all men to build upon,’ Father Ambrose had said. The hermit had not understood for a long time what the Father had meant, but he had dug wide and he had dug deep for the foundations, because at that time his own will had slept, and he had dug and delved under the direction of others who knew so much more about how to build a chapel than he. And as the trenches for the foundations grew, Keren began to understand. A cairn of stones had appeared one morning on the side of his trench, and the next day the cairn was gone, and the stones lined the bottom of the trench. It was not right. It was not at all correct. Keren had been down in the quarry, learning how to split stone, when all this had been done. By the time he had hauled the first of the stone blocks up the long winding mile to the top of the hill, the trenches were one-third filled with small stones of all sizes and descriptions. What could he do? He could not dig them out again, for as Father Ambrose pointed out, they would serve well enough, if mortar were added to bind them together.

  But he had had no mortar. So he had had to sell his labour to the foreman of the gang in the quarry below, for some mortar. And when the mortar was his, the foreman had come up the hill with the architect who was responsible for building the great new church in the valley. Together they had shown the hermit how to do this and that, and had altered his plans. The church which had existed in his mind, that graceful, well-proportioned affair, vanished with the daydreams of his youth. The architect talked of stresses and strains, and hammer beams and king posts, until Keren’s head went round, and he had developed another of his blinding headaches.

  Building on such a height meant that winds would attack the structure, so that it must be sturdily made. The walls must be of double thickness, filled with rubble and stones bound together with mortar. The windows must be arched in the old Norman fashion, or very small and lancet-like, for winds would howl around that point. There would be no spire. A squat tower at one corner might house a bell at some point in the future … the architect had shrugged his shoulders, the foreman had jammed in several blocks with an efficiency which left the hermit gasping, and so they had departed. That had been a bad moment for Keren. The church he had sworn to build would never be beautiful, and he was not going to be allowed the privilege of bu
ilding it by himself. It worried him for a long time that he was not fulfilling the terms of his oath, by allowing other people to help him. He could not prevent them from helping him, of course, but perhaps the abbot would not understand that. Father Ambrose was soothing about it, but Father Hilarion pulled down the corners of his mouth. Father Hilarion believed in sticking to the letter of the law.

  ‘I swear by Almighty God and my hope of forgiveness and redemption, to build a chapel to the glory of God, at a place directed by the abbot. And until such time as the chapel is finished, I swear to live in poverty and to abjure speech with my fellow. …’

  The hermit woke, sweating, from an uneasy sleep. It was mid-morning, and he was chilled from lying on the bare earth, and yet he did not move. The sleep had been too short to refresh him. Besides, he had been dreaming again.

  ‘Lord,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear it. Forgive me. …’

  The ladies of the castle had gathered in the garden, and thither the squires and pages had followed them.

  The Countess’s pleasance was a sheltered plot surrounded by walls of mellow stone. There were two parts to the garden. The main or water garden contained fruit trees, which lined the walls and spread their branches sideways along the paths. Shallow canals carried water to ornamental pools and under bridges. The herb garden was a secret place, small and little frequented save by Joyeuse – who cherished the peace of the place – and Father Hilarion.

  There were many young people in the garden that day. The Count had three daughters living, two of whom were still at home. The third had married a knight who owed fealty to her father, and it was he who had marched out of the castle some months previously, in charge of the men and horses the Count had sent to join the King. This had left the castle short of men of military bent, but there were plenty of pages around to keep everyone lively.

  Apart from Joanna, Joyeuse and her younger sister Maid, there were two more girls of noble birth in the castle. These were the daughters of the Count’s sister, the Lady Elizabeth. This lady was a widow, who spent much of her time with Father Hilarion. She had not yet taken vows, but was about to do so. She was to be the abbess of the convent the Count was building in the meadows below the castle, and the new church was to be the abbey church.