He stood staring down at her, waiting for her to speak. He read guilt and distress in her expression, and he believed he knew what she had done. The stones had spoken true.
Finally, she said, ‘I have betrayed you, Hrype. I told you when you came to me before that I believed some things are best left in the past, and when the youth came looking for me the first time I played on his fears and made sure he stayed away.’
‘But he came back,’ Hrype said dully.
‘He did.’ Her voice was barely audible.
‘So what changed?’ Hrype burst out. ‘Why did you allow him to reach you when before you had kept him away?’
‘He was desperate!’ she cried. He saw clearly that she was as angry as he was. ‘I had no wish to be involved in your anguish, Magic Man, for I know what you are and I fear you. It was through no invitation of mine that the boy came to seek me out with you hot on his heels!’
It was a fair comment, and Hrype waited until the blaze of his fury had cooled. Then he said, ‘You sensed his despair then, and this time you allowed him across.’
She smiled grimly. ‘It was not a question of allowing him, for his despair fed his courage and he mastered his fear. Before I could prevent it, he was on the island knocking at my door.’
Very slowly Hrype nodded. ‘And you told him.’ He knew it; there was no doubt in his mind, for the stones had hinted at it in their own enigmatic way and now he read it in the old woman who stood before him.
She gritted her teeth, looked him in the eye and said, ‘I did.’ Then she closed her eyes and added, ‘Do what you will with me, Hrype. I deserve it, and life holds little sweetness for me any more.’
He stood rock-still beside her, bending his whole concentration on controlling the fury and the malice that threatened to pour out of him. He would not hurt her, though, for this was no fault of hers. He asked himself what he would have done had the positions been reversed and it was he to whom a deeply disturbed, suspicious young man had come seeking answers. He had an idea he would have acted no differently.
‘Aetha, I do not blame you,’ he said wearily. ‘I have been praying that Sibert would not reach you, but it was ever a feeble hope. He is more determined than I give him credit for.’
‘He has courage, but he does not realize it,’ she said. He had heard her sigh of relief at what he had just said, and now he observed, amused, that with her fear gone she was now trying to be as helpful as she could to make up for her betrayal. ‘I see a stout heart in him, yet he does not believe in his own abilities.’
‘He saved a young woman’s life once,’ Hrype said. ‘It took courage, for to prevent her death he had to kill a man.’
Aetha nodded. ‘He is from warrior stock,’ she said. ‘It is—’ She stopped, her expression revealing embarrassment.
‘Go on.’
She eyed him cautiously; then, apparently deciding that she had nothing to lose, she said, ‘He was with me for some time, and we talked much, or rather he talked and I listened.’
‘That was ever your skill,’ he remarked.
Her face softened in a gentle, reminiscent smile. Then she went on, ‘He spoke to me about his mother. I remember her, Hrype, and from what the boy says it appears she has continued along the path that I foresaw for her.’
He believed he understood what she was saying. ‘Froya is not strong,’ he said. ‘She . . . many things disturb her equanimity, and she lives in a state of fear even when there is nothing to be afraid of.’
‘She requires a lot of love and a lot of care, I imagine,’ Aetha said. ‘Like her son, she has courage but does not see it.’
‘Courage?’ he echoed. It was not a word he associated with his brother’s widow.
‘She took her man away to safety, making the crossing of the fenland under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances,’ Aetha reminded him. ‘That was not the action of a coward.’
‘No indeed, but—’ But what? It was not the moment to discuss Froya’s fragile emotional state with someone he had not been close to in almost twenty years. And, indeed, what would he say?
He became aware that Aetha was watching him. He met her eyes. ‘Be careful, Hrype,’ she warned. ‘There is a great anger in him.’
‘Directed at me, no doubt,’ Hrype said lightly. Despite everything, he found that it was difficult to be apprehensive about Sibert.
‘Do not underestimate him,’ Aetha said darkly. Then, starkly, ‘He wants to kill you.’
Hrype had no memory of leaving the causeway, but he must have done for he found himself down by the waterside at the southern end of March island, waiting for a ferry to take him back to Ely. As he returned to himself he realized that he did not in fact wish to go back, for he knew that Sibert was not there.
I must find him and face him
, he thought.
Moving almost like a sleepwalker, he turned away from the quay and the busy scene of people, animals, boats of all sizes and shouting, sweating boatmen and, taking a narrow path that turned and twined away inland, he set off to look for Sibert.
It was late in the day when he found him. It was, he thought, more a question of allowing Sibert to find
him
, for he sensed the young man’s presence before he saw him. He was on a path that led between water meadows; there was a cluster of dwellings in the distance, but nobody was about. Hrype felt fear; turning, he saw Sibert sliding down a low bank. He reached the path and leapt forward, straight for his uncle.
He had a long knife in his hand.
Hrype stood quite still. There was nothing he could say or do and he knew it.
Sibert’s face was working, and he had tears in his eyes. More than anything, Hrype wanted to comfort him, but he knew he could not, either now or perhaps ever.
He waited.
‘How could you do it?’ Sibert shouted. ‘It was betrayal, of the worst kind!’
Betrayal. That word again, Hrype reflected. What a terrible word it was . . . Still he did not speak, for the words he longed to utter would sound like the most insubstantial excuse. Rather than be misunderstood, he preferred to keep silent.
Sibert wanted him to speak and now he goaded him, accusing him of terrible things from which Hrype flinched, despite himself. Still he would not speak in his own defence, and he had to listen as all the hurt and distress poured out of the young man who stood, tears in his eyes, trembling with tense emotion and brandishing his blade, on the path in front of him.
That it was Sibert who so accused him made it all but impossible to endure. We do not care what our enemies and those we despise may think of us, Hrype thought as he lowered his eyes before the onslaught. What rips us apart is when we are attacked by those we love.
He gathered his courage and raised his head. He tried to put his heart into his expression. He tried silently to tell Sibert that he understood.
He got it wrong. He who thought he could read people so well, predict what they would say and do and be busy working out how to react even before they had moved a muscle, made a mistake so grave that it threatened his life.
For where he intended love and compassion, Sibert read something very different. Perhaps he read pride; perhaps he believed Hrype was demonstrating by his apparent lack of emotion that, complacent in his power, he did not fear Sibert and was not disconcerted by his fury. There was no time to think it through. There was no time for Hyrpe to defend himself, even had he wanted to.
With an animal howl of anguish that ripped at Hrype’s heart, Sibert swung his knife high in the air and, leaping forward, brought it down in a wide, whistling arc that was aimed at Hrype’s head. But his toe struck a tree root that snaked across the path and, stumbling, his swing went off course. Hrype, still as a statue and with his eyes closed, was aware of a very hard blow that knocked him off his feet.
He heard another cry – a very different cry now – and there was a thump as Sibert’s blade hit the damp ground. He heard footsteps pounding off down the path, the sound steadily receding until he could not detect it any more.
He was lying on something wet and warm. He turned his head slightly and saw that it was his own blood.
Then the pain began.
I frittered away most of the entire day. I was still beset by the weird sense that something was approaching but as the hours went by, and the daylight began to fade, nothing revealed itself. I wondered if I ought to try again to go inside the abbey that evening. I could dress myself in Sibert’s clothes and get in as I had late the previous afternoon; it had worked once, and there was no reason it wouldn’t do so again.
I wondered if I could locate the place where my dark-eyed stranger had helped me over the abbey wall last night. After a few dead ends and false trails, I found it. Not that it helped me much for, although there had been a convenient compost heap to climb on the inside, out here the wall reared unbroken high above my own height, and there was no way I could climb it unless someone gave me a leg up.
I stood staring up at the top of the wall. Last night I had jumped down from there into someone’s arms and that someone had kissed me . . .
I admitted to myself that all day I had been hoping I would bump into my stranger. Now, faced with the fact that I had failed, I felt both crushingly disappointed and also cross with myself for mooning after someone who probably hadn’t spared me a single thought.
Dejected and miserable, I went back to the little room.
I’d forced myself to eat a bite of supper and was just clearing away the remains when I heard a noise outside. I thought I heard footsteps – slow, irregular footsteps – and there was a sound as if someone was dragging something heavy along the alley.
At first I took little notice. The dwellings around ours housed workmen engaged on the new cathedral, and when they had money in their pockets some of them were apt to stay too long in the tavern so that their progress home was haphazard, to put it mildly.
The steps grew closer. They paused – I thought whoever it was had reached his own house – then after some time they started again. There were several in quite quick succession, and then there was a heavy, dull thud on my door.
I froze. Who could it be? Was it one of the burly monks? Had they seen me last night and taken note of where I lived so that now, when it was dark and I was all alone, they were taking their chance to come and kill me?
Oh!
They had attacked that nun who they’d thought was me. Now they had come for me . . .
I stood in the middle of the room, weakened by terror and emitting soft little moans of distress. I was too scared even to reach for my knife.
Then I heard someone whisper my name.
It’s a ruse
, I thought,
they’re pretending to be someone I know who is calling me outside, and when I go out there they’ll jump me and slit my throat
.
Even in my panic I realized how silly that was. If anyone wanted to kill me then surely they would slip inside to do it behind a closed door rather than summoning me out into the alley? As my terror receded I realized something else: it was becoming known that I was a healer, so it was just possible that someone had come to me sick or injured for help.
I gathered my courage, made sure my knife was on my belt and opened the door.
There was a body slumped against it; the thump had been the sound of it falling. I detected the metallic smell of blood and, as instinctively I put out my hands to my patient, I felt it, warm and wet on my skin.
I pushed aside the heavy cloak and got hold of the tunic underneath – my patient, it seemed, was a man – and slowly dragged him inside. The hood had fallen across his face and from beneath it I could hear ragged, uneven breathing. He was still alive then. I got him on to my mattress and tucked his cloak around him – even through it I could feel how cold he was – then knelt to build the fire and blow it up into a good blaze, setting water on to boil as I did so.
Then I lowered the hood, unfastened the neck of the cloak and set about discovering where he was injured and how bad it was. The blood was welling up from where his left arm met his chest and the cut was long and deep. I stifled my groan of despair, for Edild always presses upon me the need to reassure rather than alarm a patient. But in my heart I doubted my ability to save him. He seemed to have been bleeding for some time, and even if I managed to stitch him up and stop the flow now it could well be too late.
I was going over in my head Edild’s lessons in stitching, recalling what I had done for Morcar and mentally checking that I had everything I would need, when my patient spoke.
‘I think,’ he said in a husky voice that was barely audible, ‘that it may look worse than it is.’
I looked up into his face. It was Hrype.
I bathed and stitched for what seemed like most of the night. I had never treated such a grave injury without the steadying presence of my aunt, and I knew in my heart that I was not ready for anything like this. I must have caused him so much pain, and when he managed to unclench his teeth sufficiently to suggest some of the poppy draught I could have kicked myself for not having thought of it straight away.