Hermit of Eyton Forest Read Free

and returned to his work without breaking the rhythm. Hugh had one
glimpse of a weather-browned country face and round, guileless blue eyes.
    “Yes,
I should think he might do very well,” he said, impressed and amused, “whether
with a spade or a battle-axe. I could do with a dozen such at the castle
whenever they care to offer their services.”
    “He’d
be no use to you,” said Cadfael with certainty. “Like most big men, the
gentlest soul breathing. He’d throw his sword away to pick up the man he’d
flattened. It’s the little, shrill terriers that bare their teeth.” They
emerged into the band of flowerbeds beyond the kitchen garden, where the rose
bushes had grown leggy and begun to shed their leaves. Rounding the corner of
the box hedge, they came out into the great court, at this working hour of the
morning almost deserted but for one or two travellers coming and going about
the guest hall, and a stir of movement down in the stables. Just as they
rounded the tall hedge to step into the court, a small figure shot out of the
gate of the grange court, where the barns and storage lofts lined three sides
of a compact yard, and made off at a run across the narrows of the court into
the cloister, to emerge a minute later at the other end at a decorous walk,
with eyes lowered in seemly fashion, and plump, childish hands devoutly linked
at his belt, the image of innocence. Cadfael halted considerately, with a hand
on Hugh’s arm, to avoid confronting the boy too obviously. The child reached
the corner of the infirmary, rounded it, and vanished. There was a distinct
impression that as he quit the sight of any watchers in the great court he
broke into a run again, for a bare heel flashed suddenly and was gone. Hugh was
grinning. Cadfael caught his friend’s eye, and said nothing. “Let me hazard!”
said Hugh, twinkling. “You picked your apples yesterday, and they’re not yet
laid up in the trays in the loft. Lucky it was not Prior Robert who saw him at
it, and he with the breast of his cotte bulging like a portly dame!”
    “Oh,
there are some of us have a sort of silent understanding. He’ll have taken the
biggest, but only four. He thieves in moderation. Partly from decent
obligation, partly because half the sport is to tempt providence again and
again.”
    Hugh’s
agile black eyebrow signalled amused enquiry. “Why four?”
    “Because
we have but four boys still in school, and if he thieves at all, he thieves for
all. There are several novices not very much older, but to them he has no
obligation. They must do their own thieving, or go without. And do you know,”
asked Cadfael complacently, “who that young limb is?”
    “I
do not, but you are about to astonish me.”
    “I
doubt if I am. That is Master Richard Ludel, the new lord of Eaton. Though
plainly,” said Cadfael, wryly contemplating shadowed innocence, “he does not
yet know it.”
     
    Richard
was sitting cross-legged on the grassy bank above the mill-pond, thoughtfully
nibbling out the last shreds of white flesh from round his apple core, when one
of the novices came looking for him. “Brother Paul wants you,” announced the
messenger, with the austerely complacent face of one aware of his own virtue,
and delivering a probably ominous summons to another. “He’s in the parlour.
You’d best hurry.”
    “Me?”
said Richard, round-eyed, looking up from his enjoyment of the stolen apple. No
one had any great cause to be afraid of Brother Paul, the master of the novices
and the children, who was the gentlest and most patient of men, but even a
reproof from him was to be evaded if possible. “What does he want me for?”
    “You
should best know that,” said the novice, with mildly malicious intent. “It was
not likely he’d tell me. Go and find out for yourself, if you truly have no
notion.”
    Richard
committed his denuded core to the pond, and rose slowly from the grass. “In