Brother Cadfael 14: The Hermit of Eyton Forest

darkened. A massive face, fleshy and yet hard, muscled like a wrestler's arms, handsome in a brutal fashion, the face of a man not in anger at this moment, but always ready to be angry. He was shaven clean, which made the smooth power of his features even more daunting, and the eyes that stared imperiously straight before him looked disproportionately small, though in reality they probably were not, because of the massy flesh in which they were but shallowly set. By the look of him, not a man to cross. He might have been fifty years old, give or take a few years, but time certainly had not softened what must have been granite from the start.
    His horse was standing in the stable yard outside an open stall, stripped and gently steaming as if his saddlecloth had only just been removed, and a groom was rubbing him down and hissing to him gently as he worked. A meagre but wiry fellow, turning grey, in faded homespun of a dull brown, and a rubbed leather coat. He slid one sidelong glance at Cadfael and nodded a silent greeting, so inured to being wary of all men that even a Benedictine brother was to be avoided rather than welcomed.
    Cadfael gave him good-even cheerfully, and began his own unsaddling. 'You've ridden far? Was that your lord I met at the gate?'
    'It was,' said the man without looking up, and spared no more words.
    'A stranger to me. Where are you from? Guests are thin this time of year.'
    'From Bosiet - it's a manor the far side of Northampton, some miles south-east of the town. He is Bosiet-Drogo Bosiet. He holds that and a fair bit of the county besides.'
    'He's well away from his home ground,' said Cadfael with interest. 'Where's he bound? We see very few travellers from Northamptonshire in these parts.'
    The groom straightened up to take a longer and narrower look at this inquisitive questioner, and visibly his manner eased a little, finding Cadfael amiable and harmless. But he did not on that account grow less morose, nor more voluble.
    'He's hunting,' he said with a grim and private smile.
    'But not for deer,' hazarded Cadfael, returning the inspection and caught by the wryness of the smile. 'Nor, I dare say, for the beasts of the warren.'
    'You dare say well. It's a man he's after.'
    'A runaway?' Cadfael found it hard to believe. 'So far from home? Was a runaway villein worth so much time and expense to him?'
    'This one is. He's valuable and skilled, but that's not the whole of it,' confided the groom, discarding his suspicion and reticence. 'He has a score to settle with this one. One report we got of him, setting out westwards and north, and he's combed every village and town along all this way, dragging me one road while his son with another groom goes another, and he won't stop short of the Welsh border. Me? If I did clap eyes on the lad he's after, I'd be blind. I wouldn't give him back a dog that ran from him, let alone a man.' His dry voice had gathered sap and passion as he talked, and he turned fully for the first time, so that the torchlight fell on his face. One cheek was marked with a blackening bruise, the corner of his mouth torn and swollen, with the look of a festering infection about it.
    'His mark?' asked Cadfael, eyeing the wound.
    'His seal, sure enough, and done with a seal ring. I was not quick enough at his stirrup when he mounted, yesterday morning.'
    'I can dress that for you,' said Cadfael, 'if you'll wait while I go and make report to my abbot about another matter. You'd best let me, it could take bad ways. By the same token,' he said quietly, 'you're far enough out of his country, and near enough to the border, to do some running of your own, if you're so minded.'
    'Brother,' said the groom with the briefest and harshest of laughs, 'I have a wife and children in Bosiet, I'm manacled. But Brand was young and unwed, his heels are lighter than mine. And I'd best get this beast stalled, and be off to wait on my lord, or he'll be laying the other cheek open for me.'
    'Then come out to the guest hall steps,' said Cadfael, recalled as sharply to his own duty, 'when he's in bed and snoring, and I'll clean that sore for you.'
    Abbot Radulfus listened with concern, but also with relief, to Cadfael's report, promised to send at first light enough helpers to clear away the willow tree, clean out the brook and shore up the bank above, and nodded gravely at the suggestion that Eilmund's long wait in the water might complicate his recovery, even though the fracture itself was simple and