Brother Cadfael 14: The Hermit of Eyton Forest

without any company... '
    'You shall have company,' she promised, seizing on one complaint to which she could provide a complaisant answer. 'I'll send your bride to keep you company. I want you to get to know her better now, for after today she'll return to Wroxeter with her father, and you, Richard,' she said warningly and with a sharpening eye on him, 'will return with me to your own manor, to take your proper place. And I shall expect you to conduct yourself properly there, and not go hankering after that school, now that you're married and a man of substance. Eaton is yours, and that is where you should be, and I expect you to maintain that, if anyone - anyone - should call it in question. Do you understand me, sir?'
    He understood her very well. He was to be cajoled, intimidated, bullied into declaring, even to Brother Paul and Father Abbot if need be, that he had run home to his grandmother of his own will, and of his own will submitted to the marriage they had planned for him. He hugged his secret knowledge gleefully to his heart as he said submissively: 'Yes, madam!'
    'Good! And now I'll send in Hiltrude to you, and see that you behave well to her. You will have to get used to her, and she to you, so you may as well begin now.' And she relented so far as to kiss him again on leaving him, though it resembled a slap as much as a kiss. She went out in a dusty swirl of long green skirts, and he heard the bolt shot again after her.
    And what had he got out of all that, except the fact that his pony was in the stable here, and if only he could get to it he might make his escape even now. But presently in came Hiltrude, as his grandmother had threatened, and all his resentment and dislike of the girl, undeserved though it was, boiled up within him into childish anger.
    She still seemed to him to belong at least to the generation of the mother he could hardly remember, but she was not really utterly plain, she had a clear, pale skin and large, guarded brown eyes, and if her hair was straight and of a mousey brown colour, she had a great mass of it, plaited in a thick braid that hung to her waist. She did not look ill-natured, but she did look bitterly resigned and wretched. She stood for a moment with her back to the door, staring thoughtfully at the boy curled up glumly on his bed.
    'So they've sent you to be my guard dog,' said Richard unpleasantly.
    Hiltrude crossed the room and sat down on the sill of the shuttered window, and looked at him without favour. 'I know you don't like me,' she said, not sadly but with quite unexpected vigour. 'Small reason why you should, and for that matter, I don't like you. But it seems we're both bound, no help for it now. Why, why did you ever give way? I only said I would, at last, because I was so sure you were safe enough there at the abbey, and they'd never let it come to this. And then you have to fall into their hands like a fool, and let them break you down. And here we both are, and may God help us!' She relented of the note of exasperation in her own voice, and ended with weary kindness: 'It's not your fault, you're only a child, what could you do? And it isn't that I dislike you, I don't even know you, it's just that I didn't want you, I don't want you, any more than you want me.'
    Richard was staring at her, by this time, with mouth and eyes wide open, struck dumb with astonishment at finding her, as it were, not a token embarrassment, a millstone round his neck, but a real person with a great deal to say for herself, and by no means a fool. Slowly he uncoiled his slim legs and set his feet to the floor, to feel solid substance under him. Slowly he repeated, in a small, shocked voice: 'You never wanted to marry me?'
    'A baby like you?' she said, careless of offence. 'No, I never did.'
    'Then why did you ever agree to do it?' He was too indignant over her capitulation to resent the reflection on his years. 'If you'd said no, and kept saying it, we should both have been saved.'
    'Because my father is a man very hard to say no to, and had begun to tell me that I was getting too old to have another suitor, and if I didn't take you I should be forced to enter a sisterhood and stay a maid until I died. And that I wanted even less. And I thought the abbot would keep fast hold of you, and nothing would ever be allowed to come of it. And now here we are, and what are we to do about it?'
    Himself surprised at feeling an almost sympathetic curiosity about this woman who had