Chapter 5: The Path Behind the Abbey

Five days after the first frost her aunt took them both out to the abbey.

They went with two carts and eight servants and the usual load — hams, salt, a bolt of undyed cloth for the sisters’ winter, coin for the lamps. Meret did it every year at the turn of the season. Mira had come up this road twice a year since she was small, and the abbey had never once looked to her like anything but a man in a collar that did not fit him: walls patched in three kinds of stone, the church roof raised at some point by someone with more ambition than money.

Ada held her mother’s hand from the moment they came in under the arch. She held it while Meret knelt on the flagstones through the whole of the sisters’ office, longer than either of the girls could kneel. She held it through the singing. And when Meret rose at last with her knees wet from the stone and her face gone quiet and loose the way it went afterward, Ada took her hand again and walked her out, and on the road down to the guest house she did not let go of it once.

Meret took it for what it looked like. She had a daughter who was to be married in the spring to a man in the north, and the girl was frightened, and it was a natural thing for a frightened girl to want her hand held.

There was bread in the guest house, and thin beer, and a dish of dried apples. Meret ate almost none of it and then went into the inner room she took every year and lay down on the bed with her shoes off.

“Come here,” she said, and Ada sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand back into her mother’s.

“I said a thing to the saint today,” Meret said. “I made a poor bargain with him.”

“What did you say?”

“That he might have a year off the end of my life for every good year of yours, and I’d not haggle. And I asked a second thing besides, and I’ll not tell you what it was, but the two together are worth a good deal more than a year off the end of me.”

Ada put her face down against her mother’s shoulder.

“Don’t.”

“It’s no great sum.” Meret’s hand came up and lay over her hair. “I’ve had a good run of them.”

Ada said nothing for a while. Then she said, “You should sleep. You always sleep after.”

“I always sleep after. It’s the last vice left me.”

Mira stood in the doorway with her hands on the frame and watched the two of them and could not think of anything to do with herself.

It took Meret a quarter of an hour to go under. Ada sat and held her hand through all of it and did not look round. Then, when her mother’s breathing had gone long, she laid the hand down on the quilt a finger at a time, lifted her weight off the bed carefully, and stood.

She had not said one word to Mira in three days that was not about the weather or the road.

Then she looked at Mira.

Mira nodded once.

They went out past the kitchens and around the back to where the firewood was stacked against the wall under a shed roof, and Mira knelt and pulled out the bundle she had carried out from Eastvale that morning under her cloak.

A gray kirtle, a wool coat, a hood, boots, and a coarse shirt for him. Ada changed behind the woodpile with Mira holding her own cloak spread against the yard, and the abbey’s pigeons walked about in the wet between the cobbles and took no interest in any of it. Her good clothes she folded and put under a stone at the foot of the stack. Then she put the hood up and looked at Mira again, and there was nothing in her face now at all.

The back gate was a small door in the wall that let the sisters out into the wood without going round by the road. It was barred, and the bar was a hand’s breadth of oak in iron sockets, and Mira lifted it out and set it against the stones and held the door open while they went through. He was where the trees started, at the top of the path, with a bundle of his own, and his boots were black to the ankle with the wet. He had been standing long enough that the leaves had come down around him.

Ada went to him and stopped a pace short and said something Mira could not hear. He said something back. It did not take many words either way.

Mira walked out with them because she had said she would — a hundred paces and then a hundred more, down through the beech wood where the path was a carters’ track in summer and a gutter in everything else. The leaves were down and wet and the smell of them was strong enough to taste. The wood had not been cut this year. The pale stumps of last spring’s cutting were still standing about in it, gone gray and soft at the top.

At the bottom the path turned along the foot of a long field and went out of sight behind a hedge of thorn. It was there that he stopped.

He put his bundle down in the leaves and came back up the path and went down on both knees.

Mira stood still. In the four years Bram had been in the yard at Eastvale she had never once heard him speak. She had heard that he spoke, the way you hear a thing about a man you have never talked to. Once, in the stable door, she had stood with a message for the groom and he had been there, and he had taken it from her and given her back nothing at all but the flat look he gave everyone, and those eyes of his, which were the color of green bottle glass and which made the women in the kitchens uneasy and the children follow him along the fence.

“My lady,” he said.

His voice was low and it did not hurry, and there was a burr in it from somewhere north of the vale; it was the kind of voice people believed.

“I’ve got nothing to pay you with,” he said. “No money. Nothing else a man could put in your hand.”

He was looking at her, and it took her a moment to understand that he was not asking for anything.

“So I’ll say it and you can have it. The day you need a man for a thing, you send for me. Wherever I’m at, I’ll come. That’s all I’ve got to give you and it’s yours.”

He got up off his knees, took his bundle, and went down the path after her. Mira stood in the leaves and watched them to the thorn hedge. Ada looked back three times, and the last time Mira lifted her hand, and then the hedge took them.

Going back up, she barred the gate again and drove the bar home with the heel of her hand. Then she went round by the orchard so that she would come in the front way, under the bell, and she crossed the yard the way a person crosses a yard who has been out walking and is cold from it.

She was halfway to the guest house when she heard the singing.

It came from somewhere below the ridge on the far side, where the wood runs down into the next valley. There were axes in it first, and then a voice over the axes, and then two more taking it up. The tune carried. The words did not, not at that distance; what reached her was the shape of it, a line going up and turning over and coming down again. She stopped in the wet leaves and listened to the end of it. It was not a song she knew, and when it stopped the axes went on a while and then those stopped too.

She was still three steps from the door when it opened inward and her aunt came out into the yard in her stockings with her hair down her back, saying Mira’s name and then more of it, and the doorkeeper came out of her lodge with her sleeves rolled, and two of the sisters came after her. Her aunt had been out into the yard already, and into the kitchen, and down to the gate, and round the side of the church, and had found nothing.

“A man came over the wall,” Meret said. “That’s what’s happened. He came over the wall while I was asleep and he—“

“Aunt—“

“Get the steward. Get the steward, and the brothers, and every man on this hill—“

They had every man on the hill out for two hours. They went through the bakehouse and the brewhouse and the loft over the stable and the cart shed and the wood to the first bend and the well, twice, with a pole down it. The sisters went through the church and the shrine and the cells and the little walled garden and stood in it afterward with their hands folded. The lay brothers took lanterns down the path and came back and stood about in the yard not saying anything.

Mira told the steward her part of it — she had asked Ada to walk with her, Ada had said she was tired, she had gone round the church with one of the girls and come back to an empty room — and then she stood with her back against the cold wall of the passage and watched her aunt’s hands.

The steward came last, with his cap in his hand.

“My lady. The green-eyed one. He’s gone. His blanket’s folded and his bundle’s out of the loft.”

Meret looked at him and did not put the two things together. Her face was doing the work of it and failing.

They had the horses put to before the light went. Meret wanted a rider sent ahead to Eastvale for men, and Mira, who could not think of a reason that would not sound like a reason, said, “Don’t send him ahead. If he goes ahead they’ll come out of the gate with every man in the hall and it’ll be over the town before we’re through the ford.” Her aunt stared at her and then nodded and got into the carriage, and Mira got in after her and pulled the door shut and sent the maid round to ride with the boxes.

For the first mile her aunt cried into her handkerchief with her face turned to the window, and Mira sat opposite her with her hands in her lap and let her. She was sorry. That was the part she had not looked at straight when she was planning it, and it did not change anything now that she had it in front of her.

“Aunt. Will you hear me a minute.”

“There’s nothing to hear.”

“I’ve been turning it over since the loft and it won’t sit right with me.” She waited. “There was no man came over that wall. The gate was barred. I barred it myself when I came up out of the wood, and the doorkeeper tried it and found it barred, and we had eight of our own people in the yard the whole afternoon and the brothers in the wood from noon. If a stranger had come over that wall we’d have had a stranger. Somebody would have had a hand on him before he was off the ladder.”

“Then where is she?”

“I left her.” Mira’s voice came apart on it, which was true and which helped. “She said she was tired and she would sit, and I went, and I was gone the better part of an hour because my dinner was sitting heavy on me, and I came back and she was gone and I thought she was with you.”

“Child. This is not yours.”

“It is, though.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “And aunt — the boy’s gone. The green-eyed one. His bundle’s gone out of the loft.”

Her aunt’s mouth came open and then closed again.

“You think they—“ She stopped herself with the handkerchief. “You think she would—“

“Aunt. Who goes over a wall for a girl and takes the groom with him? He’d have taken the horses and left the man. He’d not have gone up into a loft for him.”

Meret did not answer.

“And I’ll tell you the other thing, and I’ve been sitting here deciding whether to tell you, and I’ll tell you, because you’ll hear it from someone else if I don’t and then it’ll be worse.” Mira looked at her. “Six days back, when we rode out to the mill and he went with us. I came round the end of the pear trees and they were standing together at the bottom of the orchard, close, and she had her hand on his sleeve. She saw me and she stepped back and she said the wind was in her eyes.”

Every word of it was a lie. Her aunt, who had never in her life considered that Mira might lie to her, took it in and turned it over and found that it fitted.

Her color went and came.

“That boy,” she said at last. “Do you remember the boy at all? Three years back. The lady that came through going south to her husband’s people, with the eleven in her train and that cart with the striped cloth on it. She had a name for keeping young men about her, and it was not a kind name, and I had heard it as well as anyone. And she saw him in the yard and she asked me for him. And I gave him. What was he? A stable boy. Who refuses a great lady a stable boy?”

She had her hands in her lap and she was not looking at Mira now.

“Six days after she was gone he was found on the road outside the wall, whipped till he could not stand up, and nobody rode after her and nobody said a word about it in the hall afterward. He came back to the horses on his own legs, and I gave him a blanket for the winter and thought I had done a fine kind thing.” She stopped. “I gave him away like a sack of meal. But that’s not — that isn’t the same, that isn’t—“

She got hold of Mira’s wrist then, and her grip was not a gentle one.

“Not one word of this to another living soul. Ada’s name — do you hear me? Not the steward. Not your uncle’s man. Not your father. Not one word.”

She had been working toward this since the guest house, and she was ashamed of how much of her own fear went out of her when her aunt said it. “No, ma’am.”

“And I’ll tell your uncle, and no one else will tell him.”

“No, ma’am.”

Her aunt let go of her wrist and sat back and cried the rest of the way into Eastvale, and Mira sat opposite her and looked out at the hedges going by and did not say anything else.

Her uncle came up out of his chair and put the table over, and had his sword half out of the scabbard before Meret got both hands on his forearm.

“Osric. Osric.”

“Get off me.”

“Put it up and hear me. If you ride out of that gate tonight with a hundred men and drag the roads from here to Alderford, every farm between will know by noon tomorrow that the duke’s daughter is gone, and by the day after it’ll be all over the vale, and the envoy is at Vauntholm this hour, this hour, Osric—“

He stood there with the sword in his fist and the breath going in and out of him.

“A man came over a wall,” he said.

“No man came over that wall.”

“Then where is she?”

Meret told him. It took her a while and she got through it badly and she got through it, and at the end of it he walked the length of the hall and back and kicked the leg of the table and stood looking at the floor.

Then he said, “Giles. Get me Giles.”

Giles came in with his coat buttoned and his hands folded and listened to the whole of it from the beginning without once interrupting, and when it was done he asked two questions — which of the household had been at the abbey, and whether the sisters could be relied on to be slow — and then he said, “Then she is taken ill at the abbey and keeps to her chamber. That will do for a fortnight. By morning I’ll have the tale of it written out, and a physician’s man who will say it over as his own. The eight who went with her will be spoken to tonight, one at a time, and they’ll be told that the first of them to open his mouth about the abbey loses his place and his character and his roof. Captain Rolf will pick the men who ride, and he’ll pick them out of the guard and not out of the household, and no more than four, and they’ll go out two roads and not one.”

Osric said, “Four men.”

“The men are one thing. The money is another. Two of the four are better spent at Alderford, where a man with a mule and a girl has to cross water or go forty miles round. If they’re for the coast, four men will hear of it at Brenmoor before they’re at the coast, and silver will hear of it faster than the four men will. If they’re for the border, then God help them and nobody will hear of it at all.” Giles paused. “And I would send to the abbey tonight for the girl’s clothes and have it said she went to the coast, in case anyone should ask in six months why her dresses were in a chest here.”

“They’re under a stone at the woodpile,” Mira said.

Her uncle looked at her.

“That’s where she left them,” she said.

Giles wrote that down.

She had carried the letter since before dawn, folded twice into the bottom of her sewing basket. All day she had known she would give it over. She had waited for the hour when her uncle would have nothing else to listen to.

She gave it over at the end of that day, when the men had been out three hours and were not back yet and the hall was full of Osric’s voice and her aunt had gone up to lie down and could not lie down.

The letter was short and the hand went crooked at the end of it.

I have gone of my own will and not by any force, and no one in this house helped me to it or knew of it. I cannot ask your pardon because I do not think I shall be given it. I ask it anyway. Do not send men after me. There is nothing in the world that I would not rather than be brought back.

Osric read it twice. Then he read it a third time and turned round and threw the jug at the wall, and then he stood in the middle of the floor and cursed her, in the flat manner of a man going through the names of things he owned, and her aunt came down the stairs with her wrapper half on and heard him at it and sat down on the bottom step and cried.

The men came back at the ninth hour with nothing and went out again before light. They came back the next night with nothing, and the next.

In the hall the steward sat up with two men and a list, writing down which houses were to be asked, quietly, and which were not to be asked at all. The guard came and went through the yard at all hours with their lanterns, and the gate was opened and barred again behind them, and the bell in the tower rang the hours over a town that had heard nothing.