The Red Saint
9781465650429
102 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When Denise of the Hermitage went down to draw water at the spring at the edge of the beech wood, she saw the light of a fire flashing out through the blue gloom of the April dusk. It was far away—that fire, almost on the horizon, a knot of tawny colour seen between the dark slopes of two high hills. Yet though it was so far away Denise could see the long flames moving, sometimes shooting upwards, or bending and sweeping towards the ground. Denise stood and watched these flames that waved and flickered yonder through the dusk where the smoke spread out between the hills into a kind of pearly haze. It was so still under the boughs of the great beeches that the distant fire seemed strange and ghostly, burning without a sound. The little pool where Denise had filled her pitcher was not more silent, the pool fed by an invisible spring, and believed to be miraculous and holy. Yet though those far flames were so silent, Denise could set a sound to them, a crackling roar that would be very real to those who looked on the thing as on a sacrifice. There would be many watchers on the hills that night, sullen and silent folk to whom that blaze would speak like a war cresset teased by the wind on some great lord’s tower. Peter of Savoy’s riders, those hired “spears” from over the sea, Gascons, Flemings, Bretons, were out to keep the King’s peace in the Rapes of Pevensey and of Hastings. Denise knew that private war had been let loose, for had she not heard from the priest of Goldspur, and from Aymery the manor lord, that many of the lesser gentry and the Cinque Port towns were calling for Earl Simon? The pot that had long been simmering, had boiled over of a sudden. And those who had scalded toes had only their own perversity to thank. In such a fashion began the Barons’ war in many a quiet corner of the land. Lawyers might orate and scribble, but when men quarrelled over a great issue, and the heart of a people was full of bitterness and discontent, the rush was towards the primitive ordeal of the sword. “God—and the King!”—“Earl Simon and the Charter!” These two rallying cries cut off brother from brother, and father from son. There had been years of verbiage, oath breaking, famine, peculation, and cynical corruption in high places. The law was no law, the King’s oath a byword in brothels and in taverns. The great Father—even the Pope—had had both fists in the English money pots. Poitevins, Provençals, and Italians had scrambled together. The country was sick of it. Men who were in grim earnest hastened to get to blows. As Denise, half hermitess, half saint, went back through the beech wood, the fire, like a great red brazier, still shone out on her, latticed by the black boughs, or hidden for a moment behind a tree bole. And though the wood was as still and solemn as a temple, it seemed full of a hushed and listening dread, waiting for the wind that should come roaring through the tops of the trees. Unrest was upon the hills, and in the deeps of the valleys. Denise felt it as she might have felt the nearness of thunder on a sultry night in June. But if no wind stirred in the wood that night, there were other sounds more human and more passionate than the voice of the wind. Denise had said her prayers in her cell when the dead leaves under the beech trees whispered with the moving of many feet. Indistinct figures went in and out among the tree boles, the muttering of voices mingling with the rustle of the leaves. A full moon had risen, and begun to throw long slants of light into the darkness of the wood, outlining the black branches, and splashing the trunks of the trees with silver. In and out, through the still moonlight and the shadows, came the moving figures whose feet filled the whole wood with the shiver of dead leaves.
