The Wanderer and the Way 15
The Lady Vanishes
This is Chapter 15 of The Wanderer and the Way
Theodemir was wakened from sleep by angry men demanding to know where Agnes had gone. It took him some time to get his wits about him and understand what had happened. When he did, panic overtook him, for he thought at once that Witteric had followed them and had contrived to steal Agnes from them in the night. He protested to the men that it made no sense to accuse him of taking Agnes away since if he had done so, he would certainly have gone with her. They were too sunk in their distrust of him to see the sense of this at first, but soon Hathus awoke, and when he understood what had happened, he scolded them for their illogic and for the time they were wasting by accusing a man so obviously innocent of Agnes’s present disappearance, however guilty he might be of the kidnapping that had first brought Agnes to them.
Once they were made to see this, they began to see that Theodemir’s anxiety for Agnes was as deep and as genuine as their own and actually began to soften towards him for the first time since they had left Iria Flavia. Hathus then called in the men who were keeping the last watch of the night and those who had kept the watches before them, but none had seen anyone come or go in the night. Hathus, not expecting a planned attack, or an escape, and not wishing to weary his whole company by setting a guard at every quarter, had only put one man per watch on the road before and behind them so that they should not be stumbled upon unawares by another band of travelers. It would have been a simple enough matter for someone who knew where they were camped to slip in or out unnoticed if they went silently enough and did not alarm the horses. Hathus, therefore, did not berate his guards, thought the men who had taken the watches all hung their heads, though none of them could know if Agnes had disappeared on their watch or in the direction they were charged with watching. As a company, they had failed her, and as a company they smarted at it to a man. And as a company, they begged for the duty of immediately mounting and scouring the countryside until Agnes was found.
Hathus kept a cooler head than any of them, though his anxiety was no less than theirs. Agnes might simply have gone to find a private place to make her toilet, he suggested, and they would only mortify her if they went running about looking for her and stumbled upon her in a private moment. It was, he reminded them, a hard thing for a lone woman to travel with a large company of men, and they must be careful to mind their manners and to give her every consideration her femininity deserved. But though they all agreed with this and gave their oaths to him that they would treat her as he instructed, not one of them, Hathus included, believed that she would appear in a moment from behind a bush to mock them for their panic. No, not a man among them could have said how they knew, but her absence had a different quality from this. Agnes was gone, and if they were not swiftly about the chase, they knew in their bones that she would be going further and further from their care and from the safety that they felt that only their company could provide her in all the world.
They conceived wild plans for galloping off to the eight points of the wind and were shouting at each other over whether it was better to take a moment to fill their water skins and put food in their pockets so as to be ready for a long hunt, or to ride at once when every second of delay could bring some disaster upon she who was to each of them now, the whole of their purpose, the journey of the king’s ambassador having been set at nothing as long as Agnes was missing. It was then Theodemir’s turn to talk some sense to them, though he was the last man they were minded to listen to. But at last, he shouted them down, and Hathus, remembering his duty, waved them to silence, and Theodemir said, “It is one of two things. Either my uncle has come in the night and stolen her back, or she has decided for herself that her duty lies with her sisters and she is making her way back to them. In either case, she will have gone back the way we came and by the same road.”
There were some among them who thought that this must be the case, and the men who had been watching that road begged in particular that they should be allowed to redeem themselves by riding back down the road to find her. There were others who declared that this could only be more infamy on Theodemir’s part and that this was just another ruse of his. Some even dreamed up among themselves that Theodemir had crept into their circle in the middle of the night and murdered Agnes as she slept. The absurdity of this suggestion was the first thing that caused Hathus to raise his voice to anyone since the journey began.
At this point, Theodemir’s anxiety overcame his shame, and he said, “While you quarrel, she grows further away. I am going after her. I am the king’s ambassador. You are my escort. Come with me, or fail in your duty to me and to her.”
To his surprise, this speech did not earn a rebuke from Hathus. Instead, Hathus mounted his horse, selected two of the night watch to accompany them, and told the rest to break camp and be ready to move on the moment the four of them returned with Agnes.
They had gone a hundred yards down the road when Hathus cursed himself for a fool and sent one of the men of the night watch cantering back to camp to count the horses and, if there was not one missing, to bring a spare horse back with him to the hunting party.
The soldier quickly returned to them leading one of the spare horses.
“None missing, lord,” he reported to Hathus. “Those who took her must have had a mount for her or taken her before them in the saddle.”
“She may simply be on foot,” Theodemir said. He realized that there was something deeply penitential in Agnes’s character that would make her choose the hard path every time. “She would not steal a horse, no matter what her need.”
“She’s no fool, either,” Hathus said. “She would know she could not wake the horses without us waking also.” Quite how Hathus should have had enough commerce with Agnes to judge if she were a fool or not, Theodemir could not imagine, but the captain said it with an authority that made them all believe it. “If she is on foot,” Hathus continued, “we will catch up with her soon enough. We won’t go off at a mad gallop but go attentively, looking for any sign that will tell us if she is on foot or on horse. If Witteric has taken her, I doubt we’d catch him on the road without ruining the horses. So scout as I have taught you to scout. And keep quiet so that our ears may be as attentive as our eyes.”
All this instruction, though wise, proved unnecessary, for in less than an hour they saw a small womanly figure mount the crest of a ridge ahead of them, and they cantered after her and soon caught up with her. It was Agnes, walking slowly and limping slightly from a cut on her left foot that had been caused by a sharp stone on the road, unseen in darkness. Theodemir urged his horse ahead of the others so as to come to her first, and though the two soldiers urged their mounts to cut him off, Hathus called them back and let Theodemir be the first to approach Agnes.
Theodemir swung down from his horse and stepped in front of Agnes. Agnes lowered her head so as not to meet his eye, then stepped around him and continued down the road. Theodemir fell in beside her. “Stay, lady, I beg you,” he said. “Look, you are limping, and your foot is cut. Let me tend your feet as once you tended mine.”
She walked on without answering him.
“Lady,” he pleaded. “Forgive me. I know it was your will to stay and suffer all that my uncle planned to do to you. But I beg you to understand. No natural man would have allowed you to do that. Ask them. To a man they will tell you that they would not have allowed you to do that. Most of them would have killed Witteric to prevent it, and then been killed for his murder in their turn, and done it gladly, and stood defiant before God in judgment and told him they would do it again and that he must accept that or they would gladly go to Hell for having done it for your sake. I only regret that I had not the courage to do the same.”
“Witteric would have killed you if you had tried,” she said. “You do not have the streak of blood in you that he has.” All the while she kept walking, painful though her cut foot must have been.
Theodemir knew this for the truth, and his heart shrank within his chest.
“I thought I had courage once, lady,” he said. “I think it was Eric who beat it out of me. But beside you, we are all cowards. You know what you go to, and yet you hurry there on bleeding feet. I have never seen courage like it. But still, I could not let Witteric do what he means to you. I took the coward's way to prevent it. But it is only the cowardice I regret, not the act. And I love your person more than I admire your courage. I will not let you go back to him.”
“Then you had better poison me again,” she said. “But if I live through it again, as soon as I can stand I will turn and walk back to my sisters.”
He stepped in front of her again and put his hands on her shoulders to restrain her. She fought him, though she was too small and too weak to break his hold or do any harm to him. And when she could not break free of him, she collapsed on the road, weeping and cursing him.
Hathus stepped up then. “I have let you have your chance,” he said to Theodemir. “Now leave us be, and let me talk to her.”
So Theodemir, feeling so wretched he could barely stand, went back out of hearing, sat down in the dust of the road and hung his head. The two soldiers, also drawn back out of earshot at Hathus’s command, turned their backs on him and spoke in whispers between themselves.
Hathus sat down beside Agnes in the road and spoke to her softly, and the next time that Theodemir looked up at them the captain’s arm was about her, and her head was resting on his shoulder, and they looked in every way a tableau of a father comforting a weary and grieving daughter. And in this, Theodemir understood how long it had been since Agnes had known a father’s love or enjoyed a father’s protection in a world where every decent man became her suitor and every less-than-decent man schemed to possess her. He wished then that he could have been that for her, and yet he had not the years for it, nor yet the heart for it, for he loved her, and loved her more ardently every time she pushed him away.
Presently Hathus arose and offered Agnes a hand to rise. She took the hand, and then, with strange suddenness, she turned and embraced him and wept in his arms. Hathus beckoned one of the men to bring forward the horse that they had brought for her. He soothed her and asked her if she was ready to ride. She released him and nodded shyly, hiding her tears from the men surrounding her. Hathus helped her mount, and then they turned and proceeded back towards the camp, one soldier riding in the van to warn of danger, the other taking the rear to warn of pursuit. Theodemir was thus left trailing behind Hathus and Agnes, who rode side by side in silence.
Once they returned to camp, Hathus washed and bound the wound on Agnes’s foot and slathered it with honey that one of the men had stolen from a nearby nest of wild bees. He bound it and laid Agnes down in the cart again to sleep as the caravan assumed its journey eastward. Theodemir then approached the captain and begged to know what words Hathus had found to make Agnes change her mind and come with them.
Hathus replied, “I told her that while she has a dozen sisters in Iria Flavia, she now has a father and twenty brothers on the road to Aachen and that rather let her be raped and beaten and made a concubine by Witteric, we would ride back to Iria Flavia together in a fury and kill the man. And I also told her that Witteric, whose habits I know well, and who knows me and my inclinations as I know his, and who hates me as I hate him, will certainly have called men loyal to him together and set a watch upon the road, so that if we ride back to Iria Flavia, we will find him well armed and well defended, and there will be a hard fight of it, and many of us will die before we see him dead. And then I bid her choose if she would go on to Aachen with us or if we should go back to Iria Flavia with her to kill Witteric and rescue her sisters. And then she wept, for it was a cruel choice I put to her. That is when you saw me hold her and comfort her. And then she chose to come with us. But this choice will trouble her conscience for many days, so I would advise you not to trouble her about it. Nay, I demand it of you, whether you be the king’s ambassador or not. Do I have your word?”
“If she will come with us and be safe, my vocation and my honor are satisfied, sir,” Theodemir replied. “You have saved me from my folly once again, and I place her, her comfort, and her safety in your hands. It is clear that you are a better judge of them than I am, and it is in my heart that God has sent you to me as an aid to my vocation, the end of which I am yet to discern.” They seemed to him very grand and appropriate words as he spoke them, though afterwards they left him feeling a fool, and lonely fool to boot.
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