“Then God be thanked, say I.”
She was old, and shaken by her vigil. Her hair was driven by the breeze into grey, wispish threads; but her eyes, even in the tempering moonlight, showed like pools of living fire.
“I feared there’d be no home-coming for you two,” she said, the tang returning to her voice already—“especially when Brant and Michael Draycott came back with the tale of what they’d seen.”
“What should they know about the cave?” asked Hardcastle, with tired wonder.
“What I chose to tell Brant when he stumped into my kitchen, a half-hour after you’d gone, and grumbled that Storm had taken another ewe of his in the night. ‘I wouldn’t worrit about that,’ says I. ‘Garsykes has taken the Master, and I’m nigh out o’ my wits.’ That sobered the shepherd.”
She touched Hardcastle, to make sure that he was in the flesh before her, then told, in tart, brief speech, how Shepherd Brant had gone to raise Logie-side against the Wilderness—how all its strapping yeomen, except Michael Draycott, were at Skipton market—how Michael and Brant had stolen down to the Garsykes hollow, to see if they could put a fight up, and had found a company of devils dancing with Nita round a fire at the cave’s mouth.
Tired as he was, needing food and drink, and sleep’s forgetting of the cave, the Master warmed to Rebecca’s tale. There were two men at least who had cared to rouse the Dale for him and all that Logie stood for.
“They came back here,” said Rebecca, “for bite and sup before they left again to meet the Logie Men as they rode home from market. I wouldn’t daunt their spirit by telling ’em there was a full moon, and our men by that token would come late, with a plenty of good ale inside them.”
“That same full moon, Rebecca,” said Hardcastle, with chastened humour, “showed us the way out.”
She listened, her lean, old body tense with eagerness, as he told what had chanced. Then she was no longer the woman who had waited, every fear on edge, for news that could only be evil, so it had seemed through the long waiting-time.