Denise had some sign at last from the Goldspur folk, for she found that offerings had been left at her gate, and since her store of food had fallen to half a very dry loaf and a pot of honey, she was carnally glad of such a godsend.
The evening of the same day while she was at work in her garden, two of Aymery’s villeins came out of the wood, each carrying a bundle of ash stakes and an axe, for they had heard that the saint’s fence was as flat in places as the walls of Jericho. The two men, Oswald and Peter, were a little shy of Denise, as though the Goldspur conscience had accused the community of neglecting the Red Saint. They told her that the cattle had broken out from the pen, and strayed far and wide through the woods. It had taken them days to recover the beasts, and they had been hampered by the knowledge that the men of Pevensey were still sweeping the hundreds of the rape.
Both of the men knew that Aymery was a prisoner at Pevensey, but they did not know that he had been taken at the very doorway of the Red Saint’s cell. Nor did Denise betray to them all that had passed; she had too much pride and a sacred sense of secrecy for that. Oswald and Peter set to work, their axes catching the sunlight that sifted through the trees, white chips flying, their brown faces intent and stolid. Denise stood and watched them for a time, and Oswald, the elder of the two, told her what had befallen Father Grimbald. A swineherd had found him half dead in the woods, and had hidden him in a saw-pit for fear of Gaillard and his men. It had been a sharp escape, and a sharp sickness for Grimbald. He was still in hiding, and being healed of his wounds, and there was not a woman in the whole hundred who would not have had her tongue cut out rather than betray Grimbald to Peter of Savoy.
Dusk was falling before the men had finished mending the fence, and a wind had risen like a restless and plaintive voice, making the twilight seem more grey and melancholy. The whole beech wood had begun to shiver with a sense of loneliness that made the earth itself seem cold. Oswald and Peter knelt down before Denise, and asked her to bless them before they shouldered their axes and marched off into the wood.
The two men followed the winding path that struck the main “ride” running through the heart of the wood, and they walked fast because of the twilight, and because it was believed that the wood was haunted. For the wilds were the haunts of the evil things of the night, and when a saint lived a holy life in such a place she was sure of being tempted and vexed by devils. The tale of St. Guthlac of Crowland was a tale that was told of many a saint. When the lamp of sanctity was lit in some such wilderness the spirits of evil would fly at it in fury, and seek to beat it out with the rush of their black wings.
Oswald and Peter were no more superstitious than their neighbours, but they were as timid as children in the thick of that dark wood. And to frighten their credulity a strange sound seemed on the gallop with the gusts of the wind, a sound that was like the trampling of a horse under the sad gloom of the trees. The sound came so uncomfortably near to them, that Oswald and Peter bolted into the underwood like a couple of brown rabbits. And looking back half furtively, as they scrambled through brambles and under hazels, they had a glimpse of a great black shape rushing through the darkness on the wings of the wind.
The two men did not wait to see more of it, but got out of the wood as fast as their legs could carry them.
“It was a ghost or a devil,” they said to one another. “God defend us, but surely it is a terrible thing to be a saint.”
They pushed on, heartily glad to be free of the far-reaching hands of the spectral trees.
“It was good for us that we had the saint’s blessing.”