She woke on a rough cot in a strange, round room. It had a heavy wooden door set into one side. Opposite the door was a fireplace large enough to lie down in. The forlorn coals dying there were drawn right up to the edge, almost spilling from the hearth.
The room was once a guard house, the bottom floor of a barbaric tower, with a last ragged bit of curtain wall stretching north toward the mountains.
A thump and scrape at the door caught her attention. Someone outside unlocked the door, opened it, stepped inside. Once in, the man tossed aside two lengths of oak and then shut the door firmly, locking it again before looking up. The bandit—she saw then that that’s what he was—glanced at her momentarily before setting down a plate of food near her cot. He carried the wood to the fireplace and stoked the embers. He stopped humming.
“Caught you napping. Caught you on walksies, and now I’ve caught you napping. Haw! Haw! Haw!” He was in high spirits. “Best eat while the vittles is warm.”
She didn’t move. The bandit finished with the fire. He unlocked the door and left, locking it again behind. He was careful in the everyday exercise of his trade.
She looked around the room more closely, waiting to see whether he would return. Along one edge of the room was a heap of old rags and everywhere on the floor the remains of long neglect: dust, insect husks, and bits of chipped masonry—some perhaps bone. In the center of the room was a table with no chairs. Compiled fortunes had been won and lost at that table for hundreds of years, hundreds of years ago, as guards gambled away their hours not on watch.
She came away from the cot, her bright dress absurd in that place. She carried the plate to the table and looked it over. A wholesome mess—peasant food and no cutlery. She closed her eyes to keep from crying and told herself that her father would find her, that her mother would once again hold her in her arms, and that this would all be over soon. She ate from duty rather than hunger.
Before she finished, the bandit returned. She was glad she hadn’t cried. The process of unlocking, entering, and locking was the same; it would always be the same. This time he carried pen, ink, and parchment, which he thrust at her saying, “Now for your ransom note, girl. Write what I say.”
He looked at the fire for a moment and began.
“My Dear Magistrate. I’ve caught your little one. You’ll have her back if you put a hundred sovereigns in the belly of a pumpkin you’ll find in the cleft of the great yew that grows beyond the tannery. If not, then I’ll cut out your own pumpkin’s guts.” He thought for a moment more and concluded that this was very well done indeed.
“Did you get all that? How did you like that last part, pumpkin? Haw! Haw! Haw!” He snatched the parchment and held it close to his face by the light of the fire. The girl had written everything in silence. Her hand was unsteady, but she was sure she had spelled everything correctly. She imagined the tanner’s place and how quickly her father might rescue her.
The bandit searched the paper. He couldn’t read or write, and he grew afraid that the girl had tricked him. She wrote a secret message to her father. He was certain of it. He wadded the parchment up and threw it in the fire.
The girl gasped.
“Caught you at it! I did, didn’t I! I can see it on your face.”
The treasure he imagined his was slipping away! He reached back to strike her but fear of something held him. He flew to the door—unlock, open, slam, lock it tight. And off he went to drink and think about how he could claim his reward. The girl crept to the cot and stayed there all night and the next morning too.
For a month the bandit waxed lunatic and her daily meal waned in quality and volume. She became a connoisseur of his monomania. The natural consequences of her abduction had no place in his plan. He was running out of supplies. She surmised that he couldn’t manage the trick of transmuting flesh to gold. Where early he gloated and pranced, lately he skulked and turned inward.
And feeling that the sand was running out of her glass, she too turned to despair. Her father never came. No trumpets nor the clatter of hooves nor clang of steel announced the wave that might crash the door in on itself and free her from her ruin. She soon resented the dress she wore with its lace and bright colors, its heraldry of days past.
Soon she could bear it no longer and turned to the discarded pile of rags. She rummaged and chose, then set about sewing herself a new set of clothes. Something more keeping with her new station as the prisoner of a fool. In short order, she’d stitched together a simple frock.
She stripped off her once-pretty dress and discarded it into the fire. It burned away while she dressed. She bound up her tangled, oily hair in a kerchief she’d found and darned. Then she sat on the cot and dreamed again of what lay beyond the circuit of masonry that had become her prison. She thought less of father and more of escape.
Next day, the bandit returned. The lock scraped open, the door heaved wide. In he bounded, shut and locked the door. Then he froze. An expression of rage, which all wise people know to be the profoundest self-pity overtook him. He sputtered, mumbled, and spat.
“What trick is this? Where is she?”
The girl sat mute, less afraid now than before, but wary nonetheless, all the more wary just now.
“Have you… what… I know what this is!” His mind had latched onto an implausible conjecture that he accepted at once as God’s own revelation. “He sent you to switch places with her! That damned magistrate and his tricks!”
He let the firewood and plate he carried fall to the floor. He fumed, cursed, and might even have muttered ‘woe is me’ in pitiful earnest. He paced the room and then pulled himself together. It took all he had to manage it.
“You must go. It’s not right: you suffering in her place. There’s a good girl.”
She stood carefully and walked to the door. He paced her and then unlocked and opened the great door. He nodded her away.
“I’m frightfully sorry for the ways of them muckety mucks. Trust no elites. Go on home now before your dear mammy takes fright.”
She curtsied and left. He shut the door against the light and the sky and her anabasis. Then she ran straight home to her parents. But in the tower’s belly, the bandit wailed and gnashed his teeth, he flailed about and flogged himself. Sometime about midnight he threw himself onto the little cot and by dawn he had distilled from his boil of emotions so pure a narrative of injury that it would cleanse all of his past sins and all of the sins he might ever after perpetrate.