Some people are born rich. Some become rich. Others aren’t quite so fortunate. Giles and Virginia Jarvis were of the fortunate variety. Giles had made lots of money working in the City. Ginny had inherited hers from her mum and dad. So when they married it was like a great clanging-together of bank vaults that rang out across the land.

They bought a big old house out in the country with dozens of bedrooms and stone columns at either side of the front door and a long gravel drive which swept up to it through the hundreds of acres of woodland that came with the estate. They liked the idea of running their house in the way a squire and his wife might have run it a couple of centuries earlier, so they created a deer park and commissioned a couple of follies and a croquet lawn with peacocks strutting around it, and employed plenty of staff to do all the cooking and cleaning and to treat Giles and Ginny with the kind of respect they felt their considerable wealth deserved.

One Saturday morning Ginny was riding her horse through a part of the woods she’d never explored before when she happened to come across a dank little cave. She climbed off her horse, crept up to the entrance and peered into the darkness.

‘Hello?’ she said.

A minute later she was back on her horse and charging towards the house, barely able to contain her excitement. She abandoned her horse at the front door and went haring straight up the stairs in her muddy boots.

‘Giles,’ she called out, ‘Giles, darling,’ and her words went flapping all around the high ceiling and echoing up and down the corridors.

Her husband peered over a banister, convinced that Ginny had done something truly dreadful, like take a pot-shot at some pesky pigeon and hit a local by mistake. But when he finally located his wife she was positively beaming.

‘I’ve found a cave,’ she said.

It wasn’t the sort of news that Giles had expected and it took him a couple of moments to come up with what felt like an appropriate response.

‘Well done,’ he said, at last.

‘We must get ourselves a hermit for it,’ Ginny declared. ‘Like people used to.’

Unlike his wife, Giles had never paid much attention in history lessons and consequently wasn’t up on hermits and, more precisely, what a hermit was for. But, as Ginny explained that afternoon and all through supper, one doesn’t have a hermit for anything in particular, except for looking rather wild and living a life of solitude and generally occupying what would otherwise be an empty cave.

At first, Giles found the idea rather baffling. But within a couple of days he began to think it quite a novelty. And by the end of the week he considered a hermit an absolute necessity and was quite indignant that no one had brought it to his attention earlier on.

The following week they put an advert in the local newspaper, under Situations Vacant:

with their name and address printed beneath it, to which all aspiring hermits should apply.

The Jarvises had high hopes. After all, they reasoned, how many jobs could there be which offered free meals and accommodation for doing nothing except sitting and thinking all day? So they were, frankly, surprised and a little disappointed when, a full week later, they hadn’t received a single application. How very strange, they thought. Then, how very ungrateful. Here they were, offering a cave with all the trimmings and the general public were too hoity-toity to take them up on it.

Ginny began to talk vaguely about turning the cave into a grotto and making up a couple of sightings of fairies, to stimulate interest. Either that or just filling the damned thing in. But the following Tuesday as they took tea in one of their many lounges and listened to a concert on the radio a maid shuffled in and announced that a rather rough-looking fellow had fetched up at the back door and was asking if the hermit job was still available.

Ginny let out a little yelp – a peculiar noise, similar to a small dog being trodden on, which, in Ginny, tended to indicate profound delight. Giles hadn’t heard that little yelp half as much as he would’ve liked to lately so, to show his support, he slapped his thigh and let out a low guffaw of his own.

The maid was told to take the fellow through to the library and, a couple of minutes later, Ginny and Giles strolled in after him. He was an oldish chap – in his fifties or sixties – and was standing before the shelves of books looking thoroughly dumbfounded, as if he’d been thrown into a book-prison.

‘Do you read much?’ Ginny asked, by way of starting up a conversation.

The fellow turned and shrugged, as if he didn’t have particularly strong feelings on the subject either way.

‘I know,’ said Ginny, ‘it’s so hard to find the time.’

As she spoke, Ginny gave her budding hermit a quick once-over. He was a fairly bedraggled specimen, which was no bad thing since bedragglement was quite fitting for a hermit, but there was a ripe old smell about the fellow so, rather than risk him ruining their upholstered furniture, Ginny found him a wooden chair to sit on, thinking it might be easier to have it scrubbed clean after he’d departed. Or burned, if necessary.

Giles and Ginny settled themselves on to one of the enormous sofas and for a moment simply sat and observed their guest as he continued to marvel at the opulence of his surroundings.

‘Are you a religious man?’ Ginny asked, eventually.

The fellow considered the question, then shrugged. ‘Not really,’ he said.

Ginny could see that her guest wasn’t particularly well versed in the art of chit-chat. ‘But, if you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘you strike me as someone who likes to do a little thinking.’

The fellow thought about it for a moment. ‘I suppose,’ he said, then nodded. ‘Yes, I sometimes like to think.’

Ginny smiled, as if the fellow was finally confirming the sort of intelligence she had suspected him of having, and she took this as a cue to go more fully into what the job entailed. They had a cave, she explained, and wanted someone to live in it. Someone who might cultivate the long-haired, solitary attitude of a hermit.

As she spoke the bedraggled fellow nodded but continued to gaze around the room.

‘Which means that you must agree not to shave, or cut your hair, or trim your fingernails,’ Ginny insisted. ‘We want that savage look.’

The fellow nodded again.

‘And you must stay in your cave – or thereabouts,’ Giles added, in case there was any chance the fellow had failed to grasp the whole living-in-a-cave idea.

The fellow nodded once more, then all three of them sat in silence for a moment, until the old fellow suddenly seemed to find his voice.

‘There was something about food …’ he said, ‘… in the advert.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ginny. ‘One of the staff will drop something off every morning. You know, a little bread and cheese – that sort of thing.’

This talk of bread and cheese certainly seemed to perk the old fellow up and, not long after, he suddenly sprang to his feet, like some soldier standing to attention.

‘Right then,’ he said.

‘Very good,’ said Ginny, and she and Giles hauled themselves up from their sofa. ‘When would you be able to start?’

The old fellow tugged back his jacket sleeve and stared at his wrist, as if a watch might suddenly appear there.

‘Well, straightaway,’ he said.

So they all marched down to the cloakroom, where Giles and Ginny pulled on their wellington boots. Then they all trooped out through the back door and headed off towards the woods. As they marched along Ginny did her best to impress upon her newly appointed hermit what sort of behaviour was expected of him. Contemplation, she said. That was what they were after. Nothing too noisy or demonstrative.

‘As a rule, hermits tend to be quite introverted,’ she told him.

Ginny had envisaged her hermit dressed in a shroud or simple cassock, but the old fellow’s clothes were already so rough and ragged that she saw no need to make a fuss. Enquiries were made as to whether there were family members who might need to be informed of his new position or any personal knick-knacks which might need picking up. There weren’t.

‘We’ll have one of the boys bring you out an old straw mattress,’ Ginny told him as they continued walking. ‘And a spade,’ she said, and waved vaguely at the woods off to her right, ‘for your convenience.’

They finally reached the cave and the hermit stared into it without much enthusiasm. Giles and Ginny worried he might be about to turn and walk away. But he shrugged, as he seemed to be in the habit of doing, and said that he’d seen worse. Then Ginny told him about the vow of silence, which she said she hoped that he would agree to.

‘Silence?’ said the hermit.

Ginny nodded. ‘Most hermits appreciate a little peace and quiet,’ she told him. ‘It helps them think.’

The hermit gave another shrug, which Ginny took as his consent on the issue. ‘Oh, and if anything interesting occurs to you while you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘you must feel free to share your thoughts with us.’

The hermit looked stumped. ‘How do I tell you what I’m thinking if I’m not allowed to talk?’ he said.

‘We’ll have some paper and pencils sent over,’ Ginny told him. ‘Just jot down any thoughts and leave them at the cave entrance. One of the staff will pick them up.’

They stood around for another few moments. Then Giles announced that he believed that they had taken care of everything and he and Ginny were about to leave when the hermit raised his hand, like a schoolboy.

‘About the bread and cheese,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ said Ginny. ‘We’ll send it over with the mattress.’ Then she brought her finger up to her mouth, as if that simple gesture effectively stifled every last word he might otherwise have uttered in his insignificant little life.

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘as quiet as the grave.’

For the first couple of months the Jarvises were quite besotted with their hermit and would use any excuse to drop in on him. His hair had been quite lank and greasy to begin with, but as it grew, along with his beard and fingernails, he looked more like the wild man Ginny and Giles had imagined and became ever more popular with them. At dinner parties they would talk with great affection of their ‘noble savage’ and sometimes gather together great packs of guests to creep up to the cave and spy on him as he went about his contemplative chores.

For his part, the hermit was reasonably happy with the arrangements – at least to begin with. He had somewhere to sleep, even if it was quite damp and draughty. More importantly, he had a regular supply of food delivered to his front door. A plate of sandwiches would appear outside his cave first thing in the morning along with fresh fruit and the occasional buttered scone. But as the months crept by the quality of food gradually deteriorated. One day there was nothing but a bag of rotten apples waiting for him. A pot of mouldy old broth turned up the following week. Then he began to be given what looked suspiciously like the scraps from the Jarvis’s previous night’s dinner. And some days there would be no food at all.

But it was the silence that did the damage. The hermit had never been one for inconsequential conversation and, in fairness, there had been the odd day when he quite enjoyed the solitude. But his vow of silence soon became a burden. It hung around him like heavy chains. And after several months spent staring out at the dismal weather or huddled under his blanket against the cave’s cold wall he found his thoughts beginning to take unusual routes and strange diversions and his mind begin to unravel as it went along.

Giles and Ginny, meanwhile, had found a new distraction. Giles was dozing by the fire one night when his wife sat down and snuggled up beside him.

‘I’ve got some news,’ she said.

‘What’s up?’ said Giles.

‘Come summer,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t a new little junior Jarvis pottering about the place.’ And she made that little yelp which her husband loved so much and heard so rarely. ‘Daddy’s going to have himself an heir to the throne,’ she said.

The next few months were a frenzy of planning and preparation. Rooms had to be redecorated and converted into nurseries. Nannies and other help had to be interviewed and hired. Week by week, Ginny grew a little heavier and eventually became so exhausted that she spent most of the last month of her pregnancy laid up in her bedroom, before the midwife was finally called and duly delivered a baby boy named Jack who, if he only knew it, was bound for a life of suffocating wealth.

At that point any remaining interest in the wild old man in the woods promptly evaporated and all their attention was directed towards their son. Jack spent most of his days on his back, staring up at the ceiling until the face of a nanny or a mother or father peered in at him. He slept and fed; was changed and bathed. And late at night, in those moments before his mother reached him, his cries would carry through the nursery window – out into the darkness and deep into the woods.

The hermit’s messages had started out quite innocently, with maids returning to the house with bits of paper proclaiming

and

But over the months they began to take on a more disturbed tone, with notes such as

and

Some of his notes began to contain peculiar drawings; others were covered in illegible scrawl. But by then the Jarvises had grown quite bored, had told their staff not to bother them with his infernal rantings and had more or less washed their hands of him.

The first real sign of trouble was when the peacocks went missing. The maid who was sent out to try and round them up found their remains at the edge of the wood – two bloody carcasses among a few fancy feathers. It was a gruesome, if isolated, incident which sent a small shudder of fear right through the household. But there was no way of knowing exactly who or what was responsible. It could quite conceivably have been a fox. Over the next few days the hermit was seen wandering all over the grounds and acting most peculiar. With his long hair and long nails, he wasn’t the kind of fellow the staff wished to stumble across without fair warning. And when Giles found a note tucked under his car’s windscreen wiper which said simply

he decided he’d had enough and sent some of the lads out to try and track the hermit down.

He wasn’t in his cave and there was no sign of him in the deer park, so the lads split up and went hiking off into the woods. An hour or two later one of them came running up the drive to report a sighting of the wild old man. Giles took down his shotgun, called all the men on the estate together and had his scout lead them into the woods to the spot where the hermit had last been seen. They spread out and swept up the hill. They followed the valley. Between them they had binoculars, food and water, as well as Giles’s anger to drive them on, but after three or four hours of leaping streams and hacking a path through the undergrowth they had nothing to show for their efforts, except arms and legs which were badly scratched by bracken and feet which were numb with cold.

They were out near a ridge and Giles was about ready to call a halt to the proceedings when one of the boys waved to get his attention and pointed over to the west. The whole party froze and stared out towards the line of trees on the horizon. But there was nothing there. Just the bare trees silhouetted against the cold, grey sky. Then a figure suddenly sprang up and darted from one tree to another. A gasp went round the lads and Giles brought his gun up to his shoulder. He closed one eye and waited. And when the figure next slipped out into the open he let both barrels go.

Every bird in the woods took to the sky in a mad clatter of flapping and cawing. The gunshots rang out for miles around. For a while, nobody dared move a muscle.

‘Do you think we hit him?’ Giles asked the others.

The boy beside him was quite convinced he hadn’t got within ten yards of him.

‘I think you may have winged him, sir,’ he said.

Then everyone ran up to the ridge where the figure was last seen moving. They looked hard but found no sign of him, nor any spots of blood.

‘Well, that should’ve scared the mad old rogue back to wherever he came from,’ Giles told the others. And, to a man, they all stood and nodded and agreed that it most definitely should.

It would be the last time Giles ever set eyes on the fellow. But for the rest of his days he would imagine himself back in the woods, bringing the gun up to his shoulder and doing a better job. For, two days later, when Jack’s nanny slipped out of the nursery to warm a bottle, the window creaked open. And as little Jack lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling an unfamiliar face swung into view. He saw a matted beard and long, lank hair hanging over him. He saw two hot, wild eyes look him up and down. And, at last, Jack saw a pair of hands with long, sharp fingernails reach down towards him – felt them slip beneath him and lift him up.

The nanny returned just in time to see the wild man ease himself out of the window, with the baby clutched to his shoulder. She screamed and, not long after, her mistress came running in to see what all the fuss was about. Ginny found the nanny still screaming and pointing towards the open window. She ran over to it. And the last thing she ever saw of her son was him looking back over the hermit’s shoulder as he disappeared into the woods.

Of course, the police were called and the locals were alerted. Search parties were given descriptions and sent on their way. Vast rewards were offered for the baby’s safe return or information which led to a satisfactory conclusion. And not surprisingly, the locals spent their every spare minute doing their best to claim the prize.

The Jarvises scoured the woods themselves but found no sign of the wild man. And, year by year, they came a little closer to accepting that they would never set eyes on their precious son again.

But from time to time there would be talk of a sighting – of some strange creature making his way through the undergrowth, clutching a youngster and, later, of the two of them running side by side. Five long years after they first disappeared, a local woman claimed to have come across two wild-looking creatures in a clearing near the edge of the estate and as soon as word got back to the house, she was summoned by Ginny Jarvis.

The woman stood in the library, looking quite intimidated, when the Jarvises walked in to meet her, just as they’d met the hermit all those years before. But Ginny insisted the woman sit on the sofa beside her and took her hand and told her to take her time and tell her all about the two figures she claimed to have seen.

The woman said that she’d only seen them for a matter of seconds before they noticed her and went scurrying back into the undergrowth.

‘All I can say’, she said, ‘is that one was fully grown – an oldish fellow. And the other small, just like a child.’

Ginny begged her to go on.

‘Both looked quite wild – with matted hair hanging round their shoulders,’ the woman told her. ‘And long, sharp fingernails.’

Ginny gripped the woman’s hand in desperation and asked if there wasn’t anything else she could tell her. ‘Did either speak?’ she asked.

‘Not at all,’ said the woman. ‘They were both as silent as the grave.’