Hilde’s father was a drunken brewer who beat his wife and children daily. Two younger brothers died suspicious deaths, and a baby girl, born two years before Hilde, was shaken to death by John for crying at night. Understandably, after losing three children, Elizabeth dearly loved Hilde, and took pains to protect her from her father’s unpredictable wrath.
John Overdale, for all his sins, was Christian, and used this to every advantage. The local priest was corrupt; selling indulgences and taking bribes, and thus was easily controlled by John and other influential men of the village. However, Elizabeth had been raised quietly in the old ways, worship of Nature as a Mother Goddess, and passed these beliefs on to Hilde. Fortunately, John never discovered the pagan nature of his wife and daughter.
While Hilde was still a young child, her mother began to weaken, sickened by what was probably some manner of internal cancer. Fearing what would happen once she was dead and unable to protect Hilde, Elizabeth, on her death-bed, whispered to her daughter to run from John if her mother was to die. After this, Hilde, presumably under the age of ten, fled to near-by Kensford, a slightly larger village, where she was taken in by the local lord, serving as a kitchen girl.
Lord Matthew was an elderly man, well schooled, and a devout Christian. He treated his servants better than many nobleman treated their serfs, and it was in this pleasant atmosphere that Hilde grew up. A fellow kitchen servant, Martha, was quite learned in hearth wisdom, herbalism, and how to birth babies. She acted as the manor wise-woman and midwife, and took young Hilde under her wing; training the girl as her apprentice.
After many years, the venerable Lord Matthew died, and his estate went to his foolish, evil-hearted, twenty-year-old son. About three months later, the king’s representatives came through rounding up men to serve in the latest Crusade into the Holy Lands. The young lord went through his household, hoping to find twenty servant men to give to the king’s delegates so he would be excused from the fighting himself. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough male servants, so the boy was forced to cheat.
Lord Andrew sent a huntsman out into the village to grab stable boys from the central square, but even then, he still needed one more body to give the king’s men. Hilde was scrubbing the main hall stairs, and as Lord Andrew walked by, he formed a plan. Two of his personal servants grabbed her, dressed the girl, who by then was probably around the age of 18 and under-nourished, so her figure was not pronounced, in a tunic and jerkin, and cut her hair short.
Thus, without so much of a words of explanation, Hilde found herself marching through the counties with the rest of the gathered army, on their way to the Holy Lands. Wise from her years in the manor house, Hilde knew better than to betray her gender, and was fortunate that no one ever noticed. She fought hard during the Crusades, but was confused as to why Britain was invading foreign territory, and soon tried to avoid killing Islamic soldiers.
While in the Holy Lands, Hilde met perhaps the only other woman serving in the army at that time, Gabrielle Gevonne, who would soon be Embraced, and one day become the Ventrue Justicar, but at that time, she was still mortal.
During a massive retreat in which the British were driven back to the coast, Hilde was lucky enough to be injured semi-seriously, and ended up serving on a ship which brought looted supplies back to London, where she managed to buy her freedom with an ornate shield she’d found on the battlefield. The big city, however, was filthy and unfeeling, so Hilde fled to the shires, finally stopping in the village of Bromstock.
Since her kidnapping on the manor stairs nearly five years previous, Hilde had been maintaining the masquerade of being male, but once safe in the country, dropped this guise. She fell in with Old Sarah, an aged woman, wise beyond her years, who was the local healer. From her, Hilde perfected the knowledges that had lain dormant in her since the days of Lord Matthew, and she soon became an intelligent and talented midwife.
Old Sarah, as well as being a healer, was also a potter, though her hands were too gnarled by arthritis to work the wheel by then. However, she was fond of sculpture and taught Hilde how to make small figures of clay, her favorite being a palm flute she made for her apprentice. This, unfortunately, prove to be the downfall of the two, for when agents of the Church and Inquisition swept through the town, they took the sculptures to be a sign of witchcraft, and dragged Hilde and Old Sarah to the nearest Inquisition compound for ‘confession’.
While in her cell, Old Sarah, knowing that she would be heavily tortured before an inevitable death, ingested some of the mold that was growing on the stones, recognizing their lethal species. She died two hours later, and out of frustration for not being able to kill her themselves, the agents had her body stripped and burned in the courtyard.
Hilde, however, was fortunate enough to end up in a communal holding cell with another woman, and three men. One of them, unbeknownst to anyone, was a Garou, a Red Talon in Homid form who didn’t know how to speak any human languages. He’d been caught by the Inquisition during a raid on his pack’s caern, and being the Warder, was captured as he defended the stronghold while the sept escaped. In the fight, the Garou had been wounded in the arm, and not being in Breed form, could not regenerate.
None of the other cell members, being mortals, could communicate with the confused, frightened man. When Hilde was placed in the room, she immediately tore off the hem of her skirt and bandaged the Garou’s wound. He was grateful, but how much, the young midwife would never fully know.
The next day, Hilde was taken to an interrogation room and harried to confess to witchcraft, which she refused to do. Finally, the agents threw her back into her cell, promising her execution at dawn. As dusk fell, and Hilde faced what she was sure to be her last night, sounds of battle drifted down from the above-ground levels of the compound.
The Red Talon’s pack had come back for him, and had slaughtered every single agent of the Church and Inquisition in the area. They tore into the cell that he shared with Hilde and the other mortals. The wounded Garou reverted to Breed form as his pack massacred the cell-mates. Only as they were about to kill the terrified Hilde did the werewolf step in and protect her. He begged his brethren to spare her, for she’d helped him when the other didn’t. Impressed by her honor, the pack ran off, letting her live.
Taking back her belongings, a short sword, her herb pouch, and her palm flute, all having been grabbed from her by the agents, Hilde fled south; further into the country. This land was covered in dense forests, and the villages that braved the highwaymen to exist were all small and close-knit. It was in one such hamlet that Hilde found work as a scullery maid in a tavern.
The ale house was off one of the main trade roads of the shires, which brought most of the travelers and merchants to it on their way through the village. However, a few weeks after Hilde began work there, a convoy came through, and in their care was a feverish stable-boy. His masters were busy drinking in the tavern, so Hilde took it upon herself to care for him. A few hours later, he showed the colors of the plague, and the rest of his caravan were also beginning to sicken.
Within a day, the Black Death had spread through the town, and being the closest thing to a healer, Hilde was blamed for halting the epidemic, and not curing the stricken. She was driven out of the town and into the vast thick woods, crossed by only a scant few paths. By this time, Hilde was herself infected with the plague, and close to death. Staggering through the forest, she collapsed at the foot of a large tree, and expected to expire.
Tobias Ashenstone, an old man who lived in the woods with his adult, retarded son, was gathering herbs when he found Hilde. Noting that the black nodes of the disease had burst, and that when they did, the person usually survived, he and his son, Matthius, brought her back to their hut deep in the forest, which is where Hilde woke from her fever two days later.
Thankful to the man who’d saved her, Hilde stayed on with Ashenstone and Matthius, and the elder taught her a great deal about the healing nature of potions made from plants and stones. Ashenstone, like Hilde, believed in the old ways of the druids, and only his living so deep in the forest prevented the church from coming after him, for he did not often like to go into the near-by villages. Matthius, who was slow, was believed by the old man to be a fairy changeling who survived, though could not speak any human tongue.
Two years later, the winter was uncommonly fierce, and Matthius caught pneumonia, dying within a week. All through his son’s illness, Ashenstone sat by his side, trying to bring him back to health. After Matthius died, the old man wasted away, and himself was dead in a month. Hilde buried the two in the near-frozen earth, and planned to leave the hut at the end of the winter, heading again further south into the shires.
One warm day in the spring, about a week before Hilde was ready to leave the cabin, agents of the Church found the cabin, looking for the legendary healer Ashenstone. Not knowing the first name, or even the gender of their quarry, after an inspection of the potions and herbs in the hut, they took Hilde, not listening to her protests. Again, the charge was heresy against the Church and the crime of witchcraft.
Long days and nights of torture and interrogation followed, and the agents finally decided that Hilde should be hung the next day at dusk. The warden, a sadistic man who was used to getting what he wanted, tried to rape the woman, but when she fought back, scratching his face, he changed the sentence to be hung, drawn, and quartered; a punishment usually reserved only for treason against the king.
Hilde sat in her cell that day, and endured the taunts of the guards and other prisoners. She viewed her death as a martyrdom for all healers and those who resisted the patriarchal, bigoted, heavy-handed methods of the Church. Hilde was not afraid to die. As the sun set, she was taken from her cell, dressed in the shrouds that corpses were buried in, put in a cart along with her own coffin, and paraded to Tyburn Square, the site of the gallows, and all other public executions.
Since it had been raining heavily all day, there were only about ten spectators to the horrible deed. Hilde was to be hung by the neck until nearly dead, tied to four horses running in different directions until her joints were unhinged, the executioner would slice her down the front to remove and burn her inner-organs, then she would be decapitated, and her head put on display.
The man put the noose around her neck, and kicked the stool out from under Hilde. She flinched, but strangely, did not fall, nor was she hung. A man with wild eyes was staring at her, then he turned and screamed, throwing the whole square into chaos. Everyone, spectators, guards, even the executioner, seemed to go man and run howling into the night. The madman, who was actually a powerful Malkavian, approached Hilde, and cut her down with his sword.
He looked deep into her eyes and kissed her, biting deeply into her neck to drain the blood, then bled his vitae into her mouth, creating a childer. Weak from her Embrace, Hilde tried to speak, tried to ask what had happened, but her sire spoke, attempting to soothe her.
"Shh, don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re as innocent as a child."
Hilde woke up the next night in an underground cellar, and her sire was gone. Knowing nothing about who or what she was, she wandered the village, then took off into the woods. Fortunately, two Ravnos were on their way through, and found her, telling Hilde of her Cainite heritage and the Traditions of the Kindred. Though they abandoned her a few nights later, the neonate Malkavian soon happened on the town of York, and was taken in by Lord Carlos, a local Lasombra, and one of his clan, Donna Anya Scervantes.
Tragically, the Embrace had left Hilde’s mind altered. By virtue of being Malkavian, she was, in effect, insane, however, the words of her sire were not lost on her, and Hilde Ashenstone’s madness was that of child-like innocence. All of her intelligence remained, but hidden in a fog, expressing itself randomly, and the once independent, head-strong woman had become like a child lost in the woods.
Hilde was in York for about four years, becoming the ‘pet Malkavian’ of the Lasombra Anya. One night in 1180, the Knights Templar, an elite force of the Inquisition, raided the Cainites of the city. Fearing for her friend, Anya told Hilde to stay in the house, not alerting her to what was happening. While the night grew bloody, and the York went up in flame, Hilde became worried and left the house.
Staked in the front hall of Lord Carlos’ estate, Hilde was saved and spirited away by a Nosferatu servant who Anya had charged with watching after the Malkavian. He took her into the underground domains of his clan, waiting to be contacted by his Lasombra master. However, he was killed two months later by a Lupine, and Hilde, still in Torpor, was passed down to the protection of his childe.
The years passed swiftly, and when the childe died in 1603, he passed Hilde on to the seven other members of his warren, who were still neonates. By 1755, the group had moved to the sewers under London, and in 1895, a team of hunters nearly wiped them out. A little more than a hundred years later, there were only three of the original warren remaining, and they had been hearing rumors of a 5th generation Nosferatu living in America, in the town of Swarthmore.
Taking their duty quite seriously, they arranged for Hilde’s body to be sent there in the hopes that their elder might know what should be done with her. However, by the time the body reached Philadelphia and was covertly stolen by the Swarthmore warren, Mange of Nosferatu had been dead for more than six months, destroyed by an explosion. Chris Fullery, the city’s sheriff and top-side member of the warren had fled, fearing assassination.
The other three Nosferatu, and Dr. Megan Roberts, who like the former sheriff, enjoyed Kindred relations in the city, took the Malkavian down into the sewers, and unsure of who she was and why she had been sent to them, woke her, and left her in a darkened tunnel. Terrified and confused, Hilde hid herself, and sought out the nearest house that had Kindred auras within. It was the estate of William Blair of Ventrue, the city’s Prince.
Discovered, she was brought before him. Hilde thought that she was still in England, in 1180, and was convinced that Lord Carlos, Anya, Alex(York’s Toredor Prince), and Brother Belemonte(a Cappidocian) were somewhere nearby. The Malkavian ended up in the care of Eternus Hyperion, and Josie, a Gangrel and Daughter of Cacophony who ran the Swarthmore orphanage.
Shortly, Hilde was contacted by the Ventrue Justicar, Gabrielle Gevonne, who she’d met during the Crusades, although forgotten about. A scandal had developed around a staked Tremere assassin, and in preparation for a conclave, the Justicar asked Hilde to find out what she could. For now, Hilde is staying at the orphanage and helping with the children, and plans to stay in Swarthmore until she can begin her search for Anya and Lord Carlos.