PART II
I
So the Young Lovell sat listening to the old Elizabeth in the sun that grew hottish amongst the flowering bushes. He thought to himself nigh all the time, and still every second thought was of that lady.
His thoughts went like this--
There could be no doubt that the law would not help him to retake his Castle; but he longed for her red, crooked, smiling lips. He must therefore get together a band and besiege that place; and at the thought of climbing through a breach in great towers whilst the cannon spoke and the fascines fell into the ditches, arrows clittered on harness, greek fire rustled down, and the great banners drooped over the tumult, his blood leapt for a moment. But her hair he remembered in its filaments and it blotted out the blue sea that lay below his feet and was more golden than the gold of the broom flowers and the gorse that surrounded him. He thought that, first, he must have the sanction of the Bishop Palatine and his absolution from any magic he might in innocence have witnessed; but, in longing for her queer smile, he could scarcely keep from springing to his feet. He knew he must be moving over the hills, but the remembrance of her crossed breasts with her girdle kept him languishing there in the hot sun as if his limbs had lost their young strength.
So, when the old woman had finished her story, she sat looking at him with a queer glance. He spoke no word until she could not but say--
"Master, where did ye bide? Was it with the bonny witch-wives?"
He contemplated her face expressionlessly.
"Tell me truly, old woman," he said, "where will ye say that I did bide, to save my name?" for he knew that this old woman could tell a very good tale.
"I will say Gib Elliott took ye up into Chevyside and held ye there in an old tower, till a scrivener of Embro' could be found to take your bond for a thousand marks. And ye shall send fifty crowns to Gib by me--he was my mother's sister's foster son--and he shall say that so it was."
"Say even that," he answered, without either joy or sorrow in his tone.
"Oh my fair son," she cried out in an unhappy and lamenting voice, "I knew ye had been among the witch-wives; and shall your face, a young comely face of a golden lording...."
"What ails my face?" he asked.
"Sirs," she cried out, "his face is like the very still water of old grey rock-pools, with no dancing before the wind and sun."
"Even let it be so," he answered.
"Ay, ye are in a worse case than your dad," she cried. "All the Ruthvens had these traffics."
He looked at her hardly.
"My brother Decies was a witch's son?" he said. "That was my father's sin that sent him roaming?"
"Of a witch that dressed as a nun and stole into a convent," she said, and rocked herself woefully where she sat beside her washing board at the edge of the pool. "They found witch marks upon her. They should have drowned the child, but he took it by force and with great oaths and sent it into foreign shires. And that made his sin the heavier."
"Ah, well!" the Young Lovell said.
"You Ruffyns," the old woman went on lamenting, "for, call yourselves never so much Lovells, Ruthvens ye will remain, and ye are never of this countryside but of the Red Welsh or the Black Welsh or of some heathen countryside. And always ye have had truck with witches and warlocks. The first of ye that came into these parts was your grandfather's father and he had a black stone, like a coal but not like a coal. That was given him by a witch that loved him, as she went on the way to the faggots, for they burnt her. And without it, how could he have made his marvellous booties, riding thro' the land of France, from how 'twas to how 'twas, and sacking the marvellous rich and walled cities? And I had thought to have saved you from these hussies, seeing that you might well be of a better race, your mother being of a German house and the Almains, as all the world tells, being foul and dirty in their lives, but almighty pious so that nine crucifixes in ten that we buy come from there. Therefore as you came first from your mother's womb I put the fat of good bacon in your mewling mouth, and your sleeves I tied with green ribbons, and I took you to the low shed in the tennis court and rolled you down the roof--and the one thing should have saved you from the fiends and the other from the witches, and the third even from the fairy people. And these things are older than holy water, though you had enough of that...."
"May it save me yet!" the Young Lovell said. "But what I now have to consider is how to take my mother from these people and to get back what is mine own."
"Aye," the old woman said, "you were ever a good child to your mother; therefore I had hopes of you. For your sisters, they were all black Ruffyns, bitter and so curst that they had no need for resort to the powers of evil to help them."
"Tell me truly now, old woman," her master said, "how long may my mother live and abide the treatment that she now has and not die?"
"Ah," the old woman lamented, "how altered is now her estate from what it was, who had the finest bower that was to see in the North Country! Not a Percy lady nor any Neville nor any mistress of a Canon of Durham had such a one. Remember the great red curtains there were to the bed, and the painted windows that showed the story of the man without a coat. And the great chest carved with curliecues from Flanders, and the other chest with the figures of holy kings, and the third that was from Almain and stood as high as my head upon twisted pillars and had angels holding candles at each corner. And for what was in the chest--the stores of gowns, the furs of zibelline and of marten, the golden chains joining diamond to diamond and pearl to pearl! ... And now she lieth upon a little pallet, and here, upon these bushes, is drying all the linen that she hath. The one gown of scarlet is all that there is for her back, except for the great slit coat that they have given her for fear that she die of the cold. And her little dog Butterfly is all that she hath for comfort, that sits in her sleeve.... But yet I think she will not die, and it is certain that none of them wish her death that should bring against them the mighty house of Dacre to have her heritage. But day after day they come in, now one, now two, now three and cry out upon her with great and curious words seeking to gar her give them her lands and render up her yearly dower. And so she sits still; and sometimes she gives them back hard words, but most often she says no more than that they shall give her her due and let her go. And so they rave all the more. But I do not think that she will die..."
"And has she never sent word to her own mother?" the Young Lovell asked, "I think that ancient dame could do more than another to save her."
"I think she is too proud," the old woman said. "Of the Duke of Croy she has spoken often enough, but of her mother never one word, so that, God forgive me, I had forgotten that she had that mother though it was in her house I saw the first of God His good light three score and twelve years was. For you know that these ladies have never spoken together nor written broad letters since your grandfather Dacre died, and your father, on the day the funeral was, was sacking the castles and houses that were your mother's inheritance. And the old lady thought they should have been hers; so that to this day she is wealthy enough in gold but hath little or no land and dwells in but a moderate house in the Bailey at Durham, though when her son, the Dacre, is in London she is mostly there herself."
The Young Lovell stood up upon his legs.
"Then if there is no great haste to save my mother's life," he said, "it is the better. I would else very well have hastened to get together twenty or thirty lusty bachelors and so we might have burst into this Castle of mine. But if my mother may stay out a fortnight or a month it is the better. For I will get together money and a host and cannon and so we may make sure."
"Ay," the old woman said, "but hasten all ye may for the sake of Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer."
"Now tell me truly what is this?" her master asked.
The old woman burst out into many ejaculations how that with the haste and her master's strange looks she did not know what she had told him and what she had missed out.
Certain it was that Richard Bek, Robert Bulmer, and Bertram Bullock held the White Tower for him, the Young Lovell. The others could not come to them for the White Tower stood on a rock twenty yards from the Castle and joined to it by such a narrow stone bridge that it was, as it were, a citadel. It could stand fast though all the rest of the Castle should be taken, having been devised for that purpose. Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer, poor squires, or almost of the degree of yeomen, had always been captains of the White Tower and in it the dead Lord Lovell had kept his marvellous store of gold--as much as four score thousand French crowns, more or less--and all these were theirs still, with such strong cannon as might well batter down the Castle; only Richard Bek would not do this. And to him there had resorted from time to time certain strong fellows that were still faithful to their master, creeping in the night along the narrow bridge into the tower ... such as Richard Raket, the Young Lovell's groom that had lost his teeth at the fight of Kenchie's Burn. There might be a matter of twenty-five of them that held it and victualled it by boats from the sea at night.
"Old woman," the Young Lovell said, "ye keep the best wine for the last, but ye have our Lord's warrant for that."
So he got slowly up and put the bit in the mouth of Hamewarts, that had been grazing, and when he was on that horse's back he looked down on Elizabeth Campstones and said--
"Old woman, tell me truly, shall I take thee with me upon this great horse; for I think my kin will very surely hang thee for having talked and walked with me?"
She looked up at him with a surly, sideways gaze.
"Ah, gentle lording," she said, "if I may not with my tongue save my neck from thy sisters and their men I may as well go hang, for my occupation will be gone." He left her straining a twisted and wet clout over the dark pool.
When he came to the high uplands where there was some heather, he saw a man with a grey coat with a hood, and as soon as that man was aware of him, he went away with great bounds like a hare, but casting his arms on high as he sprang. The Young Lovell was well accustomed to that stretch of land. It was full of soft, boggy places and he knew therefore that that man had some money in his poke and desired to betake himself where no horse could follow. But because the Young Lovell knew that land so well, he threaded Hamewarts between bog and soft places, calling the notes of the chase to hasten him. Thus the great horse breathed deep and made large bounds. And the Young Lovell thought that times were not all that they should be when every footman must run from every gentle upon a horse and upon Lovell ground. For either that man was a felon, which was not unlike, or he feared that the gentleman should rob him, which was more likely still. The Young Lovell was resolved that these things should be brought to better order on his lands, for he would fine, hang, or cut the ears off every felon of simple origin that was there. To the gentle robbers too, he would not be very easy, though this was not so light an enterprise, since most of them would prove to be his cousins or not much further off. Still, they could go harry the false Scots.
In five minutes he was come up to that man in grey, and that man cast himself at first on his knees in the heather and then on his face, for his sides were nearly burst with running and leaping. The Young Lovell sat still and looked down upon the hind, for he was never a lord of much haste. And afterwards, the man, with his face still among the heather, for he was afraid to look at death that might be ready for him--this man fumbled for the grey woollen poke that lay under him. He pushed it out and bleated--
"I have but three shillings;" and when the Young Lovell asked him how he came by his three shillings, he said that he was bound for Belford neat's fair to buy him a calf.
"Then I wager two cow's tails," the Young Lovell said, "Hugh Raket, you owe me those shillings; for such a knave as you, for docking me of my dues, I have never known. You should pay me twelve pence and five hens and three days' labour a year--yet when did you pay my sire even the half of the hens in one year?"
This Hugh Raket turned himself right over upon his back and setting his arm above his head to shield his eyes from the sun he gazed upwards at the rider's head. His jaw fell though he lay down.
"If I am no Scot," he said, "ye are the Young Lovell."
"I am Lord Lovell," he got his answer, "get up and kiss my foot, for that is your duty."
He looked down at the man whilst he did his homage and said with an aspect of grimness:
"Ay, Hugh Raket, if you were not my horse-boy's brother you would be a poorer man and I a richer!"
The man looked up at his lord with an impudent shade on his face that had a thin beard. It was true that he had not many times done either suit or service since the field of Kenchie's Burn, for so surely did a Court Baron come round so surely would Hugh Raket be away on the hills after a strayed sow or goose, and Richard, his brother, would beg him off from the Young Lovell. Nevertheless, from time to time, the Young Lovell would take a couple or two of hens from him by force, for this was a very impudent family, and if they had the land scot-free and lot-free for a few years they were such fellows as would swear it was their free-holding--gay fellows they were, both brothers, but they had always a wet mouth for the main chance:
"Friend Raket," his lord said now, "that you are a very capable cozener I have known very well ever since your brother aided me upon the field. But, if you are upon Belfordtrod, catch you hold of my stirrup leather and you may have its aid as far as that town is. And, if hidden hereabouts--for you hold this land of me--you have any sword or crossbow or pike or such arms as naughty knaves like you are forbidden to have, you may go dig it up and bring it to me and I will look the other way. For, since I came out of my prison I have no arms at all, and it is not meet or seemly that I should ride unarmed."
The husbandman looked keenly at his lord; for, since Bosworth Field, the King had ordered that none of the simple people, unless they bought a licence at the cost of one pound English, should carry more arms than a short knife.
"Friend Raket," his lord said, "I think I can find thy arms as well as thou canst, for well I know this terrain, and they lie in a stone chest over beside that holed rock. But, if you will fetch them for me, giving me the sword and carrying for me the crossbow and for thyself the pike, I will call thee my man-at-arms, and so you shall have licence to keep all the arms you will in your own steading, which shall much comfort you when you think of the false Scots in the night-time." And at that, calling out, "O joy!" and ducking his head between his hands, the fellow ran over the ling to a great stone with a round hole in it that maidens were accustomed to pass their hands through up to the elbow to show their lovers or bridegrooms that they were pure. He knelt down beside this stone.
The Young Lovell sat on his horse in the summer weather. He gave one great sigh and gazed upon the blue sea behind and below him and the green plain before and on a level. The husbandman came back to him. Upon his head he had a cap of steel; over his back a small target was slung; in his left hand he held a pike with a steel head three foot long and armed with a hook such as the common sort use in battles to pull knights from off their horses. Bundled together in his arms were a Genoese cross-bow, a great sword and a little dagger, whilst slung across his back was a leather bag filled with such heavy steel quarrels and bolts as should fit the cross-bow. These arms Hugh Raket and his fellows used when they went raiding into the Scots or the Middle or the Western Marches; for they cared little whom they journeyed upon; even, when they heard that the Scots marched with a strong body upon Carlisle or the Debateable Lands they would take a hand with the Scots and bring back what they could.
And without any manner of doubt these arms--the knight's great sword and dagger which were a pair, and the Genoese bow--had been taken in a foray when the Lord Dacre was Warden of the Middle Marches and had some Genoese and many gentlemen to help him, though he had not made much of it. The little target had certainly been taken from the Scots, for it was such a one as the Murrays and the Macleods use, being not much larger than a cheese-top with many bosses and bubbles. But the pike and the steel cap this fellow might have made himself, for they were rude enough.
He stood looking up at his lord with a face of anxious roguery, but the Young Lovell never heeded him till the husbandman spoke; he was gazing to northward as if his eyes would start from his head.
The man continued watching his lord and thinking his thoughts as to where that lord had been until he spoke and asked the Young Lovell whether he should indeed have leave to bear all these weapons and be a man-at-arms. The Young Lovell came out of his reverie and said:
"Yes, yes; ye shall be my man-at-arms." And then he said: "Give me the great sword and the dagger. I will make them serve as arms enough till we come to Belford."
The bondsman was intent upon his own bargaining.
"Then if I be a man-at-arms," he said, "I shall no longer be a bondsman."
"If you will give me back your lands, that is so," said his lord. He was buckling on his sword and he hung the dagger from the belt. He drew the sword from the scabbard to see that it was not rusted in, and it came out very easily, for it had been lately greased.
"It is not very long since you used this sword in gentle feats of arms," the Young Lovell said.
"For using it," the man said, "I will not say that; cudgels and stones proved enough."
"Well, you shall tell me," Young Lovell said. "But now take my stirrup leather and let us go to Belford, for the sun is high."
The man took the stirrup, and whilst he ran lightly beside the great horse over the ling and the mosshags he called, a little coyly, his story up to his lord. It was a long tale, or he made it so, for there was a great deal to tell as to how a Milburn called Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock had called the bondsmen of the Castle Lovell together, and of how they had said that in the absence of the Young Lovell they would pay no heriots, nor yet hens, nor yet bolls of wheat. So, when the bailiff of the Castle had come among their steadings and had sought to take heriots for the death of the Lord Lovell and tythes in hens and pence, they had greeted him at first civilly and had asked to see the charters and papers of their lands, saying that that was the custom upon the death of the lord.
That had occasioned some delay, since the charters and papers had all been taken to Cullerford, to the tower of Sir Walter Limousin that had married the Young Lovell's sister, the Lady Isopel. So a strong guard was sent to Cullerford and brought the charters back for the time. At beat of drum the charters, customs, the number of the rent-hens and such things had been read out by the bailiff and the lawyer called Stone, standing upon a little mound at the head of the village. From here these things had been read from time immemorial, even to the oldest ages when it had been called the Wise Men's Talking-place. The lawyer Stone had told them that the heritage of the old Lovell had fallen to those three, the Decies, called now Young Lovell and the husbands of the ladies Isopel and Douce. They had, the lawyer read, fyled a suit against the late Young Lovell for sorcery, at a Warden's Court held in the Debateable Land on St. Mark's Day last gone. Since the Young Lovell had not appeared, that bill had been fouled and those three had taken his lands and all he had. And the lawyer Slone, standing upon that mound had bidden them go back to their byres and, peaceably, to do suit and service and pay their heriots and rent-hens and bolls of corn and the rest.
Then Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock, his friend, and Robert Raket, had answered for the other bondsmen that they would think upon it. Then the three of them had ridden to Lucker, where there was a lawyer called Shurstanes, and had taken counsel with him. So when, upon the morrow, the bailiff of that Castle came again, those three cunning ones had met him courteously, and said that, for a suit of sorcery, a Warden's Court could not foul or find a bill. It must go before a court of the Bishop Palatine. They had great respect for the Lord Warden, but so it was and his court was only for raidings in the Marches. And for the dispossession of a barony that could only be tried (after the Bishop's Court in Durham had found a true bill of sorcery) in an assize of the King's justices travelling, Alnwick or wheresoever it might be. And any such finding of the assize court must be ratified by the most dreadful King of England in council before ever the Young Lovell could be dispossessed of his lands.
And those three cunning men had further answered the bailiff that they were very willing to pay rent-hens and tythes and heriots and pence and whatever was rightfully to be had of them. But first they must be assured of what the King said in his council. Else the Young Lovell, coming again, might have it all of them a second time, and that, being poor men, they could not well abide.
Then the bailiff went back to the Castle--he was not the old bailiff of the Lord Lovell who had been cast out of his dwelling in the King's Tower and had gone to live at Beal--but it was a new bailiff that Sir Walter Vesey had brought from Haltwhistle, where he had been a surveyor's clerk.
But, in three days, the bailiff had issued again from the Castle and had gone to the byres of the poor widow of Martin Taylor, having about him ten pikemen for his protection.
Then Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock and Richard Raket considered that if this thing were done, even upon the poorest of them, it might well serve as a precedent. They had called together all the bondsmen and their sons, and the number of sixty-seven men and all the women had come, being ninety in number, and the more noisy because it was a woman and a widow that the bailiff sought to oppress. So they had thrown stones at the pikemen who were bearing off the widow's donkey, and had broken out the bailiff's teeth, and driven them all back to the Castle.
And, in expectation that the bailiff should come again with a greater force, they had fetched from their hiding-places all their arms, and had them ready. But the people from the Castle never came again; without doubt they thought they were not strong enough; the bondsmen of Castle Lovell were all very notable reivers and fighting men.
Thus, if Sir Walter and Limousin and the Decies came out with such forces as they had, it was very likely--nay it was certain--that the men who were in the White Tower and still faithful to the Young Lovell would issue behind them into the Castle with their cannons, and so, if they might not take the Castle they might at least set free the Lady Rohtraut, and have her away by sea; for they of the Castle had no boats, and no fisherman would help them.
The Young Lovell listened as attentively as he might to what Hugh Raket had to say, and, at the end of the story, they were come to the hill top where the heather and marshy ground ceased. They saw before them great plains of green grass with people going about everywhere, and there getting their hay. And a little way away there were going, along a trodden road, some ten armed men and another amongst them, all on horseback.
So the Lord Lovell kept himself apart, but sent Hugh Raket to look who these men were that went abroad upon his lands. Before him, but a little to the right was the town of Belford, but the monastery, with its great church and its great tower just in building, was a little to the South, near the wood called Newlands. Further to the South was the little hamlet of Lucker. He cast his eyes behind him and he frowned. For, apart from the sea and the sky, the two Castles and the islands set in foam, he had seen mostly the square tower of Glororum. A little company, in the clear weather, were riding out of this tower, and there the Lady Margaret dwelt. It seemed a weary thought to him since he remembered the lady with the crooked smile.
Hugh Raket came back to him and said that those ten men rode with a prisoner that had been convicted of theft in the Courts of the Nevilles. He had appealed to the Bishop's Courts in Durham, and so they were taking him there. Hugh Raket thought that it was a folly to make such matter of a felon. Let them hang him to the first tree and ride back. For this appeal, before they had the thief strung up, should cost the Neville lord, for guards and victual and horsemeat and harbouring, nothing less than ten pounds which was a great sum of money, and a folly too.
He was of opinion that, if such great lords as the Nevilles and the Darceys and the Young Lovell suffered none to appeal from their courts, but hung every man that came before them, it would be much better; for then there would be none of this monstrous outlay that was for ever occurring, and the great lords could excuse their poor bondsmen their rent-hens and their suit and service.
The Lord Lovell made Hugh Raket tell all over again his story of how they had contended with the bailiff. For, the first time, he had not been very attentive. But now he bent his brows firmly on the face of this cunning bondsman and gave him all his mind. And then it speedily appeared to him that it was this fellow that had really moved in the resistance to the bailiff, and that Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock had had little to do with it, for they were simple, slow fellows. So the Young Lovell frowned upon Hugh Raket and called him a naughty knave, for the Young Lovell prized good order in his dominions above everything.
The bondsman began to cry out then, that if they had paid their tributes, heriots and what not to the bailiff of the false pretenders, they would have none wherewith to pay the Young Lovell's bailiff when he came in turn as come he would.
"Now are you a very naughty fellow," the Young Lovell cut into his outcry, "for well ye knew ye thought I should never come again, but was away amongst the false Scots and dead, or amongst the false witches and worse. So ye were minded to escape all your suits and services for ever. And, for the bailiff of a great lord, proclaimed with drums upon his hill, he is no person for such scum and vermin as ye are to protest against, or against whom to cry out to lawyers. It is for you to do your services to those whom God for the time sees fit to set over you, and to our Lord the King and the Prince Bishop and the Lord Warden and others. For, if such fellows as you are to question whom ye shall pay and whom ye shall not pay, what peace or order should we have in these my lands? Nay, we shall see ye rise up against mine own bailiffs, so that, by God His sorrow, I must speedily come against ye with fire and brands...."
The Lord Lovell set his teeth and the bondsman shrank back. Nevertheless, he mumbled that they were very poor folk and could never pay two sets of masters, the one against the law and the other their rightful lord.
"Sir, you lie," the Lord Lovell said. "For very well ye know that such a parcel of rich scoundrels are not between Tweed and Tyne. For my Castle is a very strong Castle, and I have been and shall be to you a very powerful lord at whose name all the false Scots do tremble. So that, from the shadow of that my Castle, ye go burning and reiving into Scotland and the Marches, whereas none dare ever come against ye to take what ye have by right or what ye have falsely stolen. I have had complaints against ye, in my father's time, that, in one winter season, you and Barty of the Comb and the other Milburns and Jock Corbit and his fellows and others that are upon my lands, with fellows from Haltwhistle, and God only knows where or under whose leadership (though I think it was a Wharton that led ye), you cast down or burned ninety-two towns, towers, stedes, barnekyns, and parish churches; ye slew one hundred and seven Scots, and prisoners taken were two hundred and nine, who were ransomed with whitemail and black; 2,700 horned cattle ye took, and 3,039 sheep, along with nags, geldings, goats, swine and eight hundred bolls of corn...."
Hugh Raket mumbled that he had had very little of all this.
"Filthy knave," his lord said, "I know not what you had but you had your share, you and Barty of the Comb and Jock Corbit. And well I know that I was--God help and save me--surety for you and my other men at the Warden's Court where complaint was made against ye. And well I know that when ye should have assoiled yourselves by arms, it was my armourer that had made the arms ye wore, and so war-like did ye appear that none came into the field against ye, the complainers being mostly Scots widows that ye had made. God keep and save me! now I wish I had never done those things for you, for you came away with no bills fouled against ye and ye had the Scots horned cattle, and black and white mail, and their nags and geldings and goats, and so ye have waxed fat, and would rise up against your betters."
The bondsman was silent, deeming that the better course before the visible anger of his lord, and the Young Lovell continued:
"If ye would not pay your just dues to me where then should ye be? If it were not for the fear of my name how should you be safe in the nights? And how may I make my name feared but by keeping a great store of knights and men-at-arms and bondsmen and my Castle very strong? Where should ye be if I had no lead upon my roofs, and the rain and frost destroyed my towers? Ye would be men undone, for the false Scots would come burning and slaying, and the Lords Percy should take all ye had, and the Bishops Palatine would sell ye into slavery. So I rede ye well, pay me what ye owe me, or I will be in your steads and barnekyns a very burning torch, and upon your nags and geldings a death rider such as ye never saw."
The bondsman fell upon his knees before his lord's horse.
"Ah gentle lording," he cried out, "God forbid that we should not pay ye all that we owe. Then indeed were we all undone, for no men ever had lord so gentle and so kind."
"Foul knave," his lord said, "I know that if by my murder ye might well profit, murder me ye would, you and your fellows; but ye dare not for fear of the Scots."
The bondsman wept and groaned with his hands held up, and his hood fallen from his face.
"Now, by God's dreadful grace, that is not so," he cried. "For if I would have murdered ye--and I tremble at that word--might I not have done so even now, when I had the arms and weapons that I surrendered to you so that ye might have killed me? Ye are my very dread lord, and well I know it. For I have sate under the mass priest and heard his sermons, and well I know how that the lion is the symbol and token of Antichrist, the dragon of Satan, the basilisk of death, and the aspic of the sinner that shut his ears to the teachings of life. And have I not seen all these trampled beneath the feet of the Saviour in stone set upon the church door? And shall I be like unto the aspic and pass from life to hell ... the aspic that shutteth his ears? Alas, no! I do know that there are set over me, God and the Saints and the most dreadful King Henry, Seventh of that name, and the Bishop Palatine and the Border Warden and the monks of St. Radigund. But before all these men and next only to God, comes my most dread Lord Lovell of the Castle, and that if I do not serve him with all rights and dues, fire and sword will be my portion in this life or else the barren hillside and hell-flame in after time...."
The Lord Lovell said:
"Well, ye have learnt your lesson, the mass priest has taught you well."
Then the crafty bondsman, seeing that his lord's face was softened, and hoping, by means of his brother, still to escape his due payments, sighed and said:
"I would indeed, and before the saints, that I must give greater payments to my lord if there were none to other people. For there is no end to this payment of taxes and tithes. No sooner is my lord's bailiff gone than there come my Lord Warden's men seeking to take my horse for the King's wars in France--God curse that Lord Warden! And he gone, comes the Bishop Palatine's bailiff seeking payment for the milling of my corn at his mills on the Wear though the grists were all my own. Then comes the prior of St. Radigund's for a half tithe; then Sir John, the mass priest, for a whole. Then there are the market dues of Belford--for God His piteous sake, ah gentle lording, set us up here in Castle Lovell a market where we may sell toll free--we of the Castle. Now if I will sell some bolls of wheat and ship them to the Percies at King's Lynn, I must pay river dues at Sunderland according to the brass plate that is set in the Castle wall at Dunstanburgh. And if I pay that due it is claimed of me again a second time by the Admiral of the Yorkshire coast, saying that I should not have paid it the first, though God He knows what maketh the Admiral of Yorkshire in our rivers and seas. So with wood haulage to Glororem, and maltings to the King's Castle guard at Bamburgh, and a day's work of service here and two days in harvest there, God knows there is no end to a poor man's payments. But this I know..." and the peasant scowled deeply, "that my Lord of Northumberland may rue the day when he taxed us for the French wars. It is not that Lord Percy that shall live long."
The bondsman allowed himself these words against the Percy partly out of his great hatred, and partly because he knew his lord did not love this Earl of Northumberland for his treachery to King Richard upon Bosworth Field.
They were still halted at the edge of that plain that the lord might the better hear his bondsman. But the Young Lovell heard only parts of what the peasant said, for he was nearly lost in thought whilst the great white horse cropped the grass. At last the Young Lovell spoke.
"For what you say," he exclaimed, "as to the multiplicity of burdens there is some sense in it. And it might well be that I could buy some of these rights from the King, or the Prince Bishop, or others, as it chances. And, for a market, I am well minded to buy the right to hold one from the King. And so was my father minded before me. But you know very well that your gossip, Corbit Jock--like the tough rogues that ye all are--this Corbit Jock stood in the way of it. For the only piece of land I have that is fitting for a market lies under the wall of that my Castle on the way running through that my township of Castle Lovell. And amid most of that, as ye know, Corbit Jock has a mound of his holding. How his father got it I know not. But there, running into my Castle wall, is his mound, and on it a filthy barn leaning against my Castle wall, and before the barnekyn a heap of dung and a shed that might harbour five goats. The whole is not worth to him ninepence by the year, and it is far from his house and of no use to him. Yet, though I would well and willingly buy this of him, and my father would have bought it of his father that there we might have a market holden, ye know very well that this Corbit Jock will not sell and I have no power to take it from him. For, though I might get a broad letter from the King in his Council to take this mound by force, and to pay him full value, yet such a letter must cost me much gold, and it is doubtful if the King's writ, in such matters, runneth in these North parts. In the country of France, as I heard when I was there of the Sieur Berthin de Silly, such things are done every day by the King's letters. Nay, he was about then engaged in such a matter with a peasant, whom he dispossessed, but paid well and so has a fair market below his Castle of La Roche Gayon. And so it may well be in the South of this realm for aught I know. But here it is different, and I am not minded to have a hornet's nest of lawyers about my ears in order to give a market place--that should cost me dear enough when I bought the rights of my lord the King--to such rogues and cozeners as you and Barty of the Comb and Corbit Jock and the widow of Martin Taylor. But, if ye will talk of the matter with Corbit Jock that he may sell his mound to me, I will promise you this, that you shall have your market. For I am your very good lord. And so no more of talk for this time."
He set his horse towards Belford, going decently by roundabout ways and paths from landmark to landmark that he might not trample down the long grass of which his bondsmen were making their hay all about him. Of late years, since his father had been too heavy to ride, the Young Lovell had considered much the matters of his lands, and he had done certain things, such as selling by the year to third parties of the rights to collect his dues, whether on malt, hens, salt, housing and of other things. And these new methods, of which mostly he had heard in the realms of France, Gascony and Provence, had worked well enough, for his incomings had been settled and the buyers of his rights had neither the power to steal his moneys nor so much to oppress the bondsmen as his own bailiffs had. So that, in one way and another, he could talk of these things to his bondsman whilst he thought of other matters. And one of these matters came into his head from that talk of the shed of Corbit Jock that leant against the very rock below his Castle wall.
From below the flags of the men-at-arms' kitchen, in the solid stone of the rocks, there ran a passage going finally through the earth not ten feet from the mound of Corbit Jock. The only persons that might know of this passage had been the dead lord and Young Lovell himself. The Decies might know of it, for the dead lord had prated of all things to his bastard. But it was odds that it would never come into the Decies' head, for he was a very drunken fellow and remembered most things too late.
Now if, under cover of night, the Young Lovell could introduce a dozen or twenty lusty fellows with picks and other instruments into Corbit Jock's barnekyn, in five hours or less they could dig a way into that tunnel where it went under the ground. Then it was but pushing up the flagstones of the kitchen and they would be terrifyingly and surprisingly within the Castle whilst all the men-at-arms could be drawn off from those parts with a feigned attack on the outer walls. Or, if by chance there were men in that passage and guarding it, they could put into it a great cask of gunpowder and so kill them all. It was a task much easier than my lord of Derby and Sir Walter Manny had, who tunnelled under the Castle of la Reole for eleven weeks when Agout de Baux held it and yet could not take that place which is in Languedoc, though he had with him three Earls, five hundred knights and two thousand archers. The young Lovell thought he would have his Castle more easily.
And as he rode through the fields, the thoughts of war driving out those of the lady with the crooked smile, the siege of that Castle grew clear to him and like a picture, red and blue and pink, at the edge, or the head of a missal. At first, hearing that the White Tower was held for him with its gold and cannons, he had thought that, going by sea into that place, which was like a citadel over against a walled city, such as he had seen at Boulogne and Carcassowne and other places, he would set the cannon to batter down the walls and so enter in with what many he could get together.
But then it had seemed to him that that was his own Castle and, if he beat down its walls, he must build it up again at his own pains and great cost--for the building of castles is no light work to a lord, however rich. Moreover, his sisters would certainly set his mother in whatsoever part of the Castle he began to batter--so that he must either kill his mother or leave off; for that was the nature of his good sisters.
And then he began to think of stratagems and devices by which he might, more readily and at less cost, come to his desires. And so he cast about for a cunning device by the means of which he might get possession of the great gate of that Castle. But at that time he thought of none.
So he rode an hour through the fields, diverting himself with that picture in his mind and with his bondsman stepping beside him. Then they came to a brook which was a bowshot from the frowning and high tower of Belford monastery. This was so new that the stones were still white and the scaffold poles and planks all about its crenellations. The Young Lovell stayed his horse by the streamside and spoke to his bondsman.
"Now this I will do," he said, "and you may set it privately about the countryside. For I know well, Hugh Raket, that it is you that are the masterful rogue in these affairs. Although in your story you have sought to make it appear that Barty of the Comb and others had a great share in devising a mutiny against that bailiff, yet it was you alone that stirred up the people. So let it be known to my men a fortnight hence, at nine at night they shall meet me at a certain place of which I will warn you later. And each man shall be armed as he is when he goes against the Scots. Then they shall come into my service for four or five days each, as if it were harvest time and they doing their services due to me. Then they shall sack a tower and have their sackings. And of the prisoners that they take in another place they shall have the ransoming, unless I prefer to hang those prisoners. In that case I will pay them what the ransoming would have been. And, for the men out of the sea, they shall be excused all rent-hens and services and heriots that they owe me. You--that is to say--have called them heriots, but rather they should be called deodanda. For a heriot is paid, the tenant being dead, by the tenant's heirs. But in this case it is the lord that is dead and what is paid is paid by the bondsmen as a fine or a forfeit, because they did not save the life of their lord."
The bondsman looked upon the face of his lord and marvelled what manner of man this was that, in the very conception of a martial scheme, could so hang upon the niceties of words. But the Young Lovell was a very sober, hardy and cunning lord. In all that he said he had his purpose. So that, before the peasant could speak and ask him for more particulars of that bargain, the young lord drew up Hamewarts' mouth from the water where he had drunk sufficiently and went on, lifting his hand in the sunlight.
"So that it is in the nature of deodand rather than of heriot. And how it works is in this wise--that, every tenant having to pay and suffer upon the death of his lord, so he works very carefully to keep his lord alive. So mark you well that, Hugh Raket. For, if I succeed in this enterprise, two out of three of you shall be excused all rent-hens and deodands due at the death of my father. But if I fail and die--and, full surely I will not live if I fail--ye must all of you pay double, rent-hens, deodands and all. For then shall my sisters be my lawful heiresses and you must pay to them firstly all that you owe upon my father's death and then all that you owe upon mine who am your rightful lord. So you will be in a very pitiful case if I die, and it will well repay you to fight well for me. Mark that very carefully and report it where you will. But, if you think rather to make favour with my sisters, you know very well it is not they that will go to the sweat and cost of getting leave of our lord the King to hold markets. No, but they will get them to Cullerford and Haltwhistle and strengthen these places, and the Castle will be thrown down, and the Scots will come in upon you and you will be in a very lamentable case."
He paused and looked earnestly upon his bondsman. And then he continued:
"So I have spoken what was in my mind very soberly and I think well. For this business of being a great lord is not merely the riding about in summer time and the sacking of castles. But I have to think what is good for me to do for my people. For your good is mine and I study how to bring it about. And that I learned of the Lord Berthin de Silly when I was in France. Now think well upon what I have said and give me your answer, yea or nay. For I know well that the others will be guided by you."
The bondsman looked upon the stream and upon the monastery whose wall, like a castle's, lay new and square in the sunlight.
"I take thought," he said, "not that I doubt the upshot, but that I may find words. For these matters are above my head that you have deigned to speak of. But of this, gentle lording, you may make sure that, at eight of the clock a fortnight hence, I will meet you at any place of which you shall send me the name. And there shall be with me sixty-eight or seventy stout men and well armed after our fashion."
He went on to try to say that this lording was a soldier so cunning and so great a knight that all the countryside said they would very gladly go a-riding or a-foot with bows, into Scotland or Heathenesse or the South, whatever his enterprise. But, since he was a better hand at grumbling at taxes than in praising his lord, he got little of it out. Nevertheless he made it plain that fighting men would be there on the appointed day, and so they parted--the lord riding across the stream to the monastery and the hind along it to Belford town.
II
The monk Francis was a small, dark, quiet man and not overlearned. He was rising thirty and he was always at work. The monastery of Belford was one given over rather to study and learning so that he, the active one, had always much upon his hands. But all such time as he could save from his duties he devoted to praying for the soul of the cousin he had slain by mischance, taking her for a deer and slaying her with an arrow, as she came to him amongst thick underwood to tell him that the Scots were marching southwards through the Debateable Lands.
That had been ten years before; nevertheless he had prayed that morning very reverently for his cousin's soul, walking up and down between the rows of haymakers and their cocks, in the sunshine; keeping one finger between the leaves of his book of prayers and yet marking diligently that none of the bondsmen slipped away into their own grass to use the scythe there. For it was marvellously fine weather, and such as had never in the memory of man been known in those parts for the heat of the sun and the dry clear nights. So that it was considered that the saints must be blessing that part. Nevertheless, these naughty bondsmen, owing some three, some five days' labour of themselves and their wives and children to the monastery, must needs always be seeking to slip away to their own lands and doing their scythe work there. This they would do, if no monk watched them, though by so doing they robbed the monastery and went in danger of excommunication. But those, as the learned Prior said, were evil days, so that it might almost be said, as was said aforetime of the accursed robber who came against the Abbey and Church of St. Trophime, that he proclaimed that a thousand florins would get him more soldiers than seven years of plenary absolution from the Pope at Avignon. As to whom, said the Prior, Froissart, the chronicler declared that men-at-arms do not live by pardons nor set much store thereby. And as much might be said of their bondsmen.
For it was to be said for this monastery of Belford that the monks set more store by a great chronicle that they were assisting the monk Oswald to write--all of them searching here and there--than by the work done by their bondsmen, the good estate of the lands of the monastery or even the saying of the offices. They set more store by learning than by aught else.
Their lands were administered by laymen, so that they were often robbed, and when the monk Francis had come amongst them their revenues had been scarcely an hundred pounds by the year, or very little more. And, even at the time of his coming, the monks had been against receiving him, for they said that here was a man, though of piety undoubted, who could not tell the chronicle of Giraldus Cambrensis from that of the monk Florence, or Asser from Vergil and Flaccus. But, in those days, the Prior had over-ridden them, pointing out that this novice was very wealthy; that their kitchen and dinner tables were in a sad state, that they had no longer money enough to pursue, upon a princely scale, the succouring of the poor that sat upon their benches, and that they could with the greater serenity pursue their studies and sleep after meat, if they had amongst them a knight who had proven himself diligent upon his own affairs and had increased his substance in the world. For, though they had butlers and cellarers amongst their number, yet the butler thought more of Brute than of his office and the cellarer was more minded to know where lay the bones of the British Kings than where were his keys. The ungodly came in and drank their wine in the cellar, yea, and carried away the mead in black-jacks.
These monks were portly, learned and somnolent, religious with a solid contempt for the unlearned--though they would upon occasion, being large men, line the walls and hew down attacking raiders with balks of timber, bars of iron and other weapons that drew no blood, those being, according to the canon, the proper arms for churchmen. These haughty monks accepted this Francis, who was known to the world as Sir Hugh Ridley, to be of their holy and learned brotherhood. But yet they regarded him as little more than a lay brother, though he wore the monk's frock, and they never voted for his advancement to any office such as sub-prior or the like.
Yet that day he had said two offices for them, had watched in the hay fields and was now coming in, at noontide to check accounts with the bailiff of the Priory about the great tower that was then in building. Seventeen monks there were and twenty lay brothers who were a lazy band. Thirty men-at-arms they had for their protection under the leadership of a knight, Sir Nicholas Ewelme, and they afforded shelter and victuals for 136 poor men, each of the seventeen monks being the patron of eight of them. These poor men sat in the sun on benches, each before their patron's room and should be served by him at meals. But this was nowadays, mostly done by the lay brothers, the learned monk laying one finger beneath a dish or vessel served to the poor men, so that it would not be said that the custom had died out.
The monk Francis, in his grey cloak came in by the little postern gate from the hayfields. He went to his rooms across the quadrangle; and he perceived how certain peasants in hoods of black cloth with belts of yellow leather were bringing in sacks and baskets. These sacks and baskets, as the monk Francis knew from the dress of those peasants, contained ammunition, small round balls of lead or, in the alternative, well-rounded stones from the beach. These peasants were workers in the lead mines upon the lands of the monastery and it was so they paid tribute with balls to shoot against the false Scots if they came a-raiding to Belford.
And, as he was going into his room, before his benchful of poor men that stretched their legs in the sun, it happened that one of the peasant's bags burst open and all the round, leaden balls ran out under the archway. Then there was a great bustle, the guards on duty and the guards that came out of the chambers in the arch starting to pick up the balls. And the monk Francis smiled to think how universal is the desire in men to help in picking up small, round objects that fall out of a sack. So that if the false Scots had been minded to take that place, they could have done it very well then, all the guards and peasants and others being on their hands and knees, huddled together and the gate open. And it seemed to the monk Francis that that would be a very good stratagem for the taking of a tower or the gateway of a strong place.
One of the poor men had been a man-at-arms at Castle Lovell, but was put out now and masterless. He came to the monk Francis as he went in at his door, and reported that it was said that the young Lord Lovell had been seen, having come out of captivity of the false Gilbert Elliott. The monk said he hoped well that that was so, for then all the men-at-arms from Castle Lovell that were there could go again to his service, and that he was a very good lording and his good friend in God.
He wished to cut the matter short for that time because he knew that there awaited him in his outer room John Harbottle an esquire, and the receiver of many domains of the Earl of Northumberland. This esquire was come with the accounts for the building of the great new tower that the Earl had given to the monastery. But the former men of the Lord Lovell crowded before the monk and after him into his outer room, all bringing tidings that the Young Lovell had been seen to ride through his township. And, to the number of thirty or so, they clamoured all at once, asking for his advice as to how they should find their lord and what to do when he was found.
The monk Francis was very glad to think that the Young Lovell was come back, not only because he was his true friend but also because this rabble of disemployed men-at-arms was a burden to the monastery and he had it on his conscience that he let them bide there. For that he had done, so that they might serve his friend if he came back. That monastery was rather for the relief of poor men ruined by raiders, for travellers and for criminals seeking sanctuary. He would very gladly have had news of his friend whom he loved, and have settled the disposal of these sturdy, idle and hungry men. Yet, being a man of many affairs, he thought that the day could only be got through by doing all things in order, and behind all these ragged men in grey, he perceived the esquire, John Harbottle, a portly, bearded man in a rich cloak of purple, with a green square cap that had a jewel of gold. This John Harbottle appeared not greatly pleased at the clamour, for he also was a man of many affairs, being the Percy's receiver, and a very diligent one.
So, without many words, but quietly, the monk Francis drove out some of these fellows, and then, calling to a grizzled and dirty lay brother, he bade him drive out the rest and bar the door. And so he took John Harbottle by the sleeve of his purple coat and drew him through the doorway into his inner room and closed the door. Then there was peace.
This inner cell was a light room with no glass in the windows. Beside the bed head there was a shelf that had on it the water-bottle of the monk Francis, his plate, his cup, his napkin and the book of devotions in which he read during the dinner hour, his needles and bodkins, his leather book of threads and such things as he needed for the repair of his clothes. Beneath this shelf was a curtain, and this hid the spare garments of the monk, as the vestments in which he said the simpler offices, his spare breeches, stockings, braces, and belt. At the other side of the bed head was a large crucifix of painted wood, from which there hung Our Lord who was represented as crying out in a perpetual agony. Before the crucifix was a fald stool, that had across one corner, a great rosary of clumsy wooden beads, and upon it a skull whose top was polished and yellowed by this monk's hands. For he had it there the better to be reminded of what death is when he prayed for the soul of the cousin he had slain.
When he had killed that woman he had been possessed rather with the idea of what he could do for her poor unhanselled soul than with agonies of ecstasy. And so, with a strong will he prayed, year in, year out, for her sooner relief from the pains of purgatory, knowing God to be a just Man and prayer most efficacious.
So, having brought John Harbottle in, he sat himself down on his three-legged stool of wood before his double pulpit. This had in its side a round opening, and in the interior such books, papers, or parchments as the monk Francis had in immediate use. He was of a very orderly nature, rather like a soldier than a priest.
He reached into the inside of his pulpit for his parchment that he was to peruse with John Harbottle, and that esquire stood behind him leaning over his back. Then John Harbottle said:
"Meseems the Master of Lovell has come back?"
"That I hear," the monk Francis answered.
"I think there is heavy trouble in store for him," John Harbottle said.
"I think there is but little," the monk answered. John Harbottle meant that the Earl Percy, in the Border Warden's Court, had given judgment against the Young Lovell. The monk meant that the religious of that countryside were not best pleased with the Earl Percy; they considered that sorcery was a matter for the courts ecclesiastical. But each was a man of few words, and without any more, the monk Francis unfolded his parchment. They went to their accounts, John Harbottle standing behind the monk and checking each item as he read it:
"And in the like payment of money to the prior of the house of the Brethren of St. Cuthbert, within the parish of Belford, near the wood called Newlands, for this year, (as well for that part of the work of the new tower there as for the carriage of stone and other stuff by the contract, in gross) 100 shillings...." The Earl was giving the tower to the monks, they employing two contractors called Richard Chambers and John Richardson to build it for them and the Earl paying the accounts.
"Just!" John Harbottle said, and the monk read on--
"Carting four loads of lead, 24s. 6d.; bought eight loads of stone, 10d.; iron, with the workmanship of the same, for the doors and windows, 8s.; bought seven locks 4s. 2d., with keys; six latches 12d.; and snecks and other iron 4s. 2d...." So the monk read on, and the receiver nodded his head, saying, "Just."
Once he said--
"I wish I could have things so cheap for my lord."
"Then," the monk answered, "you must haggle as I do and in God His high service."
So they made out between them that all these things, and making the arch between the great chamber and the tower came to L10 6s. 4d., and since they owed Robert Chambers and John Richardson already L17 13s. 4d., the whole payment then to be made was L27 19s. 8d.
The esquire, John Harbottle, pulled his money bag from beneath his girdle and counted out the money, throwing it on to the bed, for there was no table in that cell.
Then he drew from his belt two papers and so he said:
"My lord will have you buy from Christiana Paynter the armorial bearings of my lord to set up upon the tower, and that shall cost you 3s. And this you shall have carved upon the same stone:
"'In the year of Xt. jhu MCCCCLXXXV This tower was builded by Sir Henry Percy The IV. Earl of Northumberland of great honour and worth That espoused Maud the good lady full of virtue and beauty ... Whose soule's God save.'"
"That shall be set up," the monk said.
"Then," John Harbottle said, "there is this you may do to convenience me who have been your favourer in all things. That you may the earlier come to it, read you this paper which I have written out, but in English, for I have no Latin beyond mass-Latin."
"What we may do to please you," the monk said, gravely, "that we will, if it be not to the discredit of God."
"It is rather to His greater glory," the esquire said.
So the monk took the paper and read:
"The Prior of Belford, Patent of XX merks by yere. Henry Erle of Northumberland...." The monk glanced on, and his eye fell upon the words, "myn armytage builded in a rock of stone against the church of Castle Lovell," and, later on ... "the gate and pasture of twenty kye and a bull with their calves sukyng,"--"One draught of fisshe every Sondaie in the year to be drawen fornenst the said armytage, called the Trynete draught...."
The monk looked up over his shoulder at the esquire.
"I perceive," he said, "that you would have us to take over the commandment of my Lord's hermitage at Castle Lovell."
John Harbottle looked down a little nervously at his hands. That was what he sought.
"I have heard that the holy hermit is dead?" the monk asked.
"It is even that," John Harbottle said. "I am worn with the trouble of riding over from Alnwick to Castle Lovell. It is a great burden, yet there is the hermitage that must be kept up for the honour of the Percies."
"That," the monk said, "was because it was esteemed a privilege to house a holy anchoret."
"Then," John Harbottle asked, "may not my lord save his soul as well by making your brotherhood a payment to watch over the holy man?"
"I am not saying that he may not," the monk said.
"Then of your courtesy, do this for me," John Harbottle said, "for it is a troublesome matter. This last year, once a month, news has been sent me that this holy man was dead. Then I have ridden over to Castle Lovell and lost a day, calling into the hole in his cell to see if he would answer 'Et cum spiritu tuo,' as his manner was. And, after a whole day lost, he will answer; or maybe not till the next day, and there are two days lost when I should be getting rents or going upon my lord's business. And I am not the man to have much dealing with these holy beings. A plain blunt man! It gives me a grue to be thus calling in at a little hole. And the stench is very awful. I do my duty by the blessed sacraments on Sundays and feast days. And if he be dead, I must find a successor. It will not be very easy for me to find a man to go into that kennel and be walled up. And never again to come out...."
The monk looked again at the paper with the particulars of the gift.
"Well, I will think of it," he said, "or rather I will commune with the worshipful Prior and Sub-Prior. But I would have you know that if they agree to do this thing it is upon me that the pain and labour will fall, for there is none else in this monastery to do it. So I must go over to Castle Lovell once by the week at least to see that the holy hermit is given bread and water. And if he be truly dead it is I that must find his successor; that will not be easy."
"But twenty marks by the year for doing it," John Harbottle said, "that is a goodly sum to fall to your brotherhood."
"I do not understand," the monk answered him, "for this patent is not very clear--whether that twenty marks is in addition to the grassground, the garden and orchard at Conygarth, the pasturage of kine, bulls, horses and the draughts of fishes. Or are the draughts of fishes and the rest to be taken as of the value of twenty marks by the year?"
"It is the last that is meant," John Harbottle answered, a little dubiously.
"Then it is not enough," the monk said firmly and made to roll up the paper, "I cannot advise the Prior to accept this gift. For the monastery must lose so much of my time and prayers, though, God knows, those are little worth enough; yet I, a not very holy man, am all that these saintly brothers have to care for their temporalities."
John Harbottle grumbled some retort beneath his breath, and then he sighed and pushed the paper with his hand.
"Then take and write," he said, and when the monk had mended his pen he dictated. "'And in addition the said stipend of XX markes by year to be taken and received of the rent and ferm of my fisshyng of Warkworth, by thands of my fermour of the same for the tyme beynge, yerly at the times there used and accustomed to, even portions. In wytnes whereof to these my letters patentes, I the said erle have set the seale of my names.' ... That," John Harbottle continued, "if you will agree to, you shall have written out fair on parchment, and so the matter ends."
"I think it will end very well," the monk answered, "and the Earl of Northumberland shall have honour of it in Heaven. And, since I am about to do this thing in your service, and to relieve you of travels and the fear of a holy man, having no advantage myself and seeking none, since I am a monk, so I will take it as a kindness if you will do, for my sake, what you can at odd moments to advantage the cause of my friend, this Young Lovell, who is lately come, as I have heard, from prison amongst the false thieves of Rokehope and Cheviot."
John Harbottle did not answer this, for he thought there was little love lost between his lord and that young lording. Within himself he thought that, if the religious should espouse that lording's cause it would be a good thing for the Percy to be advised to let him be, and this monk had great voice with the lower order of people whom the Earl had cause to fear, since they were sworn to have his blood because of the taxes that, in the King's name, he laid upon them. But he did not speak upon those matters, saying aloud:
"It is strange, though I know it to be true, that my lord shall have honour in heaven by reason that a man be found to be walled up in a space no larger than the kennel of my hound Diccon and so live out his life."
"My friend," the monk said, "I may not listen to you further, for that would come near conversing with a heretic. And the penalty for such conversation is that at every Easter and high feast I must stand beside the high altar, in a robe of penitence, having in my hand a rod or peeled wand ten foot in length and other penances, a many I must do."
"God forbid!" John Harbottle said, "for I am no heretic and no more than a plain, blunt man. And surely these things are hard to understand."
"My son," that monk said, and by the creasing of his tight lips John Harbottle knew that he had been pleasant with him before and had not meant in earnestness to call him a heretic. "Every day you hear of the ways of God that are hard to understand. You have heard to-day or yesterday of the miracle that was wrought on Tuesday in the Abbey of our own town of Alnwick--how that the foot of Sir Simon de Montfort, that there they have and that is incorruptible, cured a certain very wealthy burgess of Newcastle called Arnoldus Pickett. For he was not able to move his foot from his bed or put his hand to his mouth or perform any bodily function. And so, in a dream he was bidden to go to your Abbey of the Premonstratensian Brotherhood and the foot of Simon de Montfort should cure him. Which, when it was known to the canons, there serving God, in order that this merchant might approach more easily--for as yet he heavily laboured in his lameness--and lest he should suffer too much, two of them brought it reverently to him, in its silver shoe. But, before the patient was able to approach for the purpose of kissing it, and by the mere sight of the slipper, on account of the merits of Simon de Montfort, he was restored. And this, to-day, our monks are writing in their chronicle and praising God. And consider what glory there will be in this foot of Simon de Montfort when it is reunited to his whole body after the great judgment, by comparison of its efficacy before Doomsday, when such healing virtue went out of it as a dead member, concealing itself in a slipper of silver...."
The monk was determined very thoroughly at once to abash and edify this minion of the Earl of Northumberland and so to bring that Lord more thoroughly to the reverence of the Church and more particularly of the Bishop Palatine with whom these monks had a great friendship. And this not only in the matter of the Young Lovell, where the Earl had sought to give judgment in a matter that was full surely ecclesiastical and not pertaining to the lay Court of the Border Warden. So that monk continued in a loud voice:
"Shall you seek to understand these miracles that are of daily happening and occur all round you, God knows, often enough? For in the monastery or priory of Durham they have not only the most famous bodies of St. Cuthbert and St. Bede, but the cross of St. Margaret that is well known to be of avail to women that labour with child. And in the Cella of Fenkull they have St. Guthric, and in Newminster the zone and mass-book of St. Robert, and in Blondeland the girdle of St. Mary the Mother of God. And all these cure, according to their marvellous faculties, the halt, the blind, those who have the shaking palsy and those with the falling sickness. And in Hexham they have the Red-book of Hexham, and at Tynemouth they have not only the body of St. Oswin, King and martyr in a feretory, but also the spur of St. Cuthbert, the finger of St. Bartholomew and the girdle of Blessed Margaret.... And all these things being under your very eyes or at a short day's journey, you will question the glory and the strangeness of God and you will set yourself up--oh, stiffnecked generation! ..."
A gentle knocking came at the cell door and the old and dirty lay-brother who was in the outer room pushed it ajar. They heard immediately a great outcry from beyond and the lay brother whispered that, at the outer door stood the Young Lovell asking for admittance with all his men-at-arms around him.
The monk opened a little door in the wall that gave into a passage leading to the church of the monastery. Through this he led John Harbottle, and at the entrance to the church he let him go. For, because John Harbottle was receiver for the Earl of Northumberland, he was not much beloved by the Lovell men-at-arms, and the monk Francis feared that they might offer him some violence now that their spirits were inflamed, and their stomachs rendered proud and rebellious by the return of their lord who should take them into his service again. And when the monk had thrown himself down before the image of the Mother of God that was in the Lady Chapel near that entrance, and had laid there long enough to say twelve "Hail Maries," he arose and went back to his cell and bade the lay brother let in Young Lovell.
III
When the Young Lovell was admitted to the inner cell, a fine smile of friendship came over the monk's hard face. He loved this young lord for his open features, his frank voice, his deeds of arms and his great courage. He stretched forward his hand towards the Young Lovell, but, in his faded scarlet cloak, and with his pierced cap in his hands the young lord went down upon his knees and wished to confess himself.
The monk Francis blessed him very lovingly, but said that he did not wish to hear a confession, and that the Young Lovell should seek a holier man. But he was ready to hear the Young Lovell's true story, and to take counsel with him as to how all things might be turned to the greater glory of the Most High. He observed with concern the saddened and blank eyes of his friend, his faded clothes, in which he appeared like a figure in a painted missal that the dampness of a cell had rendered dim. And he was determined, if he could, to render aid to his friend, for twice already he had befriended the young man, once after the battle of Kenchie's Burn, and he had done it since. For indeed, when he had had time, he had gone to the township of Castle Lovell, and had talked with the lawyer Stone and with the witch called Meg of the Foul Tyke. With the Decies he had not talked, but he had heard him on that day in the Great Hall and knew him for a false knave. He had observed, too, that the stories of the lawyer Stone and of the old women did not in all things tally. One talked of the naked witch as having black hair and six paps; the other said she was most fair and had no deformity. The lawyer placed the witches' fire to the left of the large rock called Bondale that was before the chapel, and the old woman said it was to the right, with the wind from the east, so that if it had been a real fire there must be the marks of burning upon it.
The monk had asked his questions very cunningly, rather as a religious anxious for information as to the ways of sinners, in order that he might the better detect and punish them, than as one desiring to sift their answers. But he was very certain that they were evil liars, and he was sure that, were they brought before the Bishop's courts in Durham, he would be able to bring their perjuries to light. So he was very certain that the lording had been taken by Gib Elliott and held for ransom, and well he knew that no one in the Castle would ransom him, so that it was small wonder if they had heard nothing of it. The Decies and his confederates would conceal any news they had from Elliott, and perhaps slay his messenger or keep him jailed that the outlaw might be angered and slay the Young Lovell. So that it was with a great cheerfulness that now he offered to have brought to his friend, food and clean linen and hot, scented water, and a serving man to wash his feet; for he thought he must be come from far after having fared ill enough.
But the Young Lovell would have none of these things, neither would he be persuaded to rise from his knees; but, being there, he said a long prayer to Our Lord that hung from the crucifix and appeared in an agony. And the monk sat himself at the foot of the box of straw covered with a rug that was his bed and again marvelled at the face of his friend. For the long, brown hair was blanched by the sun, the closed eyes were sunken, the lids gone bluish, the lips parched as if with desire. And so, whilst the lording prayed, the monk sat on the bed foot. Then he heard a rustle of wings and, on the sill of the glassless window, he saw a blue dove and, in the sunlight without, a fair woman that peered in at that window and smiled--all white and with the sunlight upon her.
The monk got down from the bed foot, to reprove her courteously, for no woman should be seen there between the church and the monk's cells. But then he considered that it might be a penitent of one of the other monks, and when he looked towards the window again, the woman and the dove alike had vanished from the view of that window, and he judged he had better let the matter be. And so he sat down upon the bed foot.
The Young Lovell groaned several times in his praying, and most he had groaned when that fair woman had looked in at the cell. His breathing made a heavy sound in the silent room. And then he cried out in a great, lamentable voice:
"I have been with a fairy woman! Three months long I have looked upon the whiteness of a fairy woman! Who shall absolve me?"
The monk slipped down from the bed.
"Ah misericordia!" he cried out and: "Jesu pity us!"
His face went pale even to the edges of his lips and, involuntarily, he moved backwards away from that sinner until he crouched against the wall. Then they were silent a longtime and the large flies buzzed in at the window and out.
Then the monk took his courage to himself again.
"But if you truly repent," he said quickly, "lording, and my friend, and sinner, you may be pardoned."
And since the young lord still kept silence he asked many swift questions: What sort of woman was this? Where was her bower? How had she entertained him and he her? Had he eaten of fruits from her dishes? Had he done deeds of dishonesty with a willing heart? How did he know her for a fairy woman? Had he partaken of magic rites; sprinkled the blood of newborn babies; taken gifts of gold; witnessed a black mass; gathered fernseed?
The monk asked all these questions with a breathless speed that they might the more quickly be affirmed or denied. And at last the young lord cried out as if in an agony:
"All that is a child's tale! All that is a weary folly! It was not like that...."
And then he cried again:
"I say I looked upon this woman, clothed in the white of foam and the gold of sun.... I looked but spoke no word.... Three months went by and I knew not of the wheeling of the stars, or the moon in her course, nor the changes of the weather.... I had seen Sathanas and Leviathan and Herod's daughter in the chapel...."
The monk now came more near him and with a calmer eye regarded him. He had known of knights and poor men, too, that had had visions born of fastings, vigils, hot suns and the despair of heaven. For himself he had desired none of these visions, for to each, as he saw it, God gives his vocation. But some that had seen such visions had been accounted holy and had taken religious habits; others, truly had been deemed accursed and burned or set in chains; and yet again others had proved later true knights of God, had fought with Saracens and the heathen, and at their deaths had been accounted saints. And he looked upon his friend whom he had loved, and he considered how tarnished and stained he was with the air and with fasting. And he remembered how, in the tents before and after Kenchie's Burn, they had talked together. Then it had seemed to him, from the way Young Lovell spoke, that it was as if it were more fitting that he, the monk, should be a rough soldier, and that the esquire and lord's son a churchman.
For the Young Lovell had talked always of high, fine and stainless chivalry, of the Mother of God as the Mystic Rose, of the Tower of Ivory, and of the dish that had the most holy blood of God. Of none of these things had Sir Hugh Ridley that was afterwards the monk Francis, heard tell, when he had been a knight of the world. He had considered rather his forbear Widdrington that fought upon his stumps at Chevy Chase as the very perfect Knight; and, rather than of the death of King Arthur of Bretagne, he was accustomed to sing:
"Then they were come to Hutton Ha'! They ride that proper place about, But the Laird he was the wiser man For he had left na' geir without."
But this young Master of Lovell, who had lain in those tents, had travelled far and seen our father of Rome and the courts of France and the envoys of Mahound. Therefore, he might well have other knowledges. And certain it was that the monk Francis had never heard him speak otherwise than decorously of the lords set over him, charitably of the poor, firmly of his vassals and bondsmen and with yearning and love for Our Lady, St. Katharine, Archangel Michael, St. Margaret and of our blessed Lord and Saviour and St. Cuthbert.
And, remembering all these things, the monk Francis considered that too much fasting and too much learning might have made this lording mad. And he deemed it his duty rather to bring his mind back to regaining of his lands so that he might prove a valiant soldier in the cause of the Bishop Palatine and Almighty God.
Therefore he said now:
"Tell me truly, ah gentle lording and my son, what it was that befell you. So I may the better judge."
And when the monk heard first how the young man had watched his harness within the chapel, that alone seemed to him a proof of a midsummer madness such as a reasonable confessor should have persuaded him against. And he gained in this conviction the more when he heard how Behemoth, Leviathan, Mahound, Helen of Troy, the Witch of Endor and Syrians in strange robes had visited the young man and had tempted him there in the darkness. All these things were strange to the good and simple monk whose knowledge of sorceries ended at crooked old women and the White Lady of Spindleston. He knew not more than half the names of the Young Lovell's hobgoblins.
Then he marked how the young man spoke of a woman's face that looked in on him in the chapel and seemed to tempt him, and the monk considered that that might happen to any man, for had he not, a minute gone, seen a woman, fair enough to tempt any man to follow her, looking into his cell. For he remembered her as the fairest woman he had ever seen, with dark and serious eyes; though she smiled mockingly too, which was what, in the life of this world, this monk had asked of women. And he had yet to learn that the desire to follow after a fair woman was, in a gallant lording, any mortal sin, else Hell must be fuller than the kind Lord Jesus would have it Who died to save us therefrom.
Thus all things hardened this monk in the conceit that the Young Lovell suffered more from over fasting than from any cardinal sin, and when it came to the story of the very fair woman sitting upon a white horse amidmost of doves and sparrows and great bright flowers, though it gave him some pause to think that this had lasted for ninety days, yet it abashed him very little.
Then the Young Lovell was done with his tale. The monk asked him first of all:
"Now tell me truly, my gentle son; how can you tell this lady from one of the kind saints or from the angelic host?"
"In truth I could not tell you that," the young lording said, "it is only that I know it."
"And if you spake no word with her," the monk asked further, "how may you know that her thoughts were wicked? Had you not fasted long? Had you dwelt especially upon lewd thoughts before that time? Should you not have been, if any poor mortal may be, in a degree of as much grace as we may attain to?"
"It is true," the Young Lovell said, "that I had done my best, but we are all so black with sin as against any true and perfect knights...."
The monk would not let him finish this speech.
"Hear now me, Young Lovell," he said, "and what my reading of these matters is. I am not thy confessor, but until a better shall come I order you to believe what I say and that is your duty as a Christian man. And I bid you believe that this lady was from heaven itself, and if not one of the saints then one of the blessed angels of God. And how I read that is this: Firstly, is it not written that the hosts of heaven shall be clad in white raiment, with the glory of the sun about them and the light of the dawnstar upon their faces? And as for the doves, is it not written that those fowls of the air are the symbol of innocence, it being said: 'Be ye wise as the serpent and free of guile as the dove'? For the sparrows we have the words of our Lord God His well-loved Son, that the Almighty had them in His especial keeping, and many such may well flutter about the fair courts of heaven. So that if you had seen serpents that are horrible monsters you need not have been abashed, yet you saw only doves and sparrows. And for the white horse, it was upon such a beast that the blessed Katharine, the spouse of Our Lord, rode to the confrontation of the forty thousand doctors. It may well have been that most happy and gracious Lady; though if you did not mark that she had a wheel, which as I think is the symbol of that saint, perhaps it was not she. Or again it may have been. For without doubt the blessed saints in heaven are relieved of the labours of bearing what were their symbols here on earth. And indeed that is most likely. And for the great flowers, what should they be but the blessed flowers of paradise itself. And that they should be in that place is in nowise wonderful. Are we to think that, having been once set around by those blossoms like the jewels of Our Lady's diadem, any one of the hosts of heaven would willingly go without them? Not so, but assuredly our Lord God will let them have the company and stay of such flowers, Who hath promised to those bright beings an eternity of such bliss as shall surpass mortal imaginations....'
The monk had spoken these words with a tone nearly minatory and full of exhortation. But now he approached the Young Lovell and set his arms around his shoulder and spoke soft and in a loving fashion.
"My beloved son in religion whom I should hold as a brother if I were of this world," he said, "I cannot say if you were pure in heart at that season, yet I hope you were. If you were you may take great pride and be very thankful. If you were in a state of sin then consider this for a warning and amend very much your ways. And it may well be that the hosts of heaven who are all round us and watch very attentively that which we do on earth--that they are and have been concerned to see how that you regard too little the needs of the Church that is militant here in earth, forgetting it in the too frequent contemplation of the Church Triumphant that is in heaven. For I think that your tales of chaste knights of Brittany and the pursuers of the Holy Grail are rather glimpses vouchsafed to us of how it shall be with the Church Triumphant than of anything that can be until that day. In these North parts the times are very evil and we have more need of a great lord and one ready to be a strong protector than of ten Sir Galahads seeking mysteries, though that too may be a very excellent thing in its time and place. Yet I would rather see you Warden of these Marches, since the one that we have, though an earl pious and generous enough, turns rather his thoughts in fear to the King in London Town than in love and homage to the Prince Bishop that is set above us. And I make no doubt that it was to exhort you to this that that angel or that saint came down. And, in token, you have, for the time being, lost your lands to very godless people who have sought to dispossess you by having recourse to the courts temporal upon a false charge. You say to me that ever since you saw that lady's face this world has seemed as a mirror and an unreality to you so that you cannot cease from sighing and longing. I will tell you that those very same words were written of Gudruna, Saint, Queen and Martyr of these parts. Being an evil and lascivious queen she had in sleep a vision of the joys of paradise and so she said that she never ceased from sighing for them all the days of her life. Yet nevertheless that did not hinder her from waging war against the heathen and winning a great part of this kingdom from Heathenesse, so that she converted forty thousand souls. And, for the fact that three months have passed, I will have you remember the case of the founder of this monastery--blessed Wulfric. For walking in the fields here, Our Lady came to him and so he remained upon his knees by the space of forty and nine days in a swoon or trance, being fed by such as passed by or as gradually flocked there to see that wonder. And so, being restored to himself, he said that Our Lady had but just gone from him, having staid, as he thought, but a very short while. And that is explained by this, that to the dwellers in heaven and in the sight of God, even as marriage is not, so time is not, it being written that in His courts one day is as a thousand years. So it may well be that that angel--and by that I think it may have been rather an angel than a saint--having no knowledge of time and none either of the necessity of mankind for shelter or food--for the heavenly host have no need of either--so this fair, pretty angel in staying ninety days before you may have thought it was but the space of a minute, for it is only God that is all-wise. Yet may God, observing these things from where He sate in Heaven, and desiring neither to abash the angel nor to starve and slay you, have conveyed nourishment to you by the hands of other angels and have rendered mild the winds. And now I think of it, in these last ninety days, there has been very little or no rain at all so that the hay harvest and fenaison is a month before its time and all men have marked this for a marvel. So I read these wonders, and so I command you to regard them until you come upon a man more holy, to interpret them otherwise. And for that, if I be wrong, we shall very soon know it, for I will have you go with me--as soon as I shall have arranged certain matters of this monastery--to the Prince Bishop himself in Durham. And there, if he do not find me at fault, we will devise with him how best you may again be set in your inheritance. For I will tell you this. A fortnight gone I had speech with that gracious prince for a space of two days touching the affairs of the diocese, and he said that he would very well that you should be set back in your lands. And I ask you this: If such a mighty prince and wise and reverend servant of God shall say that, commending you, what would it be in you but a very stiff-necked perseverance in humility and the conviction of sin to gainsay him, a prince palatine that hath spent many years in the city of Rome before the face of the pope himself?"
The Young Lovell sighed deeply. In all those long speeches he had heard rather the voice of a friend that sought to enhearten him than that of a ghostly pastor and comforter. And at last he said:
"For what you say, father, of my retaking my Castle I will do it very willingly, and so I will administer my lands that, with the grace of God, it shall be to His greater glory, if so I may. And for what you have bidden me believe I will seek to believe it, but strong within me is the thought of what before was in my mind that I may not change it all of a piece. Nevertheless, by prayer and fasting I may come to it."
The monk, who had observed his penitent's face to light up at the mention of his Castle, said quickly:
"Why, I think you have fasted enough," and so he bade the lay brother to bring there quickly wine and meat, and hot water to wash with, and clean linen if they had any good enough. And so he bade the young lord lay off the heavier of his garments and unbrace his clothes, for it was hot weather. And so food and a table were brought and the lay brother washed the feet of the lord, whilst he reclined upon the bed-foot. Whilst he ate, little by little the religious brought the Young Lovell to talk of how he should have arms and money for his men-at-arms and other costs.
And the Young Lovell saw that he had still in his cap his string of great pearls and this he pledged to the monk Francis for the sum of two hundred pounds.
Of this sum, one hundred pounds the monk Francis had of the funds of the monastery, and he could just make it with the twenty-eight pounds that John Harbottle had paid him. This hundred pounds the Young Lovell should take with him upon his adventure to Durham and the other hundred should remain with the good monk. And this should pay for the keep of thirty men for a fortnight, at the rate of fourpence a man, and that would be seven pounds. And the men should have arms from the armourer of the monastery and from the men-at-arms there until they came to arms of their own. And if they should return those arms unbroken and unharmed the Lord Lovell should pay for their hire at the rate of one shilling the man per week, and all that should be matter of account out of the hundred pounds that remained.
So the monk Francis bargained for the good of his monastery, for he held it against his conscience to give these things for less. Moreover, he perceived that in talking of these things the Young Lovell appeared to come back to life. Then the Young Lovell told this news to his men-at-arms who stood before the door.
Afterwards the Young Lovell bought of the knight of the monastery, Sir Nicholas Ewelme, some light armour for his horse; and for himself he bought a light helmet, a breastpiece and an axe, which were not very fair, but sufficient to make the journey to Durham. And all these things having taken many hours, it was decided that they should put off their departure until the next day at dawn when the Young Lovell should take with him ten of his men-at-arms. By that evening, the news of his being at the monastery having spread, more than twenty more of his men, with an esquire called Armstrong, came there and entered his employment.
IV
The Lady Margaret of Glororem had that day, near dawn, abandoned hope that the Young Lovell, her true love, would come again, and for that reason she rode south to Durham to set about the releasing of the Lady Rohtraut in good earnest. She had been unwilling to do this before hope departed of his returning, because he was her lord and might have plans for the retaking of his Castle and the rest, and any action that she might take might hinder these.
She had said that she would ride to Durham on the day when the Young Lovell should have been ninety days away and that was the ninety-first. That night she lay at Warkworth where she had the hospitality of the Percies. She had with her an old lady called Bellingham and three maids with forty men-at-arms under the direction of the husband of the lady called Bellingham, an old esquire who had never come to be a knight, but yet a very honest man and capable for such a post. For if he had little skill or desire to take fortresses or the like, he could very well set out his men so as to drive off any evil gentry.
And that night the Lady Margaret, after supper--which was late because it was the time of the haying when every man of the largest castle must be in the fields whilst daylight lasted--the Lady Margaret held a hot discussion with the Earl of Northumberland. The Lady Maud his wife was by, that was daughter to the Earl of Pembroke, and she sought to moderate at once the anger of that lord and the importunities of that hotheaded damsel. The Lady Margaret would have the Percy raise his many with cannon and siege apparatus and march against Castle Lovell to release her aunt, the Lady Rohtraut who was also that Earl's cousin. And so she exhorted him, in the light of a great fire of sea coal, for the nights were chilly enough if the days were fine.
She said many words in that sense to the Earl before he answered her. At last he spoke to a page standing behind her, that was son to the esquire, John Harbottle, and gave him a key and bade him bring a little box that he would find in an aumbry in the tower where his muniments and charters were locked up. For this Earl, according as he was at Alnwick which he did not much love, or at Warkworth where he much delighted to be, so he moved his window-glass, his muniments and his charters from the one Castle to the other, and for their greater safety they were placed in the tower called the Bail. Night and day watch was kept in the chambers that were both above them and below, with the best ancients and lieutenants that he had, keeping watch upon the men-at-arms. So high a value did his lord set upon his charters.
And when the box was brought to him he opened it with another key and took out certain old and stained papers and parchments which he bade this lady read. And she could make little of them because there was no light but the firelight, for the Earl and his wife were accustomed to go to bed after supper.
When she could not read them, the Earl took them from her and read them easily enough, for he had them nearly by heart, though the writing was cramped and nearly fourscore years of age, or more. And once, whilst he read them, the Earl looked over the edge of a parchment at the Lady Margaret and asked her if she had heard of a Percy called Hotspur. She answered, yes, indeed; so he read out lugubriously what was in that writing.
"The King to the mayor and sheriffs of York, greeting: Whereas of our special grace we have granted to our cousin Elizabeth who was the wife of Henry de Percy, Chevalier, commonly called Hotspur, the head and quarters of the same Henry to be buried: we command you that the head aforesaid, placed by our command upon the gate of the city aforesaid you deliver to the same Elizabeth, to be buried according to our grant aforesaid." And, with a droning voice the Earl followed other pieces of the body of that Henry Percy about the realm, a certain quarter of him having been placed upon the gate at Newcastle, another at Chester, another at Shrewsbury, and so on. And when he had done with Hotspur, the Earl went on to read of the fate of the father of Hotspur, Henry, the Fourth Lord Percy of Alnwick. This lord fell at Bramham Moor fighting against King Henry IV, as Hotspur had done at Hately Field, fighting against the same King four years before. This lord's head and quarters were placed upon London Bridge: one quarter upon the gate of York, another at Newcastle, and yet further pieces at King's Lynn and Berwick-on-Tweed. Lugubriously and in a level voice this Earl read out all the writs that he had collected, whether by the King's hand or Privy Seal, whether of setting up or for burial. He looked gravely upon the Lady Margaret and asked her what she learned from them. And when she said that she learned that those Percies were very gallant men, he shook his head and said that he found from them this lesson, that it is not healthy for a Percy to rebel against a King Henry that slew a Richard. For, just as Henry IV had put down King Richard II by the aid of the Percies that afterwards rose against him, so King Henry VII had put down and slain King Richard IV on Bosworth Field with the aid of that Percy that there spoke to her. And very surely it would be upon no Bramham Moor or Hately Field that that Percy would fall, for he was determined to be a very good liege man of King Henry VII and that was all he had to it.
Then the Lady Margaret said boldly that, for this present King she knew nothing of him, nor either could anybody, seeing that he had reigned but a little while. The Percy made sounds of disagreement and anger, for he was afraid of having such things said in his Castle, and moreover desired to be in his bed.
She exclaimed loudly that she regretted having seen the day when a great lord should talk of loyalty to a King not a year on the throne, where they, the great barons of this realm, had set him. For the Percies were a respectable family though they were not of the standing and worth, in those parts, of the Eures, the Dacres, or the Nevilles; they had acquired the most part of their lands by a gradual purchase of Bishop Anthony Bek, who betrayed his ward the young Vesey, so that the Veseys ever since were poor enough and some of them as they knew had taken to evil ways. Still the Percies had had some very good knights amongst them, such as that Hotspur and his father Henry, and others.
At that point the Countess Maud sought to calm her, but the Lady Margaret would not be quieted. For she said that this was what all the North part was saying, and it was better for the Earl to hear it than to sit all day surrounded by flatterers of the make of John Harbottle and his like, or than setting up tablets on the walls of towers as John Harbottle was doing at Belford, praising the credit and renown of this Earl.
The Lady Margaret looked a very fair woman and the Earl had an eye for such, or very certainly he would have had her taken away, for he regarded himself like a second king in those North parts. Her eyes were very dark and flashed with the firelight; her black hair fell in two plaits, one over her back and one over her shoulder, and when she pointed at him her white hand, on which were many rings set with green stones and red stones, her ample sleeves of scarlet damask touched the firelit carpet. In the dark hall of that place her angry figure appeared to wave as the flames went over the logs of the sea coal, and over her shoulder looked the white face of the old lady, Bellingham, her duenna, who was much afraid. For the Lady Margaret continued her rude speeches. She was so vexed that the Percy would not go to the rescue of her aunt, the Lady Rohtraut.
"Sir Earl," she said, "this is the manner of the governance of this realm of England, that, if the great barons dislike a King they set him down. So they did, for one cause or another, with Edward II and with Richard II and with Henry VI and with Edward V and with Richard III. He, I think, was a very good King; nevertheless you and others betrayed him on Bosworth Field, God keeps the issue. And when we put down Edward II we set up Edward III; misliking his grandson we set up Henry Bolingbroke instead. And that Bolingbroke, called Henry IV, we did not well like when we had set him up. Yet I do not blame anyone either for setting him up nor yet for seeking to force him down again. For somebody must be King. He will make fair promises before we come to it, and if he break them afterwards it must be put to the issue of swords, pull devil, pull baker. So this Henry IV was too strong for Hotspur, God rest his soul... Then came Henry V that was a King after my heart and all good people's hearts, and so it went on... But that you, a Percy, should cry out before this King has sat in his saddle a year, that you are afraid of the fate of your grandsire Hotspur; that I think is a very filthy thing and so I tell you. And we of the North parts are not like to suffer it."
The Percy smiled a red smile in the firelight.
"Then you of the North parts," he said, "women and jackanapes, will do what you are held down to do... For I tell you this: this Henry Tudor sitteth so firm in his saddle by my aid that we will break all your necks or ever you raise them from the dust where you belong. And that I say to the North parts, brawling and fighting brother against brother as ye are ever doing... And this I say to you Margaret Eure and my gentle cousin: that your aunt, who has broad lands should be in prison to your cousins of Cullerford and Haltwhistle and to Bastards suits well my case and there she shall stop for me. For she has broad lands and the Lovells have broad lands and so have the Dacres, to whom she belongs, and whilst they are at each other's throats it is well for the King in London Town and for me at Alnwick. And I wish you were all at each other's throats more than you are; for the King shall have his pickings by way of fines and amercements, and so will I, and so will lawyers and bailiffs and others, and so ye are weakened the more. And it was for this reason that I gave judgment against your true love, the Young Lovell, in my Warden's court, though I knew that judgment should not stand... For I think that Young Lovell was a dangerous whelp, with his prating of this and that, and his being a very good knight and commander. And so I would be very willing to pull him down again if the Scots had not hanged him, as I hope they have. And I have written a broad letter to the King in London that these Lovells are a dangerous race with their hearts full of love for Richard Crookback. If the King do not forbid it, and, if Young Lovell shall come again to raise men and march upon Castle Lovell, I will march out with men and cannon and hot-trod and hang him upon the first gallows I come to. So say I, Henry, Earl Percy."
The Lady Margaret swallowed her hot rage and considered that she might better sting this lord with a low voice. So she spoke very clearly as follows:
"Henry Earl Percy, thou art a very filthy knave, and so thou knowest and so know all thy neighbours. Thou wast a foul traitor to Richard; thou art a foul traitor to thy kith and kin and to thy peers. For thou mightest well put down Richard Crookback. That was open to any man that could. And thou mightest well set up Henry and seek to maintain him till he has time to prove himself. But to seek to weaken thy kith and thy kin and thine order and thy kind that he may sit firm rivetted whether he deserve it or not, with the house of Percy as his flatterers, servants and pimps--that is not a pretty and gallant thing. For my cousin Lovell, I do not think ye dare set out against him, for if ye did, all the North part--and it is not yet so cast down--should rise upon you, and there should not remain, of Alnwick, nor yet of Warkworth, one stone upon another. And for this thing of my cousin and true love, I think you have a little mistaken it. For whiles my true love is away we, such as the Eures and the Dacres and the Nevilles and the Widdringtons and the Swinburns and the commoner sort, and the Elliotts and Armstrongs, go a little in doubt. For, if my true love be dead, it is his sisters that are his heirs, and to set them out of that Castle would be to set down his heirs, which is a thing not to be done. But if the Young Lovell should come again I think you should see a different thing, for there is not one of these people but should rise upon you, aye, and the Prince Palatine. I think you could not stand against us all. For that so they would do I have upon their oaths...."
The Countess Maud said then:
"So there you have the end of it." But the Earl was in haste to seize a point:
"Then there you are convicted by your own mouth," he said hatefully to Lady Margaret. "I hold that Young Lovell to be dead and his sisters' husbands are the heirs of that Castle. How then shall I march upon a Castle that is the lawful property of Cullerford and Haltwhistle upon an idle peasant's tale that a lady there is captive?"
The Lady Margaret made him a deep reverence, leaning back in her scarlet gown that had green undersleeves.
"Simply for this," she said, "that there are Percies that would have done it." Then she laughed; and after she was done with her curtsy that took a long time, she said:
"So, now I have what I wish, I will get me gone from this your Castle of Warkworth."
So she made her way to her room that had dark hangings all of the crowned lion of the Percies. And when she was there she called to her the old squire, John Bellingham, that had charge of her men-at-arms. He had gone to his bed and was some time in coming.
So she bade him rouse all her men because she would ride forth from the Castle. Then he said it would be very dangerous, seeing the darkness of the night and the rumours of Scots being abroad. She answered that, if the night were dark it would be as hard for the Scots to see them as for them to see the Scots. And she had chosen him, John Bellingham, to be the ancient of her men because he was said to possess much knowledge of the different ways of that country-side, that never the Scots could come to him if he had but two minutes' start by night.
In the middle of that dispute came the Countess Maud a knocking at the door. She cried out that it was not to be thought of that this lady should leave their Castle in that wise. She, the Countess, had done as best she might to make hospitality for that lady, and it would be an ill discourtesy if she left them so. This Countess Maud, daughter of Sir Herbert Stanley, Earl of Bedford, was of the South parts, and she was amazed at all these clamours. Indeed she had not well understood all that had been said, for when the Earl and the Lady Margaret had become heated they spoke in the Northern fashion of which she knew nothing. So the Countess said again that she had done all she knew to do honour to that her guest. If she had fallen short of due hospitality, very gladly she would amend it. This Countess was a large, white woman that had once been very fair. And she wrung her hands.
Then the Lady Margaret laughed and bade peremptorily John Bellingham to bid her men arm themselves and lie all together under arms, for they had been scattered about the Castle. And, at all those noises the women of the Lady Margaret awakened and came into the little room where they slept; two were in their shifts and one had her bed clothes about her. Then the Lady Margaret bade them dress themselves and lie down upon their beds; but to be ready. After that she answered the Countess Maud that her entertainment had been such as she had seldom had before, lacking nothing, but with certain dishes added, that in their rough North parts they had seldom seen before though they had heard of them. Such were the scents in the water for washing hands, the golden apples of Spain, and the fowl called a Turkey. And indeed the Countess had made her great cheer. Nevertheless, since eating these things she and the Earl had become sworn enemies, and it would be contrary to the rules of hospitality if she stayed longer in that Castle.
The Countess wrung her hands again and said, "What was this of making enemies and why could they not live amicably together as cousins did in the South?" The Lady Margaret laughed and answered that if the people of the South were better than they of the North in these matters, then they were better than God meant men to be; nevertheless she was glad of it.
Then came John Bellingham, who by now understood the danger of the matter, to say that the Lady Margaret's men were all together and armed in a room in a wall by the postern gate and at the foot of a stairway just beside that lady's chamber-room. Then the Lady Margaret bade him let her men lie down upon straw in that room; but upon any sound that the Percy's men were arming or at any movement of lights in the Castle, he should come at once to her.
Then the Countess Maud asked what was this, for she had not understood what had passed between the lady and her ancient, by reason that they spoke in the Northern tongue. Then came a knocking at the door and the dame Bellingham said that there stood the Earl Percy in his night-gown. So the Lady Margaret said that was what she feared--that the Earl should come down at night with amorous proposals; but she was jesting. The Countess did not know this and she went to the door and began to cry out upon that lord for desiring to dishonour her.
Then between the two of them came a great clamour, the Countess holding to that, and the Earl crying out that she was a fool and that this matter might lead to the deaths of them all if she would not let him come in to speak to the Lady Margaret. This the Countess did not wish to allow, for the Countess Maud had no comprehension at all of what all this trouble was about, and it seemed to her to be nonsense to say, as her lord did, that this matter might lead to the deaths of them all.
Nevertheless, when the Lady Margaret heard those words she laughed very silently but long to herself. For she knew that now, if she could come out of the Castle and get safe away, she had a power that might well drive that Earl to do all that she wished later, or some of it.
Henry, Earl Percy, had indeed said much and so much to his kinswoman in his anger. For it was indeed his intention, secret but resolute, to break the power of all the barons and great nobles in the North, so that King Henry VII should be almighty and himself the King's viceregent. When the day came there would be indeed no end to his power in those parts, for the King would be very distant and there would be no one to oppose him. So he fomented all the quarrels that he could amongst these people, and he had seen with joy the troubles that were afoot about the Castle Lovell.
But as yet he was not ready; for all these people were still very strong in armed men, wealth and lands, and, if they joined together they might well overset both himself and King Henry VII with him. Thus he wished he had bitten his tongue out before ever, in his anger, he had revealed what was his secret design to his cousin. For the Lady Margaret was a great gadabout and, if he could not come to her, either to modify what he had said or to bind her to secrecy, there would not be a Dacre or a Eure or a Widdrington that would not soon know the worst of his design.
He had sought his bed, but his pillow had seemed to be of nettles, and since he had discerned that it might be her design to ride away early, he had sought her chamber door to have speech with her. He did not in truth know what to do. He was very willing to have laid her by the heels and to keep her a prisoner in that tower. But he was afraid that that might bring about his ears a hornet's nest of his cousins, and even it might bring him reproof from the King. The King was not at all willing or ready to have the whole of Northumberland rise upon him at that time. Nay, Henry VII had bidden him to be very careful that, whilst he weakened these troublesome people as much as he could, he should rouse their anger as little as he might.
All this, laughing behind the door, the Lady Margaret knew very well, even to the fact that the Lord Percy might come to shutting her up in prison. But she knew that, whilst the silly Countess kept him crying at the door, he could not bid his men to arm against her, and whilst her men were armed and his not, he could do little or nothing at all. They could all go out at the postern gate and so into the trackless sedges of the sea and the marches. Moreover, the Percy and his Countess were such married people that, upon any occasion they quarrelled furiously and at great length and so they did now.
For the Countess was well begun upon her grievances such as, as how the Earl had dealt with his lands of her dowry, as to the little attention he paid her as his wife, as to the fact that she had no more than four damask dresses and, very particularly, as to the store he set by one of her ladies called Isabel. And at the last she pushed the door to against his resistance and set the bar across it.
The Earl thundered upon it very violently but in the end he went away. The Lady Margaret did as best she might to comfort the Countess Maud until at last John Bellingham came to tell her that people were astir in the Castle with some lights, though whether they were about arming themselves or getting ready for the day and the hay harvest, he could not well say. But indeed the Earl Percy had twice ordered his men to arm and seize the lady and twice he ordered them to desist, during that night; for he was in a very great quandary.
So the Lady Margaret went down the little stairway, after she had roused her women, and found her men by the postern gate. The keeper of the gate did not dare to withhold the keys for he knew that they, being thirty to one, could slay him very peacefully.
When they had walked from the walls of that Castle over the bridge and two good gunshots beyond and the day was beginning to break, they all stood together upon a little mound, and the Lady Margaret sent a little boy called Piers, that was her kinsman and page, back to the Castle to ask for their horses. For they could not have taken horses out by the postern way which went narrowly down twisting steps. She did not think that the Earl would dare to come and take her there. It would have been too great an outrage, to set upon a lady of her quality in the open; besides, being thirty and more, they would be able to give account of themselves and no doubt get away by tracks that John Bellingham knew very well. So the ladies sat down upon shields of the men-at-arms, for the grass was wet with the night's dew, and they watched the dawn come up over the sea and across the wide stretches of the Coquet river. The Lady Margaret and her handmaidens made merry and played a game with white stones that they picked up; but the old lady Bellingham moaned and grumbled a great deal, for she was weary with having watched and stiff with the rawness of the air.
So, after a time, when it was quite light, the page called Piers came back. He reported that at first the Earl had been in a great rage and had threatened to hamstring all the Lady Margaret's horses; but, afterwards, he had seemed to change his mind and had given orders that all the horses should be sent out to her. Moreover, he sent her word that, if she would come back into the Castle he would give her news of the Young Lovell, for his receiver, John Harbottle, had sent him, through the night a messenger from Alnwick with very certain tidings, and these she should have and might make a treaty with the Earl if she would go back.
But she believed this to be more lying in order to get her back into his power; so she sent ten of her men to fetch the horses from the Castle gate and very soon they perceived all the horses come round the Castle wall, to the number of thirty-two with eleven mules. The Lady Margaret rode a tall horse called Christopher, a brown, that she loved, and John Bellingham had another tall horse. But the old lady and the three maids had mules, and there were seven pack mules that carried the Lady Margaret's hangings, furnishings for her room if she slept in an inn, her dresses and much things of value as she would not willingly leave in the Tower of Glororem. The men-at-arms rode little, nimble horses, such as the false Scots had, very fit for picking their way amongst springs, heather and the stones of hillsides. This lady could not bring herself to believe that her true love was not dead, so that, although she laughed and jested to keep up the hearts of her maids, as her plain duty was, within herself she was a very sad woman.
When the sun was off the horizon they broke their fast with small beer and cheese that they got from a husbandman's tower near Acklington, for they were sticking inland. This husbandman advised them to go by way of Eshot Hill and Helm, for, by reason of the dry weather, the road from this latter place to Morpeth was very good travelling, and it ran straight. The Lady Margaret was minded to sleep that night at Newcastle, which would be twenty-four miles more or less, for she had no haste to be in one place more than another. She had little pleasure in life; although she wished to rescue the Lady Rohtraut she thought this could only be done by means of the Lady Dacre, her mother, that had been a Princess of Croy. And, from the news she had, it was very unlikely that that ancient lady would reach her house in the city of Durham before that night or the next day.
So, as they rode between the fields, the sun rose up--its rays poured down fiercely and smote on them. It was marvellously hot weather, so that those ladies must at first lay off their gray cloaks and then open their shifts at the neck and fan themselves with their neckerchers. A great langour descended upon the Lady Margaret; her head ached sorely and her sadness grew unbearable.
And all, even to the men-at-arms and the page Piers, complained of the great heat and because they had had little sleep the night before, and the ladies yawned and half slept upon their mules. So, when they came to a little green hill where ash trees climbed to the top, the Lady Margaret said, out of compassion to them, that when they were at the top of the hill, so that they could see the flat country all round, they might get down from their horses and mules and sleep the noontide away in the shade. And so they did.
The men-at-arms got down from the sumpter mules mattresses that the ladies might lie upon them, and there, in a shady grove, they lay and slept. The men set their backs against trees and let their heads fall forward between their knees. One or two were set to walk as sentries outside that wood, to watch the flat country below, so that no sound was heard in that little wood save the light noises of steel and of buckles clinking as the watchmen walked. And so they lay a long time, all recumbent, some covering their faces with their arms, some casting them abroad.
The Lady Margaret awakened from a slumber, and the sun had climbed far round in the heaven. Then she perceived a lady watching her through the trees and smiling. So beautiful and smiling a lady she had never seen. She stood between the stems of two white birch trees and leaned upon one, with her arm over her head in an attitude of great leisure. The Lady Margaret rose from her mattress and went towards that lady; she had never felt so humble, nor had her eyes ever so gladdened her at the sight of the handiwork of God.
Then that lady walked through the wood, very light of foot, so that the long grass was hardly trampled at all, and no briars caught at her gown. Yet the Lady Margaret could not overtake her. So that lady came to the edge of the wood and the hill to the west, looking over the tower called Helm, where the white road ran southward and the green lands swung up towards the distant hilts. And here there was a white charger and a great company of ladies-in-waiting, all very beautiful, in gowns of sea-blue silk with girdles of silver and gold. The Lady Margaret had never seen so fair a company, though she had seen the Queen of Richard Crookback with all her court. Then it seemed to her that that lady pointed down into the plain as if she wanted to show her lover and her lord. On the road that came from the North, the Lady Margaret perceived one that she knew for a knight, by the sun upon his armour, and a monk that walked beside him. And a mile behind, by the cloud of dust that rose, she knew there were men-at-arms, and perceived their spears above the dust. The Lady Margaret knew that this must be the other lady's husband, for certainly such a troop of fair women would never ride abroad in that dangerous country without men to guard them.
Then she saw that lady riding down the hill, with all her many, towards the little figures in the plain; but they went so quickly that it was like a flight of blue doves in the sunlight below her. Then the Lady Margaret wondered who that lady must be, for she knew of none in that neighbourhood that could keep up so fair a state, except it were the King of Scots, and not even he, and that could not be the Queen of Scots, for she was a stout, black lady, whereas this one had been a tall woman with red-gold hair, such a one as she could have loved if she had been a man. And, at the thought that that woman was going to her lover and her lord, the Lady Margaret wept three or four tears, for that she would never do herself, and going back to her guards, she upbraided them for that they had let that lady pass unchallenged. But they said they haD seen no one.
V
The Princess Rohtraut of Croy, Tuillinghem and Sluijs, Duchess of Muijden and Lady Dacre, dowager of the North, was a vociferous old German woman who passed for being ill to deal with. She would cry at the top of her voice orders that it was very difficult to understand, and, when her servants did not swiftly carry these out, she would strike at them with the black stick that she leaned upon when she hobbled from place to place. This she did so swiftly that it was a marvel; for she was short and stout. She could not move without groans and wheezing and catching at the corners of tables and the backs of chairs. Nevertheless she would so strike with her stick at her servants, her stewards, the gentlemen attendant upon her son, the Lord Dacre, or even at knights, lawyers, or lords that frequented her son. She had told the King, Richard III, that he would come to no good end; she had told the Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, that she was an idle fool, and King Henry VII that his face was as sour as his wine. For that King, being a niggard, served very sour wine to his guests. Richard III had laughed at her; the Queen Elizabeth Woodville had gone crying with rage to King Edward IV. King Henry VII had affected not to hear her, which was the more prudent way. For her father, the Duke of Croy, who still lived, though a very ancient man of more than ninety, was yet a very potent and sovereign lord in Flanders, Almain, and towards Burgundy. Seventy thousand troops of all arms he could put into the field either against or for the French King, and eighty armed vessels upon the sea. The Emperor of Rome was afraid of him, for he was very malicious and had great weight with all the Electors from Westphalia to Brunswick and the Rhine. Moreover, though he himself rode no longer afield, his son, the brother of the Princess Rohtraut, was a very cunning, determined, and hardy commander. And that was to say nothing of the powers of the Dacres in England.
So those Kings and Queens did what they could least to mark the outrageous demeanour of this Princess. They did no more than as if she had been a court jester, and affected to wonder that she had once been a beautiful and young Princess, for love of whom her husband, then a simple esquire, had languished longer than need be in prison in Almain. Yet so it was.
This Princess spent the winter of most years, latterly, in London for the benefit of the climate. The summers until lately she had been accustomed to spend in Bothal Castle or Cockley Park Tower, which she hired of Sir Robert Ogle, who had lately been made Lord Ogle of Ogle. Upon the death of her husband she had inherited much land near Morpeth and she considered that she would have had much more had not the Lord Lovell, lately dead, seized so much of it by reason of his marriage with the Lady Rohtraut, the Princess's daughter. The lawsuits about these lands were not yet concluded, and it was these that the knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle were seeking to force from the Lady Rohtraut by keeping her imprisoned. The Princess had, however, by no means abandoned her claim to these lands and it was to prosecute her lawsuits that, each summer, she came to the North. She was otherwise a very rich woman, having many coronets, chains with great pearls, rubies, ferezets, silks, hangings, furniture and much gold. Moreover, she was for ever trafficking in parcels of land with the Ogles, the Bartrams, the Mitfords and other families round the town of Morpeth. In that way she had both occupation and profit, and she harried the leisure of the several receivers of her son, the Lord Dacre whom the King kept in London.
Now, upon a day, being the second day in July of the year 1486, this lady sat upon a chair resembling a high throne upon three stone steps covered with a carpet. She had behind her yet another carpet that mounted the wall and came forward over her head in the manner of a dais. This old lady inclined always to the oldest fashions.
Thus, upon her round, old head she had an immense structure that bent her face forward as if it had been that of our Father at Rome beneath the triple tiara. It was made of two pillows of scarlet velvet, covered with a net of fine gold chains uniting large pearls. Such a thing had not been seen in England for two or three score years, but the ladies at her father's court had worn them when she had been a girl. For the rest of her, she was dressed in black wool with a girdle, from which there hung ten or a dozen keys of silver, steel, or gold inlaid with steel.
The room was fair in size, but all of stone and very dark because of the smallness of the windows. The roof went up into a peak. All painted the stone walls were, with woods and leaves, with fowlers among trees setting their nets, and maidens shaking down fruits, and men and women bathing in pools, and the vaults of the ceiling showed the history of the coffin of St. Cuthbert. Each history was divided from the other by ribs of stone painted fairly in scarlet with green scrolls. There you might see how the good monks set out from Holy Island, or how the coffin floated of itself, or how the women called one to the other about the Dun Cow. This room without doubt had formerly been some council chamber or judgment room of the Prince Bishop's in old days. But its purpose was by now forgotten, and the Lord Dacre had bought the house lately, for he considered the practice of living always in castles to be barbarous and uncomfortable. It was his purpose to pull down this old stone house and build there a fair palace where he might dwell in comfort. But, for the time being, it suited his mother well enough to dwell there.
She was sitting in the chair like a throne, leaning forward and perusing a great book of accounts held up to her by an old fellow who knelt before her in black cloths with the badge of the Dacres upon one shoulder and the silver portcullis of Croy upon the other. The old lady puzzled over this tale of capons, pence, eggs, bolls of wheat, oats and the rest that her tenants owed her. She thought it was not enough. And consequently messengers came in from the Prince Bishop, from the Dean, from the Chapter, down to the sacristan, to ask how it was with her health after her long journey from London city to Durham. She had come there the night before. And one brought her the offering of a deer, another of two fat geese, a third a salmon, a fourth a basket of strawberries grown beneath a southern wall. And, as each of these things was brought before her, she would lean forward and look upon it, and so she would lose her place in the book of accounts and scold perpetually at the old man that held it up for her.
In one of the deep, narrow window spaces stood a notable man of forty, stout and grave, with a brown beard cut squarely, and wearing a very rich blue cloak and blue round hat with a great white plume. He said nothing at all, but pared his finger-nails with a little knife. He looked between whiles out upon the high, wooded banks of the Wear that confronted his gaze across the river, and were all ablaze with the sunlight: once the Princess Rohtraut turned her head stiffly to have sight of him. But he was standing too far in the depth of the window, her chair being between one window and the other. So she cried out in a rough voice that was at once insulting and indulgent:
"This is very easy spying for King Henry." Then she chuckled and added, "Do you hear me, Sir Bertram of Lyonesse? This is very easy spying for King Henry."
He made no answer to this gibe, but instead he pushed open the window and carefully surveyed the deep gorge beneath him, for this place was new to him. The night before they had come in by torch-light, over a steep bridge above a black river. The gate into the tower had been opened for them only after long parleying, but he had perceived walls well planned and formidable, great heights in the blackness, and steep, up-and-down streets amongst which they went between strong, stone houses. But he had been aware that this city of Durham was a very strong place.
He had been set to sleep that night in a room that faced inwards, and rising in the morning he had seen that just before his face were the great stones of the wall surrounding and fortifying the cathedral. Beneath his gaze were two great towers, pierced with meurtrieres, which are slits through which arrows may be shot. Between these two towers was a gateway which he doubted not had a double portcullis, devices for dropping huge stones and rafters upon any enemy that should break through the first portcullis and be captured by the second, so that they would be like rats in a trap. By craning his head out of his window he could see, further along, both to his right and to his left, tall towers in this inner wall, each tower having the appearance of an arch let into its face. But this Sir Bertram was an engineer well skilled in the plans of fortresses, and he knew that what appeared to be arches led up to two slanting holes in each tower, and that the slant of each hole was directed with a fell and cunning purpose. For, to each tower foot a steep and narrow street of the town came up. So, if any enemy should have won the town itself and should come up those streets, then those in the tower would set running down these slanting holes balls of stone weighing two, three or four hundred pounds. By the direction of the slantings, those balls of stone would run bounding down those narrow streets and cause dreadful manglings, maimings and death, principally by the breaking of legs.
By those and other signs, this Sir Bertram knew that here, even within the walled town was a fortress almost impregnable and dreadful to assault. This Bishop might well be a proud and disdainful prelate. He was safe, not only from foreign foes, but from his own townsmen, which was not so often the way with Bishops. For it is the habit of townsmen to be at perpetual strife with their Bishops, seeking to break in on them by armed force and to make the Bishops give up their rights and rents and fees in the towns, which if the Bishops could not prevent was apt to render them much the poorer. But at this Prince Bishop the townsmen could never come, so strong was this citadel within the town.
So he would become ever richer, not only for that reason but because of the great shrines of St. Cuthbert and of the Venerable Bede. To these, year in, year out, at all seasons and in all weathers, thousands resorted with offerings and tolls and tributes.
So this Sir Bertram perceived it would be no easy thing to humble this Palatine Prince even though the Percy had reported to King Henry VII that he could smoke out Bishop Sherwood at very little cost.
It was true that, as the Percy thought, King Henry VII heartily desired the downfall of this Bishop Sherwood. He had supported Richard Crookback and loved little King Henry. And indeed, Sir Bertram knew, for he had the King's private thoughts, that the King would very willingly see the downfall not only of the Bishop Sherwood but of this whole see of Durham. For it was contrary to that Prince's idea of kingship to have within his realm a Palatine county with a Bishop there having such sovereign powers that it was as if there was no King at all in the realm. But, to be rid of the bishopric, even King Henry thought would be impossible since it would raise against him all the Church and get him called heretic and interdicted as King John had been. So that the King would very willingly have had the Percy to act as his catspaw and make civil war upon Bishop Sherwood and so drive him out of the land. That might impoverish and weaken the see a little, but not much. For a Bishop is not like a temporal baron; though Sherwood be cast out another must succeed him and have all his rights and grow as strong or stronger.
It was upon these things that this Sir Bertram--a cool and quiet knight, loving King Henry and beloved by him above most men--meditated whilst that old lady cast up her accounts, and he trimmed his finger nails. So, when he leaned out of that bright window, he perceived how steeply perched was the house in which he was. Sheer down to the river ran rocky paths with here and there a tree. At the bottom was a high wall well battlemented and slit for archers to hold it. The river ran very swiftly. On it there was a fisherman casting his nets from an anchored boat. The boat tugged and tore so at its chain that even the practised fisherman had difficulty to stand. So the river must be very swift, and there would be no mining there.
On the other side of the river the banks rose as steeply and were clothed with trees. There cannon might be set against the town. But to shoot so far they must be great guns and the Percy had none of these, nor were there any large enough nearer than Windsor. If the Percy had them, it was difficult to think that he could drag them there into position, and all that would take a year or two years. So, this Sir Bertram, who had been sent there by the King to advise him, considered, as his first thoughts, that if the Earl of Northumberland attacked this Bishop Palatine he might take the city, but hardly the inner citadel, and never at all the castle within. Or, if the King lent him cannon, he might break the wall of the citadel.
On the other hand, having the Bishop shut up in the castle the Earl might starve him out--but this he could not do unless all the country round were friendly to the Earl and hated the Bishop. Without that there would be no doing it. And the same might be said of any project for dragging cannon on to those heights. For the cannon must be brought up narrow valleys where ambushes very easily could lie, and that could not be thought of in a hostile country.
The Percy had reported himself to King Henry as being cock of all the North parts; if that were true, he might very well be loosed upon the Bishop. But from conversations that he had had with the Lords Dacre and Ogle, as well as with the Abbot of Alnwick and lesser men, this Sir Bertram thought it was possible that the Earl Percy was not so strong nor yet so beloved in those parts as he would have the King believe. In that case, if he relied upon this Earl and this Earl's faith, the King might get great discredit and no profit either in those parts or elsewhere. It was in order to study and inquire into these things that this cautious Sir Bertram was come into those parts. So he leaned upon the sill of the window and looked down upon the river that appeared two hundred feet below.
After he had watched the river and reflected a long time, for he was a slow thinker, adding point to point in his mind, to have as it were a strong platform on which to build, he heard a woman's voice say highly:
"I tell you, ah, gentle Princess, that there is no man more hated in these North parts, and if you will lend your sanction and your wealth we may speedily have down not only these robbers that hold your daughter imprisoned by his encouragement but also that flail of the North himself."
Sir Bertram turned slowly on his elbow, leaning upon the sill and looked into the room. There he saw a monstrous beautiful young lady that kneeled with her voluminous rich gown all about her and held out her two hands towards the Princess whom he could not see. The Princess did not speak, and that lady held her peace, so that knight moved softly and deliberately forward, and when he was near the younger lady he asked her:
"Even who is this man who is so hated in the North parts?"
That young lady looked at him with astonished lowering and resentful eyes, as much as to say, who was he that he should ask her such a question? The Princess had been leaning back in her chair with both elbows upon the arms and a hand caressing her chin, for all the world as if she had been an old man considering a knotty point. But, when she saw Sir Bertram and heard his voice, she said hastily and harshly:
"Get up, child and your ladyship. It is not decent that a lady of high rank and my kinswoman should be spoken to kneeling by a Cornish knight of nowhere and yesterday, God help me, if he be ten times a King's spy!" And so she bade the lady, who was the Lady Margaret of Glororem, to fetch a stool from a corner of the room and set it by her throne on the step. And there she had the Lady Margaret sit beside her and that Sir Bertram fetch off his hat with the large feather and so stand before them. "For," said she to that knight, "you may well be the King's companion, but in this place the King's writ does not run and I am a royal Princess and this is my cousin and niece."
It was nonsense and a tyranny, but Sir Bertram did it with calmness. He cared little about forms when there was news to be had that could help him and only one old woman and one very beautiful and proud one before whom to abase himself. So he made an apology, saying that he had not known that lady to be of such high rank, she being in the dim room and not over plain to his eyes which had been gazing on the sunlight. He bent one knee and stood there composedly with his hat in his hands before him.
Then that old Princess, who had affected anger affected now a complaisance towards that gentleman. She spoke as follows, formally to the Lady Margaret:
"This Sir Bertram of Lyonesse," she said,--"though God knows where Lyonesse is; I have heard it is some poor islands in Scilly or Cornwall or where you will,--so this Sir Bertram of Lyonesse is the King's commissioner to inquire into the state of these North parts. And if you will ask me what make of a thing a commissioner is, I will answer you that he is what you and I and other simple folk do call a spy. But the King calls him his commissioner and that is very well."
She looked upon Sir Bertram maliciously to see if he winced. But that knight turned his face composedly to the Lady Margaret.
"Ah, gentle lady," said he, "you may count that for truth. I am here to find out what I can."
The old Princess liked this Sir Bertram, in truth, very well. She counted him so low, on account of his obscure and distant birth and his former poverty, that she could jest with him as if he had been a peasant boy. She considered English lords as of so low a rank against her own that she thought not much about them, one with another, except may be it was the Dacres and their kin. So she was very glad to keep this Sir Bertram, if she could do it without trouble or expense, and have some amusement from it.
She turned upon the Lady Margaret and said again:
"You must know that, though in a concealed manner, this Sir Bertram is of great worth in the counsels of King Henry VII. Why this should be so, God knows, for one says one thing and one will say another. But so it is; in all matters in which a king may be advised this new knight rules the King."
Then again Sir Bertram looked upon the Lady Margaret:
"Ah, gentle lady," he said, "to dispel what may appear of mystery in this royal Princess's account of me, let me say this--for I would not have you think evil of me: I have twice saved this King's life, once by discovering assassins sent to murder him in France before he was King and once, since, at Windsor where I caught by the wrist a man with a knife that came behind him when he walked in the gardens. And I have farmed the King's private lands to greater profit than came to him before and, having studied the art of fortifying of a pupil of the monk Olberitz that made most of the strong castles of France, I have designed or strengthened successfully certain strong places for this King. If I could say I had saved this King's life in gallant battles I would rather say it, for it would gain me greater honour in your sight. But I am rather a man of the exchequer board than of the tented field. It is for caution, defence and prudence that the King trusts me rather than for things more gallant that should stir your pulse in the recital. I wish it were the other way, but that is not the truth of it."
"Well, it is true what this knight says," the old Princess confirmed him. "He has twice saved the King's life by caution and has increased the King's gear and so on. Now he is sent here as the King's spy--the King's reconciler or the King's trumpeter or what you will. For his mission is to take a survey of these North parts first and then to prove to them that the King is a mild, loving, gracious and economical sovereign."
"Well, that is my mission," Sir Bertram said to the Lady Margaret, "and I hope I may do it."
"I will tell you what I think of it," the Lady Margaret said then, "as soon as I have your opinion on certain words I said two nights ago to Henry Percy, my cousin, Earl of Northumberland."
"I shall hear them very gladly," Sir Bertram answered.
Then, in her own way, the old Princess exposed all these matters to Sir Bertram of Lyonesse, how certain filthy rogues had taken prisoner her daughter Rohtraut, and the rest. Sir Bertram had heard all that before. The King had ordered him to travel to the North with the Princess of Croy, protecting her the better with his train and bearing a share of her expenses, so that he might the better make out the affairs of the Dacres, what was their wealth, who resorted to them, and whether they seemed to conspire with other rebels. And, upon the road, in three various towns, three delayed messengers had met the Princess of Croy, coming from that very Lady Margaret with broad letters in which she told the story of the things that passed at Castle Lovell. So Sir Bertram had heard most of the tale before, nevertheless he heard it very gladly again, more particularly as the Lady Margaret corrected the old Princess here and there and made things the plainer.
It was a very long congress that they held in that room with the vaulted ceiling and the painted walls, that were all sprays of leaves and dark green boskage with the figures of men and women in scarlets and whites and blues, holding bows and fowling nets and fish nets and falcons. For, when the Princess had told that story she was impatient to know, but with sarcastic and hard words, what this adviser of the King would advise her to do. For her own part, she said, it was her purpose to go with a small train, and unarmed, up to that Castle Lovell and in at the door. And she did not think it was those robbers who would withstand her when she set free her daughter, opening the door of her prison with her own hands, and so leading her out into the light of day and so there to Durham, where she might dwell till justice was done about the lands and other things that were in dispute.
The Lady Margaret said she was very glad to hear this, for she had been afraid that the Princess had too much displeasure against her daughter, seeing that in fifteen years she had not spoken to her or written broad letters.
The Princess erected her old, round head stiffly, with the pillows upon it, and exclaimed that it was not the fashion of their royal house to quarrel with its daughters or to do less than decency demanded for their rescue and sustenance. She would not wish that Lady Rohtraut to dwell in her house and at her charges for ever, for she must have her due train and estate, and that would make a great charge. But, until she were set up in her own lands and had her wealth again, that Princess would there maintain her and her train.
The Lady Margaret said again that she was very glad of it, and she was certain that those robbers would very quickly release the Princess's daughter. For they would fear the might of the Dacres and the Duke of Croy with his tall ships, his cannon, and his thousands of men that would come by sea and burn that Castle.
It was at that that Sir Bertram said that the King of England would not very willingly seE Flemings and Almains landing in his dominion; but the Lady Margaret might be certain that that King would see justice done to that injured lady by his own knights and the terror of his name.
Then the old Princess scowled upon both that knight and the lady so fiercely that her eyes grew red and dreadful. She smote her breast with the handle of the black crutch that dangled from her wrist and cried:
"Mutter Gottes! By the mother of God! It is not the King of England nor my father, the Duke of Croy, that shall go to that Castle but I alone and _bij Gott_! It is at my wrath that the knees of these robbers shall knock together and the keys fall from their hands."
Then the Lady Margaret said that that might well be the case and Sir Bertram said that so it would be much better. The old Princess bent her brows upon that knight and asked him, jesting bitterly, if he had any better advice to give her. He said that he had none, but that he would very gladly hear what Henry, Earl Percy, had had to say to the Lady Margaret and she to him and also something of Sir Paris Lovell, that well-esteemed lording.
The Lady Margaret told him very clearly all that she knew, and that knight considered her to be as sensible as she was fair. When she told him of the disappearing of her true love and of the rumours that were told against him he had a pensive air; but when she told him of the Percy's high words of how he was minded to break the great lords of the North and that that was the King's mind, Sir Bertram frowned heavily. When she said that it was the duty of great lords not to support too readily a new King that they had set up, nor too abjectly to obey him or lavishly fawn upon him, that knight's eyebrows went up, for this was a new thought to him. And so, whilst she recited to him the history of this realm of England as she had done to the Percy, he continued with his left hand behind his back holding his blue hat with the white feather and his right hand to his mouth whilst he hit the knuckles and reflected.
The old Princess of Croy said that all that the Lady Margaret uttered was nonsense; the truth of the matter was that all the English and their lords were murderers and wallowers in blood, slaying their kings without reason or pity or the fear of God, but like hogs fighting at a trough.
When she was done Sir Bertram took down his hand from his mouth and smoothed his beard. He said that if that was the mind of the Northern lords, though it was a new thought to him, he need quarrel little with it. For, though he might need to reflect further upon the principle, yet undoubtedly the case of King Richard III had gone in favour of the Lady Margaret. He was a King set up by certain lords and pulled down again when they found him evil. And, as far as the practice went, he would be satisfied to have that the touchstone for King Henry VII. For he was certain that that King would prove a dread lord benign, loving and prudent; all mighty lords and Princes of the North parts would gladly acknowledge--in the course of a year or two--that there had never been so good a King and they would all of them very willingly support him. And, if King Henry VII did not prove as good a King as he then reported, Sir Bertram, though he loved him, would very willingly see him cast down as Richard Crookback had been.
The Lady Margaret said she was very glad to hear it, and that upon such terms they might soon be good friends. Then Sir Bertram smiled a little in his beard and said:
"Ah, gentle lady, I perceive from certain words you have dropped that you did not think all these thoughts of the constitution of this realm of England by your lonely self." And so he perceived certain tears in that lady's eyes.
"Nay, truly," she said, "I learned them of the lips of my lord, Sir Paris Lovell, in sweet devising and conversations that we had before his death, and may God receive his poor soul and give him sweet rest in paradise! For such a gentle lording or one so wise in the reading of books, anxious for the good of his estate, so fine of his fair body, so fierce in war and fightful in the breach, or so merciful to his foes, they being down, God never did make. Though he was of young age yet he had fought in Italy, in Ferrara, in Venice, in France, in harness; in this realm against the false Scots and upon fightful journeys into Scotland."
Sir Bertram lowered his head a little.
"I wish I had been such a one," he said. "This was a very gallant gentleman. I have heard other such reports of him."
The old Princess said:
"I did not know I had had such a swan and phoenix amongst my grandchildren."
"Why, it is true, madam," Sir Bertram said. "You have lived too much amongst the Dacres to know that you had this lording for part heir."
Now this house, built in the old days before that time, and all of stone, like a fortress, had for its greater strength only one staircase. It wound round in a little space, all of thick stone, so it would be very difficult for an enemy to come up it if it were at all defended. On the lower floor there were no windows at all towards the street, to make it the stronger, and that staircase served all the rooms. This old fashion struck the Lord Dacre as very barbarous, and he would have it all pulled down, with a big hall and hangings upon the ground floor and large square windows with carvings on them, as was the pleasanter fashion of London and that new day. The paintings, too, in that room he would have whitened over, and the stone ceilings covered in with wood and beams, that should be bossed and carved and gilded and with coats of arms. But, for that time, so it was, and the staircase came up from the street.
Now it happened that, below, the door into the street was open, and a fisherman owing a tithe of fish for that Princess's table stood before it offering fish. The old steward had gone to him and complained that his fish and trout, eels and lampreys, were not fine enough to set before that Princess. Much of this could be heard in that room, and then came the sounds of the feet of a company of horse and the clank of armour and loud knockings upon the gate that went into the cathedral precincts and voices crying out and answering. With one thing and another none of those three could hear a word that there they uttered.
So the Princess was angry and clapped her hands for an old woman to come that had a white clout hanging down before her chin, for all the world as if it were a beard. The Princess bade take that fisherman into the kitchen and he to be given twenty stripes--for she had heard what passed between him and the steward--the door into the street was to be shut and news to be brought her what knight that was that rode with his many up the street. And if it was a knight of these parts and one she knew, she ordered him to come to her for she desired news of that countryside.
So that old woman, as best she could, went down the stairway sideways, for she was very old and fat and the stairway very little and winding. Then they heard her clamorously upbraiding alike old steward and the fisherman for the clamour they had made. Afterwards, the door was closed and there was peace. Then Sir Bertram looked gravely upon the Lady Margaret. And:
"Ah, gentle lady," said he, "from what I have observed of your conversation I can tell you this much. You tell me that this Sir Paris Lovell was a good friend to Richard Crookback that is dead. And I do not much blame him for it, since, as you tell me, that late King showed great courtesy here in the North parts when he was Duke of Gloucester. And well King Richard III knew how to bear courtesy when it suited him, though at other times he was a false tyrant. So that this Sir Paris Lovell was a friend to Crookback and could have aided him against my King if his father would have given him leave. But this his father would not do and it is so much the better.
"And further you have reported to me that this Sir Paris Lovell has said to you, in his own words: 'Now this King Richard is dead and alas for it! And we have another King of whom I, Sir Paris Lovell, know little, though I fear he may be a heavy ruler. But so as it is'--so you say you remember the words of this lord--'what I am minded to do,' said he, 'is to set up a chantry where masses may be said for the dead King's soul. If he had been alive I would have fought for him, but now I will see if I may live at peace with Henry of Richmond for a King. For to be sure, what we need in these North parts is peace amongst ourselves, that husbandry and mining and fisheries may flourish on my lands and others. And so one may make such a great journey into Scotland that the false Scots may not raise their heads for fifty years or more again. And so we may have leisure to go upon our own affairs. Therefore I, Sir Paris Lovell, for one will, if I may, live at peace with King Henry VII and be his subject if he will be bearable.' ... Now therefore I, Sir Bertram of Lyonesse..."
"God keep us," the old Princess cried out here, "you speak more like a lawyer drawing a bond than a gallant knight."
"Madam and gentle Princess," Sir Bertram said, "I am more like a lawyer than a gallant knight." And so he looked again gravely upon the Lady Margaret who, in her voluminous gown, sat on her little stool beside that kind of throne and leaned her arm along its arm, folding her hands together. She looked upon him earnestly and, after a time, she said:
"Good Knight, if you talk with me thus to make an agreement with me in the gentle Lord Lovell's name, I tell you that can never be, for he is dead."
"Ah, gentle lady," Sir Bertram answered, "how can it be said that any man is dead that is but three months away? These are strange and evil times. God knows I am no very learned knight and one not overways well-read in the lore of Holy Church. Yet nowadays strange things are seen, books not written by hand, Greek sorcerers, as I have heard, driven out of Byzantium by the Sultan, who press with new learnings across Christendom. I have heard there was lately one new Greek Doctor at London called Molossos, or some such name, though I never came to see him. And he had crabbed books of Greek and other sorceries. So, if your true love and lording be but ninety days away..."
"Sir," the Lady Margaret said, "my lord was never for so long a prisoner amongst the false Scots or the thieves of Rokehope without news to me. Surely they have killed him."
"I do not well know this country as you tell me; but let me ask you this: if the false Scots had killed so great a lord would they not boast and say great things? Or if the thieves of Rokehope or the Debateable Lands, or of those places that I do not know, had taken him, would they not have made more attempts at his ransoming than once sending to Castle Lovell? For you tell me that you think he was taken by Gib Elliott, as you call him, or some such naughty villain, and that Gib Elliott sent to Castle Lovell for his ransom and that the Knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle refused to give either white mail or black, as the saying is. And maybe, as you think, they clapped that messenger into prison for greater secrecy, so that the countryside might have no news of your lord but consider him gone away with warlocks and others. But, in the first place, is it to be thought that such a messenger could be come from that Elliott to Castle Lovell and no one know it? Would not the Castle Lovell bondsmen see him and report it to your bondsmen and so on through all the countryside? For what cause should that messenger have in going to Castle Lovell, to be very secret, though Cullerford and Haltwhistle should desire to keep it secret afterwards? Or again, why should Gib Elliott, if that be his name, slay the Lord of Castle Lovell merely because Haltwhistle and Cullerford refused ransom or imprisoned his messenger? Gib Elliott I take it, is as other men, and seeketh money and how best he may have it. Moreover, Castle Lovell is a great Castle, and cannot be taken in a little corner. I will tell you this: that within a fortnight that news was known to us in London Town; for merchant wrote it to merchant at the bottom of his bills, and packman passed the news on to packman from town to town."
"Say you so!" the old Princess called out at this. "Ye knew it and I did not, yet ye never told me!"
"Madam and gentle Princess," Sir Bertram answered, "that is the duty of the servants of a King, to be all ears and no tongue. And partly that is why I am here, for the King desired to know if such lawless robberies could be done in any part of his realm. So now I am inquiring into this matter. And this I will ask you, my fair and gentle lady--if that news was known in London Town under a fortnight, should not that Gib Elliott know it in a day or two days at the most, seeing that all the countryside talked of that and nought else? For it is not every day that a great lord dies and robbers seize upon his Castle and imprison his sad widow. So, very surely, this Gib Elliott would hear of this thing or ever his messenger could come to Castle Lovell and back again. And then, very surely, he would send another messenger to some friend of the Young Lovell, to see if he might not get a ransom of them, since his enemies held his Castle. Consider how that would be with a cunning robber. Full surely he would have sent a messenger to yourself, ah, fair and gentle lady, to have money of you, if of none others?"
"Sir," the Lady Margaret interrupted him hotly and with a sort of passion--"I am very certain that that lord is dead. For three times Saint Katharine, whom I love above other saints, appeared to me in a gown of gold and damask and leaning upon her wheel. She looked upon me sorrowfully, as who should say my true love--for whom I had besought that saint many times--was dead to me."
The Cornish knight raised his hand.
"God forbid," he said, "that I should say anything against that sweet madam Katharine. Yet there are true dreams and false dreams and dreams wrongly interpreted. And of this I am instantly assured, that this Lord Lovell is held prisoner by no border raiders. It is not to be thought upon."
The Lady Margaret spoke to him contemptuously and almost with hatred, so her breast heaved as she bade him say then where he considered that that lord should have been or should even then be hiding. The Cornish knight answered slowly:
"Ah, gentle lady, what to believe I do not so well know. But this I know that I would rather believe in tales of sorcery in this matter than in that idea of border robbers. For these are strange times of newnesses coming both from the East and the West. From the East is come new learning which is for ordinary men, a thing very evil at all times, leading to sorceries and civil strife and change. And from the West is talk of a New World possessed with demons and pagans and dusky fiends as is now on the lips of all men. And I hold it for certain that, if anything evil and inexplicable shall occur in this land from now on it shall come from that East or that West. The path to the West having been found, shall it not lead those demons and dusky fiends in upon us? And, all the contents of Byzantium having been set flying in upon us, shall we go unharmed?"
"This is very arrant folly," the old Princess said; "what shall a parcel of soft Greeks or Indian savages do to this island in the water?"
"Madam and gentle Princess," the Cornish knight answered, "I speak only the misgivings of wealthy and sufficient men of London Town. It may be a folly here. But this I hold for strange: this lording was the one of all the North parts to have most of new-fangled lore, as I have heard: he has read in many books of which I know not so much as the name; such as _Ysidores Ethimologicarum_ or _Summa Reymundi_--or maybe I have the names wrong. And he has travelled to Venice where many evil, eldritch and strange things are ready for the learning.... And now I will ask you this: ah, gentle mistress ... Have you of late had news of a monstrous fair lady that several people have seen to ride about these parts, attended, or not attended at all ... upon a white horse?"
"Such a one I saw yesterday," the Lady Margaret said, "and so fair and kind a lady it made me glad to see her."
Then Sir Bertram crossed himself.
"And have you," he asked, "heard where she dwells or who she is?"
"I never heard," she said; "I thought she was the King's mistress of Scotland, for a lesser she could not be."
"I have heard of her this many months," Sir Bertram said, "for, for this many months, I have been set by the King to gather information about these North parts. And now from one correspondent, now from another; now by word of mouth, now here, now in Northumberland, I have heard tell of this White Lady. And this again I will tell you.... An hour agone, as I looked out of this window, I saw a knight, with a monk and a small company of spears go over Framwell Gate Bridge. The sun was upon their armour. And, as they rode over it, I perceived upon the banks before me a wondrous fair figure of a woman in white garments, going among the thick of the trees as lightly as if it had been a flower garden. And, as she went, she held her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun so as to gaze upon that knight. And I think that was that strange lady. And, if you ask me what she is, I think she is a vampire, a courtesan or a demon from the East. And if you ask me where your lord is, I will say I think she has him captive amongst weary sedges and the bones of other knights, if they have been dead long enough to become bones. And there he sits enthralled by her and she preys upon his heart's blood...."
The Lady Margaret stood up with her hand to her throat. Her face was blanched like faded apple blossom.
"Good sir," she said, "I think ye lie. For that lady had the kindest face that ever I saw."
"Yet such fair faces," Sir Bertram said, "are, as is known to all men, best fed by the heart's blood of true knights."
"Before God," the old Princess cried at him, "I have heard such tales of my bondsmen's wives...."
"Or, if you will have it a little otherwise," Sir Bertram said to the Lady Margaret, "let it be thus. This monstrous fair and magic lady saw this Sir Paris in a grove or amid the smoke of war or where you will in Venice or near it. And so she fell enamoured of him. Such things happen. And so, coming in a magic boat, in the morning before cockcrow she finds him--having waited many years for this chance--by the sea-shore where you say that chapel was. And so she beguiles him to step aboard and miraculously they are transported to the very isles of Greece. And there, poor man, he sitteth in the sun, lamenting beneath a vine as they say there are in Greece, and to beguile him she dances before him...."
The Lady Margaret held out her white hand to silence the words upon his lips. And so they heard a voice speak to the porter below and a heavy tread upon the stairfoot.
"Sir," the Lady Margaret said to the Cornish knight, "I think you do lie. For I hear my true love's voice and his foot upon the stair."
At that heavy beating of an iron foot on the stone steps a sort of fear descended upon both Sir Bertram and the Lady Margaret; but the old Princess said jestingly:
"Now I shall see the eighth wonder of the world."
VI
John Sherwood, Bishop Palatine of Durham, was seated in a deep chair, in the vestiary of his dwelling in Durham Castle. He had just come in there from the cathedral, and he was very weary with having sung a solemn mass for the soul of Sir Leofric Bertram, one that had, in times past, been a great benefactor of that see. This mass was sung every year upon the second day of July and, along with the oration, it lasted a full two hours. He had had a little fever too, and was weak with the monthly bloodletting which had been done the day before; for the Prince Bishop and his household were bled upon the first day of each month. Moreover, he was fasting till then, and it was close on the stroke of eleven.
So, although a good dinner awaited him, of five courses, each of fifteen dishes, he had felt so tired that there, in his own vestiary--for he did not wear the vestments of the cathedral or the monastery, but, in all his canonicals, walked across the green from the cathedral down to the castle with the people all kneeling and candles and a great cross and his crozier carried before him--he had fallen down into the deep chair in his mass garments. It made it the worse that his vestiary was up two flights of stairs in the castle that was old and not well arranged.
This vestiary was a large hall, but so tall that it seemed narrow and, in spite of two deep window spaces, its sombre vaulting of stone went up into darkness. The Bishops of Durham had always very many and very splendid vestments of their own, not belonging to the cathedral, and so on three sides of the room and from twelve feet high or more there were chests of oaken wood to hold vestments, with round cupboards in which copes could be laid out. In the two angles of the wall between the windows were all manner of great pegs and wooden bases upon which armour was hung or displayed. Upon three of these pegs were three helmets, the gauntlets hanging beneath them. Below each were the breastplates, the thigh pieces and so on. The great swords, with their crossed hilts, and scabbards covered in yellow velvet, were in stands along the bottom of the wall, like a fence. Above them were the more splendid and bejewelled plumed hoods for his falcons, their jesses, and leashes for his hounds; and tall steel maces made, as it were, panels between them. Spears or lances this Bishop had none, his arm being the heavy mace. He had four suits of armour, a black one, English, and kept well greased, for rainy weather or dangerous times; a French one of bright and fluted steel that he wore on Spring days; and one Milanese, very light and so beautiful in its lines that it pleased him to see it--a steel helmet that seemed to float like a coif, without a visor at all, and steel chain-mail as light as silk yet impenetrable even to the steel quarrels of arbalests.
These three suits were arranged upon the wall. The suit of state, of black steel inlaid thickly with gold, stood upon a stand, like a threatening man, between the two windows and catching the light from each. This piece came from Nuremberg, where it had been worked for the Prince Bishop of Muenster, but he dying, the Bishop had bought it of the heirs. Upon the helmet was a prince's circlet of gold and all the breastplate, the thigh and kneepieces were hammered and graved and inlaid in gold with scenes from the life of Our Lady. Her Coronation in Heaven was shown upon the visor. This fine piece the Bishop wore only upon occasions of great state, such as if he should make a progress through the Palatinate with the King upon his right hand out of courtesy, since, of right, his left alone belonged to the King and the right to the Pope of Rome alone. This Bishop Palatine thought himself a delicate rather than a splendid prince; he had, before being Bishop, spent many years in Rome, as the King of England's friend and advocate; so he thought that better could be done by a display of simplicity and elegance, for a sovereign Bishop, than by great profusion of coarse things. Thus, such Bishops as Anthony Bek, that was Patriarch of Jerusalem as well, had had forty suits of mail to his own body alone.
So there, now, Bishop Sherwood sat, leaning back in his chair and crushing up his cope which was a grief to his vestiarius, an old and orderly man. For this was a very splendid cope of black velvet from Genoa; it was worked with broad silver in pomegranates, the sacred initials being of seed pearls over silver, and the vestiarius did not like to see it crushed. The crozier leant against an oaken case in the corner; and a great cross was against the heavy table where the Bishop sat. The Bishop had sent away his pages and attendants, saying that his head ached so that he could not bear the opening and closing of cases where these things should be placed. He had sent for some wine, a manchet of bread and a little salt to refresh himself with and these, in vessels of silver, stood before him. He had made shift to pull the rich glove off his right hand, and so he had taken a sip of wine and was dipping the bread in the salt. He felt himself a little refreshed. Before him, upon the table, stood two mitres, and his glove lay between the silver dish of bread and the wine cup.
Then the vestiarius, who stood in the doorway, perceived that Bishop, all black and silver, lean forward in his chair, gazing out of the window with his jaw falling down. The sunlight was streaming in. The vestiarius considered with disfavour--for he was a sour old priest--that the Bishop was undoubtedly ill, and God knew when he should get those vestments put away, which should be done before the stroke of noon. So the Bishop passed his hand across his eyes, after he had made the sign of the cross repeatedly.
"Gilbert," the Bishop said, "my eyes are very tired."
"It would be better, then," the vestiarius said, "not to look out at that window upon the sunlight. You have tired them with looking upon the picture of the new missal while you said mass."
"That may well be," the Bishop said. He was a little afeared of the anger of his vestiarius, who had been with him twenty years, and would not let him do as he would. So he continued for a little looking at the napkin they had laid beneath his refection. It was worked in white damask with the letter M, being the initial of Our Lady's name.
After a while, being anxious to lessen his weakness in the eyes of his servant, the Bishop raised his eyes to the two mitres that stood before him. Both were of white silk stuff, very curiously and beautifully sown, but one was high and the other more squat. The Bishop was about to speak of these, to placate the old sour man--for it was in such things that he took most interest. It was very quiet in that room.
There came a knocking, like a fumbling at the door. So the vestiarius went to it, and, opening it by a crack, whispered out by that way. And then he turned and said sourly:
"Here is a monk. A monk of Belford called Francis. He says he has your word that he may come to you at all times and seasons." The Bishop made a sign with the hand, that hung over the arm of his chair, that that monk should come in. And indeed the Bishop had given orders that the monk Francis should come in to him at all times.
For those, as the Bishop saw them, were evil days and full of sudden perils that must very suddenly be reported to him. And, as far as peril from the North went--and mostly from Alnwick way--he knew no man, monk or laymen, that could more swiftly warn him. Besides, the Bishop heard his conversation with pleasure and counted him a very holy young monk, so that he would gladly have had him for his confessor.
He accounted him the best adviser that a Bishop could have in that see. For of the religious that he had round him there, the lay priests were too ignorant, with a rustic simplicity; the monks of Durham were too haughty; those of Belford too learned; those of Alnwick too set upon the glory of their abbey. The ecclesiastical lawyers quibbled too much over parcels of land; the knights were too formal and concerned for the state of the see. But this monk Francis loved God and considered the world.
The Bishop had been reflecting in that way for some time whilst the monk, entering in his woollen robes had knelt beside his chair. Then the Bishop stretched his hand languidly out and the monk set his lips to the ring upon it. So the Bishop pointed a finger to the taller of the two mitres.
"This is my new one," he said, "it has just come to me from Flanders, while I was at mass."
The monk Francis looked upon the new mitre.
"I have never seen finer stitching in silver," he said. The vestiarius said harshly:
"I consider the old one more fitting. For a Prince of the Church Militant it is more fitting. It sits more squatly upon the head, like a helmet."
The monk Francis looked upon him, and seeing that the Bishop did not wish to speak, he said:
"That is true! But then this new one, with its greater height is more graceful and seemly. Moreover there is room upon it for another panel over the forehead. The old one, you perceive, has only a picture of the crucifixion of our Lord worked in pearls and silk. Whereas the new one has below it a picture of Our Lady at the Tomb. It is always good to have a picture of Our Lady."
This was a thing that the vestiarius could not gainsay. So he brought out:
"Well, if the Bishop and monks are content with it, it may work to the greater glory of God;" and then he said: "Prince Bishop, I would have you go to another room that I may put away your vestments."
The Bishop stood up upon his feet and the vestiarius went down upon his knees. So the Bishop blessed him and put his hand heavily into the arm of the monk Francis.
"You shall lead me to my chamber," he said.
"God help us," the vestiarius cried, "shall I not first take off your vestments?"
"I had forgotten," the Bishop said. So he stood by the table whilst that old man took off the great cope, the silver cross and the white robes and stole that were beneath and fetched a purple gown edged with fur--for he considered that Bishop to be cold and weak with the blood that had been let from him the day before as the custom was. Upon the Bishop's head he set a furred cap, covering his ears, and hung round his neck once more the silver chain with the great crucifix in silver dependent. And so the Bishop, when he had drunk a little more wine, went up the stairs slowly to his chamber, and the vestiarius called in several pages and young boys and saw to it that they laid those vestments away in due order.
The Bishop's chamber had been taken out of a Norman gallery with pillars and arcades. Here many men-at-arms in parti-coloured woollen garments of natural wool and yellow, sat about on the floor or between the arcades, playing at dice together or drinking from flagons. Their immensely long pikes stood against the arches beside them. One, with his eyes shut, leaned back against the wall, saying prayers in penance for a crime he had committed.
The Bishop, upon the monk's arm passed slowly down this corridor to his chamber which had bare walls painted yellow in honour of St. Cuthbert; a great quantity of books, very big or very little, were upon shelves. A great many manuscripts in rolls lay upon other shelves, and papers that overflowed from chests, of which there were five, along one wall. There was a pallet bed in this room; a three-cornered stool and a coarsely hewed lectern; a prie-dieu and a crucifix. Thus it was a very bare room. This Bishop, though he affected somewhat great state before the people, was, in secret, a very ascetic man.
Few people, however, came into this bare room--not even his highest officers. The square windows--but that had been done in Bishop Skirlawe's days just a hundred years ago--were filled with bright glass, showing once again the history of the translation of St. Cuthbert. All in little squares this history was, monks with shaven heads crouching down as if the space would not contain them, and the head of Dun Cow showing yellow against a background of glass shining like pigeon's blood rubies. One of these little, square casements hung open and through it the distant landscape showed clear, with hills grey and woods grey-blue, astonishing for its tranquillity.
So, the monk Francis being sat up on his three-legged stool, the Bishop began to pace up and down before the long window space--backwards and forwards over the tiles, with an immense swiftness. Once he turned his face imperiously to where the monk sat and said harshly:
"Pray God, you bring me no ill news."
The monk, who had been gazing, out of respect, at the tiles, raised his glance to say:
"I think it is rather good news."
The Bishop said:
"I thank God!" and touched his fur cap. Once again he resumed his pacing, biting his lips and clenching and unclenching his fingers.
Suddenly, in the stillness there resounded a rustle of wings, and, balancing unsteadily upon the iron frame of the open window, there appeared a blue pigeon that craned its head to one side or the other, watching the Bishop. From outside there came a still greater rustle of wings.
Then the monk's face grew colourless.
"Father in God," he said in a low voice, "what is that fowl?"
The Bishop turned his lean head round over his shoulder, when he saw the pigeon that gazed anxiously at him, he smiled a kindly and soft smile.
"That is my weakness, Brother Francis," he said. With his brushing step he crossed the smooth tiles towards one of the chests that was filled with parchments. As he lifted the lid that pigeon flew from the window on to his shoulder. And immediately another pigeon took its place in the opening. "Brother Francis," he continued, "you are a stern man, yet be indulgent to my weakness. It was your namesake that was called 'of the Birds.' And in Scripture you may read the exhortation: 'Be ye guileless as doves and with the wisdom of the serpent.'" So he lifted that chest-lid and took from it a little linen bag of pease.
Then the face of the monk became radiant.
"Father in God," he said, "I thank heaven for this. For those very words I used twenty hours ago and now you use them again."
"Why," the Bishop said, "what harm ever came from these pretty fowls of heaven?" The pigeon on his shoulder stretched its neck out to reach his mouth with its bill. Urgently and insistently it did this. And others were entering the window space. Then, before the flutter of their wings should drown his voice, the Bishop said that these birds reminded him that his dinner hour was come. And he begged the monk Francis to tell a page that he should find amongst the men-at-arms in the gallery that the Lord Bishop would have his guests sit down to dinner and eat with a good appetite; whereas he himself was a little indisposed and would have his own cook send up to him four eggs with a little saffron and some of the drink called clary, such as the cook knew he wished for when he was ill. So, the monk Francis went out and, after some time, found that page, who was playing knucklebones with another in the stairway. And when the monk had cuffed him well he sent him upon his errand, and so went back to the room. The Bishop was smiling down at from twenty to thirty pigeons. They were around his feet, upon his bed where he had sat down, upon his knees and, precariously they found footholds, fluttering their wings upon his moving arms.
So there he sat, looking upon those fowls of the air and smiling. And in a little time that page brought him the four eggs, the saffron and the beverage called clary. And so the Bishop ate his meal, sprinkling the saffron upon the eggs. He scattered fragments of the hard yolk amongst the pigeons. And when he was done and had drunk his drink he shook the crumbs off his gown and came over towards the monk Francis, all the pigeons scattering before his feet.
The Bishop was a man much taller than the monk and much thinner in the features. That is to say that, of late years, he had grown thin with his cares, but his purple and furred gown gave him a certain bulk. So he looked down upon the monk and said:
"My brother in God, you have perceived my weakness, for each day I spend certain minutes upon these birds and gain comfort from the contemplation of their beauty and guilelessness. And I think they are the only friends I have, so lonely is my state in these great and peopled halls. Time was, no doubt, when a Prince Bishop was beloved, dwelling amongst people of a simple piety. And in such a day I could have done well. But, as I have often told you, my brother, in this place I cannot see my way. I am troubled with many doubts. If these were again the days of St. Thomas of Canterbury, I could at least extend my neck to the butcher's sword. I think I should have had that courage.... But this then is my road and in which God has set me. And very willingly I totter along it. Only, from time to time, my brain reels; I seem to see nothing, amongst great defiles, with rocks that roll down upon me. And this my see appears like a little church set between towering precipices.... And so I rest my brain by playing with these birds."
"So," the monk Francis said, "St. Gerome had a lion, that lightened his labours and the solitude of his cell, and so many other saints had."
"But I am no saint," the Bishop said, "and have no licences so to disport myself as they had.... But even so it is! God give me guidance. For it is certain that the King that we have hates me a little and in some sort fears me. And he is a strong, persevering and cunning prince. And I do take him to be an evil prince that murdered a very good King, my friend and the friend of this see. And if I had courage and could see clearly, I should raise up the standard of this my see and call to me the barons and the knights and so, in a crusade, march to the dethroning of this King. But, as you know, I am not framed for such a part. I am no commander, neither has God given me the golden gift of oratory to inflame men's hearts to a holy war. Nor yet, in this age, is the spirit of piety abroad among the people, and I know not who are my friends.... So here I sit in doubt and perplexity. And now there is come, even to this my city, a man calling himself commissioner of this upstart King. For such a man thundered upon the city gates last night. And very willingly I could have refused him entrance, but in my trouble and perplexity I did not dare. What say you then, brother Francis, to all these things, for I will hear you very willingly?"
The monk kept his eyes for some time longer upon the floor and at last he spoke:
"My lord and prince," he said, "pardon me beforehand if in what I shall tell you now I have done aught amiss. But this I will tell you at once: this commissioner of King Henry's is a subtle spy. Therefore, taking upon my own person the shame, if shame there be, I have set myself to counterspy him. For it fell out in this way: in certain secret manners--not under seal of confession--I have known for some time past that this Sir Bertram of Lyonesse, was gathering news of the North parts. There are certain contractors for the building of our Tower in Belford, and one of them is called Richard Chambre, a burgess of Newcastle. And because I have lent him now and then a little money and much good advice, this contractor is my good friend and child. So one day, last September, this Richard Chambre told me, whilst devising of other things, that there was one, John of Whitley, a burgess of Newcastle, that went gathering news for a knight of the King's court called Sir Bertram, of Lyonesse. He was writing him letters and the like, and this John of Whitley had come to Richard Chambre, and had asked him for news of our monastery of Belford, and of how we monks were affected towards the new King.... And so, gathering here a piece of news and there another, I gathered that this Sir Bertram had agents here and there--one a monk in Alnwick called Ludovicus and another, a bailiff of our own, called the Magister Stone at Castle Lovell. But that Magister is much in Durham...."
"God help me," the Bishop said, "I have seen him often upon the affairs of the Knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle...."
"Well, he is an agent of that Sir Bertram's," the monk said. "Now let me go on further with my story."
"But this is very terrible hearing," the Bishop said. "All this spying and treachery is a new thing. It is even as it is in Italy."
"This is a new age, Father in God," the monk said, "and you will find this King to employ as many spies as any Duke Borgia or of Ferrara. And so it will go from bad to worse. Therefore let us be prepared.... So this matter is: I came this morning, riding with a certain knight and lord, to Framwell Gate Bridge, just as they opened it. And because I would speak certain private words with that lord I had ridden with him a mile ahead of his spears. So we waited at the bridge for them to come up. Then I fell a-talking with the captain of the bridge as to the news and so I heard, as ye know, that this same Sir Bertram, calling himself commissioner of the King had come in last night with the old Princess of Croy and her train--but his own train had been sent to lodge in Old Elvet. So I learned where he was, for every woman in the street could tell me.
"I went swiftly afoot to the house of the Princess of Croy, and the door stood open with the old steward before it, chaffering with a fisherman. So, frowning fiercely upon that steward, I crept up that stairway, my sandals making no sound, and going higher than the door, I stood upon the stairs and had a fair view of this Sir Bertram and heard much of what he said.... I would have come to you the sooner, Father in God, but this was a very pertinent matter and I heard you were saying of mass."
Then the monk Francis reported to the Prince Bishop much of what that Sir Bertram had said, but keeping back some of it for the time. The Bishop stood before him, clasping and unclasping his hands; the pigeons, having dispersed about the tiles in the search of pease that had rolled away, flew now, by ones and twos, out of the little window again.
In the view of the monk Francis the coming of this Sir Bertram meant, as he under-read that knight's words, an immediate calm in those parts, but afterwards, in three years or four, a much greater danger. For, as the monk saw it, it was the design of that King Henry Seventh to show himself to the great lords of the North, a very kind, indulgent and lenient ruler. So he should gather them under his wing to be a potent engine against that see of Durham, that powerful kingdom within his kingdom. Thus, for the time being, the monk perceived no danger for that see. He thought--and time would very likely prove him right--that that Sir Bertram would begin, to the Bishop as to the great lords, with kind and soothing words, or even with presents. So, peace being there established and the memory of King Richard forgotten, the King would begin to move the lords of the North against that bishopric. And, doubtless, the further extent of his design--the bishopric being weakened by the meeting of the lords--would be to lop off the great lords, one by one, advisedly and with caution until the King had the upper hand of all in those parts....
"This is a very fell scheme, my brother," the Bishop said. "I had rather the King would march upon me with his flags on high."
"So would all the King's enemies," the monk Francis said, "for that would bring him down. He is not strong enough for that." He paused for a moment: "If my lord and prince will let me speak my mind..." he began again.
"You are here for that," the Bishop said. "What I need is counsel."
"Then I will say this," the monk Francis began again: "To a mine you set a countermine and so may we. This subtle King will by acts of graciousness win the North parts to him. My lord and prince under God, you may do this very much more easily than he. For, by the grace of God, in these days you are a very wealthy Prince but he for a King is very poor, he having great expenses for wars in France and elsewhere where rebellions break out. And acts of graciousness, in this world, end either in gifts of money or the remission of fines, rents and amercements. These this King cannot come to do, or he will starve. But all these things you can do very easily. If he can spare the nobles a little he will do it, but he must then press the more heavily upon the commons and so great cries against him will rise up in these parts.... But you, lord and prince, can be gracious to all. And so I would have you show yourself. Thus, at the end of three or four years this King may find himself only the poorer for his efforts."
"I hope you may be right," the Bishop said.
"Time will show it," the monk answered, "and the grace of God. Now I will talk to you of the Young Lovell.... He is come here again."
"God help me," the Bishop said, "I have been talking of him all this morning."
The monk Francis said:
"Ah, that is what I had thought. And it was with that bailiff--the lawyer, Master Stone."
"It was even with him," the Bishop said. "He seemed a worthy and a pious man and full of zeal for this see of Durham."
"Well, you shall hear," the monk said. "I will wager he came with this advice--that you should lay hands upon the estates of the Young Lovell under a writ of sorcery, and so divide them between yourself and the Knights of Haltwhistle and Cullerford. Thus you should be beforehand with the Earl of Northumberland who would do as much for the King's disgrace in these parts."
"It was even that that he reded me do," the Bishop said. "He urged the see should gain much good land thereby."
"And lose much worship," the monk said. "It is that that Sir Bertram wishes."
"I can see as much as that," the Bishop answered. "And this Master Stone--who is an ill-looking man--never told me that the Young Lovell, as you say, was come again, but said that he was dead and that Cullerford and Haltwhistle, being by marriage his heirs, would very willingly divide with me. He was insistent with me to issue that writ this afternoon."
"Well, it was a clever, foul scheme," the monk Francis said. "For well that bailiff knew the Young Lovell had been seen riding into Castle Lovell! Hard he has ridden here--if a lawyer can ride hard--to get that writ against the Young Lovell or ever we could come to you. So with that he would have earned great disgrace for you and this see. But what I would have you do is to confirm, as far as the see goes, that Young Lovell in his inheritance. So it will rest with the King, the Earl of Northumberland, and this Sir Bertram to dispossess him. And thus shall their names stink in the nostrils of all this country-side. For that young man is very beloved, by gentle and simple, having fought well against the false Scots at Kenchie's Burn, as these eyes did see."
The monk spoke long and earnestly in that sense; and indeed he had the right of it. There would have been none in that country that would not have cried shame on the Church for her greed, if the Bishop had divided these lands with foul knights like Sir Walter Limousin and Symonde Vesey and Vesey the outlaw and the Decies. But if the Bishop would confirm Sir Paris Lovell in the lands over which the see had rights and overlordships, great discredit would fall upon the Percy for having, in a Warden's Court, essayed to ruin the Young Lovell on a false charge.
And after the monk Francis had talked in that way for some time, the Bishop was convinced of--nay he shuddered at--the trap into which he had nearly fallen. But, he said, the lawyer Stone had so bewildered him with one legal point and another--such as how the Decies, being knighted and plighted by the Prince Bishop himself in the name of the Young Lovell, had all the rights forfeited by that lording. He would very willingly resign a portion of his rights by way of fine; it was, moreover, in the protocol of the Bishops of Durham that no Bishop could refuse such a gift freely made, to the disadvantage of the see. And the lawyer said, from his knowledge of canon law, that, the Bishop having made the Decies into Young Lovell and a knight of the Church and the betrothed of the Lady Margaret of Glororem, nothing could undo all those things but a bull or dispensation of the Pope.
"Well," the monk Francis said, "I have considered that point and have read in such books as our poor monastery hath, both upon the canon and the civil law--such as the book of decrees of which the first leaf begins '_Jejunandi_' and the penultimate leaf ends '_digestus erif_,' or the book of decretals which begins '_Nullain res est_' and ends: '_in causa negligenciae_.' Also I have spoken with the most learned of our brethren upon this case and with your sergeants of law and your justices and all with one accord agree that a long law case might be made out of it. That Decies hath his grounds of appeal, at least upon the matter of knighthood and betrothal. For it is very uncertain if you could unknight him or break his betrothal with the Lady Margaret of Glororem without an appeal to our Father in Rome.
"As to the matter of the other rights conveyed by that name, that is much simpler. For the Young Lovell has only to make appeal to you through a person of the Church as his best friend. Then you shall give him licence, under the decretal '_in causa negligenciae_' and he may at once enter upon his lands by force or how he may...."
"What then should the man called Decies do?" the Bishop asked. "I am not very learned in these laws; but that lawyer Stone said he may do great things."
"For that," the monk Francis said, "he might. But, if I can have a say with that Decies, he shall hang from a very high tree. Or, if the Young Lovell is too tender of his half-brother, for that the Decies is, the Decies shall at my complaint to your officers and, after a fair trial, be broken upon the wheel. For before a court non-ecclesiastical he hath brought false witness against a vassal of your see upon an ecclesiastical charge, to wit sorcery. There is no escape for him."
The Bishop was, by that, hot to do grace to the Young Lovell. And, after he had made the monk Francis recite over again all that he had said, he agreed very heartily to do all that that monk asked of him. For that was a position that jumped very well with Bishop Sherwood's character, and one that made all things the plainer to him. Being a churchman, subtle rather than vigorous, he desired above all things the good and glory of his see. He desired that, so much above his own glory and good, that in later years he left his see and went into exile rather than that the bishopric should suffer from the King's hatred of his person. But he could see very well that the bishopric of Durham would lose rather than gain by taking the lands of a young lord, well loved and deserving well of those parts. The Church, as he was aware, was called, in those days, avaricious, gluttonous and avid of lands and rent. But here, by a shining instance, he might show that the see-palatine of Durham held its hand and so that see should gain in credit and renown at the expense even of all other bishoprics in the realm and of the realm itself. And here was a course of action that this Bishop could very well understand and set going. Besides, of his own predilection, he had a hearty inclination towards such high and chivalric natures as was the Young Lovell's. He saw in him a shining and armoured protector against the foes of his see. Seeing things very much in symbols and pictures, this Bishop seemed to see that young lord, in silver harness, shining in the sun and raising his sword against the mists, fumes and flames that beset this fair city of Durham.
Therefore he said hastily to the monk Francis that if that monk would take a sheet of parchment and write the various matters of canon law and the rest, he, the Bishop, would commit them to memory, and, that evening he would call before him the lawyer Stone, the Young Lovell and, if it seemed advisable, the King's commissioner and announce to them what his rede was in all these matters.
So he gave the monk a great sheet of parchment from a chest and the monk turned round to the pulpit and began to write. The Bishop walked up and down behind his back, rubbing his hands delicately together with pleasure at that their scheme and at the discomfiture of the King's commissioner that must ensue therefrom.
Now let us turn for a moment to what passed in the house of the Princess Rohtraut of Croy, Lady mother of Dacre, during this time, whilst the monk wrote.
VII
At that heavy beating of iron upon the stair the Lady Margaret and Sir Bertram of Lyonesse looked into each other's eyes, crossing glances of apprehension in the one case and of terror in the other. For the Lady Margaret was divided between joy and love and the sad and sorrowful gaze that three times the Bride of Christ had cast upon her in her dreams. Sir Bertram, for his part, was filled with dread of sorceries, fearing for his soul. For, if in matters of statecraft and the affairs of this world he was a very cool man, yet--as is often the case with those who are half men of law, half men of state, new and rising men not very scrupulous of means but solidly set upon matters of their day--this Sir Bertram quailed like a dog before thoughts of death, sorcery, the omens of superstition and hell fire. So he crossed himself again and again. For, though much of his talk with those ladies had been wary and cautious, he had very sincerely believed when he said that this Paris Lovell had been carried off by a white witch or a magic courtesan. Such things he believed in as he believed in treachery, guile, want of faith in men and the deceit that lies in women, coming from Adam's snake-wife, called Lilith.
Only the old Princess leaned forward in her throne-chair, watching the dark stone doorway with pleasant eyes, for she believed neither in the sorceries nor the prowess of her grandson, but made sure of finding him an arrant fool.
So a figure in very shining steel stood in that little painted arch. At sight of it, at the very first, the Lady Margaret cried out. For she knew very well every detail of the silken dresses and accoutrements of her lord and love. And there he stood in his armour of state, fluted, with long steel shoes and a round helmet without a plume, like the head of a bull-dog. This suit of armour she had last seen upon the Decies, and it seemed to her like a sort of sorcery that he should wear it there. For she never thought it was the Decies that stood before her; she had known too well the young lord's voice upon the stairs.
How he had come by that suit was no sorcery but a very simple matter.
At Castle Lovell, since they could by no means come at the late lord's gold in the White Tower, they were much in need of money; for they could gather no rents and no fines and no tolls. The people would not pay them. Therefore, in those months past, without remorse they had sold all such furnishings of the Castle as they could find buyers for. For the jewels of the Lady Rohtraut they could not do it very easily, since the goldsmiths of Newcastle set their heads together and would have none of them, fearing the reprisals of the Dacres and suits at law and the like. But certain hangings and furniture they sold for a good price to a German of Sunderland, who shipped them beyond the seas. And certain arms that they had, more than they had men for, they sold for what little these would fetch to certain armourers of the town of Morpeth. Amongst these had been this suit of state. For this suit was too small for the Decies; it had galled him very uncomfortably beneath the arm-pits and between the thighs, when he had played the part of his half-brother, and he had been heartily glad to be out of it. It had been too large for the Knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle, so that they rattled inside it like walnuts in their shells in June. As for Henry Vesey of Wall Houses, the evil knight, he said he would be hanged if he wore the Young Lovell's armour, for it would bring him ill-luck. So they sold it for forty shillings to a Morpeth armourer called Simon Armstrong, who thought he had a bargain. But he found that neither knight nor esquire of that countryside would take it of him, for the reasons given by Henry Vesey. So there it was in his store.
Now two days before, very early in the morning, the monk Francis, Young Lovell and ten men-at-arms, well found, had set out from the monastery of Belford, the monk upon a trotting mule, the Young Lovell, in light armour, upon Hamewarts, and the men-at-arms upon little galloways, small horses such as the Scots use when they came raiding over the borders. But at the monastery gate they found nine men of the old Lovell men-at-arms waiting to come into Young Lovell's service. There was no room for them to be harboured in the monastery, so they must come along with the Young Lovell. And, ever as he rode along--and he went slowly for that purpose--came men-at-arms and bowmen hastening out of the hay-fields, where they had taken service, to come under the banner of the Young Lovell, until he had forty men and more. And at a cross in the hill-paths, ten miles below Belford, there were awaiting them Cressingham and La Rougerie, esquires that had been in service at Castle Lovell. They were well armed, upon little Scots horses, and came out of the hills where there was a deserted tower. They had with them seventeen men, and four women that had served in Castle Lovell, and all were well fed and found, so what they had done in the meantime it was better not to inquire, though they swore that all they had came from the Scots' side of the border. The Young Lovell was well heartened by the sight of all these men, and they rode onward, to the number of sixty-five men and two esquires; twenty-two men having no horses and holding by the stirrups of them that had.
They made a circuit round Alnwick, for the monk Francis doubted the friendship of the Earl of Northumberland. So they went from the high ground by Hagdon to Eglingham and so, holding always to the hills and moors, above Broom Park and Overthwarts and across the North Forest, going south and to the east of Rothbury. There they deemed themselves safe of the Percy, and they could take to the lower grounds and such roads as there were. There being a good road from Eshot Hill to Morpeth, they made for that, and hit upon it towards two in the afternoon, having come nearly forty miles since four of that morning because of the roundabout path they had followed.
There, because they were near his mother's lands, it came into the Young Lovell's head, and seemed good to him to visit these places and take possession of them in her name. Therefore they made what haste they could and so came to the Castle at Cramlin by six of the evening. This Castle of his wife's the late Lord Lovell had very much neglected, having stripped it of all its furnishings and even of much of the lead upon the roofs. And, where there were slates or stone roofing, the rains and snows had penetrated to the upper floors. Nevertheless the lower rooms were sound enough. So the Young Lovell said that that night he would sleep there. Mattresses and bedding were brought from the bondsmen of that place for the Young Lovell, the monk and the two esquires; the men slept very well upon straw in the stables. Also the Young Lovell sent the esquire Cressingham with the men to his mother's house at Killingworth, and the esquire La Rougerie with the men to her other house at Plessey, which stood in a pleasant place. So then the monk Francis went to his prayers and the Young Lovell round the battlements of that smallish Castle. He noted carefully what stones were sound and which tottered, and so he came to the conclusion that, with a little mason's work well expended, his men might hold it very well for a space.
Then came back those two esquires, having left five men each in the houses at Plessey and Killingworth. The houses they reported to be in as sad a plight as that Castle, or worse, so that it seemed that they must fall into utter ruin. At a bondsman's house the esquire Cressingham had come upon a fellow calling himself the receiver for the Knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle. This man the esquire had brought with him and he proved of much use. For, in the first place, he had taken some money which he had about him and, in the second, he had a great book of accounts which showed what was due to the Lady Rohtraut from each holding. So they kept that fellow in a stable, taking from him the money and the book. Both these esquires said that all the men of these villages and hamlets welcomed the coming of their lord and were ready to do him suit and service. In those parts the Lady Rohtraut had nine thousand acres of serviceable land and twenty of heathery and indifferent. So they slept very well that night.
On the morrow they had much to do. Thus the monk went with the esquire Cressingham and men bravely armed from farm to farm, warning the men there that those were the lands of the Lord Lovell and his mother. They had that false bailiff well trussed upon a little horse to show them the way; but long before noon he had begged to be allowed to take up the service of the Lord Lovell, and so they were the quicker done and had no hindrances, all the peasants vowing to do their services very willingly.
One other thing was good, and that was that the esquire La Rougerie was the son of a Frenchman, very skilled in matters of fortifying and building in stone. This Frenchman the old Lord Lovell had brought from France to see to the building of the White Tower, which he wished to make a citadel, as it were, of Castle Lovell. And this esquire had learned much of his father; the Young Lovell could trust him very well. So the Young Lovell sent that La Rougerie into the countryside to find masons and stone workers, and he found some, though not many, for most men of that class worked in the fisheries in summertime, coming back to building only when the storms drove them off the seas. The Young Lovell was minded to have that Castle put first into a state to withstand an assault and later to have it roofed and rendered fair, with the lower part of one of the round towers turned into a wheat-pit and another made into a great pit of brine, in which they could cure whole carcases of oxen, swine and sheep, to the number of five hundred or more. So, when he had showed La Rougerie the weak places he had discovered the night before, he took thirty of his men for the greater safety and rode unto the town of Morpeth, Here he sent for the bailiff of that town to come to the market place and told him that his errand was very peaceable. For he desired to buy arms and bows for twenty of his men, with twenty-five pikes and two hundred barrels of arrows and several pack-horses, and a saker or two for the defence of Castle Cramlin and ten or more pack-horses to carry all these things. So the bailiff of that town answered him very civilly saying that he was glad of that lord's visit because he was akin to the Dacres and the Ogles and the Bertrams and other lords that had been friends to the good town of Morpeth. And he did what he could amongst the armourers and citizens that had arms to sell. So, in a short time, the Young Lovell had a good part of what he sought. This would not have been the case so easily but for the arms that those of Castle Lovell had sold to these very armourers. As it was, many of the Young Lovell's men got back arms that they had borne in that Castle before. Then came the armourer called Armstrong to the Young Lovell and begged him to be his good lord and pardon him. This the Young Lovell said he would do if his crime was not very great. So that armourer revealed to the Young Lovell that he had that lord's armour of state which he had bought for forty shillings, but no knight of that part would buy it of him. And he said that if the Lord Lovell was his very good lord he would pay him again that forty shillings, but, if not, he might take it and welcome. Then the Young Lovell was glad of that armourer, and said that if Armstrong would put new straps to all places where straps should go he would pay him fifty shillings for his honesty. So the armourer was very glad.
It was four of the afternoon before the Young Lovell came back to Cramlin Castle, having nearly all that he needed of harness, pikes, bows, pack-horses and the rest, but only one hundred and twenty barrels of arrows, three sakers and a little gunpowder, for the town of Morpeth could not supply more at that time. Still it was well enough, and there he found that La Rougerie had brought masons and carpenters enough to do his work roughly in a week's time, and afterwards to amend it fairly and in permanence. And, towards six, came back the monk Francis and the others with good news of the bondsmen's submission. They drove before them three young oxen and over thirty sheep and lambs, and these things were offerings from the various hamlets of the Lady Rohtraut, together with eleven hogsheads of beer and other things eatable that should come after. And these bondsmen promised that for six months they would supply all that should be needed for the support of such men as the Lord Lovell should see fit to leave in that Castle, the price being left in account between that lord and them, and the men-at-arms to be ready to defend them against raiders if any should come.
So the Young Lovell began to be of better spirits for, with all these preparations for warfare, he had thought less of the lady of the doves. And the monk Francis encouraged him in this, though once or twice he sighed. But when the Young Lovell asked him why this was, he said it was because of his cousin that he had slain. One thing that had given heart to the Young Lovell was this, that amongst the arms that had come from Castle Lovell unto the hands of the Morpeth armourers was a fair lance and rolled round it a small fine banner of silk with the arms of Lovell upon it. Now, the Lord Lovell, because of his estate in those parts, had the right to ride across the lands of the Bishop of Durham with his banner displayed, and he would have ridden to that city very unwillingly without it.
So, after taking counsel together, they decided that they would lie down and sleep at six and, rising at twelve, should ride to Durham so as to come there at the dawn. The Young Lovell would take with him twenty spears and the esquire Cressingham to bear the banner, who was a fine man of thirty with good armour of his own. And the twenty spears should be all fine men on the best horses that they had. So they should make a fair show when they rode into the city of Durham; and, the more to that end, the Young Lovell took with him his armour of state upon a pack horse, that he might put it on when he was a mile or so away from the bridge.
The remaining five and forty men with the esquire La Rougerie, who was a man to be trusted, should remain to hold Castle Cramlin for the Young Lovell and to aid in the buildings that should go forward there. In that way the Young Lovell rode out from a Castle of his own.
And, in that way too, he came before the Lady Margaret and his grandmother, the Princess Rohtraut, as well as Sir Bertram of Lyonesse, in his armour of state. He seemed to survey them for a space through the opening of his helmet. This he had kept closed in riding through the city for fear any friend of the Knights of Cullerford and Haltwhistle should by chance be in those streets and aim an arrow at him from a window or from behind a buttress. Then he pushed up the visor.
Stern he always looked when his face was framed in iron, but so stern as he looked that day the Lady Margaret considered that she had never seen him. He had broad, level eyebrows of brown, a pointed nose, firm lips and a determined chin. The Lady Margaret knew that he had a pleasant smile but he showed none of it then, and he paid no attention either to her or to the Cornish knight. His grandmother regarded him with a keen, hostile glance, and with his eyes set upon hers he advanced grimly towards her. His short dagger was girt around him, but he had no sword. So, in that shining harness, he knelt before that old lady on the second step. He lifted up his hands and said:
"Madam, Princess and my Granddam, to whom I owe great honour...."
"That is a good beginning, by Our Lady," the Princess said.
"I would not so soon have come to you," he continued in firm tones, "but that you sent me your commands."
"Well, this grows better and better," the old woman said.
"It is neither out of lack of duty, nor of due awe and natural affection, that I had not the sooner come," the Young Lovell said.
"That passes me!" the Princess cried out. "By Our Lady, I do not understand that speech."
The Young Lovell who towered on high when he stood, and was tall enough though he knelt, appeared like a great hound, attacked by this fierce little woman as by a savage lap-dog.
"Madam and gentle Princess," he said slowly, "I cannot easily say what I would say, for no man would say it easily."
"Then you are on a fool's errand," the Princess said, "for a wise man can say most things." She considered him for a moment and then said jeeringly: "If you had business in the town, stiff grandson of mine, say you had business: if you were gone after wenches, lie about it. But I care very little. I sent for you to have your news; so leave the complimenting and give me that."
"Madam and gentle Princess," he began again, though the old lady grunted and mumbled. "I did not come before because I sought assoilment."
"What is assoilment?" she asked.
He answered briefly:
"Pardon for sin, witting and unwitting."
"Well, get on," she said impatiently.
"Lacking that assoilment," he said, "I did not know if I were a fit knight to come into your presence."
"Why, I am an old horse," she said, "and not to be frightened by a dab of pitch. If you never showed yourself but after confession you might live in a cave, or so it was in my time."
"Then," said he, "know this. I came to my Castle and they shot upon me. So I have gathered together certain of my men and have taken my mother's Castle of Cramlin and hold it. So that is my news. And when I have the pardon of the Bishop and have paid forfeit, or what it is, I will get more of my men. For my standard is set up in Castle Cramlin and my men come to it from here and there. So in a fortnight or less I will retake my Castle; and I shall hang my brothers-in-law, send my half-brother across the sea, and put my sisters into nunneries. These are my projects."
"Body of God!" the old lady said. "By the Body of God!"
Then the Cornish knight moved round and stood beside the Princess and spoke to the Young Lovell.
"Ah, gentle lord," he said, "may I ask you a fair question?"
"By God's wounds," the Young Lovell said, "you shall ask me none. Who be you?"
"A poor knight," Sir Bertram answered, "but the commissioner of the most dread King Henry!"
"Then you are a friend of the false Percy," the Young Lovell said. "Get you gone. You are no friend to me."
And at that the old Princess cried out:
"Body of God! You have taken Castle Cramlin? Then without doubt you have taken Plessey House and Killingworth?"
"Madam and gentle Princess," the Young Lovell said, "I have taken and hold them for my mother. And so I will do for all my mother's lands whether round Morpeth or elsewhere."
"Then I have no more to say," the old Princess said. "Get you gone." The Young Lovell remained nevertheless kneeling for a space.
"Madam," he said, "it comes to me now that ye have a lawsuit with my mother for certain of those lands."
"Aye, and I will have them," she said. "It is not you nor any stiff popinjay shall hold them from me." She leaned out from her chair and cried these words into his face, her own being purple and her eyes bloodshot. So he crossed himself with his hand of bright steel.
"Madam," he said, "I cannot talk of lawsuits. They have done me too much wrong."
"But I will talk of lawsuits," she said. "By God, I will take a score of my fellows and drive your rats from my Castle of Cramlin!"
"Madam and gentle Princess," he answered, "you could not do it with ten score nor yet twenty. For I have there forty of the best fighting men of this North country; and in two days I think I shall have six score. How the rights of this lawsuit may be I do not know. But my mother's necessity is great. She has languished for a quarter year in prison during which time you have done nothing for her. When the lands fall to me upon my mother's death you and the Dacres may have them again. That is all that I know. And so I pray our gentle Saviour to have you in His keeping; and so I get me gone."
All this while the Lady Margaret had sat motionless, gazing upon her true love's face that never cast a glance aside at her. For it was not manners that she should speak before that old lady. But when he was on his feet and near the door, she ran down from that throne-step, and her rich robes and her great veil ran out behind her. The Cornish knight was already in the stairway, and the Lady Margaret came to it before the Young Lovell, for he walked slowly on account of the weight of his armour. So in the stairway she came before him and held up her hands to his steel chest:
"Ah, gentle lord," she said, "will you speak no word with me?" And, in having said so much, because she had spoken before he had, she had said too much for manners, and she hung her head and trembled, for she was a very proud woman.
He looked at her with stern and affrighting eyes.
"Ah, gentle lady," he said, "you are plighted to my false brother."
"No! No!" she said, "not with my will. Would you believe I am in a tale against you, with your false sisters?"
He raised his voice till it was like the harsh bark of the male seal; his eyes glowed with hatred.
"Gentle lady," he cried out, "ye should have known!"
The sight of this lady had been to him a sudden weariness, like the sound of a story heard over and over again. And hot anger and hatred had risen violently in his heart when she spoke.
But then he perceived her anguished face, the corners of the proud lips drawn down and the features pale like alabaster. And he remembered that all things, to pursue a fair course, must go on as they before would have gone--even all things to the end. So that, although his heart was weary for the lady of the doves and sparrows, he said:
"Ah, gentle lady, I believe you. I remember me. My false brother was inside these pot-lids. You could do no otherwise. All these things shall be set in order. We will sue to the Pope. So it shall be." He could not easily find words; that was very difficult speaking for him; for still this lady was wearisome beyond endurance to him, because of the lady of the doves and sparrows. But he would not let her see this, for he knew she was a loyal and dutiful friend to him, and he must take her to wife when he had his Castle again and the dispensation of our Father that is in Rome. And indeed she fell upon her knees before him there in the stairway:
"Gentle lord, my master and my love," she said, "I smote your false brother on the mouth in that day. And all my lands are yours and my towers of Glororem and on Wearside; and all my red gold and all my jewels of price. And all my men-at-arms are yours, to the number of eight score, and two esquires; and all my bondsmen that can bear bows, and my rough pikemen...."
He stepped back stiffly in his arms, so that he was nearly within his grandmother's chamber again. And this he did that he might avoid her touch. And he said "No! No!" That he said because it seemed horrible to him to have her aid in the retaking of his Castle. But, before she was done speaking with her deep and full voice, he knew that these things too must be.
Therefore he advanced upon her courteously, and stretched out his hands in steel and raised her up.
"Ah, gentle lady," he said, "all these things shall be, and I thank you. And peaceful times shall, God willing, repay these troublous ones."
She looked upon him a little strangely; but she held her cheek to him.
"Ah, gentle lady," he said, "I may not kiss you. For, as I stand before you, I am a man under a ban, so I think I may not do it until my lord the Prince Bishop shall have assoiled me and taken cognisance of my plea to Rome against my false brother."
She wished to have said: "Ah, what reck I of that!" and so to have taken him in her arms, steel and all. But that she might not do for fear of her manners. For she had been well schooled, and, whereas, she might well, if she would, give him her towers and lands and men and bondsmen, still she could not go against the ban of the Church; for the ladies of her house of Eure were very proud ladies. Neither, for pride, though the tears were wet upon her cheeks, would she ask him what ban it was that he lay under.
So, seeing those her tears, he said as gently as he could--for when the head of the axe is thrown the helve may as well go with it:
"Ah, gentle lady, be of very good cheer! For I am assured of assoilment by such a very good churchman that I know no better. And, that once had, shall we not make merry as in the old time? Aye, surely, for if you will, I will well. And so, that it may be the sooner done, I will go to that good prince." Yet, as he said these words, he sighed. Then he added: "In a little while, gentle lady and my true love, I will come back to you."
So she stood back in the stairway to let him pass; but it was piteously that she looked after him. For she had never seen him so earnest and so sober. He seemed the older by twenty years, and never had his foot been so heavy on the stairs; it was like the beating of a heart of lead.
Now when the Young Lovell came to the stair-foot where there was a square space, there there was standing the Knight Bertram of Lyonesse. And so he stood before the Young Lovell that that lord could not pass him or get to the street. And hot rage was already in that lording's heart, for never had he talked so painfully as he had done to that Lady Margaret, and it seemed as if his breast must burst its armour. Up to him stepped that Cornish knight and spoke in gentle tones, bending his particoloured leg courteously, in the then fashion of London town.
"Gentle lording," he said, "you called me even now the friend of Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. Let me say presently that by my office I stand above that lord, though far below him in my person. So I am no friend of his, though not his foe."
The Young Lovell held his brows down and gazed upon this man beneath them, breathing heavily in his chest.
"Go on," he said.
"Then I will tell you this," the Cornish knight went on. "I have heard you twice say ye were beneath a ban. Now that may well be and I think it is along of a White Lady."
The Young Lovell loosened his dagger within its sheath.
"My silken knight," he said, "ye were never so near your death."
"Gentle lording," that knight answered, "if I die another will take my place and no one will lament me. But it is my function and devoir to talk and so I take it." He paused for a moment, and then he went on: "God forbid that I should say word against Holy Church; I am not one that does it. Yet I will say this: If Holy Church will not raise the ban from you, yet I, Sir Bertram of Lyonesse, who have some skill at inquiries, will so put this matter to the King and dread lord that, without more words said, that judgment of the Warden's Court against you shall be revised, and if those false Knights shall withhold your Castle from you you shall have instant licence to take it again and do justice upon them as you will. And the fines due of you under that judgment shall be remitted to you. For I acknowledge that therein the Percy hath overstepped himself; for firstly he can give no judgment and foul no bill upon a suit of sorcery. And secondly, I am convinced that here was no sorcery. For, touching that White Lady...."
"Sir Knight," the Young Lovell said, "I bid you stand aside from that door and see a thing...." Then Sir Bertram stepped down into the roadway.
The Young Lovell took out his dagger and raised it above his shoulder. It was of the length of his forearm. The door that stood against the wall, being open, was of thick oak, studded with large bosses of iron. The Young Lovell brought forward that dagger over his head and it sank into that door up to the hilt, and sank in and passed through the door, and so into the mortar between two stories and the door was nailed there.
"Sir," the Young Lovell said, "seek to withdraw that dagger."
"Nay, that I cannot do," Sir Bertram said.
"Neither can I nor any man," the Young Lovell said. "And I am glad of it. For if you had spoken more upon that theme, that dagger should have gone through your throat. And this I tell you: there is no knight in all the North parts that could have done that, and I think none in all Christendom. How it may be in Heathenesse I do not know, for I hear that the Soldan has some very good knights. And that I did to show you that I am no braggart if you will hear me further."
"Very willingly will I hear you further, ah, gentle lording," the Cornish knight answered, and again he bent his knee where he stood in the street.
"Then," the Young Lovell said, "it is because I can do such deeds as that you have seen that all the men of the North parts will willingly follow me upon any journey. So it would be well if the Percy let me be. For--an he will not I will come to Alnwick and to Warkworth with twice four thousand men for this Percy is little beloved. And so, with scaling hooks and hurdles and faggots and the rest I will smoke him out of Northumberland and hang him upon the first tree in this County Palatine. And that you may tell your King."
"Ah, gentle lording," Sir Bertram said, "I tell you that judgment is already reversed."
"Of that I know nothing," the Young Lovell said. "But so it is as I have told you. If your King will dwell at peace with us of the North parts he may for me, and I ask nothing better. And so much more I will say, that he has good servants; for no man ever went nearer his death than you when you spoke to me now. And I think you know it well, yet you gave no ground and spoke on. I do not like your kind, for I have seen some of them about the courts of princes, here and elsewhere and you are the caterpillars upon the silken tree of chivalry that shall yet destroy it. Yet that was as brave a feat as ever I saw, and your King is happy if he have more such as you."
VIII
In the meanwhile that monk Francis sat writing in the Bishop's room and the Bishop walked up and down behind his back. Once or twice the Bishop paused in his walking as if he wished to speak to the monk, but again he walked on and the monk Francis continued to write rapidly, pausing now and then and looking upwards as he sought to remember the words of the decree beginning: "Jejunandi," or the Decretal: "Nullam res est...."
So at last the Bishop stood for a long time near the door, looking down at the nails of his fingers, and then suddenly:
"Touching the matter of sorcery, my brother in God...." he said.
The monk swung quickly round upon his stool:
"There was no sorcery," he said determinedly. "Those three of Castle Lovell were perjured."
"So I gathered," the Bishop said softly; "I considered that; it appeared so from what was said to me by the lawyer, Magister Stone."
The monk looked with the greater respect at the Bishop.
"Father in God," he said, "will you tell me how you came upon that thought?"
The Bishop smiled a little faint smile of pleased vanity. For he liked to be considered that he was a subtle reader of the hearts of men. In that he thought that he was the superior of this monk.
"When a man comes to me," he said, "with two tales, to each of which he will swear to find many witnesses, I am apt to think that one is false. So it was with this our friend called Stone."
"May I hear more?" the monk asked.
"It was in this way," the Bishop said, "and now you will see why I was troubled in my conscience when you found me. This lawyer Stone took it for postulated that I thirsted for the lands of this Young Lovell. He would have it no other way. Though once or twice I said I loved justice better than land he would have it no other way, but took my protestings for the solemn fooleries of a priest. He is, I think, a very evil man, with the face of an ape, stiff gestures, and the voice of a door hinge."
"I know the man very well," the monk Francis said. "He has twice proposed to me the spoliation of widows with false charters for the benefit of our monastery."
"So," the Bishop said, "he would have it that I was greedy of gold and lands for my see. And indeed I am if I may have them with decency. So he saith to me under his breath that, in two ways I might have Castle Lovell. One tale was that this Young Lovell had capered with naked witches and others round a Baal fire. For that he had as witnesses himself and another gossip called Meg of the Foul Tyke and that bastard called the Decies."
"It is because of that false witnessing that the Decies shall be broken on the wheel," the monk Francis said.
"Well, it was false witnessing," the Bishop said. "And so I divined. For, afterwards, this lawyer, brings along another story. And it was easy to see that this lawyer considered this the better story of the two and would be mightily relieved of doubt if I would adopt it. And it was this."
The monk Francis looked now very eagerly upon the Bishop, who stood straight and still in his furred gown, lifting one hand stiffly:
"There is in the village of Castle Lovell," he said, "a fair lovechild called Elizabeth. Some will have it that the father is the Young Lovell, some that it is of the Young Lovell's father. How that may be I do not know, but it is certain that that child is of the Lovell kin and Harrison is its name. Now, as May comes in, that child, as children will, goeth afield seeking herbs for a coney that the mother had a-fattening. So the child Elizabeth goeth further and further amongst these hills of sand where green stuff is rare. For, that she might not pluck herbs in the bondsmen's fields, that are laid down to hay, that child very well knew. So, looking up suddenly, that child perceived upon a high sand-hill, and sitting upon a brown horse that she well knew, a knight that very well she knew too, being the Young Lovell. For this lording was accustomed to bring the child Elizabeth pieces of sugar and figs and to give her fair words and money to the mother.
"So that child had no fear of the Young Lovell, but ran up to him crying out for sugar and figs. But he paid no heed to her, only sat there upon his horse. So the child looked further and perceived, upon a white horse, a lady in a scarlet gown, in a green hood, who smiled very kindly at her. So that child was afraid, as children are, and ran home. That was in the midst of May....
"Now came fell poverty into the hut where dwelled that woman and her child. The last pence were gone, the fatted coneys eaten; they must go batten upon roots, and when that mother sought relief of the Ladies Douce and Isopel in the Castle they jeered and spat upon her. And ever the mother cried that if the Young Lovell would come they would find relief. Then at last that child took courage and said that she knew where the Young Lovell was and would lead her there.
"So she leads her mother through these hills of sand--and it was then close to July, the 29th of June as it might be. There upon the hills of sand that mother perceives the Young Lovell. He sat upon his brown horse, in his cloak of scarlet, with his parti-coloured hose of scarlet and green. He wore his cap of scarlet set about with large pearls...."
"These pearls," the monk Francis said, "I have as a gage in my aumbrey of Belford."
"His long hair fell down upon his shoulders and he looked away. Then wearily that mother climbed the sand-hill crying out to the Young Lovell for gold. He never looked upon her but gazed always away; nevertheless he fingered his girdle and found his poke and cast down to her a French mark of gold."
"I thank God he did that charity," the monk Francis said, "even if he did not know it; and I think he did not."
"Why let us thank God," the Bishop said. And he asked: "Then this is a true tale?"
"I think it is," the monk Francis answered. "But, of your charity, tell me more."
"Then," the Bishop said, "that poor woman fell upon that piece of gold in the sand and kissed it. And, as she looked up over it to kiss too the Young Lovell's hand, so she saw a fair, kind woman. Red hair she had and was clothed in white with a jewel of rubies in a white hat. Such a kind, fair lady that woman had never seen, and the Young Lovell gazed upon her and she into his eyes. Then tears blinded that woman and grief and pain at the heart. So she came back to her hut, she knew not how; and, indeed, she knew no more until there came the lawyer Stone holding a cordial to her lips.
"For, you must know that that child, taking that piece of gold from her mother's fingers and being all innocent, went away into the village to buy food for her mother. So the first man she came to, seeing her with it, took her to the house of the lawyer Stone to have the right of it. Then the lawyer having beaten her, she told him that the Young Lovell had that day given it to her mother.
"So the lawyer, avid of news of the Young Lovell, jumped like an ape to that poor hut. But it was two days before that woman could speak, though he nursed her and fed cordials to her never so. Then that lawyer got men-at-arms and scoured the country according to her directions. But upon the Young Lovell he never came."
"By that day," the monk Francis said, "he was in my cell commending himself to God."
The Bishop looked apprehensively upon the monk Francis.
"Then this you take for a true tale," he said. "Woe is me."
They were both silent for a while, and then the monk said--for they were looking with faces of great weariness upon the tiles:
"Father in God, tell me truly, I do pray, all that you know from this lawyer."
"Brother," the Bishop said, "God help us, this lawyer was insistent that the tale of sorcery against this lording should be let to lapse or changed for another, such as that he consorted with old fairies and worse."
"How then," the monk Francis said, "would he put aside his former perjuries?"
"He would say," the Bishop said, "that his eyes deceived him, magic being in the air, and that on that morning the Young Lovell rode furiously past him going as if he knew not whither."
"Why so he did!" the monk Francis said, "but that shall not save the lawyer. His former oaths are written down."
"Brother," the Bishop said, "it is that lawyer's plan to begin another suit in the courts ecclesiastical and there not to swear at all, but ignoring the bill before the Wardens, to bring many witnesses about this fairy lady."
"What other witnesses has he?" the monk Francis asked. He spoke like a man without hope.
"You must know," the Bishop said, "that this lawyer during these months was enquiring of the Young Lovell in the past. So in Newcastle he found a master-tailor to whom the Young Lovell for long owed four pounds. And one day in February this tailor, needing money, went out from Newcastle towards Castle Lovell, riding upon an ass. And so, upon the way, he saw a lady that had a white horse and was little and dark. He was in tribulation for his money and pondered much upon the Young Lovell whether he was a lording that would pay him or one that would have him beaten at the gate.
"And, as he thought that, this lady looked upon him as if she would ask the way to where the Young Lovell dwelt. She was little and swart and had a green undercoat.
"And again in February there was a ship boy that went from Sunderland with a white falcon his ship had brought from Hamboro', for the Young Lovell. Now, upon this voyage, this ship boy had conceived a great love for that falcon even as boys will that upon ships are beaten by all and conceive loves for dumb beasts. So that ship boy went pondering with the white hawk and wondering and almost weeping to think that that lording might be a cruel master to the falcon. For he loved that falcon very well. So he was aware of a kind, fair lady with a white horse that looked upon him as much as to say that the Young Lovell would be a gentle and kind lord to that fowl. She was a great fair woman in a German hood of black velvet--such a one as that ship boy had seen and, as boys will, had conceived an ardent love for, in Hamboro'."
The monk Francis said: "Ah," and then he brought out the words: "Father in God, I too have seen her--and twice. When I thought of the Young Lovell."
Then the Bishop groaned lamentably; three times and very swiftly he walked from end to end of the cell, holding his hands above his head. Then he ran upon a shelf and with a furious haste pulled out a large book bound in white skin. He threw it open upon his bed and bade the monk come look at a picture.
This picture was all in fair blues and reds and greens, going across the two pages of the book.
"I had this book in Rome," the Bishop said, "of a Greek called Josephus. Look upon this picture."
The picture showed a mountain with trees upon it. And round the mountain went a colonnade of marble pillars. In between the central columns, where it was higher, sat a grey-bearded and frowning man. Naked he was to the waist and he was upon a throne of gold. At his left hand was an eagle; in his right the forked lightning of a thunderbolt. Beside him stood a proud woman in purple with a diadem of gold. In the next temple was a helmed woman that leaned upon a great spear; next her, a man all furious, that held up a great round shield and a pointed sword. Over against him reclined a great man with a lion's hide who leant upon a club; beyond him a man all white with the sun in his hair and beyond that a youth with wings upon his feet, upon his cap and upon a rod, twined with snakes that he held. All these were in the temple, and many more, such as a woman in a chariot drawn by oxen, and an old crowned man rising from the blue waves of the sea.
Then the Bishop laid his trembling imperious fingers upon a place higher up the mountain, above the temple.
"Look upon this," he said. There, amongst olive trees, the monk perceived a pink, naked woman. In one hand she held a mirror into which, lasciviously, she smiled. Her other hand held out behind her a wealth of shining hair like gold. Above her, clouds upon the blue sky turned over and let down a rain of pink roseleaves.
"I do not know who these be," the monk Francis said. "I was never in Rome."
Then the Bishop said harshly:
"Was the woman you saw like this woman?"
"Not so," the monk answered, "she had dark hair divided down the middle and parted lips. She was like the cousin that I slew and so she smiled."
The Bishop groaned. And so he wrung his hands and cried out:
"As God is good to me, I saw that naked woman stand so and smile so, in my vestiary, this morning after I had said mass. Six times I made the sign of the cross and she went not away. I was pondering upon the case of the Young Lovell.... She went not away.... Pondering.... God help me, a sinful man.... The eremites of the Libyan desert.... But no, it was not so.... No temptation...."
The waves of terror shook that Bishop with the thin features. His hands were so knitted and squeezed together in a paroxysm that it seemed the blood must spurt from his finger nails. And even as he stood, so he groaned with a hollow and continuous sound. Then the monk Francis cried out:
"Those are the fairies! Those women are the fairies! God help you, Lord Bishop, you cannot condemn my friend because he has seen them, if you cannot keep them out of your own vestiary.... For all about this world they are.... They peer in upon us. Thro' the windows they peer in! Looking! Looking! You cannot condemn my friend.... Like beasts of pray in the night they peer into the narrow rooms.... Hungering! ... Hungering!" His voice was like heavy, fierce sobs and it sounded against the Bishop's moans.
"God forgive me," he cried out, "it was upon these that I thought when I comforted my friend with talks of angels and saints.... I lied and thought I was lying.... Angels! These are the little people! The little angels, as the country people say, that were once the angels of God. But they would not aid Him against Lucifer, doubting the issue of the combat.... They it is, have brought this fine weather we enjoy. A great host of them, like fair women, is descended upon this country. They cannot live without fine weather...."
Both these churchmen were weakened with fasting and prayers when they might have slept. The monk Francis had great fears, their minds leapt from place to place. That long, bare room seemed surrounded with hosts of fair, evil fiends. He imagined devils with twisted snouts and long claws scraping and scratching at the leads of the painted glass and at the stones of the mortar.
Then the Bishop cried out upon him with a fearful voice, calling him ignorant, a fool rustic monk, a low, religious filled with barbarous superstitions. He came close to the monk Francis and cried into his very face:
"God help me, thou fool, bleating of fairies.... All those women were one woman! ... And again God help me! When I heard thee bleat ignorantly of the prowess of that young knight I did not believe thee.... But now I do believe he is the most precious defender we have in this place.... I will asperge his shining armour with holy oils.... I will bless his sword.... God help him.... How shall he fight against a goddess with a sword of steel.... Yet she is vulnerable! All writings say she is vulnerable...."
He began a pitiful babble that the monk could not well understand, of Italy where he had lived many years as the King's Friend. So he spoke of cypress groves and the ruined corners of old temples, and fireflies and nights of love. He spoke of earth crumbling away in pits and great white statues with sightless eyes rising out of the graves on hill-sides, tall columns that no one could overset, and the gods of the hearth. Of all these things the monk Francis knew nothing. The Bishop spoke of crafty Italians with whom he had spoken, and of subtle Greeks of the fallen Eastern Empire; and of how this subtle creature, as the credible legends said, dwelt now, since the fall of Byzantium, upon a mountainside in Almain, and of an almond staff that flowered....
Then that Bishop cast himself upon his bed, face downwards, and so he lay still.
That monk sat there many hours upon the little stool, and whether the Bishop slept or thought he could not tell, for the Bishop never moved. Then that monk considered that that Bishop had many and strange knowledges, having passed so long a time in foreign parts. And there was fear in that monk's heart, for he thought he was with a sorcerer that aimed to make himself pope by sorceries. And afterwards he fell to considering of how this Bishop should deal with his friend the Young Lovell, for that Bishop was master and lord.
And so, being the harder man of the two, he went over in his mind the necessity that that see had for a champion in those parts and how there could be none so good as the Young Lovell, even though that knight were, as he feared, a man accursed and certain of a pitiful end. Yet he might as well do what he could for the Church before that end came. And the monk thought of the evil King and the subtle Sir Bertram and the grim coward that the Percy was and the discontent of the common sort and how that might be used. And he thought of all these things for a long time, as if they were counters he moved upon a chess-board. And he cried to himself: "Ah, if I were Bishop I would control these things."
And then he remembered that it was long since he had prayed for the soul of his cousin that he had slain. So he set himself upon his knees and sought to make up for lost time in prayer. Those windows faced towards the west, being high over the river that rushes below. And from where one knelt he could see the tower of St. Margaret's Church through the open casement of stained glass. And at last, towards its setting, the sun shone blood red through all those windows of colours, ruby, purple, vermeil, grass green and the blue of lapis lazuli. All those colours fell upon the tiles of the floor that were hewn with a lily pattern in yellow of the potter. Twenty colours fell upon the figure of the Bishop, lying all in black upon his bed and as many upon the form of the monk where he knelt and prayed. Scarlet irradiated his forehead, purple his chin and shoulder, and to the waist he was bluish.
The voices of the pigeons on the roofs lamented the passing of the day with bubbling sounds, the great bell of the cathedral and many other bells called for evening prayer in the fields; it was late, for that was the season of hay-making. Then that praying monk perceived, through the small window, a great red globe hastening down behind the tower of St. Margaret's Church and, with a sudden deepening, twilight and shadows filled that long room because of the opaque and coloured windows.
And ever as the monk prayed there, he was pervaded by the image of his cousin's face--Passerose of Widdrington she had been called, for she was held to exceed the rose in beauty. In that darkness where he knelt he was pervaded by the thought of her face with the hair divided in the middle, the smooth brow, the so kind eyes and the parted lips. He knew she must be in purgatory for that space, for he had killed her with an arrow in the woodlands, unassoiled, and he could not consider that his prayers yet had sufficed to save her so little as five hundred years of that dread place. Yet, tho' he knew her to be in purgatory, in those dark shadows he had a sense that she was near him so that he could hear the rustle of her weed moving around him. She had loved green that is very dark in shadowy places. A great longing seized upon him to stretch out his arms and so to touch her. Then he remembered that it was that face that had looked kindly in upon him in his cell, and he groaned and cried upon our Saviour and His Mother to save him from such carnal longings. He had much loved his kind cousin whilst he had been a rough knight of this world. Many had loved her, but he alone remembered, and he considered how she that had been most beautiful was now no more than a horrible and grinning skull, God so willing it with all beauty that is of this world and made of the red blood that courses through the veins.
At the sound that he then gave forth he heard another sound which was that of the Bishop where he stirred upon his bed. And, in the deep shadows, he was aware that that Bishop sat up and looked upon him. And at last John Sherwood, Bishop Palatine spoke, his voice being harsh and first.
"Brother in God," he said, "I have determined that this Young Lovell shall have my absolution and blessing upon his arms and the sacrament of knighthood and all the things of this world that you desired for him. Touching the things that are not of this world I will not say much, but only such matters as shall suffice for your guidance. For of these matters I know somewhat and you nothing at all."
The Bishop paused and the monk said humbly:
"Father in God and my lord, I thank you."
"I lately rebuked you," the Bishop said, "for meddling brutishly in things of which you knew nothing. For you cried out to me ignorant and rustic superstitions, such as it is not fitting for a religious to meditate upon. And so I rebuke you again and I command you that you ask of your confessor such a penance as he shall think fitting for one that has miserably blasphemed, and in a manner of doctrine.... Now this I tell you for your guidance.... This apparition that you have seen and I, appeareth with many faces and bodies, being the spirit that most snareth men to carnal desires. So doth she show herself to each man in the image that should snare him to sin, with a face, kind, virtuous and alluring after each man's tastes. That is the nature of such false gods. For this is a false god, such as I have discerned you never, in your black ignorance, to have heard of. But Holy Writ, which I have much studied and you very little, after the fashion of certain monks, enjoins upon us to believe in the existence of false gods. So there are ever strange and cold creatures, looking upon this world with steadfast eyes. For Lucretius says, that was a writer, pagan yet half inspired: 'The universe is very large and in it there is room for a multitude of gods.' So I rede you, believe of false gods."
"Father in God, I will," the monk said, "I perceive it to be my duty. For now I remember me the Church enjoins upon us to be constant in fighting against such, therefore they must exist."
"Then this too I command you as a duty," the Bishop said from the thick darkness, "that for the duration of his life you quit never this knight but be ever with him, seeking how you may win him from the perception of this evil being. For signing of the cross shall not do it, neither shall sprinklings with holy water such as avail with the spirits of men deceased or with Satan and such imps. For this is even a god and the only way you may prevail against it is by keeping the mind of your penitent upon the things of this world of God. If you shall perceive this form of a woman here or there you shall speak to him quickly of setting up an oratory, or charity to the poor, or riding, in the name of God, against the false Scots. This shall avail little, but somewhat it may. Do you mark me?"
"Father in God," the monk said, "you put me in much better heart than I was before. For if I may, I will tell you how once I have done."
So the monk, from the darkness, told the Bishop how for the second time he had seen that lady. This was upon the road below Eshot Hill, going to Morpeth, near the farmhouse called Helm. Here, as he rode with the Young Lovell, a little before his men, he had seen that lady come out of a little wood and mount upon a white horse with a great company of damsels upon horses about her. And so all that many, brightly clad, rode down to a little hillock and watched that lording pass them, all smiling together. So that monk for the first time had been afraid that this was no St. Katharine and no angel of God.
But the Young Lovell had gone drooping in the hot sun and thirsting within himself and had not seen that lady. And at first that monk had wished to pull out his breviary and bid the Young Lovell read a prayer in it. But in his haste he could not come upon it amongst his robes for he was riding upon a mule. So, in that same haste, he had made certain lines with his finger nail upon the saddle before him and commanded the Young Lovell to look upon them saying it was a plan of Castle Lovell that he scratched, and the White Tower. And to have money, he told the Young Lovell, that lord must go with a boat to below the White Tower where it stood in the sea. And so Richard Raket should lower him gold in baskets at the end of a rope.
And the Young Lovell had looked down upon these markings attentively and said it was a good plan and never looked up at that lady and her company who sat there, all smiling, until they were passed.
"Well, she can bide her time," the Bishop said; then he said: "Brother in God, I have never seen this Young Lovell, but I perceive that he must be fair in his body."
"He is the fairest man of his body that ever I saw," the monk answered, "And as I have heard said by servants that went to meet him and his father, to Venice, he was esteemed the fairest man that those parts, as all the world, ever saw. But how that may be I know not."
"You may say he is the fairest knight of Christendom," the Bishop said. "That is very certain. I know it that have never seen this lord.... But so it is that I see you are not so great a fool as I had thought. And it is ever in such ways that you shall deal with this Young Lovell as you did then."
"I will very well do that, if I may," the monk said. "And if I may do nothing more I will spit upon that foul demon who without doubt beneath a fair exterior beareth a beak or snout, claws, and filthy scales...."
"Nay do not do that," the Bishop said, "for if God who is the ancient of days permitteth these false gods to walk upon this godly earth that is His, shall we not think that they are in some sort His guests? Or so I think, for I do not know."
So by that hour both these churchmen were very hungry and weary too. For that reason the fury was gone out of them, and it was ten at night. So the Bishop called for torches in the gallery and went into a little refectory that he had in that part of the Castle. Whilst these two ate heartily together, the Bishop sent messengers to the higher officers of the monastery to rouse them from their beds and to say that shortly after midnight, as soon as they might, the Prince Bishop begged them to rise from their sleep and sing a _Te Deum_ in the cathedral, upon a very special occasion.
In the black cathedral, near the steps that pass into the choir, the Young Lovell knelt. Beside him, since he was so great a lord, stood the esquire Cressingham supporting his banner and his shield and having in his arm the helmet of state. There were lay brothers up before the altar, moving into place a great statue of Our Lady that ran upon wheels. This they were bringing from near the North door to stand before the high altar. This statue was twelve foot high of brass gilt and, the better to see, these lay brothers had placed a candle upon Our Lady's crown. That was all the light there was in the great space that smelt of incense and was sooty black.
As near as she might to the black line in the floor--beyond this no woman may go in the cathedral of Durham and even Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine had been beaten with rods by the monks when she passed it to join King Edward--beyond this line knelt the Lady Margaret of Glororem in the darkness, and behind a pillar was the lawyer Stone who would fain speak some words with the Young Lovell. For he wished to have sold the people of Castle Lovell to him if the Young Lovell would pay him a small price.
The lawyer had waited all that night from seven or earlier.
Then a little noise began to be heard in the great cathedral, and two little boys came in and lit candles by the North door and then came a page bearing a great sword. He leant it against a vast pillar and began to laugh with the little boys that had lit the candles. Then there came in the Bishop with his chaplain and the monk Francis.
So the Bishop went and stood before the Young Lovell and said he had permission of them of the monastery to hear that lord confess himself there where he knelt. So the esquire Cressingham removed himself to a distance and drove away the little boys when they would have approached. And so the Bishop absolved the Young Lovell and bade him rise from his knees and go with him to where the Lady Margaret of Glororem knelt in darkness.
Her too he bade rise from her knees, and so walked up and down between them, saying comfortable things and exhorting them, when the Pope should have given them licence, to marry one another and live faithful each to each and to be charitable and piteous to the poor and be good children of Holy Church. And so by twos and threes monks began to come in, and, going behind the high altar, they sang a mass with a _Te Deum_, for it was just past midnight.
Then the Prior of that monastery placed between the lips of the Young Lovell the flesh of our Lord. The Prior wished to do this that he might do honour to that young lord, and that great boon of giving him the sacrament. And, afterwards, with the sword that page had brought, sitting in his stall the Bishop made a Knight of that lord.
In that way the Young Lovell had his knighthood and his pardon.