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 Réole 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 £10 6s. 4d., and since
they owed Robert Chambers and John Richardson already £17 13s. 4d., the
whole payment then to be made was £27 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 meurtrières, 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 Münster, 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.