'If you are with them, they cannot come to take me prisoner.'
He looked her full in the eyes with his own that twinkled inscrutably.
He said very slowly--
'Were your mar-locks and prinking-prankings so very evil at the old
Duchess's?'
She grew white: she shrank away as if he had threatened her with his
fist.
'The Queen's Highness was such a child,' she said. 'She cannot remember.
I have lived very godly since.'
'I will do what I can to save you,' he said. 'Let me hear about it, as,
being prisoners, we may never come off.'
'You!' she cried out. 'You who stole my wedding portion!'
He laughed deviously.
'Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if
you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.'
'You lie!' she said. 'You gar'd me do it.'
The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.
'Come upon the grass,' he said. 'I will not be heard to say more than
this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly
brother.'
Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he
thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its
weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white
of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when
she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his
elbow.
'Tell me truly,' she said, 'shall I see the Court or a prison?... But
you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help
me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yard-man. I would become such a
liar as thou to come away from here.'
'Sister,' he said, 'this I tell you most truly: that this shall fall out
according as you obey me and inform me'; and, because he was a little
the taller, he leaned over her as they walked away together.
* * * * *
On the fourth day from then they were come to the great wood that is to
south and east of the castle of Pontefract. Here Lascelles, who had
ridden much with his sister, forsook her and went ahead of the slow and
heavy horses of that troop of men. The road was broadened out to forty
yards of green turf between the trees, for this was a precaution against
ambushes of robbers. Across the road, after he had ridden alone for an
hour and a half, there was a guard of four men placed. And here, whilst
he searched for his pass to come within the limits of the Court, he
asked what news, and where the King was.
It was told him that the King lay still at the Fivefold Vents, two days'
progress from the castle, and as it chanced that a verderer's pricker
came out of the wood where he had been to mark where the deer lay for
to-morrow's killing, Lascelles bade this man come along with him for a
guide.
'Sir, ye cannot miss the way,' the pricker said surlily. 'I have my deer
to watch.'
'I will have you to guide me,' Lascelles said, 'for I little know these
parts.'
'Well,' the pricker answered him, 'it is true that I have not often seen
you ride a-hawking.'
Whilst they went along the straight road, Lascelles, who unloosened the
woodman's tongue with a great drink of sherry-sack, learned that it was
said that only very unwillingly did the King lie so long at the Fivefold
Vents. For on the morrow there was to be driven by, up there, a great
herd of moor stags and maybe a wolf or two. The King would be home with
his wife, it was reported, but the younger lords had been so importunate
with him to stay and abide this gallant chase and great slaughter that,
they having ridden loyally with him, he had yielded to their prayers and
stayed there--twenty-four hours, it was said.
'Why, you know a great deal,' Lascelles answered.
'We who stand and wait had needs have knowledge,' the woodman said, 'for
we have little else.'
'Aye, 'tis a hard service,' Lascelles said. 'Did you see the Queen's
Highness o' Thursday week borrow a handkerchief of Sir Roger Pelham to
lure her falcon back?'
'That did not I,' the woodman answered, 'for o' Thursday week it was a
frost and the Queen rode not out.'
'Well, it was o' Saturday,' Lascelles said.
'Nor was it yet o' Saturday,' the woodman cried; 'I will swear it. For
o' Saturday the Queen's Highness shot with the bow, and Sir Roger
Pelham, as all men know, fell with his horse on Friday, and lies up
still.'
'Then it was Sir Nicholas Rochford,' Lascelles persisted.
'Sir,' the woodman said, 'you have a very wrong tale, and patent it is
that little you ride a-hunting.'
'Well, I mind my book,' Lascelles said. 'But wherefore?'
'Sir,' the woodman answered, 'it is thus: The Queen when she rides
a-hawking has always behind her her page Toussaint, a little boy. And
this little boy holdeth ever the separate lures for each hawk that the
Queen setteth up. And the falcon or hawk or genette or tiercel having
stooped, the Queen will call upon that eyass for the lure appropriated
to each bird as it chances. And very carefully the Queen's Highness
observeth the laws of the chase, of venery and hawking. For the which I
honour her.'