A poor rag of a man, with the pinched face of a sick girl, came limping
on sore heels to the western gate of Pevensey. The man had a broken
arrow through the flesh of his neck; his mouth was all awry, and his
breath came in great heaves, for he had run ten miles that morning. When
someone caught him round the middle as he tottered at the gate, he
doubled up like a wet clout over a line, and emptied his very soul over
the stones. The guards put him on his back awhile, rubbed his legs, and
gave him a horn of mead to drink. One of them forced the back of the
arrow through the skin, and whipped it out as a woman whips a broken
bodkin out of a friend’s finger.
The beer, and the blunt heroism of this barber surgeon brought Barnabo’s
man briskly upon his haunches. He clapped his hand to his neck, saw that
there was blood on it, and promptly began to whimper.
“You’ve pulled the spiggot out,” he wailed. “Lord, did ever a hogshead
gush faster! Linen—oil, and linen, for the love of the Saints.”
The men laughed at him. One of them took a smock that hung on a nail
outside the porter’s lodge, tore a strip from it, spat on the wound, and
bandaged Barnabo’s man till he had a gorget and whimple fit for a nun.
“Take a little more beer, comrade,” he said. “Never a rabbit ran more
bravely.”
The fugitive sulked under their attentive and jeering faces.
“Go to perdition,” he retorted. “It was fifty to one, there, in the
woods. Messire Gaillard must hear of it. You will all be very brave,
sirs, when these devils begin to shoot at you from behind a hundred
trees.”
Gaillard heard of it soon enough, as did Etoile, and Peter of Savoy.
Barnabo had been waylaid in the woods that morning, and the pole-cats
had clawed him off his mule. For no man was more hated than Dan Barnabo
in those parts, a hard, shrewd man who held many benefices, and saw that
his steward ground out the dues. The Italian could not speak ten words
in the vulgar tongue. His ministrations would have been ridiculous had
he ever troubled his soul about the people. It was told that a woman had
once waylaid Barnabo, and demanded to be shriven. The Italian had
understood nothing of what she said to him, but since she was pretty and
importunate, he had created a scandal by misunderstanding her whole
desire, and by seeking to comfort her in a fashion that was not
fatherly. The woman had scratched Barnabo’s face. There were many people
who had lusted to scarify him more viciously. Barnabo baptised no
children, sought out none of the sick, buried none of the dead. Twice a
year perhaps he had said mass in the churches that belonged to him. Few
of the people had come to hear Barnabo’s Roman voice. He was a better
lute player and lap-dog than priest, and the people knew it.
Gaillard had his orders from Peter of Savoy. Etoile laughed in his face
when she met him upon the stairs.
“Let the pole-cats play a little with Barnabo,” she said. “Do not ride
furiously, dear lord! I can learn to serve at chess better than
Barnabo.”
Gaillard caught at her, but she slipped past him up the stairs.
“There are two sorts of fools in the world, my Gaillard,” she said. “One
is killed for the sake of a woman, the other through greed for a woman.
Keep out of Barnabo’s path.”
Both Peter of Savoy and the Gascon knew whither Barnabo had ridden that
April day. It was notorious that the Italian had kept a _focaria_ or
hearth-ward at a priest’s house of his in a valley beyond the hill
called Bright Ling because of the glory of its heathlands in the summer.
The woman—a Norman—was more comely than was well for Dan Barnabo’s
name, and she had kept the house for him, and rendered it to him sweet
and garnished whenever he chose to ride that way.
Gaillard and his men marched past Dallington, where Guillaume Sancto de
Leodegario was lord of the manor, and on over Bright Ling with the furze
in full bloom. The little red spy jogged along beside the Gascon’s
horse. He led them into a deep valley, a valley full of the grey-green
trunks of oak trees, and the brown wreckage of last year’s bracken. A
stream dived and winked in the bottoms, and at the end of a piece of
grassland the thatch of the priest’s house shelved under the very boughs
of the oaks. No smoke rose from the place. It seemed silent and deserted
as Gaillard and his men came trampling through the dead bracken.
Gaillard’s eyes swept hillside and valley, for he was shrewd enough to
guess that many an alert shadow had dogged them on the march that day.
He dismounted, sent his archers into the woods as scouts, and taking the
pick of his men-at-arms, marched up to the silent house, holding his
shield ready to catch any treacherous arrow that might be shot from the
dark squints. A wooden perch shadowed the main entry, and Gaillard saw
that the door stood ajar, and that the flagstones paving the porch were
littered with rushes, and caked with mud as though many feet had passed
to and fro over the stones.
Gaillard pushed the door open with the point of his sword. It gave to
him innocently enough, and he crossed the threshold, and stood staring
at something that the men behind him could not see.
The place had the dimness of twilight, lit as it was by the narrow
lancets cut in the thickness of the wall. Not three paces from Gaillard,
their feet nearly touching the floor, two bodies dangled on ropes from
the black beams of the roof. The face of the one was grey; of the other,
black and turgid; for one had died by the sword, the other by the rope.
The body with the black face was still twisting to and fro as a joint
twists on a spit before the fire. The arms had been pinioned, and the
man’s tongue been drawn out, and the head of an arrow thrust through it.
The face could scarcely be recognised, but by the clothes Gaillard knew
him for Dan Barnabo, the Italian, lutanist, lover, spoiler of the poor.
Gaillard touched the body. It was still warm. His men were crowding in,
peering over each other’s shoulders so that the doorway was full of
faces, shields, and swords.
Gaillard waved them back. He swung his sword, struck at the rope that
held Barnabo, and cut it so cleanly that the body came down upon its
feet. For a moment it stood, poised there, before falling forward to
hide its black face in the rushes.
Gaillard looked at it a little contemptuously, thinking of Etoile, and
the rivalry between her and this thing that had been a man.
“Only fools come by such a death,” he said. “A dog’s death. This man had
a woman’s hands.”
Dusk was falling, and Gaillard and his men settled themselves to pass
the night in dead Barnabo’s house under the oak trees. Gaillard, who did
not trouble himself about such a thing as a “crowner’s quest,” had the
two bodies buried in the garden at the foot of a holly tree. Waleran de
Monceaux had hanged Barnabo, and the priest was not pretty to look at
with his black face and his swollen tongue. Nor was Gaillard going to
quarrel with so convenient a coincidence. He called his archers back out
of the woods, posted two sentinels, had the horses brought in and
stabled in the hall. A fire was lit on the hearth, and the men gathered
round it, and opened their wallets for supper.
Gaillard kept the red-headed hunchback at his elbow, and questioned him
narrowly as to the woodways, and the manor houses, and the gentry with
whom he would have to deal. These Sussex rebels had hanged Barnabo, and
in the hanging, thrown down the blood gauge to Peter of Savoy. War was
Gaillard’s business. He had learnt the trade in Gascony, where neighbour
went out against neighbour as for a day’s hunting. Nor was it Gaillard’s
concern to trouble about the law of the land, and how far feudal faith
bound this man or that. The King was the great over-lord, and Peter of
Savoy stood as his champion in those parts. Hence if rebels popped their
heads up, it was only necessary to strike with the sword.
Night fell, and the men lay down to sleep in the long hall, crowding
about the fire, for the horses were ranged along the walls. The air of
the place was close and heavy with the smoke from the fire, the animal
heat of the crowded bodies, and the pungent scent of horses’ dung. Faint
flickers of light lost themselves in the black zenith of the timbered
roof. Gaillard, sitting propped in a corner with his sword across his
knees, could hear the wet murmur of the stream that ran close to the
house. He could also hear the two sentinels answering each other, and
since they seemed so whole-heartedly alert, Gaillard dozed off like a
dog.
About midnight Gaillard opened his eyes, and sat staring at the dying
fire, and though he remained motionless, his face sharpened like the
face of one who listens. His eyes moved slowly from figure to figure, to
rest at last on the shutter closing a window. And Gaillard saw that the
shutter was shaking ever so little, and he knew that there was no wind.
Gaillard did not move. He could hear a vague scuffling as of many men
moving about the house. But there were other sounds that made the
Gascon’s lips tighten and retract so that the teeth showed, a faint
crackling as of dry brushwood being piled against the door of Barnabo’s
house.
The Gascon saw the shutter open. A white face peered in with eyes that
moved like the eyes of a wonder-working image. Then the face
disappeared, and the shutter closed again, but Gaillard was on his feet,
and going to and fro, silently rousing his men. Hardly a word was
spoken. The men caught up their arms, and stood like listening dogs,
while the archers marked the windows.
Gaillard was at the door trying to lift the bar, but some weight from
without had jammed it in the sockets. He stood listening, sniffing the
air, and watching grey puffs of smoke come curling in through the
crevices. Then he shouted an order through the hall, an order that
brought his men crowding forward for a sally. Some of the strongest of
them put their shoulders to the bar. It flew up, letting the door swing
in with a gush of smoke and a crash of falling faggots.
“Out—out!”
Gaillard and his men broke through, hurling the brushwood aside,
dragging it into the hall, cursing as they realised the devil’s trick
that had been played them. Only the outer faggots were alight. There was
a gush of flame under the hooded entry, but Gaillard and his men sprang
through it with a weird glitter of gold upon their harness, and an
uprush of smoke and sparks. Dark figures flitted about the priest’s
garden. Arrows whistled and struck the walls as the Savoyard’s men came
tumbling out over the burning faggots.
There was a sharp tussle in the garden; blows were given and taken in
the dark; arrows shot at a venture; torches thrust into hairy faces.
Gaillard’s men-at-arms in their heavy mail, for they had lain down armed
to sleep, were more than a match for the woodlanders in their leather
jerkins. Soon—scampering shadows went away into the moonlight. Gaillard
and his men were left to put out the fire about the porch.
And savage men they were, men with the hot flare of that death trap in
their nostrils. The two sentinels had been stalked and killed, and the
brushwood piled against the door. The windows were so narrow that men
could have been shot while struggling through them. The flames and smoke
would have leapt in, making the place a hell of plunging, terrified
beasts, and mad and half-dazed men.
Gaillard watched his fellows trampling on the brushwood. Now and again
an arrow came whistling out of the moonlight.
“We will pay them for this,” he said grimly. “God, but they meant to
burn us like blind mice in a stack!”
The fire was soon out, and there was nothing left but to wait for the
daylight, and to keep the house in darkness so that no lurking
woodlander should have the outline of a window for a mark. Gaillard’s
men were very sullen and bitter over the night’s adventure. They had
brought in the two dead sentinels, and crowded about them, letting their
fury break out in growls for to-morrow’s reckoning. There was no more
sleep for Gaillard’s men that night; they squatted round the walls,
telling each other what they would do to these people who murdered
priests and set fire to houses where the King’s men slept.
The dawn came with a thick mist hanging over the woods, even covering
the crowns of the uplands of Bright Ling. Gaillard had made his plans,
and in the garden the little spy was drawing a map on the soil with the
point of a charred stake. The archers had gone out to scout, but had
found nothing but fog and rotting bracken. Gaillard ordered his men to
horse, and they were soon on the move through the mist, the drippings
from the trees falling on them, and on grass that was grey with dew.
The hunchback, marching beside Gaillard’s horse, led them towards
Goldspur, following the high ground where there was less chance of an
ambuscade. Gaillard had ordered silence. Not a man spoke. The grey
shapes moved through the greyer mist with no sounds but the dull shuffle
of hoofs, the occasional snort of a horse, the creaking of saddles, and
the faint jingle of steel.
It was still very early when they came to the hill above Goldspur, and
skirted the great beech wood whose topmost boughs were beginning to
glitter in the sunlight. The mist lifted quite suddenly like a white
diaphanous curtain drawn up into the sky. A broad beam of sunlight clove
like a sword into the deeps of the beech wood. And to these rough riders
of Peter of Savoy was revealed a vision, a vision such as a
crystal-gazer might watch growing from nothingness in the heart of a
crystal.
In the full sunlight at the opening of a glade a woman stood washing
herself at a forest pool. The woman’s figure gleamed like snow against
the sombre trunks of the trees. Her hair blazed about her naked body
like flames licking a white tower. As yet she had not seen that line of
armed men winding along the hillside not a hundred paces from where she
stood.
Gaillard reined in, and held up a hand for his men to halt. He looked
from the woman to the hunchback who held his stirrup strap.
“Hallo, what have we here?”
The cripple crossed himself, cur that he was.
“It is Denise of the Forest, lording,” he said. “They call her their
Lady of Healing in these parts. She has a cell yonder, in the wood. She
can work miracles, so they say.”
The rough faces behind Gaillard were all agog. A short, yapping laugh
came from some man in the rear. Gaillard turned in the saddle, and
looked for the man who had made the noise.
“Enough of that, sirs,” he said. “Shall we laugh because a saint happens
not to cherish vermin.”
Perhaps curiosity pricked Gaillard, perhaps something still more human.
At all events he pushed his horse forward and rode alone up the stretch
of green turf that sloped towards the beech wood. The men grinned like
apes so soon as his back was turned. Messire Gaillard might be a great
captain, but assuredly he was no saint.
Gaillard was laughing to himself with a coarse spirit of mischief, being
inquisitive as to what this woman would do when she discovered that she
was no longer alone. He carried his chin high in the air, his hard eyes
gleaming like the eyes of a man who has drunk strong wine. But Denise
made her womanhood a thing of pride and splendour that spring morning.
Her tunic was still open at the bosom when the Gascon’s horse threw a
shadow on the grass close to the pool.
Denise looked Gaillard straight in the eyes, and yet not at him, but
past him, as though he were so much vapour. Gaillard, Gascon that he
was, had not a word to say for himself, though he boasted himself so
debonair with women. Denise took her hair with her hands, put it behind
her shoulders, and picking up the clean cloth that she had brought,
turned and walked away into the wood.
For once in his life Gaillard felt a fool, and his arrant sheepishness
did not please him. He comforted himself with that infallible sneer that
is the refuge of a vain man who has done something mean and cowardly.
“Red-headed Pharisee, go your way,” he said. “A woman’s sanctity is as
thick as her skin. Fool! I am not the first sheep that has bleated in
these parts.”