He looked around him and added--

'I will have three of your geese to take with us,' he said. 'Kill me them presently.'

Lascelles looked after him as he strode away round the house with the long paces of a stiff horseman.

'Before G.o.d,' he laughed, 'that is one way to have information about a quean. Now are we prisoners whilst he inquires after your character.'

'Oh, alack!' Mary Hall said, and she cast up her hands.

'Well, we are prisoners till he come again,' her brother said good-humouredly. 'But this is a foul hole. Come out into the sunlight.'

She said--

'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 d.u.c.h.ess'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 G.o.dly 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 gra.s.s,' 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.ker 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 p.r.i.c.ker 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 p.r.i.c.ker 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' Sat.u.r.day,' Lascelles said.

'Nor was it yet o' Sat.u.r.day,' the woodman cried; 'I will swear it. For o' Sat.u.r.day 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 eya.s.s 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.'

Lascelles said, 'Well, well!'

'As for the borrowing of a handkerchief,' the woodman pursued, 'that is a very idle tale. For, let me tell you, a lady might borrow a jewelled feather or a scarlet pouch or what not that is bright and shall take a bird's eye--a little mirror upon a cord were a good thing. But a handkerchief! Why, Sir Bookman, that a lady can only do if she will signify to all the world: "This knight is my servant and I his mistress." Those very words it signifieth--and that the better for it showeth that that lady is minded to let her hawk go, luring the gentleman to her with that favour of his.'

'Well, well,' Lascelles said, 'I am not so ignorant that I did not know that. Therefore I asked you, for it seemed a very strange thing.'

'It is a very foolish tale and very evil,' the man answered. 'For this I will swear: that the Queen's Highness--and I and her honour for it--observeth very jealously the laws of wood and moorland and chase.'

'So I have heard,' Lascelles said. 'But I see the castle. I will not take you farther, but will let you go back to the goodly deer.'

'Pray G.o.d they be not wandered fore,' the woodman said. 'You could have found this way without me.'

There was but one road into the castle, and that from the south, up a steep green bank. Up the roadway Lascelles must ride his horse past four men that bore a litter made of two pikes wattled with green boughs and covered with a horse-cloth. As Lascelles pa.s.sed by the very head of it, the man that lay there sprang off it to his feet, and cried out--

'I be the Queen's cousin and servant. I brought her to the Court.'

Lascelles' horse sprang sideways, a great bound up the bank. He galloped ten paces ahead before the rider could stay him and turn round. The man, all rags and with a black face, had fallen into the dust of the road, and still cried out outrageously. The bearers set down the litter, wiped their brows, and then, falling all four upon Culpepper, made to carry him by his legs and arms, for they were weary of laying him upon the litter from which incessantly he sprang.