It was at this precise point in Ulanda’s cogitations that wild excited cries and alarming crashing sounds were heard in the rooms below, followed by a rush of half-a-dozen feet up their staircase. Raymond ran to the door that opened on these stairs and jerked it wide open, repeating as he did so in a high-pitched voice: “What the devil is this? What on earth’s happening?”
But the broad-shouldered Turgo, with half-a-dozen stalwart and extremely excited men-at-arms behind him, flung him aside, and bursting into the room, stood like a rocky water-fall of indignation in front of the three persons grouped round that map-laden table, behind which, in the absence of fresh logs, the fire was almost dead.
“It’s too much to endure, my lord! It’s too much for anybody to endure! There’s a big lot of men from the Fortress outside there now, led, yes! actually led, by that boy John who’s the younger of them two, so he ain’t even the heir to Roque! He’s only a young scholard, that’s what he is, yes! that’s all he is — just a scrap of a lad at school! And there he is outside the main gate of Cone waving God knows what sort of weapon in his hand and defying these Lost Towers men and our men and all the men of Wessex to touch his precious Friar and his Friar’s bedevilments!”
At this point the formidable bailiff of Cone straightened his tremendous shoulders to a degree that might have made even the powerful lover of Ghosta take notice.
“The man we need here now,” bellowed Turgo, “is Lord Edward himself — O may he soon be our lord and King! — who is already on ship-board on his way home. It’s him we need now, in this wretched bandit-beset country! Lord Edward would soon settle this crazy confusion in our ancient forest! Why, when he was with the King in London, none of these curst, insurrectionary barons dared lift a cry or wave a banner in this forest of ours! No, they daren’t, I tell you, my lord. They daren’t, I tell you, my lady! That’s what we need here today, a proper knightly prince like Lord Edward!”
“I’ll come down at once, Turgo,” said Boncor, giving his wife an enquiring glance and apparently taking for granted that she would confirm his decision. “You’d better stay up here with your mother, son,” he added in rather a less assured tone, when he noticed how nervously and anxiously the newly-made knight was pulling out and thrusting back the various silver-handled and brass-handled daggers which protruded from his leather belt.
In a flash Ulanda rushed round the table and clutched her husband by his left wrist. She had seen in a sudden vision these Fortress adherents, urged on by this crazy young John, and full of the idea that Friar Bacon, the greatest teacher in the world, must be saved at all costs, striking the already-wounded Boncor a blow that would be his death; while she, bereft of the love of her life, would be doomed to abide for the rest of her mortal days listening to this swaggering son of hers and trying to make him turn his words into deeds. God in Heaven, no! that would be more than she could bear! Let all three of them perish before that happened!
“You go down with Turgo, Sonny!” she cried. “Your father’s a wounded man. I can’t possibly let him fight with those devils! Only for Christ’s blessed sake take care of yourself, son. I don’t want you wounded too!”
Only once before in all his life had the Lord of Cone been required by the fate or by the chance that governs us all to make a psychic effort comparable with the one he had to make now. But he succeeded in making it; and the apparent ease with which he accepted the issue, when he had done so, was a triumph for his personality of which not a soul present had the faintest shadow of an idea.
“All right my dear; I’ll stay with you. Off you go, William! Do whatever Turgo thinks best when you’re down there. That little fool John has no right to bring his Dad’s men into our place. But I’ve heard he’s the best disciple the Friar’s got round here; and we know what these students are! Keep an eye on our lad, Turgo, my friend. Remember he’s the youngest knight of the oldest king in Christendom! I should say we do indeed need Lord Edward here; and I warrant these confounded lands he’s crusading in, whether they’re Arabian or Christian, will go on in the same turmoil whether he’s there or not.”
By the time the Lord of Cone had completely covered up the heart-heaving moral effort he’d just made in thus remaining in the library of his Castle, both Turgo and Sir William had reached the stairs, the latter much more concerned with the arrangement of the weapons in his own belt than with the whereabouts of the son of his sovereign, and the door had been closed behind them.
Ulanda promptly pushed both her quiescent lord into his chair and sliding down upon her knee drew his head towards her own. But it was then that the goddess of chance displayed her most devilish impishness. In the impetuosity of this gesture of affection the impulsive lady had forgotten a certain most perilously explosive inhibition in her own nerves; namely her loathing of beards.
But now, as their heads met, her husband’s curly beard tickled her cheek. By long practice she had acquired the art of kissing him without incurring this contact. But the truth was that she had come to be obsessed of late more than ever before by this loathing for, and intolerable disgust at, the touch of a man’s beard. The Baron indeed had recently begun to grow aware of this nervous mania of hers, and he often found himself wondering why at an earlier stage in their alliance she had not protested against his refusal to shave. This refusal of his was wholly instinctive.
He was constitutionally slow-moving; and was addicted to the habit of adapting himself to existing conditions; and one of the most obvious of such conditions was the simple law of Nature that the chins of men grew beards. Thus between these two persons there inevitably existed, lodged in the physical make-up of them both, the perilous possibility of a bodily, primeval, skin-for-skin quarrel of a serious kind.
It was an unfortunate coincidence however that at the very moment when her cheek was touched by the lips she loved and the beard she hated, there should have come to her ears from outside their secluded retreat, and even from outside the Castle itself, tumultuous cries and shouts and the noise of blows mixed with resounding yells of anger and pain.
These sounds may possibly have intensified her feelings by adding to her nervous mania a shiver of anxiety, though not more than a shiver, about her son. In a mad reaction against the touch of that bushy beard, she leapt up from his knee and uttered a piercing scream of rage, that flew out into the night like a wild bird whose wings were on fire.
It might well have happened that such a scream, rising from aggravated feminine nerves, and whirling off into the darkness from a height above the tops of the tallest trees, especially when the court-yard and gateway of the place were resounding with blows and cries, would have dissolved in the air unregarded by anyone except the two persons concerned.
But either by another random hit from the wanton bow of chance or, let us hope, by some special intervention of a brave man’s guardian angel, this scream from Ulanda gave to the death-pangs of young Ralph Gaulter of Evercreech the one thing needed to wholly redeem his desperation.
Gaulter had only just entered the service of the Baron of Cone, and he had only done so because of a savage tragedy, three or four generations ago, when his great-grandmother, Matilda Gaulter, had been raped by one of the Lords of Roque. But at the moment of Ulanda’s piercing scream that seemed to come down from heaven, young Gaulter was on his back on the grass with one of the red-brown bandits kneeling on his chest and pressing a broad and rusty kitchen-knife deep into his neck.