"Sir Knight, the pasty is done brown and the cook is ready to serve up, and from the gate-house window I see my lord herding his falcons, and preparing to return," said Dicky Dumpling's voice.
It aroused Ralph as from a dream. Pressing a piece of money into the porter's fat palm, he hastened to fetch his mare from the stable, and mounting her, rode away with a heavy heart through the gate of Bletsoe Castle.
Dicky Dumpling looked after him and shook his head.
"He comes with a jest, and he goes without a word! Things look ill, I trow. 'Laugh and grow fat' is my motto, laugh and grow fat! Plague on that lazy scullion! why lingers he so long with my dinner?"
CHAPTER III.
HOW ALIVA RECEIVED A SECOND SUITOR.
So fair and noble a maiden as the Lady Aliva de Pateshulle deserved a better father than she possessed. The Lord of Bletsoe was rather too inclined to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, to play a double part, waiting to see where his own interests would best be served. But we must bear in mind the condition of affairs in the time in which he lived. The old and formerly powerful county family of the De Beauchamps were fallen from their high estate; for Sir William, their head, had been ousted from his castle, and in those days a baron without castle and stronghold occupied but an inferior position. On the other hand, the house of De Breauté had come decidedly to the front; for, as the chroniclers of the time tell us, Fulke held not only the castle of Bedford, but also the castles and the shrievalties of Oxford, Northampton, Buckingham, and Cambridge. All these he had received as the reward for his services against the barons on behalf of King John, so there could be no doubt but that the De Breauté family was wealthy, and also, apparently, firmly rooted at Bedford.
It must not be supposed, however, that De Pateshulle could excuse Fulke's outrages, or that he would have gone so far as to give his daughter to one who bore so evil a name, even had he not been already married. The intended son-in-law was another member of the De Breauté family.
As the Lady Margaret de Ripariis, the unhappy wife of Fulke, had born her husband no children, the heir to his wealth was his younger brother William. Now this William de Breauté was not yet as widely known, nor as hated, as his brother, nor was it even asserted that he had taken part in any of the foul deeds committed by the latter. Soldier of fortune like his brother, he had but lately arrived from France, and taken up his residence in Bedfordshire, where perhaps he was not altogether unpopular, for he had even gone so far as to hint that, should Sir Fulke come to a violent end in one of his forays, and he, William, become the lord of Bedford Castle, the neighbourhood should have no reason to mourn the change. With regard to the De Beauchamps, however, he intimated pretty strongly that he considered his family to have sufficient title to the castle from the grant of King John, and no one, naturally, was prepared to say that the young King Henry was in a position to upset his father's arrangements.
Accordingly, when William de Breauté approached De Pateshulle with a proposal that he should give him his daughter Aliva in marriage, it was not altogether unnatural that that gentleman, being of poor estate though of good family, and not even possessing a fortified dwelling--in itself a mark of position in those days--should be willing to listen to a suit which would place his descendants at Bedford Castle, and in the position held in former days by the De Beauchamps.