'Oh, David, never mind! Do go on with the story! What happened at the battle?'
'He were killed, for sure, were Sir Richard, and his head took by they Yorkists, and kicked about like a football afore they nailed it up over Hereford gate. You'd ne'er find his skull if you looked inside the old monument—naught but the rest of his bones.'
'How awful! Then is it his ghost?'
'Oh no, Bobby! It is the White Lady, you know!'
David took advantage of these interruptions to lift his pot from the fire and examine its contents, but finding them not yet to his liking, put it on again, and continued:
'It weren't enough for they Yorkists to get Sir Richard's head; they wanted his lands along of it, and they marched across country (a set of blood-thirsty ruffians they was) and laid siege to the Abbey. Dame Eleanor, a widow new-made, as you might say, couldn't hold it above two days, for the pick of the men had all gone with her husband, and the best part of they lay stretched out stiff at Mortimer's Cross. So she lets them in at last, sore agin her will, and gives up the keys to Lord Grey of Wigmore. You'd a' thought that would a' satisfied them, but they wanted more.'
'What did they want?' said Peggy, for David seemed disposed to rest from his labours and attend to his cookery.
'Sir Richard had left a son behind him, a young lad of nine or ten or thereabouts, and he were the heir. It were him as Lord Grey wanted—told a fine tale as how he'd take him up to London, and get him put as page to the great Earl of Warwick, which were as good as makin' his fortune.'
'Did he go?'
'Nay, his mother were no fool, neither, and she knowed full well she'd ne'er see him again, no more than you'd see a duck if you gave it in charge of the fox. She'd sent him away safe out of the Abbey by that passage to the cave, most like, where you very near lost your lives last summer, and she weren't going to let on where he were, not to no one.'