Then Hereward, as he had promised, set fire to the three farms close to the Bruneswold; and all his outlawed friends, lurking in the forest, knew by that signal that Hereward was come again. So they cleansed out the old house: though they did not take down the heads from off the gable; and Torfrida went about it, and about it, and confessed that England was, after all, a pleasant place enough. And they were as happy, it may be, for a week or two, as ever they had been in their lives.
“And now,” said Torfrida, “while you see to your army, I must be doing; for I am a lady now, and mistress of great estates. So I must be seeing to the poor.”
“But you cannot speak their tongue.”
“Can I not? Do you think that in the face of coming to England and fighting here, and plotting here, and being, may be, an earl’s countess, I have not made Martin Lightfoot teach me your English tongue, till I can speak it as well as you? I kept that hidden as a surprise for you, that you might find out, when you most needed, how Torfrida loved you.”
“As if I had not found out already! O woman! woman! I verily believe that God made you alone, and left the Devil to make us butchers of men.”
Meanwhile went round through all the fens, and north into the Bruneswold, and away again to Lincoln and merry Sherwood, that Hereward was come again. And Gilbert of Ghent, keeping Lincoln Castle for the Conqueror, was perplexed in mind, and looked well to gates and bars and sentinels; for Hereward sent him at once a message, that forasmuch as he had forgotten his warning in Bruges street, and put a rascal cook into his mother’s manors, he should ride Odin’s horse on the highest ash in the Bruneswold.
On which Gilbert of Ghent, inquiring what Odin’s horse might be, and finding it to signify the ash-tree whereon, as sacred to Odin, thieves were hanged by Danes and Norse, made answer,—
That he Gilbert had not put his cook into Bourne, nor otherwise harmed Hereward or his. That Bourne had been seized by the king himself, together with Earl Morcar’s lands in those parts, as all men knew. That the said cook so pleased the king with a dish of stewed eel-pout, which he served up to him at Cambridge, and which the king had never eaten before, that the king begged the said cook of him Gilbert and took him away; and that after, so he heard, the said cook had begged the said manors of Bourne of the king, without the knowledge or consent of him Gilbert. That he therefore knew naught of the matter. That if Hereward meant to keep the king’s peace, he might live in Bourne till Doomsday, for aught he, Gilbert, cared. But that if he and his men meant to break the king’s peace, and attack Lincoln city, he Gilbert would nail their skins to the door of Lincoln Cathedral, as they used to do by the heathen Danes in old time. And that, therefore, they now understood each other.
At which Hereward laughed, and said that they had done that for many a year.
And now poured into Bourne from every side brave men and true,—some great holders dispossessed of their land; some the sons of holders who were not yet dispossessed; some Morcar’s men, some Edwin’s, who had been turned out by the king.