She was aflame in the light of the sunset. Her face was ivory, intense and ardent with glory. Her waywardness and fondness for disguise were gone; her true self, steady and unafraid, gazed out on me. The havoc of passion was replaced by the contentment of a desire all but satisfied.
“Let’s go to the castle first,” she said. “You remember its story?”
I remembered: how Robert the Devil, Duke of the Normans, had found Arlotta, the tanner’s daughter, washing linen in that same little beck; and had loved her at sight and had carried her off to his castle on the rock, where was born William the Bastard, conqueror of England and greatest of all the Normans.
Leaving the car in the village street, we climbed the rock and gained admittance. As we gazed down from the splintered battlements into the winding streets, Fiesole drew me to her, throwing her arm carelessly about my neck as though we were boy and girl.
“Look,” she whispered, pointing sheer down to the foot of the precipice, “there’s the tannery still standing and the beck running past it. And see, there are girls washing linen; one of them might be Arlotta. In nine hundred years nothing has altered.”
We stole across the threshold of the stone-paved room in which the Conqueror was born. “I’m going to shock you,” she said. “I always think of Falaise as another Bethlehem—the Bethlehem of war. The Bethlehem of peace has crumbled, shattered by war; but here’s Falaise unchanged since the day when Robert the Devil seized Arlotta and galloped up the rock, and bolted his castle door. It sets one thinking——”
“Thinking something dangerous, I’ll warrant.”
She brushed the rebellious curls from her forehead and leant back against the wall laughing. “Thinking all kinds of thoughts: that it pays best in this world to steal what you want.”
“Perhaps—if you steal strongly.”
“But I have stolen strongly; see how I’ve carried you off.”