Of his past, thou know nearly as much as I, though thou may not know the wondrous chivalry and true nobility of character of him men call!!!!!
Here the letter stopped, evidently cut short by the dagger of the assassin.
“Mon Dieu! The damnable luck!” cried De Montfort, “but a second more and the name we have sought for twenty years would have been writ. Didst ever see such hellish chance as plays into the hand of the fiend incarnate since that long gone day when his sword pierced the heart of Lady Maud by the postern gate beside the Thames? The Devil himself must watch o’er him.
“There be naught more we can do here,” he continued. “I should have been on my way to Fletching hours since. Come, my gentlemen, we will ride south by way of Leicester and have the good Fathers there look to the decent burial of this holy man.”
The party mounted and rode rapidly away. Noon found them at Leicester, and three days later, they rode into the baronial camp at Fletching.
At almost the same hour, the monks of the Abbey of Leicester performed the last rites of Holy Church for the peace of the soul of Father Claude and consigned his clay to the churchyard.
And thus another innocent victim of an insatiable hate and vengeance which had been born in the King’s armory twenty years before passed from the eyes of men.
CHAPTER XVI
While Norman of Torn and his thousand fighting men marched slowly south on the road toward Dover, the army of Simon de Montfort was preparing for its advance upon Lewes, where King Henry, with his son Prince Edward, and his brother, Prince Richard, King of the Romans, together with the latter’s son, were entrenched with their forces, sixty thousand strong.
Before sunrise on a May morning in the year 1264, the barons’ army set out from its camp at Fletching, nine miles from Lewes and, marching through dense forests, reached a point two miles from the city, unobserved.