“Do you so?” saith Dame Joan in that low quiet voice. “So do not I. She will see him yet again, or I mistake much.”
“Ha, chétife!” I made answer. “It is full well we be on our road back to Paris, for there at least will he not dare to come.”
“Not dare?”
“Surely not, for the King of France, which himself hath banished him, should never suffer it.”
Dame Joan helped herself to a roasted plover with a smile. When the sewer was gone, quoth she—
“I think, Dame Cicely, you know full little whether of Sir Roger de Mortimer or of the King of France. For the last, he is as easily blinded a man as you may lightly see; and if our Queen his sister told him black was white, he should but suppose that she saw better than he. And for the other—is there aught in all this world, whether as to bravery or as to wickedness, that Sir Roger de Mortimer would not dare?”
“Dear heart!” cried I. “I made account we had done with men of that order.”
“You did?” Dame Joan’s tone, and the somewhat dry smile which went with it, said full plainly, “In no wise.”
“Well, soothly we had enough and to spare!” quoth I. “There was my Lord of Lancaster—God rest his soul!—and Sir Piers de Gavaston (if he were as ill man as some said).”
“He was not a saint, I think,” she said: “yet could I name far worser men than he.”