“Go to, then,” saith she, as she followed me into our chamber. “Whate’er you found, you left me too poor to pay the jeweller. I would fain have had a sapphire pin more than I got, but your raid on my purse disabled me thereof. The rogue would give me no credit.”
“Hear but my tale,” said I, “and if when it be told you regret your sapphire pin, I beseech you say so.”
So I told her in plain words, neither ’minishing nor adding, how I had found them, and the story I had heard from the poor woman. She listened, cool enough at first, but ere I made an end the water stood in her eyes.
“Ha, chétife!” said she, when I stayed me. “I’ll pay the maid another time. Trust me, Dame Cicely, I believed not a word. If you had been cheated as oft—! Verily, I am sorry I sent not man to see how matters stood with them. Well, I am fain you gave her the money, after all. But, trust me, you took my breath away!”
“And my own belike,” said I.
I think Hilda and hers stood not in much want the rest of that winter. But whenever she came with work for me, either Margaret my maid, or Jack’s old groom, a sober man and an ancient, walked back with her.
Meantime Sir Roger de Mortimer played first viol in the Court minstrelsy. Up and yet higher up he crept, till he could creep no further, as I writ a few leaves back. On the eve of Saint Pancras was crowned the new Queen of France in the Abbey of Saint Denis, which is to France as Westminster Abbey to us: and there ramped my Lord of Mortimer in the very suite of the Queen herself, and in my Lord of Chester’s own livery. Twice-banished traitor, he appeared in the self presence of the King that had banished him, and of the wife of his own natural Prince, to whom he had done treason of the deepest dye. And not one voice said him nay.
Thus went matters on till the beginning of September, 1326. The Queen abode at Paris; the King of France made no sign: our King’s trusty messager, Donald de Athole, came and went with letters (and if it were not one of his letters the Queen dropped into the brasier right as I came one day into her chamber, I marvel greatly); but nought came forth that we her ladies heard. On the even of the fifth of September, early, came Sir John de Ostrevant to the Palace, and had privy speech of the Queen—none being thereat but her confessor and Dame Isabel de Lapyoun: and he was scarce gone forth when, as we sat in our chamber a-work, the Queen herself looked in and called Dame Elizabeth forth.
I thought nought of it. I turned down hem, and cut off some threads, and laid down scissors, and took up my needle to thread afresh—in the Hotel de Saint Pol at Paris. And that needle was not threaded but in the Abbey of Saint Edmund’s Bury in Suffolk, twenty days after. Yet if man had told me it should so be, I had felt ready to laugh him to scorn. Ah me, what feathers we be, that a breath from God Almighty can waft hither or thither at His will!
Never but that once did I see Dame Elizabeth to burst into a chamber. And when she so did, I was in such amaze thereat that I fair gasped to see it.