The Young Lovell: A Romance

by Ford Madox Ford

"Aye, my cousin was always one for fair women."

"So he kissed and fondled them; it was so horrid a sight...." the lawyer went on.

"Now is it a horrid thing," the lady asked, "to see a fine lording kiss a fair woman?"

"I only know," the lawyer said, "that at once all we three fell to devising how you, ah, most gentle lady, might be saved from the embrace of this lost man; and how that poor lording might be saved from his evil ways, and have his lands and all his heritage preserved to him."

"And the upshot," the lady asked, with a dry pleasantness, "was what the Decies did in the Great Hall."

When the Young Lovell, sitting amongst the furze and broom, had heard so far, he sighed with a deep satisfaction. The old Elizabeth had told her tale of sorcery alleged against himself at an intolerable length, dwelling on the nature of linen clouts here and there, and upon all that she had said to the Lady Rohtraut when she lay in the swoon. But he kept himself quiet and did not interrupt her; he had listened to her tales since he had been a young boy, and knew that if you hastened her they took five times as long. Yet he sat all the while on tenterhooks for fear she should say they had seen his meeting with the lady that sat upon a white horse amongst doves and sparrows. Had they seen that it might have gone ill with him in a suit at law. For, if they had seen it, it was twenty to one that there would be other witnesses; the place was well frequented by people journeying from Bamburgh to Holy Island. Nay, he would have been visible to the very fishers upon the sea, and to stay with such a lady, he well knew—though at the moment he sighed deeply—would be accounted a felony of the deepest magic kind in any ecclesiastical court.

But now he knew that this lawyer was simply lying, and that was an easier thing. He saw, and so he told Elizabeth Campstones, how they had hit upon that tale. The lawyer coming by the chapel, after the Young Lovell had threatened him with death for the moving of his neighbour's landstones, and the old witch meeting with him, after she had been threatened with drowning for her wicked ways; both trembling with fear, since they knew him for a man of his word and a weighty but just lord in those lands, had come together to the chapel door. No doubt they had entered in, meaning to steal his armour that was visible lying there, and hold it for ransom as the price of their miserable lives. But in the deep porch they would see the Decies snoring like a hog.

Him they wakened, and, the old witch's mind running on sorcery, the lawyer's on suits, and the Decies desiring to have his heritage and his bride, whilst the other two desired to save their lives; all three together had hit upon this stratagem that would give them what they desired. For in those days there was in Northumberland a stern hatred of the black arts, which had grown the greater since the twelve children of Hexham, two years before, had been slain, that their blood and members might stew in a witch's broth—a thing proven by many competent witnesses. So that, if the Decies should come in and claim the Young Lovell's knighthood, name, and the rest, he might, with the support of his father, make a pretty good suit of it, and, maybe, take the whole. And, if the Young Lovell should come back soon for his armour, they would murder him. Thus, the lawyer, and the witch, the one with a rope to cast over his neck, and the other with a sharp dagger, hid waiting behind the thick pillars, whilst the Decies dressed in his half-brother's harness.

And it had worked better for them than they had expected, so that now they held the Castle, and the law might be very hard set, if it ever made the essay, to get them out of it.

For, as Elizabeth Campstones presently told him, they had taken all the charters and the deeds of the Castle to Haltwhistle, where the one knight had them hidden up, and all the deeds and charters of his mother's lands and houses to Cullerford, where the other kept them. The Castle itself they held all three, the Decies and the two knights—or rather their two ladies—being captains there by turns of three days each, and dividing the revenues of it very fairly.