The Young Lovell: A Romance

by Ford Madox Ford

He closed one eye slowly and then he sighed. "Well, I must take you down," he said, "I am a reckless devil, woe is me, and if there are no Widdringtons and the rest there now, I know that Wall Houses would burn to-morrow and I should hang when they caught me.... But oh, I repent me to let you go...." And he regarded her with very amorous and melancholy laughing eyes.

"Friend Henry," she laughed, "if you will open the doors for me, for me, for your good behaviour you may kiss me twice, once here and once at the gate, for I dare say, if the truth be known, though you are too much drunk to be clear and not drunk enough to speak the truth, you are more the friend of me and of my love than any here."

"Well, they are a curst crew," he said, "and I will not hang with them; only, where there are pickings I must have my poke, and that is good Latin."

So, approaching and lifting his legs, as high as he might in the politer fashion of the day, though once in his progress he fell against the wall, he took her by the hand and kissed her on the cheek. She said she wondered how a man could make himself smell so like a beast with wine, and so he led her forth from the room, after he had waved away the guards and after she had taken leave of the Lady Rohtraut who spoke never a word. And that was as much as Elizabeth Campstones knew of her at that time, except that she promised not to rest a night in bed until she had roused all the Dacres of the North to come to her aunt's assistance.

But afterwards Elizabeth heard that the Vesey of Wall Houses had conducted the lady very courteously, not only to the gate, but, having found her a horse and guards, to her very tower of Glororem. And on the way he gave her very good counsel as to how she should aid her aunt. But that had proved a very difficult matter, for the Dacres themselves, in those disturbed and critical times, lay under such clouds of suspicion that the best of them were detained in London near the King and his court; so that, if they were not actually in the Tower or some other prison, they might as well have been. As for coming to rescue the Lady Rohtraut by force, they could not do it and, as for aiding her by any process of law, that was a matter well-nigh impossible for its slowness and because the Knight of Cullerford had stolen all her deeds and titles. Moreover, all the middle part of Yorkshire was in a state of rebellion, so that it was very difficult for messengers to come through, either the one way or the other. It is true that a lawyer from Durham came to the Castle and sought an interview with the lady on behalf of the Prince Palatine, but they pelted him from the archway with dung at first and then with flint-stones so that they never heard what his errand was. And although many in that neighbourhood would gladly have set upon the Castle and sacked it, it was difficult to find a leader and head. For the Percy was afraid, not knowing how the law was or how he should best please the King, and the Nevilles were in the South, so that there was no one left of great eminence.

The Lady Margaret and some young squires of degree raised a force of a couple of hundred or so and began to march on the Castle. But before they reached it the men-at-arms repented, saying that they would not be led by a woman and a parcel of beardless boys; and when the Lady Margaret beat them with a whip these men shrugged their shoulders and rode back the faster to their homes. She had two of them led to the gallows and the ropes round their necks till they fell on their knees and sued pardons. But that did not mend things much and there the business sat.

The Lady Rohtraut came to herself one night and knew it was no dream. And she would have letters written to the Lord of Croy in Germany, that was her mother's father, that he might come to her rescue. And no doubt he would have sent ships, though he was a very ancient man. He was a mighty prince, and had taken prisoner, in the old time, Edward Dacre, the Lady Rohtraut's father, in a battle that his suzerain the Duke of Burgundy, who was of uncertain mind, fought against the English in Flanders. So, waiting in the Castle for his ransom to come, Edward Dacre loved the Duke's daughter, the Princess Rohtraut, and was beloved by her. And, at the intercession of the Talbot, for the better soldering of a new friendship between the English and the Burgundians, the Duke, though sorely against his will, had given his daughter to Edward Dacre, he being made a baron of England on the day of the wedding. Her mother, the Princess Rohtraut, was still alive and lived with her son, the Lord Dacre, in London. But between mother and daughter there was a lawsuit about some of these very lands that her daughters sought to take from her, and in that way there was no commerce between them.

Thus it was that the Lady Rohtraut was very haughty, and would in no way submit to the importunities of her daughters and their husbands, for she had the pride of the Dacres and of a Princess of Low Germany. The daughters would still have had her marry the Vesey of Wall Houses, so that they might have the management of her properties, but she answered that for nothing in the world would she do that thing, and that it would be to give them both to Satan. She had the right to an annual dower of 3,000 French crowns and to all the furnishings that had been taken by her husband, upon their marriage, from her Castle at Cramlinton, as well as her houses at Plessey and Killingworth. And she had the right to enter again, her husband being dead, into the possession and administration of those places as well as of her lands by Morpeth.

She was minded to live as a proud and wealthy dowager and she was not minded to abate one jot of her rights and possessions to buy her freedom, though her daughters and their husbands came day by day and clamoured to her to do it.

So there abode, like a prisoner in that little room, the Lady Rohtraut till that hour. All of her servants were driven away from her, and she had only Elizabeth Campstones to dress and undress her: and of linen she had so little that the old woman must come forth and wash it every three days. And, when she brought it forth, the daughters searched it into the very seams to see that there was no letter to the Duke of Croy or to the Dacres concealed within it. And the Lady Rohtraut fell ill, and she thought her daughters had poisoned her with a fig laid down in honey, till the doctor cured her with another such fig, the one poison, if it were a poison, driving out the other.