"Two Dozen Pike-Heads clashed down as by a Single Touch."
"I am the scrivener of the Abbey," Hugh called out from within this steel girdle, "and go forth to the Tolzey at behest of your master and mine—the Lord Duke of Gloster."
"And this merry fellow; hath the Duke need for him likewise?" the captain asked, with sharp glances. "I'm sworn his Grace looks more for headsmen than for morris-dancers, as to-day's wind blows."
"Put thy queries to the Duke himself," said Hugh; "and hold us no longer waiting here, as he waits at the Tolzey."
Grumbling in his beard, the captain dropped his hand, and the pikes flashed upward. Hugh and the mock fool passed forth, and turned their feet townwards across the trampled sward. At the church gate to their right hand, a greater body of armed men stood, and beyond these, within the churchyard, high plumes on knightly helmets nodded in the morning breeze. Of what was going forward there the two saw nothing, but hurried on, glad to pass unquestioned.
They came thus to the market-place, held clear by solid walls of troopers, mailed, and armed to the teeth, behind whom the townsfolk, now heartily of but one opinion, strove to win friends and peep between steel shoulders into the open space. Still unmolested, the boy, bearing his inkhorn and scroll well before him as a badge of craft, passed with his companion to the side of the cross—where workmen toiled with axe and mallet to rear a platform of newly hewn beams and boards—and held his course straight to the Tolzey.
"Saw you what they build, there by the cross?" whispered Sir Hereward. "It is a scaffold, where presently axes shall hew flesh and blood, not logs." And then he added, "Whither go we; into the very tusks of the boar?"
"Nay, but to get behind him," returned Hugh, in the same sidelong whisper. "Halt you at the Tolzey door; mix there with the throng which idly gapes upon the soldiery, until chance offers to steal through some alley to the open fields."
"And you leave me there?"