Luke, too, turned up a little later and was brought to see the King. For fear of arrest he had been keeping out of the way till he had heard of the Duke’s flight. Giles was indeed glad to see his friend again and asked that he might be taken, too. So the King appointed him as esquire to Giles himself. It seemed that all knights had one esquire at least in their service; and thus Luke joined the royal retinue as right-hand man to the King’s Finder.
Giles asked the lame boy if he had seen or heard anything of Agnes the Applewoman. But he could give no news of her. And though the Haunted Inn was searched again from cellar to attic, and Giles kept the King’s shell constantly in his pocket hoping to hear her speak of him, no word of her, of where she had gone or what she was doing, could be learned. And they were forced, for the present, to give up hope of reaching her. Giles was sorry about this, because he wanted the King to meet her also.
‘You know, Luke,’ he said, ‘I think His Majesty should have her, too, in his service. He needs clever people. And, after all, she is the one who should be thanked for everything—even the King’s safety. For it was she who gave us the shell and told us what it could do. Do you suppose that wretched Duke did her some mischief before he took to flight?’
‘No, I don’t believe so,’ said Luke. ‘I fancy I’d have heard of it if she had been taken. What I think is that she is more scared than ever of being charged with witchcraft. You see, now that she has made me completely well, when I was supposed to be a hopeless cripple, they’d likely say that she had used some magic on me or performed some trick with the Devil’s help.’
Then, for the first time since he had seen his friend again, Giles noticed that he no longer carried a crutch.
‘Oh, Luke!’ he cried. ‘Can you use both your legs now?’
Luke drew himself up squarely on both feet, firm and even.
‘I’m a whole man now, Giles,’ he laughed. ‘I haven’t used the crutch since I lost it. It was when you leapt out to give the King the shell. I lost it between the legs of that soldier who was going to strike you down. Then I ran like the mischief down the street lest I’d be caught by the guard. And I never noticed that I had used both legs—nor even thought of the crutch I’d left behind—till I reached a hiding-place.’
For a moment Giles stared dumbfounded at the happy face and the strong and healthy figure of his once lame friend. Then he murmured as if to himself:
‘ “Giles, the patron saint of cripples,” that’s what the King said. It was after him that I was named. Yet it was Agnes that did it, Agnes the Applewoman—Shragga the Witch! Listen, Luke, do you think maybe she is a saint, instead of a witch, a saint in some disguise—perhaps the Patron Giles himself?’