Croquart turned his hands everywhere to help his men. Whistling, as he might have whistled as a boy when splitting carcasses in Flanders, he looked to the horses, cut down underwood, the fresh, green foam of the woods in spring, and built a screen between the trunks of two great oaks. A horse-cloth stretched across two poles gave some sort of shelter. Business was brisk and money forthcoming, despite the rout at Josselin and the loss of all his baggage. A ransom of twenty thousand crowns was not to be counted on every day of the week, and with the Sieur de Tinteniac as a hostage he could bargain with Beaumanoir should the marshal be discourteous enough to continue offering bribes for his head.
Croquart plunged down the slope of the hill where he had chosen ground for the night, to reappear with a bundle of freshly cut broom, which he tossed down under cover of the screen of boughs. His men’s cloaks were purloined to cover the litter; the fellows could go damp when a Tinteniac was to be kept dry. Tête Bois had already persuaded the fire to blaze, and Croquart turned to his prisoners with a smile that suggested supper.
“A bed, sire, for you and for madame.”
They saw, and avoided each other’s eyes. Croquart, officious in his courtesies, picked up Tinteniac and laid him on the pile of broom, with a saddle on which he might rest his shoulders.
“Room for two, sire,” and he looked at Tiphaïne as though it would have pleased him to lift her as he had lifted Tinteniac. Her immobility discouraged him, and the dusk covered the color on her face. She was watching the flames leap up through the crackling wood, and thinking of poor Gilbert and poor Gilles, left to be spoiled of their rings in the lonely Loudeac woods. Only that morning she had seen their two heads, tawny and black, bowed over the chess-board as they made, little knowing it, the last moves in the game of life. Croquart had killed them, yet stood there offering her the impertinences of his butcher’s tongue. The two lads might have been two sparrows caught in a trap and left with their necks wrung, for all the reflection the deed caused the Fleming.
She went and sat with Tinteniac on the bed Croquart had made for them. Her mock husband felt the unwillingness of her nearness to him, an antagonism, that he would have found in few ladies of the court.
“I remember we have a part to play,” she said, when the Fleming had moved away some paces.
“You trust me, child?”
“Yes, at all times. Yet to lie to this fellow makes me despise myself. I cannot forget the Breton blood he has upon his hands.”
“We shall remember it,” and his eyes grew alive with the firelight. “Mother of God, does a Tinteniac forget such things!”