“Damnation—may not a man eat?”
The Lord of Troy sat in his great padded chair with a writing-board on his knees, and quills and an inkhorn on the table at his side. He looked white about the gills, with that whiteness that tells of a faltering heart; his hand had lost its steady, clerkly niceness, and there were blots upon the paper. He had not been barbered, and still wore a gorgeous crimson bed-gown that made his thin face look all the yellower.
“What’s this—what’s this, man? Shut that door, Bennington. Not more bad news?”
He was petulant to the point of childishness. Fulk de Lisle’s red-brown eyes looked at him with veiled and subtle scorn.
“I could not make it worse, my lord. The Forest is up.”
“The Forest—in arms against us! Man—you are dreaming!”
“I am very wide awake, sir. We were ambushed last night as we lay outside Woodmere. They must have been a hundred to our thirty. We made a fight of it; that is all that can be said.”
Roger Bland’s face twitched.
“How many men came back with you?”
“None, my lord.”