“After the sword come the Cross and the mass book,” he said. “You will not quarrel with my conscience, sire, if I ride out to-morrow.”
“Who—in Christendom—is worth the labour of a quarrel? Command your friends, and tread upon your enemies. Go out, and heal the sick, when the husbands are not at home.”
Etoile, who had been listening at the door, pulled Gaillard into a dark corner on the stairs when he came out to see to the guards.
“So Barnabo is going a-love-making,” she said. “Good. Perhaps he will not come back again.”
And she sang to Peter of Savoy that night, a desirable woman whose face betrayed no care.
CHAPTER III
Denise was so much the saint and the Lady of the Goldspur woods that the country folk had almost ceased to wonder whence she had come, and what her past had been. She was Sancta Denise to them, a woman to whom they went when they were sick or in trouble, who came and prayed for them, and smiled on their children with her miraculous eyes. All the woodland folk in the hundreds round looked on Denise as a saint, a child of mystery who dwelt up yonder amid the great beech trees under the clouds. Offerings were left before her gate, milk, bread, eggs, and herbs, the offerings of the poor. If there was digging to be done, or the grass to be scythed in the glade, some of Aymery’s villeins would be there at dawn, working like brown gnomes in the dusk of the breaking day. Four times a year a pedlar brought her the gold thread for her orfrays work, for Denise had wonderful hands, and her embroidery had been worn by queens. The money that she earned Denise spent among the poor, and she might have walked from Rye to Shoreham, and no Sussex man would have laid hands upon her, save to touch her gown for a blessing.
Olivia, Aymery’s mother, alone had known Denise’s history, and Olivia was dead. Some had said that she was the “love child” of a great lady, others a “ward” who had fled from the King’s court rather than be married to some creature who had offered the King money. But Denise was Denise, and her past was of no account, though any hind could have sworn that she was no peasant’s child. The cell in the beech wood had been built for her by Dame Olivia, and the ground about it turned into a garden. Denise had become part of the woodland life, a tender and mysterious figure that threw a glamour over the hearts of all.
Her coming had been soon after the great famine, when the crops had failed after a wet summer. Death had passed over the land like a plague, and in the towns the dead had lain for days unburied. The famine had left sickness behind it, sick women, and sick babes at the breast, as though the whole countryside had grown feeble for lack of bread. Denise had come down from her cell in the beech wood, a veritable Lady of Compassion. It was not the bread that she had given, but the pity and the tenderness that had enshrined her in the hearts of all the people. It was as though she had magic power, a glory given of God and the Virgin. Men soon spoke of miracles. Sick children were brought to her, and water taken from her holy spring. The abbots and priors of the south heard of her, and more than one “house” considered the value that might be set upon a saint.
Perhaps Denise’s power lay largely in her youth, for she was no ulcerous and lean recluse, but a woman in the morning of her beauty, a beauty that was strange and elfin-like, rich as an autumn in red leaf. She had but to look at men, and they felt an awe of her; at children, and they came to her like birds to a witch. The hair under the grey hood had the colour of copper, with tinges of red and of gold. Her eyes were between amber and the brown of a woodland pool, her skin so clear and white, despite the sun and the wind, that men believed her heart could be seen shining like a red gem beneath. Denise was tall, and broad across the bosom. Her fingers were so long, and slim, and white, that the superstitious believed that pearls might drop from them, and that not even the brown soil of her garden could cling to those miraculous hands.