“A bandage, what shall we do for a bandage?”
Aymery tore his surcoat into strips, and knotting them together, he gave the end to Marpasse.
“Raise her, gently, gently, my man.”
While Aymery held Denise limp and still warm, with her head and her hair upon his hauberk, Marpasse wound and rewound the bandage about her body, drawing the swathings as tightly as she could.
When she had ended it, she put her mouth to Denise’s mouth, and felt the white throat with her fingers.
“Life yet,” she said.
Then she and Aymery looked into each other’s eyes.
“What next?”
That was what they asked each other.
Now Marpasse knew the country in those parts, having lived near at one time in the house of a lord’s verderer, and gone a-hawking, and a-hunting in the woods. When she and Denise had started on their flight from Gaillard and the King’s army, Marpasse had had a certain house of Sempringham nuns in her mind’s eye. It was a little convent hid in a valley, aloof from the world, and very peaceful. Marpasse told Aymery of the place. They could carry Denise there, a forlorn venture, for both felt that she would die upon the road.