Aymery came riding down past the great pool where troopers were watering their horses, the beasts trampling and splashing in the oozy shallows, and sucking lustily despite the mud. Marpasse soon marked him down, and watched his face as they came within his ken. Marpasse saw Aymery go red as a boy, and being comforted by the man’s colour, she stole a glance at Denise. Denise’s face had been shining like the face of one inspired. Marpasse saw it cloud suddenly as though a shadow had fallen across it.
So they met, with the women under the yew tree fifty paces away watching them, and the splashing of the horses and the voices of the men merging into the great murmur that seemed to fill the woods. For the moment Aymery had nothing to say. Marpasse could have pricked him with the point of her knife to make him leap out of that slough of silence. Denise stood in the long grass, a whorl of golden flowers brushing her grey gown, her face white and troubled in the sunlight. Marpasse might have had a pair of dumb and irresponsive puppets on her hands. There was nothing left for her but to pull the strings.
“I am the brown woman who mended a wound, lording,” she began.
Aymery remembered her well enough. His face resembled a grey sky through which the sun was trying to shine and could not. He had his heart in his mouth but Denise did not help him. She stood there, as though her thoughts soared into some cold and brilliant corner of heaven. Yet only the surface had the sheen of ice. The deeps beneath were full of flux and tumult.
Marpasse, being a plain and impetuous woman, could have nudged both of them, and prompted both, at one and the same moment. Matters were not moving as she had forecasted, and these two people looked afraid of one another.
“A kiss on the mouth, lording, and your arms round her,” that was what she would have said.
Her words were:—
“Earl Simon may have told you the news.”
By the sharp look that Aymery gave Denise, Marpasse guessed that he knew the truth.
“To Lewes?” he asked her, with the uneasy air of a man urging himself to do something that seemed strangely difficult.