“Let the pole-cats play a little with Barnabo,” she said. “Do not ride furiously, dear lord! I can learn to serve at chess better than Barnabo.”
Gaillard caught at her, but she slipped past him up the stairs.
“There are two sorts of fools in the world, my Gaillard,” she said. “One is killed for the sake of a woman, the other through greed for a woman. Keep out of Barnabo’s path.”
Both Peter of Savoy and the Gascon knew whither Barnabo had ridden that April day. It was notorious that the Italian had kept a focaria or hearth-ward at a priest’s house of his in a valley beyond the hill called Bright Ling because of the glory of its heathlands in the summer. The woman—a Norman—was more comely than was well for Dan Barnabo’s name, and she had kept the house for him, and rendered it to him sweet and garnished whenever he chose to ride that way.
Gaillard and his men marched past Dallington, where Guillaume Sancto de Leodegario was lord of the manor, and on over Bright Ling with the furze in full bloom. The little red spy jogged along beside the Gascon’s horse. He led them into a deep valley, a valley full of the grey-green trunks of oak trees, and the brown wreckage of last year’s bracken. A stream dived and winked in the bottoms, and at the end of a piece of grassland the thatch of the priest’s house shelved under the very boughs of the oaks. No smoke rose from the place. It seemed silent and deserted as Gaillard and his men came trampling through the dead bracken.
Gaillard’s eyes swept hillside and valley, for he was shrewd enough to guess that many an alert shadow had dogged them on the march that day. He dismounted, sent his archers into the woods as scouts, and taking the pick of his men-at-arms, marched up to the silent house, holding his shield ready to catch any treacherous arrow that might be shot from the dark squints. A wooden perch shadowed the main entry, and Gaillard saw that the door stood ajar, and that the flagstones paving the porch were littered with rushes, and caked with mud as though many feet had passed to and fro over the stones.
Gaillard pushed the door open with the point of his sword. It gave to him innocently enough, and he crossed the threshold, and stood staring at something that the men behind him could not see.
The place had the dimness of twilight, lit as it was by the narrow lancets cut in the thickness of the wall. Not three paces from Gaillard, their feet nearly touching the floor, two bodies dangled on ropes from the black beams of the roof. The face of the one was grey; of the other, black and turgid; for one had died by the sword, the other by the rope.
The body with the black face was still twisting to and fro as a joint twists on a spit before the fire. The arms had been pinioned, and the man’s tongue been drawn out, and the head of an arrow thrust through it. The face could scarcely be recognised, but by the clothes Gaillard knew him for Dan Barnabo, the Italian, lutanist, lover, spoiler of the poor.
Gaillard touched the body. It was still warm. His men were crowding in, peering over each other’s shoulders so that the doorway was full of faces, shields, and swords.