“If one of us is taken, brother, let not the other tarry. Remember Denise.”
Grimbald understood him.
“Come,” he said in an undertone, and they crossed the garden side by side.
Now there was a trestle-bridge from the garden over the moat, a footbridge made of a single plank that could be thrust across and withdrawn at pleasure. A wicket in the palisade led to the bridge. Aymery unbarred the gate, and ran the plank forward on to the trestles.
“We shall trick them,” he said grimly, “quick, they have broken in.”
He ran across the bridge, Grimbald following, the plank creaking and sagging under the priest’s weight. Aymery had stooped to drag the plank away again, when he heard Grimbald give a short, deep cry, and saw him spring forward and smite at something with his axe.
“Guard, brother, guard.”
Steel crashed upon steel, a glitter of sparks flying from axe and helmet. An arrow stopped quivering in Aymery’s shield as he sprang forward to Grimbald’s aid. Men rose at him out of the darkness. Dimly in the midst of the waving swords, he had a glimpse of two men clinging to Grimbald. He saw the priest shake them off, and beat them down before him as a boy snaps thistles with a stick. There was a rush of armed men in the darkness, the dash of steel against steel as they blundered one against another. The red splutter of a torch came tossing out of the night, with the hoarse shouting of men trying to tell friend from foe. Grimbald and Aymery lost each other, and fought each for his own hand.
CHAPTER VI
Through the darkness of the night went Denise, her grey cloak passing amid the beech trees like some dim ghost shape that drifts with the night breeze. She had been restless and distraught all day, her splendour of peace ruffled, her heart filling with a distrust of the near future. To begin with, out of the grey fog of the morning had come the man on the black horse, the man with the red eyes and the insolent scoffing mouth. Gaillard had made her shudder despite her pride, for she had learnt to hate the look of such a man before the woods had hidden her from the world. Feeling a shadow of evil near her, Denise had gone down to Goldspur after the Gascon and his men had ridden on, and had found the place deserted, so many silent hovels in a silent landscape. She had wandered up to the manor house, and found the same silence there, the same foreshadowings of tragedy.