But the nurse Isolda, terrified by the shouting of her beloved son and
lord, leapt from her bed and went to the window, filling the house with
dreadful cries. The traitors, alarmed by the mighty uproar, although the
place was lonely and so far from the centre of the town that nobody
could have come to see what the noise was, were on the point of letting
their victim go, when Bertrand of Artois, who felt he was more guilty
than the others, seized the prince with hellish fury round the waist,
and after a desperate struggle got him down; then dragging him by the
hair of his head to a balcony which gave upon the garden, and pressing
one knee upon his chest, cried out to the others—
“Come here, barons: I have what we want to strangle him with.”
And round his neck he passed a long cord of silk and gold, while the
wretched man struggled all he could. Bertrand quickly drew up the knot,
and the others threw the body over the parapet of the balcony, leaving
it hanging between earth and sky until death ensued. When the Count of
Terlizzi averted his eyes from the horrid spectacle, Robert of Cabane
cried out imperiously—
“What are you doing there? The cord is long enough for us all to hold:
we want not witnesses, we want accomplices!”
As soon as the last convulsive movements of the dying man had ceased,
they let the corpse drop the whole height of the three storeys, and
opening the doors of the hall, departed as though nothing had happened.
Isolda, when at last she contrived to get a light, rapidly ran to the
queen’s chamber, and finding the door shut on the inside, began to call
loudly on her Andre. There was no answer, though the queen was in the
room. The poor nurse, distracted, trembling, desperate, ran down all the
corridors, knocked at all the cells and woke the monks one by one,
begging them to help her look for the prince. The monks said that they
had indeed heard a noise, but thinking it was a quarrel between soldiers
drunken perhaps or mutinous, they had not thought it their business to
interfere. Isolda eagerly, entreated: the alarm spread through the
convent; the monks followed the nurse, who went on before with a torch.
She entered the garden, saw something white upon the grass, advanced
trembling, gave one piercing cry, and fell backward.
The wretched Andre was lying in his blood, a cord round his neck as
though he were a thief, his head crushed in by the height from which he
fell. Then two monks went upstairs to the queen’s room, and respectfully
knocking at the door, asked in sepulchral tones—
“Madam, what would you have us do with your husband’s corpse?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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