"Let the peasants come!" said William fitzOsbern. "They must learn to know their masters; but please the saints! we shall not need to take the lives of many. Perchance the sweet peers of heaven may send that Mortemar find us before long.... Cousin, thou hast a pleasant view from thy fortress, even through such a narrow peephole. H'm! Rich forfeitures for our sovereign Lord! Thou shalt trouble thyself no more, cousin Richard, concerning lands and mills and cheating Saxons. As far and as wide as eye can see, from the sky that is our Lord God's footstool unto Satan's fires in the centre of earth, this same pleasant country shall be thine own, in reward for this day's fealty and service, and so I, William of Hereford and Breteuil, promise thee in the name of the King.... Nay, no thanks: kneel but one moment longer.... It is meet, sirs, is it not, that our leader in this engagement should hold the honourable rank of chevalier? We will account this a field of battle. Rise up, Sir Richard fitzHugh le Scrope!" The next morning, when the Earl of Hereford had gone his way, and the bodies of the only two Englishmen slain by Ralph de Mortemar's rescuing party had been borne to burial, the new lord of the Moor, of Ashford, of Ludford, and of Stanage rode out to display the extent and resources of his manors to his astonished lady. Their itinerary ended, they stood in the evening outside the moat and gazed at the placid, billowing country beneath them. Although by the cold, saffron light of a February sunset the misty course of the Teme was the only certain landmark and it was hard to distinguish meadow and ploughland, pasture and forest, they had to feast their eyes until the last glimmer faded. "With right tillage," said Richard, "it should yield me thrice its yearly value in grain. And I will have yet more sheep, and yet more cattle: there is now place for four times as many as ever I bred.... I have made thee great and famous, as I promised; and Osbern, with the Earl to favour him, should be an even greater lord than I.... Our fishpond shall go forward upon the morrow. What sayest thou to an orchard yonder, planted with apples of Normandy? and I think that Gascon vines would ripen passably upon our southern slope. O Alftrude, thou knowest how I have loved and pondered this land this many a year; and we shall have great profit of it, ma belle, thou and I together." Alftrude dwelt at Richard's Castle well content; for, as she sometimes observed when she looked round upon her flocks, her herds and her horses, her orchards, her cornfields, her vineyards, her chickens, ducks and geese, her hounds and her falcons, her fishpond, her smooth green lawn, her yew-tree alley, her doves and her peacocks, and her band of healthy children, there was no reason at all why she should not.