There was a moment’s agony. The bed was righted; the lad thrust back under the quilt. One of the women who had crept on ahead came back, waving them forward. The knot of figures struggled out into the daylight and disappeared from Isoult’s view. She ran up the steps, and her eyes came level with the flagstones of a small courtyard. The men and women had carried the bed across it, and were disappearing through a doorway in the opposite wall. One of the women glanced back anxiously over her shoulder, for she could hear men coming down a long slope that led into the courtyard. She did not see Isoult. Then they vanished through the doorway, and Isoult climbed the last steps, and running across the court, laid her cheek to the doorpost, and peered round. A sloping passage went down under a vaulted roof, and at the end of it she saw water swishing to and fro, and the legs of a man standing beside the black snout of a barge. All of a sudden she understood. Richard the King was hidden in that bed, and they were smuggling him out of the Tower lest this bold trick should be betrayed. She heard voices behind her, and starting back into the courtyard, found herself looking into the eyes of Guy the Stallion. He carried a bloody sword over his shoulder, and some of the lowest curs from out of the city were at his heels. “Hullo, my wench, what tricks have you been playing?” He caught her by the bosom, and she humoured him, knowing Fulk’s peril and her own. “Playing at hide and seek with the Knight of the Bloody Sword, O brave Sir Guy!” She laughed in his face. “Come. I hear the Princess is above. I have a desire to look on a Princess.” “By cock, you shall. We’ll show her a comelier woman than herself.” CHAPTER XXI At Mile End Fulk Ferrers sat on his white horse, a little apart from his lords and gentlemen, who held together like desperate men expecting treachery. With the rich colours of their clothes and the glint of their harness they looked like some noble pile of plunder heaped up in the midst of a ploughed field, for the brown men of the soil in their thousands closed them in on every side. Fulk had ridden forward thirty paces ahead of his company. He sat there on his white horse, with the peasants crowding round with their solemn, hairy faces. Imperturbable, stung to a tense audacity, he looked down at them with fearless eyes; sometimes he smiled; he knew himself their King. “Sirs, here are we together, King Richard and his Commons. Speak out. Am I afraid to listen to your desires?” They surged round him, looking up into his face, held by his blue eyes and the mouth that did not falter. He had left over yonder the lords whom they hated, and had ridden into their midst, a King who was not afraid. They cheered him. “Long live King Richard.” He held up a fist. “Long life to myself, say I, my friends. But to your business. I am your King. I am here. I listen. Let no one come between us.”