Great Britain -- History -- Tudors, 1485-1603 -- Fiction; Historical fiction
So, when those men caught up with the Young Lovell, which they did near
Fontoreen, west of Morpeth, they told him of the cunning of that
husbandman. So the Young Lovell did not know whether to be more vexed
with that peasant, because it was not so much love for his master as
greed that made him be half-hanged, or whether to marvel that such a low
fellow should have read his mind so well, for surely he would never have
hanged him unshriven.
They rode on all that day until they came to Sea Houses by North
Sunderland, having covered nearly sixty miles of rough country, for they
went by the South Forest and past Rothbury and the high moors so that
they might not be observed. Four miles from Sea Houses, it being then
ten o’clock at night, the Young Lovell sent his men forward towards
Castle Lovell, and in a fisherman’s hut on the sounding pebbles of the
sea he found the monk Francis, who was very glad to see him and glad of
his news. The monk had been that day in the village of Castle Lovell
and had found that the hermit was indeed dead. So he had appointed the
day following at six in the evening for skilled masons to come and
disinter that holy man to give him holy burial. For he thought that by
that hour the Young Lovell would be well established in his Castle.
So when they had exchanged their news the lord and the monk lay down to
sleep a little on a pile of nets that the fisherman heaped up for them
in a corner of his hut, he himself lying outside upon seaweed with his
wife. At a quarter to three he waked them and they set out upon their
voyage to the White Tower. There was a good following breeze from the
due south, so that they might well come to Castle Lovell in an hour or a
little under. But the dancing motion of that little boat made that monk
Francis very ill, which was great pity for the Young Lovell. With
fasting, prayer and vigil that good monk was become very weak, though he
had once been a very strong knight. He lay on the bottom-boards of that
boat, and so deeply had he fainted that when they had come to the little
harbourage beneath the White Tower he was insensible and they could not
tell that he was not dead. So there was no getting him up the ladder of
iron spikes that was all the way there was into that tower from the sea.
The Young Lovell would not trust those spikes to bear the two of them or
he would have carried the monk up. So he climbed up alone, and Richard
Bek and the others were awaiting. But the fisherman rowed that monk
straight to the shore and carried him over the sand to the township.
Here in a hut he found the Lady Margaret of Glororem, who had ridden all
that day and night before to come there. So she tended that monk and in
about an hour he could stand again. But then there was no way of coming
into that tower.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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