So they went up together, and there found Gammer Harlock busy bed-making. She was an old woman, bent and bony, but with an amazing vigour in her attenuated frame. Her face was of the hatchet shape, with an aquiline nose and slow projecting eyes, and the compressed austerity of her mouth so drooped at the corners as to make her chin appear a separate attachment, moving on a pivot as in a mask. But she was scrupulously neat, no rent in her cloth of frieze gown, no stain on her close linen coif or the partlet about her withered neck. She showed no knowledge of their presence, but went on with her work. Clerivault sniffed and scowled. ‘Better employed in making his bed, Gammer,’ said he, ‘than in poisoning his mind.’ ‘Eh, jackanapes!’ she answered; ‘are ye there, and talking?’ She did not turn her head. Her voice was like a low whine, harsh yet thin. ‘Talk and hang,’ said he, ‘you old devil. Will you tell me this: Why, if Fulk committed murder and you knew it, you shouldn’t be broke for an accessory after the fact?’ Her eyes turned on him like a crab’s. ‘Because he was dead when I knew it, ye fine lawyer.’ ‘And being dead,’ said Clerivault, ‘you think it safe to asperse his character, which is slander and defamation. Art on the horns of a dilemma, old witch.’ She made a sound of thin derision. ‘Call his character to witness, and call again. Ye’ll get no answer, for he had none.’ She turned on him with some repressed fury. ‘Attend you to your business and leave me to mine. Nine year come Pentecost have I lived and served in this house; doing by it what was never asked in the bond; sweeping and garnishing throughout, though Fulk he lived in no more than two of its rooms; and all for a scant pittance and less meat. Do I know its every rat and shadow, think you, ay and its ghosts that walk and its voices that whisper, to be told by a niddipol lawyer’s clerk, that hath scarce set foot in these silences, what to make of them but scorn and mockery. There are eyes for those that can see and ears for those that can hear: but it is aye the fool that misdoubts others, and the wise man himself.’ ‘Misdoubts what?’ said Clerivault. ‘These maggots of a flyblown brain? Well, God quit you of your “shadows”; but not by way of my charge here, who looks to a homely home, and beings of flesh and blood for company, and not the fancied wraiths of fancied crimes. To call a house possessed is an offence at law; and when the house is a judge’s house--take heed, gossip, take heed, I warn you. His Honour is not the man to suffer the corruption of his kin or the branding of his property.’ He ended harshly, and turned to Brion, leaving the old woman muttering.