The She Wolf of France Read Online Free PDF Page A

and wiped its big black beak against its foot.
    `If I strangle it, I shall succeed in
    escaping . If I miss it, I shall fail.'
    It was no longer a game, but a wager with destiny. The prisoner needed to invent omens to pass the time of waiting and quiet his anxiety. He watched the raven with the eye of the hunter. But as if it realized the danger, the raven moved away.'
    The soldiers were coining out of the refectory, their faces all lit up. They dispersed over the courtyard in little groups for the games, races and wrestling that were a tradition of the Feast. For two hours, naked to the waist, they sweated under the sun, competing in throwing each other or in their skill in casting maces at a wooden picket.
    Then he heard the Constable cry: `The King's prize! Who wants to win a shilling?' 4
    Then, as it drew toward s evening, the soldiers went to wash in the cisterns and, noisi er than in the morning, talking of their exploits or their defeats, they went back to the refectory to eat and drink once more. Anyone who was not drunk on the night of St Peter ad Vincula earned the contempt of his comrades. The prisoner could hear them getting down to the wine. Dusk fell over the courtyard, the blue dusk of a summer's evening, and the stench of mud from the river-bank became perceptible once again.
    Suddenly a long, fierc e, hoarse croaking, the sort of animal cry that makes men uneasy, rent the air from beyond the window.
    `What's that?' the old Lord Chirk asked from the far end of the dungeon.
    `I missed him,' his nephew said; `I got him by the wing instead of the neck.'
    In the uncertain evening light he gazed sadly at the few black feathers in his hand. The raven had disappeared and would not now come back again.
    `It's mere childish folly to attach any importance to it,' the younger Mortimer thought. `And it's nearly time now.' But he had an unhappy sense of foreboding.
    But his mind was diverted from the omen by the extraordinary silence that had fallen over the Tower during the last few minutes. There was no more noise from the refectory; the voices of the drinkers had been stilled in their throats; the clatter of plates and pitchers had ceased. There was nothing but the sound of a dog barking somewhere in the garden, and the distant cry of a waterman on the Thames. Had Alspaye's plot been discovered? Was the silence lying over the fortress due to a shock of amazement at the discovery of a great betrayal?? His forehead to the window bars, the prisoner held his breath and stared out into the shadows, listening for the slightest sound. An archer reeled across the courtyard, vomited against a wall, collapsed on to the ground and lay still. Mortimer could see him lying motionless on the grass. The first stars' were already appearing in the sky: It would be a clear night.
    Two more soldiers came out of the refectory holding their stomachs, and collapsed at the foot of a tree. This could be no ordinary drunkenn ess that bowled men over like a blow from a club.
    Roger Mortimer went to the other end of the dungeon; he knew exactly where his boots stood in a corner and put them on; they slipped on easily enough for his legs had grown thin.
    `What are you doing, Roger?' the elder Mortimer asked.
    `I'm getting ready, Uncle; it's almost time. Our friend Alspaye seems to have played his part well; the Tower might be dead.'
    `And they haven't brought us our second meal,' the old Lord complained anxiously.
    Roger Mortimer tucked his shirt into his breeches and buckled his belt about his military tunic. His clothes were worn and ragged, for they had refused his requests for new ones for the past eighteen months. He was still wearing those in which he had fought and they had taken him, removing his dented armour. His lower lip had been wounded by a blow on the chin-piece.
    `If you succeed, I shall be left all alone, and they'll revenge themselves on me,' his uncle said.
    There was a good deal of selfishness in the old man's vain obstinacy in