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We might perchance win it back to the house of De Brocas by act of conquest; but even so, I misdoubt me if we should hold it in peace. We have proud kinsfolk in England, they tell us, whose claim, doubtless, would rank before ours.
Raymond was spending the time with his old friend and comrade and cousin, John de Brocas. It had become evident to all who knew him that John was not long for this world. He might linger on still some few years, but the insidious disease we now call consumption had firm hold upon him, and he was plainly marked as one who would not live to make any name in the world.
In the north the Saracen's head of the Brocas and the scarlet fish of the De Roches were waving over a strong body of archers from Holt, Woolmer, and Harewood forests. De Borhunte was up in the east, and Sir John de Montague in the west.
Since the loss of his niece, almost as mysterious to him as the escape of Raymond de Brocas from the prison, the clouds of doubt and suspicion had closed more and more darkly round the miserable man, who had let himself become the slave of his passions until these had increased to absolute madness.
"Gaston, look well about thee; for by what Malcolm says, these very woods through which we shall pass, and the Manor of old Windsor hard by, are the property of our uncle Sir John de Brocas, the King's Master of the Horse; and by what I hear, methinks we shall see him in the flesh ere the day has passed."
But, fair mistress, you may have heard how Raymond de Brocas soothed the dying bed of my father, and tended him when all else, even his son, had fled from his side; and albeit at the moment even that service did not soften my hard heart, in the times that followed, when I was left alone to muse on what had passed, I repented me of my old and bitter enmity, and resolved, if ever we should meet again, to strive to make amends for the past.
Master Bernard de Brocas of Guildford, whom I met upon the road and begged to listen to my tale, promised he would see if something might not be done. I waited and waited in anguish, and hope, and despair, and there came a day when his palfrey stopped at my door, and he came forward himself to speak with me.
Making due allowance for Lary's notorious veracity, and for Jemmy Flowers' religious inebriety, still the circumstance of a mushroom, and that a large one, flourishing on the Brocas, must ever throw a strong air of improbability over this assertion.
The Palace was warmly lighted in honour of the arrival of the Prince of Wales; and as the little cavalcade dismounted at the door and entered the noble hall, a figure, habited after the fashion of the ecclesiastics of the day, stepped forth to greet the scion of royalty, and the twin brothers heard their comrades mutter, "It is the good Rector, Master Bernard de Brocas."
There was great laxity in the matter of names in ages when penmanship was a recondite art, and even in the documents of the period a name so well known as that of De Brocas was written Broc and Brook, Brocaz and Brocazt, and half-a-dozen more ways as well.
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