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Updated: June 6, 2025
Now I know that Olaf and our men carried me into a place under the lee of a hill, and bided there till the gale blew over. There was a sharp pain as of a piercing weapon in my side as they did so, and after that I knew not much of being carried on to the house of Relf, the Thane of Penhurst, along a forest road where travelling was no easier for the fallen trees that lay across it.
And all the while those two words that came to me as I talked to Relf grew plainer, and seemed to ring in my ears unspoken, "Landless and luckless landless and luckless," for that was what it all came to. Then Uldra looked at me and saw the trouble in my face, and took what seemed to her to be the only way to help me. "You cannot think of these matters now, Redwald," she said softly.
But when we drew near I was fain to look on one of the two ladies who still sat on their horses waiting for the earl's pleasure. One was Relf the thane's wife, and the other his daughter; and it was in my mind that I had never seen so beautiful a maiden as this was. It seemed to me that I could willingly give my life in battle against those who had harmed her home, if she might know that I did so.
And I tried hard to think of somewhat to say that might persuade her, but there was that meaning in her voice that seemed to stay whatever came to me. I thought that she had made up her mind to take the veil, and there are few things that will turn a maiden from that when once she has chosen it. Then said Relf: "Maybe I ask you too suddenly, lady.
"Yet I think that I owe you somewhat," Relf said, "and now I am minded to try to show that I would thank you in deed, and not in word only." He paused, and Uldra looked at me as if asking if I could throw any light on this stranger's meaning. "Relf, the Thane of Penhurst, is he who gave me shelter and care when I was hurt in a fight and a flood last winter," I said.
Wulfnoth said no more to him, and turned sharply to me. "You give her no venison maybe you fear her therefore!" he said in a scornful way enough. "I fear her no more than Relf," I answered, "but, like him, I will not seek her without reason." "Maybe there is reason for you to hear what she tells me," the earl said. "I will have you come."
And when we looked, all the floor of the house was broken up, and the stone paving was piled in corners, and a pick or two lay on them with a spade and crowbar. "They have been digging for treasure," said Relf, "and that has kept them from my house. There are always tales of gold hidden in these old places. I have seen that they have done the like elsewhere in the village."
"It is easy to see how my cousin got into that place," he said to Relf, pointing to my helm, which was sorely dinted. The big thane looked and laughed. "That is what felled him. But I knew not of this pit," he said, looking past me into the house where Spray and the men stood round the hole. Then the smith said: "Nor did I, master. But this has been found by the forest men here are their tools."
There was a youth sitting on a table's edge by the wall over against where I lay, and a big broad-shouldered man leant on it with folded arms beside him, and at first I stared at them till my thoughts came back, and they laughed at me again, and then I knew Godwine and Relf the thane, who had but just come up from their ship to find me.
Everybody knew that she had paid Dick Socknersh thirty shillings for the two weeks that he was out of work after leaving her before he went as cattleman to an inland farm and she had found the money for Martha Tilden's wedding, and for her lying-in a month afterwards, and some time later she had helped Peter Relf with ready cash to settle his debts and move himself and his wife and baby to West Wittering, where he had the offer of a place with three shillings a week more than they gave at Honeychild.
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