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Updated: June 21, 2025
"I shall be back in five minutes," he continued cheerfully. And he went, bidding her lock the door behind him and open only at his knock. He made the more haste for her fears, passed into the town through the Porte Tertasse, and hastened to the conduit.
The firelight the other lights in the small, dingy chamber had been trampled under foot showed him two wounded men groaning on the floor, and the body of a third who lay apparently dead. Claude bent over one, found what he wanted a half-pike and glided to the door of the stairs that led to the roof. It was in the same position as in the Tertasse.
When he had advanced some paces in the direction of the Porte Tertasse he returned, and for a full minute he stood before the Royaumes' door irresolute; half-minded to knock and, casting the fear of publicity to the winds, to say that he must have at once that for which he had come. He would get it, if he did, he was certain of that.
Claude answered gently. He was radiant. He would not have exchanged his position for a crown. She was looking, and he was going to fight. "You fool," Basterga returned, "we have but to call the watch from the Tertasse and you will be haled to the lock-up, and jailed and whipped, if not worse! And that jade with you! Stultus es? Do you hear? Messer Syndic, will you be thwarted in this fashion?
The townsfolk, rallying from their first alarm, were driving the enemy out of the Rue de la Cité, penning him into the Tertasse, and preparing to carry that street. On a sudden there came, not a cessation of the uproar, but a change in its character.
It will be odd if she did not overlook it. And the young wife of the Lieutenant at the Porte Tertasse, who has ailed since her marriage a pale thing; who knows but he looked this way once and Mistress Anne thought ill of his defection? Ha! Ha! You would cross Cæsar Basterga, would you? No, Messer Claude," he set his huge foot on the fallen sword which Claude had made a movement to recover.
As a fact, Brunaulieu, the captain of the forlorn hope, had passed the word that the tower must be taken at any cost; and had come himself from the Porte Tertasse, where a brisk conflict was beginning, to see the thing done. Claude did not know this, but had he known it, it would not have reduced his courage. "Yes, I hear them," he whispered in answer to the soldier's words.
Fortunately the Royaumes' house, like all in the Corraterie which formed an inner line of defence pierced by the Tertasse gate had outside shutters of massive thickness, capable of being lowered from within. He closed these in haste and found, when he turned from the task and looked for her a small round hole in each shutter made things dimly visible that she was gone to soothe her mother.
The assailants, therefore, found themselves stayed; slowly they were driven back into the narrow gullet of the Tertasse. Even there they were put to it to hold their ground against an ever-increasing swarm of citizens, whom despair and the knowledge that they were fighting on their hearths, for their wives, and for their children, brought up in renewed strength.
The beat of many feet hastening one way towards the Porte Tertasse the clatter of weapons as here and there a man trailed his pike on the stones, the roar of rising voices, the rattle of metal as some one hauled a chain across the end of the Bourg du Four and hooked it sounds such as these might have alarmed an ordinary man who knew himself cut off from his party, and isolated among foes.
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