So lonely was it, also, that the Frenchmen swore that
their comrades slain by Grey Dick haunted them at nights, bidding them
prepare to join the number of the dead. Indeed, had not Acour vowed that
he would hang the first man who attempted to desert, some of them would
have left him to make the best of their way back to France. For always
as they crouched by the smoking hearth they dreamed of Grey Dick and his
terrible arrows.
Sir Edmund Acour's letter came safely into the hands of Eve, brought to
her by the Mayor himself. It read thus:
Lady,
You will no more of me, so however much you should live to ask it, I
will have no more of you. I go hang your merchant lout, and afterward
away to France, who wish to have done with your cold Suffolk, where you
may buy my lands cheap if you will. Yet, should Master Hugh de Cressi
chance to escape me, I counsel you to marry him, for I can wish you no
worse fate, seeing what you will be, than to remember what you might
have been. Meanwhile it is my duty as a Christian to tell you, in case
you should desire to speak to him ere it be too late, that your father
lies at the point of death from a sickness brought on by his grief at
the slaying of his son and your cruel desertion of him, and calls for
you in his ravings. May God forgive you, as I try to do, all the evil
that you have wrought, which, perhaps, is not done with yet.
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