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The Housewife
by
“You were afraid to do it,” said the Marquess, “but you were going to do it, because there was no one else to do it! Ho, madame! had I an army of such cowards I would drive the Scot not past the Border but beyond the Orkneys.”
The Queen then said, “But you are unarmed.”
“Highness,” he replied, “it is surely apparent that I, who have played the traitor to two monarchs within the same day, cannot with either decency or comfort survive that day.” He turned upon the lords and bishops twittering about his horse’s tail. “You merchandise, get back to your stations, and if there was ever an honest woman in any of your families, the which I doubt, contrive to get yourselves killed this day, as I mean to do, in the cause of the honestest and bravest woman our time has known.” Immediately the English forces marched toward Merrington.
Philippa returned to her pavilion and inquired for John Copeland. He had ridden off, she was informed, armed, in company with five of her immediate retainers. She considered this strange, but made no comment.
You picture her, perhaps, as spending the morning in prayer, in beatings upon her breast, and in lamentations. Philippa did nothing of the sort. As you have heard, she considered her cause to be so clamantly just that to expatiate to the Holy Father upon its merits were an impertinence; it was not conceivable that He would fail her; and in any event, she had in hand a deal of sewing which required immediate attention. Accordingly she settled down to her needlework, while the Regent of England leaned his head against her knee, and his mother told him that ageless tale of Lord Huon, who in a wood near Babylon encountered the King of Faery, and subsequently stripped the atrocious Emir of both beard and daughter. All this the industrious woman narrated in a low and pleasant voice, while the wide-eyed Regent attended and at the proper intervals gulped his cough-mixture.
You must know that about noon Master John Copeland came into the tent. “We have conquered,” he said. “Now, by the Face!”–thus, scoffingly, he used her husband’s favorite oath–“now, by the Face! there was never a victory more complete! The Scottish army is as those sands which dried the letters King Ahasuerus gave the admirable Esther!”
“I rejoice,” the Queen said, looking up from her sewing, “that we have conquered, though in nature I expected nothing else– Oh, horrible!” She sprang to her feet with a cry of anguish: and here in little you have the entire woman; the victory of her armament was to her a thing of course, since her cause was just, whereas the loss of two front teeth by John Copeland was a genuine calamity.
He drew her toward the tent-flap, which he opened. Without was a mounted knight, in full panoply, his arms bound behind him, surrounded by the Queen’s five retainers. “In the rout I took him,” said John Copeland; “though, as my mouth witnesses, I did not find this David Bruce a tractable prisoner.”
“Is that, then, the King of Scots?” Philippa demanded, as she mixed salt and water for a mouth-wash; and presently: “Sire Edward should be pleased, I think. Will he not love me a little now, John Copeland?”
John Copeland lifted either plump hand toward his lips. “He could not choose,” John Copeland said; “madame, he could no more choose but love you than I could choose.”
Philippa sighed. Afterward she bade John Copeland rinse his gums and then take his prisoner to Hastings. He told her the Marquess was dead, slain by the Knight of Liddesdale. “That is a pity,” the Queen said; and more lately: “There is left alive in England but one man to whom I dare entrust the keeping of the King of Scots. My barons are sold to him; if I retain Messire David by me, one or another lord will engineer his escape within the week, and Sire Edward will be vexed. Yet listen, John–” She unfolded her plan.