"And has she never sent word to her own mother?" the Young Lovell asked, "I think that ancient dame could do more than another to save her."
"I think she is too proud," the old woman said. "Of the Duke of Croy she has spoken often enough, but of her mother never one word, so that, God forgive me, I had forgotten that she had that mother though it was in her house I saw the first of God His good light three score and twelve years was. For you know that these ladies have never spoken together nor written broad letters since your grandfather Dacre died, and your father, on the day the funeral was, was sacking the castles and houses that were your mother's inheritance. And the old lady thought they should have been hers; so that to this day she is wealthy enough in gold but hath little or no land and dwells in but a moderate house in the Bailey at Durham, though when her son, the Dacre, is in London she is mostly there herself."
"Then if there is no great haste to save my mother's life," he said, "it is the better. I would else very well have hastened to get together twenty or thirty lusty bachelors and so we might have burst into this Castle of mine. But if my mother may stay out a fortnight or a month it is the better. For I will get together money and a host and cannon and so we may make sure."
"Ay," the old woman said, "but hasten all ye may for the sake of Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer."
"Now tell me truly what is this?" her master asked.
The old woman burst out into many ejaculations how that with the haste and her master's strange looks she did not know what she had told him and what she had missed out.
Certain it was that Richard Bek, Robert Bulmer, and Bertram Bullock held the White Tower for him, the Young Lovell. The others could not come to them for the White Tower stood on a rock twenty yards from the Castle and joined to it by such a narrow stone bridge that it was, as it were, a citadel. It could stand fast though all the rest of the Castle should be taken, having been devised for that purpose. Richard Bek and Robert Bulmer, poor squires, or almost of the degree of yeomen, had always been captains of the White Tower and in it the dead Lord Lovell had kept his marvellous store of gold--as much as four score thousand French crowns, more or less--and all these were theirs still, with such strong cannon as might well batter down the Castle; only Richard Bek would not do this. And to him there had resorted from time to time certain strong fellows that were still faithful to their master, creeping in the night along the narrow bridge into the tower ... such as Richard Raket, the Young Lovell's groom that had lost his teeth at the fight of Kenchie's Burn. There might be a matter of twenty-five of them that held it and victualled it by boats from the sea at night.