“Soh! She must e’en jog off with me, though how it is to be with her my lady may tell, not I, since every groat those villain yeomen and fisher folk would raise, went to fit out young Rob, and there has not been so much as a Border raid these four years and more. There are the nuns at Gateshead, as hard as nails, will not hear of a maid without a dower, and yonder mansworn fellow Copeland casts her off like an old glove! Let us look at you, wench! Ha! Face is unsightly enough, but thou wilt not be a badly-made woman. Take heart, what’s thy name—Grisell? May be there’s luck for thee still, though it be hard of coming to Whitburn,” he added, turning to Warwick. “There’s this wench scorched to a cinder, enough to fright one, and my other lad racked from head to foot with pain and sores, so as it is a misery to hear the poor child cry out, and even if he be reared, he will be good for nought save a convent.”
Grisell would fain have heard more about this poor little brother, but the ladies were entering the castle, and she had to follow them. She saw no more of her father except from the far end of the table, but orders were issued that she should be ready to accompany him on his homeward way the next morning at six o’clock. Her brother Robert had been sent in charge of some of the Duke of York’s retainers, to join his household as a page, though they had missed him on the route, and the Lord of Whitburn was anxious to get home again, never being quite sure what the Scots, or the Percies, or his kinsmen of Gilsland, might attempt in his absence. “Though,” as he said, “my lady was as good as a dozen men-at-arms, but somehow she had not been the same woman since little Bernard had fallen sick.”
There was no one in the company with whom Grisell was very sorry to part, for though Dame Gresford had been kind to her, it had been merely the attending to the needs of a charge, not showing her any affection, and she had shrunk from the eyes of so large a party.
When she came down early into the hall, her father’s half-dozen retainers were taking their morning meal at one end of a big board, while a manchet of bread and a silver cup of ale was ready for each of them at the other, and her father while swallowing his was in deep conversation over northern politics with the courteous Earl, who had come down to speed his guests. As she passed the retainers she heard, “Here comes our Grisly Grisell,” and a smothered laugh, and in fact “Grisly Grisell” continued to be her name among the free-spoken people of the north. The Earl broke off, bowed to her, and saw that she was provided, breaking into his conversation with the Baron, evidently much to the impatience of the latter; and again the polite noble came down to the door with her, and placed her on her palfrey, bidding her a kind farewell ere she rode away with her father. It would be long before she met with such courtesy again. Her father called to his side his old, rugged-looking esquire Cuthbert Ridley, and began discussing with him what Lord Warwick had said, both wholly absorbed in the subject, and paying no attention to the girl who rode by the Baron’s side, so that it was well that her old infantine training in horsemanship had come back to her.