She told them how she had fled from the storm of Exeter, with a troop of
women, who dreaded the brutalities of the Normans. [Footnote: To do
William justice, he would not allow his men to enter the city while they
were blood-hot; and so prevented, as far as he could, the excesses which
Gyda had feared.] How they had wandered up through Devon, found fishers'
boats at Watchet in Somersetshire, and gone off to the little desert
island of the Flat-Holme, in hopes of there meeting with the Irish fleet,
which her sons, Edmund and Godwin, were bringing against the West of
England. How the fleet had never come, and they had starved for many days;
and how she had bribed a passing merchantman to take her and her wretched
train to the land of Baldwin the Debonnaire, who might have pity on her
for the sake of his daughter Judith, and Tosti her husband who died in his
sins.
And at his name, her tears began to flow afresh; fallen in his overweening
pride,--like Sweyn, like Harold, like herself--
"The time was, when I would not weep. If I could, I would not. For a year,
lady, after Senlac, I sat like a stone. I hardened my heart like a wall of
brass, against God and man. Then, there upon the Flat-Holme, feeding on
shell-fish, listening to the wail of the sea-fowl, looking outside the
wan water for the sails which never came, my heart broke down in a moment.
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