"Would not
perpetual imprisonment suffice?"
"What care I? That is the churchmen's affair, not ours. But I fear we
shall not get her. Even so Hereward will flee with her,--maybe escape to
Flanders, or Denmark. He can escape through a rat's-hole if he will. And
then we are at peace. I had sooner kill him and have done with it: but out
of the way he must be put."
So they sent a monk in with the message, and commanded him to tell the
article about the Lady Torfrida, not only to Hereward, but to the abbot
and all the monks.
A curt and fierce answer came back, not from Hereward, but from Torfrida
herself,--that William of Normandy was no knight himself, or he would not
offer a knight his life, on condition of burning his lady.
William swore horribly. "What is all this about?" They told him--as much
as they chose to tell him. He was very wroth. "Who was Ivo Taillebois, to
add to his message? He had said that Torfrida should not burn." Taillebois
was stout; for he had won the secretary over to his side meanwhile. He had
said nothing about burning. He had merely supplied an oversight of the
king's. The woman, as the secretary knew, could not, with all deference to
his Majesty, be included in an amnesty. She was liable to ecclesiastical
censure, and the ecclesiastical courts.
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