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Page 454
ing with fever. "I do not know," he croaked. "Not dead on the field."
"What do you mean?" Joanna shrieked.
"I mean that I looked at every bodyevery single body on that fieldand my lord was not among them."
Joanna swayed on her feet and Edwina put an arm around her to support her. "Are you sure?" Joanna quavered. "Are you very, very sure?"
Tostig began to look frightened. "I do not understand you, my lady. Of course I am sure. I would not let the carrion that scavenges the field touch my lord."
"Sit down my love, come sit down," Edwina crooned, drawing Joanna toward a chair. "I will set a stool for Tostig. You see he can barely stand, and Sir Roger too must rest."
Sir Guy was supporting Roger of Hemel, and he helped him forward. "Madam," Sir Roger said wearily, "it is true. Lord Geoffrey was not among the slain on the field." He looked into the pale flame of Joanna's eyes, and tears came to his own. ''Madam," he whispered reluctantly, "it was a very bitter battle. I pray you to set a curb on your hope. He might have been taken prisoner sore wounded, andand"
But Joanna knew Geoffrey could not have died after being taken prisoner because Isabella had offered a fortune for his corpse. Even if he had been buried before the news came of the price the English queen would pay for the dead body, it would have been dug up and delivered. Thus, if he was not a nameless, naked body buried in a mass grave at Bouvines, he was alive! Joanna fought down gladness. Only a great fool desires to be deluded in such matters. She licked her lips fearfully.
"You must tell me exactly what happened," she said, trying to force firmness into her voice."
Geoffrey's master-at-arms did not look at his mistress but into his bitter memories. "I was wounded and my lord sent me from the field," he began. "Because he said I would be a danger to him, I went. I waited by my lord's tent for when

 
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