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dragged about first by a leg, then by an arm, as several dogs will fight, pulling a chicken or a hare from each other." |
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"That was how he found me," Roger of Hemel put in a little more loudly than necessary to draw Joanna's mind from the ugly image he guessed she had created. "Both the French and the corpse pickers had left me for dead. I do not know how I come to be alive, in truth. The last I remember was my horse being struck and going down with him. The next was of Tostig dragging me to shelter. He returned to the field again. It was a little time before I was clear in my head, but when night fell I was better and Tostig came back and told me what he had done and found. I decided to wait there until the next day when I hoped to be able to walk. My lady, I swear we looked on the face of every dead man on that fieldevery man. Lord Geoffrey was not there. He must have been taken prisoner and for some reason the sword and shield were forgotten." |
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"He was not taken prisoner," Joanna said, "that was what Lord Salisbury wrote to saythat Geoffrey was not a prisoner." |
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The men looked at her, stunned, then horror began to grow in their eyes. Tostig's head dropped forward and he began to cry in long, racking sobs. |
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"No, do not weep," Joanna soothed, "at least, not yet. He is not dead. He cannot be." |
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She told them then of the offer to pay ransom to obtain Geoffrey's body, except that to keep from enraging them in their weakness she did not admit the ransom would be doubled for a corpse or that the offer was made by the queen. Instead she pretended it was done by the king out of love for Salisbury, so that he might not need to grieve over a son buried in an unmarked and untended grave. When she was finished there was total silence in the place where they sat. Sir Roger and Tostig just stared, unbelievingly. |
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"Where is he?" Tostig cried at last, levering himself painfully to his feet as if, in spite of his illness, he would run and look. "If he was not dead on the field, and not escaped, and not a prisonerdead or alivewhere is he?" |
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