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Page 425
The funnyor not so funnypart, Geoffrey thought, was that the whole thing was true, not merely the ordinary lies one wrote to a woman. He smiled wryly and wondered whether Joanna would believe himand then whether she would care. Then, abruptly, he signed and sealed his letter and laid it aside to be put in with the other dispatches for England. Although he had been glad enough of it at the time, he remembered with pain now that Joanna had never given the smallest sign of jealousy. She had never even mentioned the liaisons he had had with the ladies of the court of which she must have been informed. That notion was no more comfortable than the uneasy thoughts of the battle the next day. Nonetheless, the two discomforts edging each other in and out of his mind made for a kind of confusion that grew into a dazed weariness and slid away into sleep.
Having taken so long to find rest, Geoffrey overslept the next morning. By the time Tostig felt it was necessary to wake him, he had missed mass and needed to rush himself into his armor and then out to organize the men and perform the duties imposed by being his father's aide, while bolting down some bread, cheese, and wine. At the last moment he remembered his letter, seized it, and thrust it up his mailed sleeve. Here it would not interfere with his movement and would be held in place by his gauntlet but could be withdrawn quickly as soon as he found the messenger who was to carry the dispatches.
Geoffrey's first sight of the battlefield, gained from the top of the little rise that had screened the English camp from the French, drove all thoughts of letters or any extraneous matters from his mind. The French were already under arms but Philip had apparently elected not to attack. However, that was not what startled Geoffrey. Philip had ordered that the bridge that spanned the river Marcq be destroyed. It was plain that the French king did not regard this as any ordinary battle. By destroying the bridge, he had eliminated any chance of easy retreat for his men and himself. He planned to fight until he won or was killed or taken prisoner. Geof-

 
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