"In good hour, Sir Taylor," said Monina: "but the talk now is, how duly to receive his grace, how induce him to accept your aid."
"Ay, by Saint Dunstan!," cried Trereife, "he has ruffled in France and Burgundy, my masters, and will look on you as clowns and base-born burghers; but no man has more to give than his life, and if he waste that heartily, time was, and time may be, when villains trod on the necks of knights, as the ghost of Charles of Burgundy could tell us. Courage is the beginning and end of a soldier's catechism."
Such were the chiefs Monina found desirous, and in their own conceit capable, of placing England's diadem on Duke Richard's head. Heron, the bankrupt mercer, who fancied himself the base-born offspring of the late earl of Devonshire, and whose first deed of arms would find him Heron no more, but Sir John Courtney; Skelton, a luckless wight, whose shears ever went astray (the true cause why Walter of Hornbeck paid not for his misshapen suit), and who, therefore, believed himself born for greater things; and Trereife, the younger prodigal son of a rural Franklin, who, cast off and disinherited, had served in the wars. in Flanders, gaining in that country no small reverence for the good Duchess Margaret, and ready therefore to right her nephew; besides, like a true hero, he abhorred this silken time of peace, and hoped to gather spoil, if not laurels, in the meditated insurrection.
The noble passengers disembarked from the Adadid. "Welcome to England, sweet Kate! welcome to the country of which thou art queen," said York; "and even if her reception be cold or rough, love her for my sake, for she is my mother."
"A stepmother I will not call her, dear my lord," replied the princess, "but the maternal embrace is strangely wanting on these deserted sands: the narrow deck of yonder caravel, were, methinks, a kindlier home: may we go on and prosper; but, if we fail, my lord will pardon me, if I welcome the day when I embark again on board the Adadid; to find, when the wide earth proves false, safety and happiness on the free waves of ocean."
