APPENDIX

THE LORD OF THE MARCHES.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWO BEGIN THEIR JOURNEY.

"O guide me through this life's uncertain wild!

And for aught else beneath the circling sun,

So Thou in Thine own bosom keep Thy child,

Father! Thy will be done!"

That every baby enters the world with a spoon of some metal in its mouth, is an old saying which is easy of interpretation. And in the ancient town of Usk, in Monmouthshire, on the first day of September, 1373, were born two babies, not many yards apart, whose spoons were made of exceedingly diverse metal.

The baby who was born in the morning of that day, in the Castle of Usk, brought with him a spoon of gold, beautifully embossed, and exquisite in shape. He found the world—as represented by the mantle in which his nurse enveloped him—soft, rich, velvety, and fur-lined. If he cried, the sound won immediate attention; and the faintest sign of illness on his part struck despair into hearts which beat with the bluest blood.

The baby who was born in the evening, in a squalid mud hovel, one of a dozen which nestled close under the Castle wall, was accompanied by a battered old spoon of the very rustiest iron. His world was a sheepskin, extremely dirty, and not particularly fragrant. His cries were answered—when they were answered—by a rough toss in the arms of his eldest sister, a slipshod, shock-headed girl of eleven years; and the possibility of his early death neither dismayed nor grieved any one, for even his mother was of opinion that he was one too many in the hovel, which could scarcely find room for the nine persons who occupied it.

Baby Number One was baptized in the chapel of the Castle, borne in his velvet wrapper by a lady of title, with the accompaniment of sweet music and joyous bells. His sponsors were a bishop, an abbot, and a prioress. He received the family name of Roger; for a hundred and fifty years back, the heirs of that family had been Rogers and Edmunds alternately, and it was the turn for the former. Roger Mortimer—an ominous name! For this boy was the heir of the earldom of March, one of the proudest coronets of England; and his mother, a fair girl of eighteen, was a Princess of the Blood.

Baby Number Two was christened in the parish church, one of a batch of ten, and might not have been christened at all if the curate had not been one who looked sharply after his baptismal fees. He received the name of Lawrence, which was the first that occurred to his parents. Very naturally protesting in his baby style against a sprinkling with cold water, he was tumbled with no particular care into the thin arms of Mariot, who rewarded him with a private shake for his vocal performance, the only music which accompanied the ceremony. As to surname, he could not be said to have any. What did the son of a serf want with a surname? As he grew older, however, some distinction between him and other Lawrences being felt desirable, his neighbours took to calling him Lawrence Madison, or son of Maud,—his mother being a woman with a tongue, and as such a more prominent character than her quiet and silent husband.

The family physician, Master Gilbert Besseford, carefully drew out the horoscope of the young Lord. It appeared from this elaborate document that he was to be a highly accomplished and intellectual youth, since Mercury was busy about him; that he would be most fortunate in wedlock, for Venus was doing something; that he would rise to the highest honours of the State, and might possibly achieve a crown, as Jupiter was most benevolently disposed to him. At any rate, something was to happen about his twenty-fifth birthday, which would place him in a position that none of his fathers had equalled. He would have a long life and a happy one.

Two items of the horoscope were true. He was to be indeed an intellectual and accomplished youth: and in his twenty-fifth year a crown was to be his, to which few of his fathers had attained. But those around him thought of a corruptible crown, and that which God had prepared for him was an incorruptible. And the happy wedlock, and the long life, and the rise to worldly honour, were not the portion of Roger Mortimer, but of Lawrence Madison in the hovel below.

That Roger should exercise in the future considerable influence over the fortunes of Lawrence, was extremely probable; since they would some day stand to each other in the relations of master and vassal, and the former possessed absolute power over the latter. But the idea that Lawrence could in any sense sway the fortunes of Roger would have been laughed to scorn by the household at the Castle. Yet this was to be.

In a small, but very prettily furnished boudoir in one of the Castle turrets, sat the Countess Dowager of March. She was considered an elderly woman, though we should think her only middle-aged; for in the days of our shorter-lived forefathers, who looked upon fifty as old age, and sixty as advanced senility, a woman of forty was some way down the hill. From a father whose character stood high both as warrior and statesman, and a mother whose remarkable wisdom and good sense were a proverb among her contemporaries, Philippa Montacute had inherited a character of unusual power, moral and mental. Her energy was tempered by her prudence, while warm affections and shrewd common sense held sway together over her actions. The character was not transmitted, except in the affections, to that handsome, eloquent, amiable young man of one-and-twenty, who was the only one left living of her four children: but it was to be reproduced in every point save one, in the baby grandson for whose birth the chapel bells were ringing melodiously, and in whose honour all the thralls were to have a holiday the next day. Alas, that the omitted item was the one which should have been a girdle to all the rest! Warm-hearted, energetic to impulsiveness, with plenty of good sense and fine understanding, the gifts bestowed on little Roger did not include prudence.

The Countess sat alone in her bower in the September twilight, and took "blind man's holiday," her imagination and memory scanning both the future and the past.

It was not quite dark when the door of the bower opened, and a woman of some thirty years came forward, dropping a courtesy as she approached her mistress.

"Come in, Wenteline," said the Countess; for thus the medieval English pronounced the old British name, Guenllian. "Is David yet back from his errand?"

"An't please your Ladyship, he came but now, and he brings tidings, agreeably to your Ladyship's pleasure, that among the thralls be two babes to-day born. Maud, the wife of Nicholas in the huts, hath a man-child; and your Ladyship's god-daughter, Philippa, wife of Blumond the fishmonger, a maid-child."

"Good," answered the Countess, feeling for the gold and ivory tablet which hung by a silver chain from her girdle, that she might therein enter the information for which she had sent. "Then, as born on the birthday of the heir, they shall be allowed some