The Shield of Love

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIV The terror was abroad, such terror as had not possessed the land since the days of the Black Death. Fulk, tramping it, with an oak cudgel over his shoulder and his face set like a stone towards London Town, saw nothing but empty fields and great woods that seemed to smother the land in silence. He kept to the open country, his forest instinct standing him in good stead, and once only did he go down into a village to beg or seize bread for his belly. He found only women, children, and old men there, for all the labourers were on the road to London. The women fell upon him like a crowd of wild cats, and he was forced to clear himself with ungallant sweeps of his cudgel. "A gentle, a gentle, by the cock of his chin!" And since his club kept them at a distance they pelted him out of the village with stones and broken potsherds, and Fulk got no bread that morning. He was sore within, most devilish sore, and full of the wrath of a strong man in pain. He heard Isoult's voice singing, and the lips that were dead tormented him. His humility towards the thought of her contrasted with his fierce desire to fly at the throat of this Blatant Beast that went bellowing through the countryside. He was hungry and in need of a horse to carry his wrath more swiftly, and chance served him before the day was out. Coming upon a solitary manor-house, half hidden by woods at the end of a meadow, Fulk adventured thither to find a horse in the stable, food in the larder, but also two hairy men eating and drinking like lords at the high table. The folk had fled to the woods, and the men in the hall were two of the Commons of England, guzzling and laying light fingers on anything that could be stolen. One was a swineherd, the other a tiler, and being two...


Genre: Literary Fiction