"Nobody seems to know, even in Ripley, that catches most news, where the Prince is. We’d best make for Lancashire."
Kit was already at his dreams again. "I care not," he said cheerily, "so long as we find him in the end."
"D’ye think he wears a halo, lad?" snapped Michael.
"Ah, a neat counter! Not for my blurred eyes, eh? Kit, you’ve been reading fairy-lore with Mistress Joan."
So they went forward into the red of the gloaming, and each was busy with the self-same dream—to find Rupert, and to remember Joan Grant.
Nothing happened along the road as Michael and his brother rode forward on their haphazard errand. All was made up of an English April—primroses in the hedgerows, bleating of lambs and fussy ewes, wayfaring farmer-folk about their lands.
They had decided to seek Rupert in Lancashire, and their best road westward lay through Knaresborough, and so forward by way of Skipton and the good town of Colne.
"The game grows dull," grumbled Michael. "We had primroses and lambs in Yoredale till I wearied of them. I thought Blake promised war and blows when we rode out to Nappa."
"The swim into York and the return—they were not enough for you?"
"I yawned so much in Yoredale," said the other, with his careless laugh. "There’s much leeway to make up, babe Christopher."
As they neared Knaresborough, Michael felt his heart beat again. The sun was free of clouds, and shone full on a town beautiful as a man’s dreams of fairyland. At the foot, Nidd River swirled; and from the stream, tier on tier, the comely houses climbed the steep cliff-face, with trees and gardens softening all its outline. It was a town to live at ease in and dream high dreams, thought Kit, until the wind of a cannon-ball lifted his hat in passing.
"Ah, we begin to live," said Michael. "Your hat is doffed to the King, God bless him!"
At the turn of the road they found a sortie from the garrison hemmed in by fifty odd of Fairfax’s dour Otley men. So Michael raised a shout of "A Mecca for the King," and Kit bellowed the same cry. The Fairfax men thought an attack in force had come; the sortie party—twenty of them, and all wounded—found new hope, and, when that affair was done, the Metcalfs rode with their new friends through the gateway of the town.