When two days passed without a messenger from you coming hither, I feared that you were beleaguered, and started that evening with six hundred men-at-arms.

We arrived at daybreak to finding only a smoking ruin.

Luckily among the crowd of dead upon the breach we found one of your men-at-arms who still breathed, and after some cordial had been given him, and his wounds stanched, he was able to tell us the story of the siege.

But it needed not his tale to tell us how staunchly you had defended the castle, for the hundreds of dead who lay outside of the walls, and still more the mass who piled the breach, and the many who lay in the castle-yard spoke for themselves of the valour with which the castle had been defended.

As the keep was gutted by fire, and the man could tell us nought of what had happened after he had been stricken down at the breach, we knew not whether you and your brave garrison had perished in the flames.