"And his line," said the baron solemnly. The three men were silent, each thinking of the death of little Edward, the Prince's oldest son, here last winter. After the aged King and ailing Prince of Wales, the heir now to the English throne was Richard, a child of four so fair and frail that he seemed made from gossamer.

"Lancaster is dangerously ambitious!" said the captal, following the natural train of thought. "I feel in him a ceaseless urge to rule, a lust for power greater even than the power he has - fires barely held in check-"

"Yet they are held in check," cut in de la Pole. "I know him far better than you do. On his loyalty to his brother, ay, and his nephew, little Richard, I'd stake my life and soul." He lowered his voice and, motioning the page to stand farther off, whispered behind his hand, "I believe 'tis not the English throne he covets."

"Ha-ha-ha!" Sir Guichard exploded into laughter half malicious, half indulgent. "Parbleu, man baron, do you think you tell us news! It was I planted it in his head, though the idea found fertile ground. He has thought much about Castile."

"Has he then made formal suit to the Infanta?" said de la Pole, discomfited and a trifle hurt that the Duke had withheld his confidence.

"Nenni - I think not yet. Something seems to hold him back. A moody man and broods much, unless he's fighting."

"He needs a woman," said the captal, shrugging his massive shoulders. He up-ended his gilt cup to let the last of the wine trickle down his throat. "Unhealthful to live like an anchorite, it must be months since that Norman whore went to his bedchamber at Cognac."

"And came out again so soon, one wonders there was time for sport," said Sir Guichard chuckling. "But soon he'll have a woman in his bed. The exiled and penniless Costanza'll not keep him waiting, once he asks her. 'Tis the best marriage she could ever hope for. All very well to be rightful Queen of Castile, but reigning is another matter when the throne's already filled. Our Duke will have a hard task to get himself upon it."

"I think this marriage might be ill judged," said the captal, shaking his head. "It will throw the weight of Castile definitely to France. Do you think the bastard King will do nothing to save his throne, when he hears the Duke's plans? We've trouble enough holding Aquitaine as it is. . . . He'll simply embroil England in yet another war." He rose and hitched his gilt-bossed girdle below his vast belly. "But whatever we think, the Duke will do as he pleases. C'est un veritable Plantagenet"

On the second floor of the Abbey, John sat on a stool in the garde-robe of his private apartments. He was naked, and Raulin was scrubbing off the sweat the grime from the tournament with a handful of lint dipped in hot rose-water. Nirac de Bayonne hovered near with a razor and basin, waiting to shave his master. By the door to the ante-room, Hankyn, the Duke's chief minstrel, softly plucked a gittern while he sang a plaintive love tune from Provence.

John was tired, and he had twisted a muscle in his shoulder while steadying the heavy lance that had prised the Sieur de Puissances from his saddle. Nor had the shoulder quite recovered from the sword wound it had received at Limoges.

John shut his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift. On this day his lieutenancy of Aquitaine was ended, he was no longer bound to sit upon the lid of the boiling cauldron his brother had abandoned to him; no longer bound to fight his brother's battles at his own costs as he had been doing for months. Again, as always in this struggle with Charles the Fifth, there was a stalemate. There had been victories, there had been losses; the French king fought a war of niggling attrition that disgusted John.

But there was a bold and brilliant step awaiting. A glorious chivalric deed blessed by God and rewarded by a prize so dazzling that John's scalp tingled and his mouth grew dry when he thought of it. Last night he had dreamed that he knelt in the cathedral at Burgos - the gleaming white limestone cathedral where he had given thanks for Najera and the birth of his son - and in the dream, he had felt the touch of the sacred oil as the archbishop anointed him and he had felt, vivid as in waking, the holy pressure of Castile's golden crown.

I shall send Guichard d'Angle to the Infanta tomorrow, John thought, as he lifted his face that Nirac might shave him, and he said, "Nirac, when you were in Bayonne last month, you said you saw the Infanta Costanza at Mass? The rightful Queen of Castile, that is."

"Si fait, mon duc, she was near to me as Hankyn there," Nirac pointed to the minstrel.

"How did she look?" said John as though absently.

"Shabby, 'er mantle was worn, 'er shoes-"

"Not her clothes, dunderhead! Her person!"

"Boney," said Nirac promptly, shaving the golden beard with deft strokes, "breasts flat as plates, white skin, black hair, long upper lip on a mout' not made for smiling, nor, parbleu, for kissing. Castilian eyes - big, black, angry. She is tres devote, they say she wears hair shirts so she'll not forget 'er father. I think she may be a little mad. Her young sister Isabella is much prettier."

The Duke frowned and Nirac, seeing he had made a mistake, added quickly, "But the Infanta Costanza is vairy young, scarce seventeen, she'll improve sans doute, and I could not see clear, la cathedrale was dark."

There was a long silence in the garde-robe except for the tinkling of the gittern. John allowed himself to be dressed by Raulin, lifting his arms into the white silk shirt, stepping into the short linen braies to which the long skin-tight yellow hose were fastened with points. The topaz velvet tunic was dagged into leaflike curls at hem and sleeves and buttoned with pearls. When he was ready dressed, the squire and varlets stepped back expecting him to walk into the antechamber, where some of his gentlemen awaited to invest him with his ducal crown and the regalia of Aquitaine. But he shook his head and breaking the long silence said to Raulin, "Leave me, all of you - except Nirac."

John walked to the open window and gazed out through the soft southern dusk across red-tiled roofs to the curving Garonne. The river shone like pewter in the twilight, and two English ships with pennants fluttering above the crow's-nests were moving downstream, bound for home.

John watched the ships a moment and then he said, "Nirac!" The little Gascon was waiting, his bright lizard eyes on his master's face. "Do you remember the Lady Swynford of Kettlethorpe?" said John, turning slightly from the window.

"Sainte Vierge! 'Ow should I forget! Belle et gracieuse, la dame Catherine." Nirac paused, then added, "I do not forget 'er knight - that Swine-ford, either."

John lowered his eyes and looked at Nirac as though he would rebuke this Impudence. But instead he said slowly, "Knolles makes good report of Swynford, he's fought fiercely and been wounded twice."

"But 'e recovers, parbleu! Nirac did not add, What a pity! though his tone implied it, because he was puzzled by the Duke's mention of a lady he had thought forgotten long ago, and mystified as to the tenor of these remarks; but yet he felt he need not hide his hatred of the Saxon knight who had so outrageously humiliated him at Kettlethorpe.

"Swynford arrived here at Bordeaux yesterday with the rest of Knolles' disbanded company," said the Duke. "He's bedridden from a leg wound. I sent him Brother William to bleed him and apply poultices."

The Duke's own physician for this swine of a knight, thought Nirac, more than ever mystified since he knew that the Duke had not seen Swynford in all these months in Aquitaine. The knight had been attached to Knolles' savage company up north where the fighting had been hardest, most vicious, most dangerous. As he thought this, a light flickered in Nirac's mind, but he was not sure. He glanced quickly at the Duke, but the blue eyes were veiled.

"I am going to ask for the Queen of Castile in marriage - all will be quickly arranged thereafter," said the Duke in the same remote voice. He raised his hand to quell Nirac's burst of excitement. "It is proper that my royal duchess should be provided with English ladies here to attend on our marriage. I shall send off escort and messengers to summon them. You, Nirac, will return to Kettlethorpe and fetch my Lady Swynford."

"Ah-ha?" said the little Gascon, somewhat enlightened, but still uncertain; for Raulin, of course, had never mentioned the episodes with Lady Swynford at the Savoy, and Nirac knew that four years had passed since the Duke had been to Kettlethorpe. But his master's next word left no doubt. In an instant the austere control vanished from the sharp-etched handsome face, and John said passionately, as one who cannot help himself, "I must see her again before I marry."

So - thought Nirac - it is like that. But surely this desire was easily satisfied - and why then all this tohu-bohu about the husband? He saw from the softened look upon the Duke's face that he might venture a question, and he said, "Mon due, then you will want to send Sir Hugh out of Bordeaux before she comes?"

John's lips tightened, then he gave a half-angry laugh. "I fear she wouldn't come unless it were to join her husband."

"Merde! You mean she's virtuous?" cried Nirac, astounded, and seeing assent in the Duke's silence, understood at least that he had quite misread the situation when he had been at Kettlethorpe. "Oc," he added thoughtfully, "she 'as spirit and strength, cette belle petite dame - I saw it when I was there."

John having once broken through the barrier he had erected against Katherine, now felt great desire to go on talking of her, and to question Nirac for any memories of her during those months the Gascon had spent at Kettlethorpe. Yet he resisted it. He was ashamed of his longing, ashamed that he had not forgotten her as he had willed himself to do and that the calculated slaking of his lust with two court ladies and the Norman whore had left him disgusted and uncured.