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Pevensey would have astonished any rough Northumbrian baron, or the fiery Marcher Lords who fought the Welsh. For Peter of Savoy was a southerner, a compeer of the King’s in his love of colour and of music. To dig a moat and build white towers was not enough for him, and the spirit of Provence had emptied itself within the Roman wall. A great part of the space had become a garden, shut in with thickets of cypresses and bays. The roses of Provence bloomed there in June. Winding alley ways went in and out, short swarded, and overhung by rose trees. There were vines on trellises, and banks of fragrant herbs. In the thick of a knoll of cypresses Count Peter kept two leopards in a cage, yellow-eyed beasts which glided silently to and fro.

Gaillard, skirting the cypresses of the pleasaunce, had his eyes on the window of the great tower where Peter of Savoy loved to sit playing chess with Dan Barnabo his chaplain, or listening to a woman singing to the lute. The lutanist sang to others as well as to Count Peter. Gaillard the Gascon knew the twitter of her strings, better perhaps, than Peter of Savoy himself.