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Gaillard had his orders from Peter of Savoy. Etoile laughed in his face when she met him upon the stairs.

“Let the pole-cats play a little with Barnabo,” she said. “Do not ride furiously, dear lord! I can learn to serve at chess better than Barnabo.”

Gaillard caught at her, but she slipped past him up the stairs.

“There are two sorts of fools in the world, my Gaillard,” she said. “One is killed for the sake of a woman, the other through greed for a woman. Keep out of Barnabo’s path.”

Both Peter of Savoy and the Gascon knew whither Barnabo had ridden that April day. It was notorious that the Italian had kept a focaria or hearth-ward at a priest’s house of his in a valley beyond the hill called Bright Ling because of the glory of its heathlands in the summer. The woman—a Norman—was more comely than was well for Dan Barnabo’s name, and she had kept the house for him, and rendered it to him sweet and garnished whenever he chose to ride that way.

Gaillard and his men marched past Dallington, where Guillaume Sancto de Leodegario was lord of the manor, and on over Bright Ling with the furze in full bloom. The little red spy jogged along beside the Gascon’s horse. He led them into a deep valley, a valley full of the grey-green trunks of oak trees, and the brown wreckage of last year’s bracken. A stream dived and winked in the bottoms, and at the end of a piece of grassland the thatch of the priest’s house shelved under the very boughs of the oaks. No smoke rose from the place. It seemed silent and deserted as Gaillard and his men came trampling through the dead bracken.