“It seems so. Eventually, of course, she must bring Theudovald south, and there will be more ceremonial, but she will be much occupied, and will hardly look for us to stay for it. We can plead her affairs and our own, and leave as soon as we can arrange it. Unless – would you want to stay to see the boy crowned in Orleans?”

“No. No, let’s go home!” She straightened up and turned to face him. “It’s a dreadful story. I liked it when we were here before, but – Father, how can one understand these people? The queen – she seemed so clever and so – so elegant – to start such a war, for such a reason! Is she out of her mind? Or sick?”

“I asked the same question, but rather more tactfully. It seems she has not been well, but nothing serious, some disorder of the stomach, brought on, says Marius, by the queen’s new habits of austerity. It appears she has taken to fasting and very plain living, a sort of penance, it’s said, in honour of the saint. And she wears rough homespun and gives her wealth away to beggars. A changed lady – but quite sane, as far as anyone with such a driving purpose can be judged sane.” The duke’s hand closed once more, reassuringly, over his daughter’s. “Be easy, child. These evil things will not touch us, and please God the boy will win free of them. For ourselves you may be sure that this will be a brief pilgrimage! Once we have prayed at the saint’s tomb, and spoken with the bishop, we will write our excuses to the queen, and set our faces for home.”

19

The royal castle at Tours was an imposing stronghold. It was stone-built, its walls grafted into the rock at the very edge of the river, which here flowed deep and wide to make a forbidding natural boundary between the kingdoms of Orleans and Paris. The castle was encircled by a moat, the water being let in by sluices from the river. The main gate was approached by a wooden bridge only wide enough for two horsemen riding abreast.

But once inside, the rather threatening approach could be forgotten. Alice and her father were housed in pleasant chambers facing south, and the furnishings were comfortable, even, in Alice’s room, pretty. The sun was warm on the stone of the window-sill, and the place was full of light. Swallows, here already from the south, skimmed and twittered outside in the bright air.

From this height the little town, clustered beyond the moat, looked clean and peaceful and toylike, with its red clay roofs and its melon-patches and flowering trees crowding right up to the walls of the great basilica which had been built a hundred years or so ago to shelter the shrine of the saint. It seemed a peaceful scene, no hint of threats to come, no sense that this was a border town of a suddenly weakened kingdom. The gates in the town walls were open, and people, beasts, carts bound for market, tiny in the distance, were moving through them.