"Exactly; to search you. How you slipped through their hands I know not." And he glanced at the other curiously.
"They were but poor rogues," answered the jester quickly.
"Certainly are you not one!" exclaimed the free baron, with a glance of approval at the slender figure of his antagonist. "Two of them paid for their carelessness. The others were so shamed, they told me some great knight had attacked them. A fool in motley!" he laughed. "No wonder the rogues hung their heads! But in deceiving me," he added thoughtfully, "they permitted their master to run into an unknown peril—his ignorance that a fool of the duke, or a fool wearing the emblem of the emperor, had gone to Francis' court."
"You were saying, Sir Free Baron, you intended to read the messages between the princess and the duke, and afterward to despatch them by messengers of your own?" interrupted the plaisant.
"Such were my plans. Moreover, I possessed a clerk—a knave who had killed an abbot and fled from the monastery—a man of poetry, wit and sentiment. Whenever the letters lacked for ardor, and the lovers had grown too timid, him I set to forge a postscript, or indite new missives, which the rogue did most prettily, having studied love-making under the monks. And thus, Sir Fool, I courted and won the princess—by proxy!"
"Of a certainty, your wooing was at least novel, Sir Knight of the Vulture's Nest," dryly observed the jester. "Although, had my master known the deception, you would, perhaps, have paid dearly for it."
"Your master, forsooth!" laughed the outlaw lord. "A puny scion of a worn-out ancestry! Such a woman as the princess wants a man of brawn and muscle; no weakling of the nursery."
"Well," said the fool, slowly, "you became intermediary between the princess and the duke, and the king and the emperor. But to come into the heart of France; to the king's very palace—did you not fear detection?"
"How?" retorted the other, raising his head and resting his eyes, bloodshot and heavy, on the fool's impassive features. "The road between the two monarchs is mine; no message can now pass. The emperor and the duke may wonder, but the way here is long, and"—with a smile—"I have ample time for the enterprise ere the alarm can be given."
"And you paved the way for your coming by altering the letters of the duke, or forging new ones?" suggested the listener.