“Speak then, and be swift. You have no time to spare, I think.”
“When the darkness fell there in the Place of Arms,” began Nicholas, “while you knights were waiting for the third blast of the trumpet, Cattrina fled under cover it.”
“As I thought, the accursed coward!” exclaimed Hugh bitterly.
“Nay, to be just, it was not all cowardice. The wizard in the yellow cap, he who showed himself to the people afterward and called down this Black Death on Venice, appeared to him in the darkness and said something to him that turned his heart to water. I think it was that if he stayed, within five short minutes he’d be dead, who otherwise, if he fled, had yet a breathing space of life. So he went.”
“Ay. But whither, man? Whither?”
“Here to his house, where he disguised himself and bade me prepare to travel with him. Only then the sickness took me and I could not. So he went with some of his people, riding for Avignon.”
“What to do at Avignon?”
“To obtain the confirmation of his marriage with the lady Eve Clavering. It has been promised to him by certain cardinals at Court who have the ear of his Holiness the Pope.”
“Ah, I thought it! What more?”
“Only this: tidings reached him that the lady Clavering, with the old Templar, Sir Andrew Arnold, journeys to Avignon from England, there to obtain the dissolution of their marriage with Sir Edmund Acour, Count de Noyon, Lord of Cattrina. In Avignon, however the cause may go, Cattrina purposes to snare and make her his, which will be easy, for there he has many friends and she has none.”