"Most gracious lady, I know nothing. Last night I sought my bed early, the better to be ready for our departure this morning and----"
"Got you that wound on your face in your bed? 'Tis a strange place to encounter such a thing."
"Madame la Duchesse, I fell upon the stairs and hurt myself."
"It resembles not a bruise. More like unto a sharp cut. Yet this is nought to me. Tell me, I say, what you know of the absence of those three. Of the young English seigneur, of your leader, the captain, and your boon companion?"
"Gracious lady," Boisfleury said again, "I know nothing. The young English seigneur I saw not at all. Madame la Duchesse will remember that he abode not with us but with madame and mademoiselle," directing his eyes towards Jacquette. "The noble captain supped alone very early and then retired at once. As for Fleur de Mai and me, we supped together; he drank more than was good for him--as--as I warned him--and then rolled himself in his cloak and slept before the fire. Whereon I sought my bed."
"I will have the house ransacked to find one at least of them," the Duchess exclaimed, her eyes ablaze; "nay, I will have the whole of this heretical, canticle-singing town ransacked, if I can do so, to find him. For the others I care not, no, not even if they have gone to their master the devil! While as for you----"
"As for me, most noble dame?" Boisfleury repeated, cringingly, though with a strange gleam in his eye. "As for me, Madame la Duchesse?"
"I do not believe you. If we were in Paris you should be sent to the Bastille or La Tournelle----"
"Madame la Duchesse has shaken the dust of Paris off her feet," the man answered, with an insolent leer. "We shall not meet in Paris when I return to it."
"Out, dog!" the Duchess cried, advancing towards the fellow, her hot Italian blood aflame at his insolence and also at the certainty that he was lying to her. "Out, animal! Or the landlord----"