The Rose-in-June came back before she was due. Master Garland came up to the house with Gilbert Gay, one rainy evening when Nicholas and Genevieve were playing nine-men’s-morris in a corner and their mother was embroidering a girdle by the light of a bracket lamp. Nicholas had been taught not to interrupt, and he did not, but he was glad when his mother said gently, but with shining eyes, “Nicholas, come here.”
It was a queer story that Captain Garland had to tell, and nobody could make out exactly what it meant. Two or three years before he had met Ranulph, who was then a troubadour in the service of Prince Henry of Anjou, and he had taken a casket of gold pieces to Tomaso the physician, who was then in Genoa.
“They do say,” said Captain Garland, pulling at his russet beard, “that the old doctor can do anything short o’ raising the dead. They fair worshiped him there, I know. But it’s my notion that that box o’ gold pieces wasn’t payment for physic.”
“Probably not,” said the merchant smiling. “Secret messengers are more likely to deliver their messages if no one knows they have any. But what happened this time?”
“Why,” said the sea captain, “I found the old doctor in his garden, with a great cat o’ Malta stalking along beside him, and I gave him the packet. He opened it and read the letter, and then he untied a little leather purse and spilled out half a dozen gold pieces and some jewels that fair made me blink—not many, but beauties—rubies and emeralds and pearls. He beckoned toward the house and a man in pilgrim’s garb came out and valued the jewels. Then he sent me back to the Rose-in-June with the worth o’ the jewels in coined gold and this ring here. ‘Tell the boy,’ says he, ‘that he saved the King’s jewels, and that he has a better jewel than all of them, the jewel of honor.’”
“But, father,” said Nicholas, rather puzzled, “what else could I do?”
None of them could make anything of the mystery, but as Tomaso of Padua talked with Eloy the goldsmith that same evening they agreed that the price they paid was cheap. In the game the Pope’s party was playing against that of the Emperor for the mastery of Europe, it had been deemed advisable to find out whether Henry Plantagenet would rule the Holy Roman Empire if he could. He had refused the offer of the throne of the Cæsars, and it was of the utmost importance that no one should know that the offer had been made. Hence the delivery of the letter to the jeweler.