Her sombre eyes went past him to dwell upon the three glittering gallants in the courtly group of five that followed at the soldier's heels.
'A man?' she echoed. 'I do not remember to have seen such a portent hereabouts in days.'
Of the three at whom the shaft of her irony was directed two laughed outright in shameless sycophancy; the third flushed scarlet, his glance resentful. He was the youngest by some years, and still a boy. He had her own brown eyes and tawny hair, and otherwise resembled her, save that his countenance lacked the firm strength that might be read in hers. His slim, graceful, stripling figure was gorgeously arrayed in a kilted tunic of gold brocade with long, green, deeply foliated sleeves, the ends of which reached almost to his toes. His girdle was of hammered gold whence hung a poniard with a jewelled hilt, and a ruby glowed in his bulging cap of green silk. One of his legs was cased in green, the other in yellow, and he wore a green shoe on the yellow foot, and a yellow on the green. This, in the sixteenth year of his age, was the Lord Gian Giacomo Paleologo, sovereign Marquis of Montferrat.
His two male companions were Messer Corsario, his tutor, a foxy-faced man of thirty, whose rich purple gown would have been more proper to a courtier than a pedant, and the Lord Castruccio da Fenestrella, a young man of perhaps five and twenty, very gorgeous in a scarlet houppelande, and not unhandsome, despite his pallid cheeks, thin lank hair, and rather shifty eyes. It was upon him that Giacomo now turned in peevishness.
'Do not laugh, Castruccio.'
Meanwhile the captain was flinging out an arm in command to his followers. 'Two of you to search the enclosure yonder about the gate. Beat up the hedges. Two of you with me.' He swung to the lady before she could answer her brother. 'You have seen no one, highness?'
Her highness was guilty of an evasion. 'Should I not tell you if I had?'
'Yet a man certainly entered here not many minutes since by the garden-door.'
'You saw him enter?'
'I saw clear signs that he had entered.'