“His badge was a Portcullis,” her uncle said, when she read this to him, “so it was natural that he should fall before a castle. He used the Beanstalk, too, and if his name had been John, a pretty thing might have been raised upon it. But you’re divagating, my dear,” he continued, smiling—and seldom had Mary seen him in a better humor—“you’re divagating, whereas I—I believe that I have solved the problem of the Feathers.”
“The Prince of Wales’s? No!”
“I believe so. Of course there is no truth in the story which traces them to the blind King of Bohemia, killed at Crécy. His crest was two vulture wings.”
“But what of Arderne, who was the Prince’s surgeon?” Basset objected. “He says clearly that the Prince gained it from the King of Bohemia.”
“Not at all!” John Audley replied arrogantly—at this moment he was an antiquary and nothing more. “Where is the Arderne extract? Listen. ‘Edward, son of Edward the King, used to wear such a feather, and gained that feather from the King of Bohemia, whom he slew at Crécy, and so assumed to himself that feather which is called an ostrich feather which the first-named most illustrious King, used to wear on his crest.’ Now who was the first-named most illustrious King, who before that used to wear it?”
“The King of Bohemia.”
“Rubbish! Arderne means his own King, ‘Edward the King.’ He means that the Black Prince, after winning his spurs by his victory over the Bohemian, took his father’s insignia. He had only been knighted six weeks and waited to wear his father’s crest until he had earned it.”
“By Jove, sir!” Basset exclaimed, “I believe you are right!”
“Of course I am! The evidence is all that way. The Black Prince’s brothers wore it; surely not because their brother had done something, but because it was their father’s crest, probably derived from their mother, Philippa of Hainault? If you will look in the inventory of jewels made on the usurpation of Henry the Fourth you will see this item, ‘A collar of the livery of the Queen, on whom God have mercy, with an ostrich.’”
“But that,” Basset interposed, “was Queen Anne of Bohemia—she died seven years before. There you get Bohemia again!”