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disarming, had begun teaching the future Henri II, then seventeen, his roles of lover and prince. It was unlucky that before his father died, Henri had become too attached to Diane his mistress, that Montmorency had become too helpful to Henri his prospective master, and that Henri had talked a little too freely of the appointment he would make and banishments he would cancel when his father was dead … selling the skin, said the Court, before the bear was killed. Francis did not like it; and it was as well, on the whole, that Francis had died when he did.
    O’LiamRoe, who was well informed in his magpie way, needed little or no material briefing from the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber who had waited with remarkable patience for two hours to take him to the presence of the King. He received an unbelievable amount of information about etiquette; about bowing, about titles, about the gentlemen he might meet—for, as the interview would take place in the tennis courts, ladies were unlikely to be there. He listened with a thoughtful tolerance as he was handed through the guard posts into the Priory, pricked with golden fleurs-de-lis and busy as a Michaelmas market. Archers, steward, equerries, pages came at him in waves, and keeping him off the main corridors, channelled O’LiamRoe and his escort into a side room, a side door and a grassy courtyard where someone had hastily pinned up a net. The Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who was red in the face and sweating slightly under his satin, gripped O’LiamRoe’s sleeve with soft fingers and said, ‘Here you are. Wait. There is the King.’
    The square had a look of disuse. Built up on three sides, it was overhung by nothing but shuttered windows. Benches, hung with fine cloths, had been put up hastily on its paved edges with food and drink laid out, and there were stools and one or two chairs, with a doublet or a racquet left lying. Because of the height of the building, the sun was nearly off them, but the four or five men talking at the far end of the court were in shirt sleeves. In the centre a man, big, broad-shouldered and black-bearded, stood listening, with an arm on either shoulder of the flanking players. He was dressed entirely in white. ‘The King,’ repeated The O’LiamRoe’s guide; and pointed.
    The O’LiamRoe’s oval face craned forward. ‘Do you tell me,’ said the Chief, fascinated. ‘He’ll be at them for the scrofula.’ Two of themen in the group had been with d’Aubigny at Dieppe: the scent of them carried downwind.
    The Gentleman of the Bedchamber, whose English was not quite perfect, opened his mouth, thought better of it, and ended by saying, ‘He has seen us. Come forward, my lord prince, and I shall present you.’
    ‘Faith, he’s complete,’ was O’LiamRoe’s next remark, as they moved forward, ‘and as black as a crow. I heard he’d greyed early; does he dip it, now? There’s a fine receipt of my mother’s: two pottles of tar to a pottle of pitch. From the hour we put a brush to it, we lost never a sheep. And is this the King’s grace?’
    The two parties had met. In a loud voice, the escorting courtier made the introductions; and as his titles hung quaintly on the warm air—Monseigneur Auleammeaux, Prince de Barrault et Seigneur des Monts Salif Blum—O’LiamRoe stood like an amiable chaffbin, the day’s merciless noon on the dreadful nap on his frieze cloak and the dreadful lack of it on the saffron tunic below; like an exercise in the assembly of rubbish, to be dismantled shortly and given away to the poor. He stood at ease, without the shadow of a reverence, and when de Genstan of the Royal Guard of Scottish Archers, slipping forward, hissed in his ear, ‘Sir, it is customary to bow,’ he merely widened his disarming grin and said, ‘Do you tell me. And here am I born like the devil with my knees at the backs of my legs. What’s he blathering on about, the poor man?’
    M. de Genstan, with the faintest sign to his allies,