t of them had been good
Kings--if not always "good" men in the nicey-nicey sense of the word.
Even old Richard I, who'd been pretty wild during the first forty-odd
years of his life, had settled down to do a magnificent job of kinging
for the next twenty years. The long and painful recovery from the
wound he'd received at the Siege of Chaluz had made a change in him
for the better.

There was a chance that Duke Richard might be called upon to uphold
the honor of that name as King. By law, Parliament must elect a
Plantagenet as King in the event of the death of the present
Sovereign, and while the election of one of the King's two sons, the
Prince of Wales and the Duke of Lancaster, was more likely than the
election of Richard, he was certainly not eliminated from the
succession.

[Illustration]

Meantime, he would uphold the honor of his name as Duke of Normandy.

Murder had been done; therefore justice must be done. The Count
D'Evreux had been known for his stern but fair justice almost as well
as he had been known for his profligacy. And, just as his pleasures
had been without temperance, so his justice had been untempered by
mercy. Whoever had killed him would find both justice and mercy--in so
far as Richard had it within his power to give it.

Although he did not formulate it in so many words, even mentally,
Richard was of the opinion that some debauched woman or cuckolded man
had fired the fatal shot. Thus he found himself inclining toward mercy
before he knew anything substantial about the case at all.

Richard dropped the letter he was holding into the special mail pouch
that would be placed aboard the evening trans-Channel packet, and then
turned in his chair to look at the lean, middle-aged man working at a
desk across the room.

"My lord Marquis," he said thoughtfully.

"Yes, Your Highness?" said the Marquis of Rouen, looking up.

"How true are the stories one has heard about the late Count?"

"True, Your Highness?" the Marquis said thoughtfully. "I would
hesitate to make any estimate of percentages. Once a man gets a
reputation like that, the number of his reputed sins quickly surpasses
the number of actual ones. Doubtless many of the stories one hears are
of whole cloth; others may have only a slight basis in fact. On the
other hand, it is highly likely that there are many of which we have
never heard. It is absolutely certain, however, that he has
acknowledged seven illegitimate sons, and I da