Instantly, moreover, her Hungarian husband and his partisans, Father Robert the Dominican Friar, together with divers Hungarian nobles, and Giovanni Pipino, Count of Altamura, one of the most powerful lords of the kingdom and the most hated by the people, held counsel among themselves as to how they might best defeat the projects of the Queen’s party. This, they decided, could only be done by acquainting King Andrew’s mother, Elizabeth of Poland, and his brother, King Louis of Hungary, with the terms of King Robert’s last will, and of how a conspiracy had been set on foot to deprive King Andrew of his rightful share in the government of Naples. Also, a complaint in the same terms was to be sent to the Pope at Avignon and a request made of the Holy Father that he would issue a Bull of coronation on King Andrew’s behalf, thereby duly confirming him in his rights of, at least, equal sovereignty with Joan his wife. At the same time, Father Robert tried to impress upon Andrew the advisability of coming as soon as possible to some kind of understanding upon the subject with Joan herself before her favourites should have alienated her affections entirely from him. These favourites whom the good monk had in mind were some of them men and some of them women. Of the men—Robert of Cabano, Louis of Taranto, and Bertrand of Artois—we have already seen something; of the women we have as yet made acquaintance with only two, Filippa Cabano, the mother of Robert the half-breed, and formerly governess to the princesses Joan and Mary; and the Empress of Constantinople, their aunt and the mother of Louis of Taranto and his brothers. Besides Donna Filippa and the Empress, however, there were three others who had influence over Joan—the Countesses of Terlizzi and Morcone, daughters of Donna Filippa, and, lastly and supremely, a young and lovely girl of sixteen, known simply as “Cancia,” who occupied, officially, the position of tiring-woman to the young Queen. Cancia had been put into this employment by her protectoress, Donna Filippa, in order that by her wiles and companionship she might corrupt the spirit of Joan, and render her the more averse to the remonstrances of Father Robert the Dominican on behalf of Andrew of Hungary his pupil, and so bring her more and more under the influence of her lover, Robert of Cabano, Filippa’s own son. And Cancia had played her part so effectually that, it is said, Joan loved her more even than she did her own sister, Princess Mary. And as it happened, Donna Filippa was beginning to suspect that, at last, Joan was tiring of her intrigue with Robert, and that she might at any moment turn elsewhere for the love denied her by her rightful husband—for life without love was insupportable to Joan’s passionately affectionate nature.