“But of what fault do they accuse Andrew?” asked Joan uncertainly. In reply, the Albanian said that the people hated the Prince for his stupidity, his coarseness and savagery; that the nobles accused him of violating their privileges and of surrounding himself to their detriment with the basest adventurers; and that, lastly, he himself, Charles of Durazzo, accused Andrew of making Joan’s life a misery to her. And then, before she could recover from her amazement at his boldness, Charles wound up by offering to remove Andrew from her path by murdering him; whereupon, the better part in Joan triumphing for a moment over the lower side of her nature, she dismissed Charles angrily from her presence, calling him coward and insolent. Without undue haste or appearance of anger, Charles left her, merely reminding her that it was not altogether impossible that some day it should be his turn to condemn and hers to be judged. So that Duke Charles, having failed in his attempt to obtain Joan’s consent to the murder of Andrew, must, instead, have recourse to the second of the alternatives that had presented themselves to him. This was to make himself the husband of the next heir to the throne—the thirteen-year-old Maria, sister of Queen Joan. On reaching his own palace, therefore, he sent for a notary, one Nicholas of Melazzo, whose fate he held in his hands by means of a certain knowledge, and ordered him to draw up a contract of marriage between the Princess Maria, his cousin, and himself, Charles of Durazzo. This the notary, albeit terrified at the audacity of the thing (seeing that Maria, as will be remembered, was intended by the terms of King Robert’s will to be the wife of either King Louis of Hungary or of the Duke of Normandy) consented to do; and then Duke Charles ordered him at the same time to seek out Tommaso Pace, the valet of King Andrew and the notary’s own closest friend, and to find out if Pace had been approached at all by any of Queen Joan’s partisans with a view to drawing him into any plot against Andrew’s life. For, as Charles argued, if such a conspiracy should ever arise, those concerned in it would be almost sure to endeavour to win over the King’s valet to their undertaking in order the more easily to carry it into effect.