In answer, the resourceful Empress, careful to appear suitably frightened by Charles’s hints, declared her willingness to do all she could to promote his wishes, begging only a little time in which to bring the Queen round to a more yielding frame of mind; a favour that Charles could not help but grant her. And so they parted with the mutual assurance of a complete understanding. On returning to the Castel Nuovo, the Empress, having reported what had passed to the unhappy Joan, withdrew to consider her own plan of action in the struggle with Charles of Durazzo. At length she hit upon a scheme so truly infernal as to claim pre-eminence over anything that had preceded it in the long list of her iniquities. She would strike her enemy to the heart; she would kill his intellect and break him as surely as with an iron bar upon the wheel, through the one person that he loved and venerated in all the world—his widowed mother, the saintly Duchess Agnes of Durazzo. Now it chanced that during those days Agnes of Durazzo lay sick of a lingering and mysterious malady, the nature of which it was beyond the ability of her physician to determine. In all probability the Duchess’s disease was one of an internal tumour; be that as it may, it was in every symptomatic particular only too well adapted to the unspeakable purpose of the Empress, who forthwith set herself to disseminating rumours destructive to the reputation of the good and gentle Duchess. Not satisfied with this alone, moreover, she contrived by a hellish stratagem to deceive even the Duchess’s doctor, so that he believed himself justified in imparting his opinion to Charles of Durazzo in person. So that mad horror, as of a lost soul, took possession of Charles, and the desire of the Empress that his mind should become the prey of devils was fulfilled. The luckless, blundering physician he dismissed curtly from his presence after their interview. An hour later the unfortunate man was discovered in a back street of Naples, stabbed to death—but not before he had written out, by Charles’s orders, the recipe of a certain draught to be administered to his illustrious patient; which thing was done in the evening of the same day. Shortly afterwards Charles was hastily summoned to his mother’s bedside from the room in which he had spent the rest of that awful day alone with his thoughts after parting from the doctor. On entering that of his mother, her attendants withdrew, leaving the fast dying woman alone with the son who had destroyed her in the interests of the family honour.