The Lady Rohtraut came to herself one night and knew it was no dream. And she would have letters written to the Lord of Croy in Germany, that was her mother’s father, that he might come to her rescue. And no doubt he would have sent ships, though he was a very ancient man. He was a mighty prince, and had taken prisoner, in the old time, Edward Dacre, the Lady Rohtraut’s father, in a battle that his suzerain the Duke of Burgundy, who was of uncertain mind, fought against the English in Flanders. So, waiting in the Castle for his ransom to come, Edward Dacre loved the Duke’s daughter, the Princess Rohtraut, and was beloved by her. And, at the intercession of the Talbot, for the better soldering of a new friendship between the English and the Burgundians, the Duke, though sorely against his will, had given his daughter to Edward Dacre, he being made a baron of England on the day of the wedding. Her mother, the Princess Rohtraut, was still alive and lived with her son, the Lord Dacre, in London. But between mother and daughter there was a lawsuit about some of these very lands that her daughters sought to take from her, and in that way there was no commerce between them. Thus it was that the Lady Rohtraut was very haughty, and would in no way submit to the importunities of her daughters and their husbands, for she had the pride of the Dacres and of a Princess of Low Germany. The daughters would still have had her marry the Vesey of Wall Houses, so that they might have the management of her properties, but she answered that for nothing in the world would she do that thing, and that it would be to give them both to Satan. She had the right to an annual dower of 3,000 French crowns and to all the furnishings that had been taken by her husband, upon their marriage, from her Castle at Cramlinton, as well as her houses at Plessey and Killingworth. And she had the right to enter again, her husband being dead, into the possession and administration of those places as well as of her lands by Morpeth. She was minded to live as a proud and wealthy dowager and she was not minded to abate one jot of her rights and possessions to buy her freedom, though her daughters and their husbands came day by day and clamoured to her to do it. So there abode, like a prisoner in that little room, the Lady Rohtraut till that hour. All of her servants were driven away from her, and she had only Elizabeth Campstones to dress and undress her: and of linen she had so little that the old woman must come forth and wash it every three days. And, when she brought it forth, the daughters searched it into the very seams to see that there was no letter to the Duke of Croy or to the Dacres concealed within it. And the Lady Rohtraut fell ill, and she thought her daughters had poisoned her with a fig laid down in honey, till the doctor cured her with another such fig, the one poison, if it were a poison, driving out the other. PART II