Meantime, at home, Beatrix held with knowledge and courage that castle, but against her were great odds.... Then came Tanneguy the Prince, who for many a year had worn her colours. With a great force, in open field, he beat the warring barons. One was slain, the other made submission. But the castle walls lay in huge ruin, and half the keep was a flaming fire.... Tanneguy’s town rose not many leagues away. Under his escort, when she had taken good order for the wounded fief, came there Beatrix and her two children, a son and a daughter. He gave her a fair house and garden, close by his own great castle.
Here she dwelled in Tanneguy’s town. With her were steward and chamberlain and tirewomen from the ruined castle, and she had the two children Alard and Yolande. Tanneguy, all the world knew, was her knight, and with poesy and tourney did her honour. He visited her in her garden and hall, and often was she in his castle.
Tanneguy hod a stone room with groined roof upheld by pillars. Outside its windows, cut in the thick, thick wall, quivered ivy and myrtle, sang the birds, hummed the bees, fell the gold light or the pleasant rain. By this room was a smaller room, and in this was built a furnace, and here tables held alembics and crucibles with a many other curiously shaped vessels, large and small, of glass or metal. Vials were there, and chests great and small, balances, and instruments with which to measure, manage, and design, earths and ores in heaps, and water falling from a stone lion’s head into a basin curved around by a stone gryphon. He had two men in brown who fed coals to his furnace, and for a helper an old, skilled man in green, a notable alchemist, but a lesser alchemist than Tanneguy himself. All this room held in a red-brown glow. With a magic hand and eye, it fascinated the children of Beatrix, often let to come and look from the great room or the deep, green garden. In the greater room of the stone pillars were Tanneguy’s books. His time considered, he had many.
He did not love books nor study more than did Beatrix whom he called his lady and who was now his guest. Together they loved knowledge, enquiry into the source and background and flow of things.