A heavy river mist, boiled in the heat of the day, had rolled in from the Seine making the night more dreadful, shrouding the buildings and palaces of Paris in its grey, wraith-like tendrils. The curfew had sounded, the streets and alleyways were now silent except for scavenging cats and the dregs of the Paris underworld snouting like rats for easy prey. Eudo Tailler, ostensibly a wine merchant from Bordeaux in Gascony, in fact an agent of Edward I of England and his master spy, Hugh Corbett, slipped quietly along an alleyway, dagger half-drawn as he edged towards the dark, decaying house which stood on the corner.

It had been a glorious summer day, the weather proving the prophets of doom wrong, those Jeremiahs who had proclaimed that the first year of the new century would see fire from heaven and blood spurting up to stain the sky. Nothing had happened. Eudo had arrived in Paris at mid-summer 1300 and found little amiss. Of course, his masters in England thought there was; Philip IV, King of France, they insisted, was secretly plotting to seize the English Duchy of Gascony by fair means or foul. The French King's master spy, Seigneur Amaury de Craon, was already in England, poking about in the dark comers of the English court, looking for juicy morsels of scandal.

Eudo suddenly stepped into a darkened doorway as the night watch, four soldiers carrying spears and lanterns, marched past the mouth of the alleyway. The spy leaned against the door. Oh, there was scandal enough in England, he thought, and most of it centred round the Prince of Wales and his former mistress, Lady Eleanor Belmont, who had been locked up in Godstowe Priory. Yet a bad situation had grown worse because the young prince had recently found the real love of his life – not the daughter of some nobleman but a man: the young Gascon catamite, Piers Gaveston. De Craon would use that, Eudo reflected, to fan the sparks of gossip into a fiery scandal In order to seize Gascony, the French would destroy the prince's reputation and, if that failed, like the hypocrites they were insist that the heir to the English throne be betrothed to the French King's daughter, Isabella, in accordance with a peace treaty forced on England some years earlier.