Publisher's Synopsis
And, indeed, it was the hunters who had found him, coming upon him almost by chance as, barelimbed and pipe in hand, he was following the flock of the poor goatherd who had brought him up, and whose son he had always fancied himself to be. The child of the old King's only daughter by asecret marriage with one much beneath her in station-a stranger, some said, who, by the wonderfulmagic of his lute-playing, had made the young Princess love him; while others spoke of an artistfrom Rimini, to whom the Princess had shown much, perhaps too much honour, and who hadsuddenly disappeared from the city, leaving his work in the Cathedral unfinished-he had been, when but a week old, stolen away from his mother's side, as she slept, and given into the charge of acommon peasant and his wife, who were without children of their own, and lived in a remote part ofthe forest, more than a day's ride from the town. Grief, or the plague, as the court physician stated, or, as some suggested, a swift Italian poison administered in a cup of spiced wine, slew, within anhour of her wakening, the white girl who had given him birth, and as the trusty messenger who barethe child across his saddle-bow stooped from his weary horse and knocked at the rude door of thegoatherd's hut, the body of the Princess was being lowered into an open grave that had been dug ina deserted churchyard, beyond the city gates, a grave where it was said that another body was alsolying, that of a young man of marvellous and foreign beauty, whose hands were tied behind himwith a knotted cord, and whose breast was stabbed with many red woun
