"Poor Janet." Katherine put down the lute and sighed. "Waiting is woman's lot. I don't suppose I'll see my Johnnie for many a long day, either."

Janet's small pale eyes sent her mother-in-law a resentful look. A blind mole could see that Lady Katherine preferred her baseborn sons to her legitimate one, and Janet considered this shameful. Her discontented gaze roamed around the Hall, which was larger and better furnished than Coleby's. She indulged in a familiar calculation as to how long it would be before Tom inherited. But Lady Katherine seemed healthy enough and looked, most infuriatingly, ten years younger than she was, a manifestly unfair reward for a wicked life.

"I think I'll go to bed," said Joan yawning. "With you, I suppose, Mother?"

Katherine nodded. The arrival of guests always meant switch of sleeping quarters. Janet, nurse and twins would occupy Joan's usual tower chamber - that had once been Nichola's.

Hawise put down her mending and began to blow out the candles. There were still twenty to go when the dogs started to bark outside. The blooded hound, Erro, that Sutton had given young John over eight years ago had been lying by the fire with his head on his paws. A dignified aristocrat, Erro, who did not consider himself a watchdog, and usually ignored the noisy antics of his inferiors. It was therefore astonishing to have him raise his head and whine, then leap up with one powerful bound and precipitate himself uproariously against the door.

"Strange," said Katherine running to hold his collar. "There's only one - Sainte Marie, could it be?" she added joyously.

And it was. Young John Beaufort came into the Hall on a swirl of soft snow. He caught his mother in his arms, kissed her heartily. "God's greeting, my lady! Sure your saint might have sent better weather to a son who's been hurrying to you these many days!"

He kissed his sister, Hawise, and, less enthusiastically, Janet, before quieting the ecstatic Erro, who barked fit to raise the dead in the churchyard across the road. John stood by the fire while the women fluttered around him removing his mantle, brushing snow from his curling yellow hair, unfastening his sword, and the gold knight's spurs of which he was so proud, heating ale for him in the long-handled iron pot over the fire.

"Oh dearling," Katherine cried, quivering with pride - surely there was no comelier young man in England - ''and you remembered your old mother's feast day! Johnnie, this is the pleasantest surprise, the goodliest thing that's happened to me in an age. I thought you abroad!"

"Well, I was." He sank into a chair with a grunt, held his steaming red-leather shoes towards the fire. "Until three weeks ago. In Bordeaux. Mother-" He turned and looked directly into her face. "I was not the only one there who remembered your saint's day."

Katherine's look of contented pride slowly dissolved, to be replaced by tenseness. She said slowly, "What were you doing at Bordeaux, Johnnie?"

Hawise's hands, which had been rubbing lard into John's wet shoe-leather, suddenly stilled. Janet ceased jiggling the twin's cradle and raised her head, not understanding the odd tone in her mother-in-law's voice. Joan looked from her mother to her brother and began to breathe fast.

"I was summoned by my father!"cried John triumphantly. "I spent a week with him and have brought you a letter from him. He wanted it to reach you today."

In Katherine's head there was a rumble like far-off thunder, while she felt a peculiar coolness as though the snow outside were melting through her veins.

"So you have met the Duke again," she said speaking from the depths of the coolness. "How does he seem?"

John's surprise that she did not at once ask for her letter was shared by Joan and Janet, but Hawise understood. She returned grimly to the shoe-leather and thought, Now what does that accursed Duke want?

"He's very tired, I think," said John, "and lean as - as Erro here, anxious to be back. His work is finished in Aquitaine, and Richard has summoned him home, much to Gloucester's fury, I believe."

"Ah - -" said Katherine.

"By God," said John eagerly, "of course, that stinking Thomas of Woodstock wants our father's grace kept out of the country, so he can have free hand with Richard and the foul plottings and warmongerings that Father holds in check. Richard's fed up for the time and is pro-Lancaster now."

"Ah - -" said Katherine again. "Far off as we are here, we've not followed court policies, or the King's whims. The Duke of Gloucester, that was Buckingham when I knew him, I thought to be in favour."

"Well, he's not now, and I think the King's afraid of him. That's why he wants Father's help. Mother," said John unbuttoning his surcote and pulling a parchment from his breast, "don't you want your letter? I'm in a fever to know what's in it!"

"And I," whispered Joan, putting her hand on Katherine's arm. Katherine took the letter and looked at the superscription: Lady Kateryn de Swynforth, Kettle thorp, County of Nicole," in John's own decisive heavily stroked black writing. It is fourteen and a half years since I have seen this writing, she thought. But it looked quite unchanged. She turned the letter over and examined the crimson imprint of his privy seal. In this there was change. The royal arms of Castile and Leon no longer occupied the dexter half. So he admitted at last the extinction of the great Castilian myth. Yet his daughter Catalina sat on the throne. He and Costanza had accomplished that much.

"Lady mother," said her son beseechingly, "for the love of Christ, read it! He told me nothing of what he wrote, and my father's grace is not a man one can question - yet he seemed pleased with me. He watched me joust and seemed very pleased."

Katherine smiled faintly. "You shall know soon what's in the letter." She rose. Under the disappointed looks of her children, she retrieved her mantle from the perch and went out into the snow, up the outside stairs into her solar. She bolted the door and put the parchment on a table while she replenished the fire. When the flames burned well, she went to her prie-dieu and knelt for some time. Then she lit a candle at the fire and placed it carefully on its iron pricket. After a while she picked up the letter and sat on a stool by the hearth. Her fingers were cold as the icicles that hung from the thatched eaves when she at length broke the crimson seal.

There was no greeting. It began abruptly, in French, as he had always written to her.

Recently I visited Chateau la Teste in Les Landes. Poignant memories were aroused of a time long ago. I am weary of many things, each day my life becomes more irksome to me, and in the light of this weariness I view some bygone actions differently from what I used to. I shall be back in England at Christmas time, and I wish to see you again. I beg of you to forget all past bitterness, to look courteously across the great chasm that opened between us, and to grant my request. I also wish to see Joan, who is with you, I understand. Harry, I have summoned from Germany and should be on his way home. Our Thomas I shall visit at Oxford before I come to Lincolnshire. John, who has brought you this letter, will remain with you until I arrive, about the first of the year. He is a son to be proud of. You have done well with him, and with the others too.

God and His Blessed Mother have you in their keeping.

John, Duke of Lancaster

Bordeaux, November 5,1395

"So - -" said Katherine aloud, putting down the letter. She repeated a sentence slowly: "Je vous emprie d'oublier toute l'amertume du passe - -" Yes, bitterness should be forgotten. She no longer felt bitterness, but there was a sharp reluctance. It's too late, much too late for us to meet again. Middle-aged people - almost old. John was fifty-five. She could not hinder the children, since their father was at last taking an open interest in them. But as for me, she thought - far better if I'm not here when he comes. She could go to Janet at Coleby. Ah, let me alone - she said to the letter, looking at the words "Chateau la Teste dans les Landes . . . des souvenirs poignants": the round room in the donjon tower, the sea air, the mewing of gulls - and ecstasy that can come but once.

She had made a new life; usually there was content. She had learned the pleasure of little things: the glint of May sunlight on a cluster of bluebells, the smell of white bread she had herself baked, quiet companionable talk with some of the village wives, whose pungent humour she had learned to appreciate.

Had she not earned freedom from turmoil? From fear and pain? The letter brought both. Fear not only of emotional upheaval, but of practical troubles. She had gradually become acceptable to Lincolnshire, time had somewhat regularised her position. The old buzzings and scandals would inevitably start up again upon the Duke's visit. Worse than that was the fear of anticlimax. Far better to keep the memory of a great love - as it had once been - than have it cheapened for ever by disillusionment. Indigne - she thought in the French word - unseemly, even perhaps ridiculous. No, she would not meet the Duke.

She persisted in her decision until the arrival of Harry on Christmas Eve. He had been studying at Aachen when his father's summons reached him, had hurriedly embarked from Holland and just landed at Boston. He arrived in a state of bright-eyed excitement. "What does this mean, Mother? Before God, I can't understand it, but surely it can't be for ill tidings he's summoned us!"

A large forceful young man of twenty, Harry had become; sleek as a pigeon in his plum-coloured cleric's robes. He had a hearty laugh, a fine resonant voice obviously made for the pulpit and a quick legal mind. In time he dissuaded Katherine from her flight, saying that she had no right to anger or baulk their father in any way, since it might prejudice him against the children. John and Joan, who were inclined to humour their mother, had not used this argument, but Katherine saw the truth of it.