Without speaking, for her throat was tight, she took his calloused hand and placed it against her womb, upon the hidden promise of new life.

EPILOGUE

Spring 1175


The white chapel held two effigies, side by side, one a woman wearing a crown of saffron crocuses upon her pale stone brow. Her companion wore mail and a surcoat, his sword carved at rest beside him and his hands clasped, not in an attitude of prayer, but holding a shield bearing the comet blazon of his family line.

‘It looks like Papa,’ Martin said judiciously and ran his forefinger over the stone ripples and folds. ‘He’ll be happy here, I know he will.’

Robert copied him by setting his own smaller hand upon the effigy’s spurs.

Joscelin lightly touched Martin’s shoulder and considered Ironheart’s tomb. He had had to search hard among Nottingham’s fraternity of alabaster craftsmen to find one who could carve the effigy as he wanted. No pious positioning of the hands or rigid garments confining the essence. He wanted Ironheart the restless, brusque warrior, not Ironheart the saint. By and large the man had succeeded, although his father’s hair had never succumbed to a comb the way it had succumbed in stone to the craftsman’s chisel. Ralf had a tomb, too, in the chapel at Arnsby, and that was rigidly conventional and blessedly resembled his brother not in the slightest. The same went for Agnes’ memorial, although that was not yet finished for she had only died the week before Candlemas of yet another seizure.

He would not dwell on the past. Linnet would rebuke him if she thought he was brooding, although she allowed him his moments of solitude and introspection. He heard her footfall now and turned to watch her walk up the nave towards him. She was wearing her thick winter cloak for, despite the sunshine, there was still a sharpness in the air and she had her burden to protect, but she walked gracefully, and he felt his heart and gut swoop together, producing a feeling of elation.

The others would be coming soon to fill the church and attend this Mass that was to be said for the souls of William de Rocher and Morwenna de Gael, but Joscelin had allowed a space of time for the solitude of his own immediate family, for the peace and breathing space to stand before the tombs of his mother and father and present to them their three-month-old granddaughter, dark of hair, green of eye - Morwenna.