And then the attack was over after a short skirmish, our own escort eventually proving more than a match for the attackers, and they were driven off, leaving two of them dead in the road. As our sergeant-at-arms ordered removal of the bodies, Owen dismounted and walked slowly back to me. His face was livid, his hair matted with sweat, but he was alive. Vibrantly alive. There was blood on his blade that was not his.

‘You are wounded,’ I said, all senses as frozen as the landscape, watching the blood drip from the fingers of his left arm.

‘Yes.’ Tight-lipped, wincing a little, he pulled at the material of his sleeve. ‘A flesh wound. I was careless.’

‘Can I help you, bind it up?’

‘No.’ He was as curt as he had ever been with me.

I said what was uppermost in my mind. ‘Was that a deliberate attack against us?’

‘No. A chance encounter by particularly enterprising robbers.’ He did not look at me.

I did not believe him, but let it slide. ‘Why were you not armed?’ I demanded. Even I heard the accusatory note in my voice.

Now he looked up at me, anger bright in his face, his lips pale and thin, his words ungoverned.

‘I was not armed because I have to live under the damnable restrictions that the English law puts on me.’

‘But—’

‘It’s not a matter for discussion.’ Oh, he was brusque. ‘Close the curtains, Katherine, and we’ll be off again.’

He left me, and I obeyed, but not before I saw him toss the sword back to its owner.

Back at Hertford within the hour, his face still set in stark lines, I kept a still tongue as I dispatched him to have Alice inspect his wounds. Giving him time, I visited Edmund and Jasper in the nursery, listened to their achievements and woes, but my mind was busy elsewhere. I was certain that the only time I had ever seen Owen wear a sword had been on the morning he had stood with me in St George’s Chapel and taken me as his wife.

So he had a sword. He could indubitably use one, had been taught to wield one, and taught well. But—what was it that he had said? English law forbade him to wear one. What a morass of difficulties the law of England gave us. And how little of it I understood.

I kissed my sons and went in search of my husband.

For I knew that the ambush had not been the work of some chance vermin, some motley collection of riff-raff, as I had first surmised, but a well-mounted, well-armed, well-organised force. Furthermore, wearing no identifying livery, they had been waiting specifically for us. Owen might deny it, but it seemed to me that their focus had been set on Owen, not on our baggage wagons. In my heart I knew it with a cold certainty. They had been there to harm my husband.

I found Owen seated on a wooden settle in the kitchens, where Alice, muttering irritably about law and order in general and footpads in particular, was in the process of cutting away the ruined cloth of his tunic from arm and shoulder. His ill humour had been subsumed under the painful exigencies of the past half-hour. Taking a seat, I waited as Alice cleansed his forearm with white wine, ignoring his hiss of pain as she wound a length of linen around it and then applied herself to another sword slice through the flesh of his shoulder, the source of most of the blood.

‘They say you fought well,’ she observed, forming a tight knot. ‘Why is it that brave men make such a fuss about a little scratch?’

Yet I saw her apply her ministrations more gently. It was an uncomfortable hour for all of us, but when Owen showed his teeth in a feral snarl, Alice patted his unharmed shoulder and pushed a cup of ale into his hand.

‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘If you could manage not to put any strain on your shoulder for a day or two—but I expect you’ll be back on horseback by tomorrow.’

As she left us, I slid along the bench I was occupying until I sat opposite him.

‘Owen.’ I held his gaze when it lifted to mine. His eyes were dulled with pain and whatever alleviating substance Alice had added to his ale. ‘Why?’

‘I know what you’re going to ask,’ he interrupted with a grimace as he tried to brace his shoulder. ‘And the answer is this—just as I said when in danger of being hewn down by some lawless villain—I don’t wear a sword because the law forbids it.’

‘But you have one. I know you have. You wore it the day we stood before the altar.’

‘And that was the damned foolish reaction of a man with too much pride for his own good.’

Which did not make sense. ‘Why does the law forbid it?’

‘A penalty of my being Welsh, and retaliation for the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dwr. A rebellion that threatened English sovereignty and thwarted the English king’s desire to rule Wales.’ He winced again as he lifted the cup of ale to his lips. ‘It was a pretty successful rebellion, all in all, until it was crushed with bloody and savage retribution. And so have we Welsh all been crushed ever since. The law discriminates against us.’

I had not thought about this to any degree, but I did now.

‘Tell me what it means to be Welsh under English dominion,’ I demanded. ‘When I asked you before, you didn’t tell me. I want to know now. How does the law discriminate against you?’

He leaned back on the settle, placing the cup beside him, weariness heavy in his eyes, resignation in his voice. ‘You know that I own nothing of my own. Have you never considered why?’

‘I think I presumed that your family had nothing for you to inherit.’

His smile was grim. ‘My family had much to inherit. But after Glyn Dwr was overthrown, all who fought for him were stripped of their property. My father fought for Glyn Dwr.’ He scrubbed his hands over his face as if he would obliterate some unpleasant memory. His voice quiet and measured, without inflection, with Alice bustling in the background and the faint chatter of servants, the heat of the ovens and the appetising scents of roasting meat, Owen told me about the restrictions he knew by heart as if they meant nothing to him, whereas I knew they were a wound on his soul.

‘The law says that I can neither wear nor own weapons. I am forbidden to own land in England. I am forbidden to enter some towns. I am not allowed to assemble with other Welshmen, for fear we might hatch another vile plot against the English government. And many would, God help them. The law keeps us penurious and powerless. That is why I have worked for you all these years. That is why I had nothing to give you and nothing to forfeit.’

And he had never told me any of it. He had kept the shameful dishonour of it bound and shackled in his heart and belly. It almost moved me to tears, but I would not. Here was no time for weak sentiment. I listened silently, and when he had finished, we simply sat. After a little while I took his hand as I pondered what I now knew.

‘No one has ever told me this.’

‘Why would they? It matters to no one who is not Welsh.’

‘It is unjust.’

‘Many would say we earned it by spilling English blood. Rebels are not well thought of.’ His brief smile was humourless. ‘And before you ask—there’s nothing that can be done about it. We have no rights before English law.’

‘I would have asked that,’ I replied. And then: ‘Not wearing a sword means a lot to you, doesn’t it?’ He turned his face from me. ‘You wore it when we were wed. You stood in your own name with a sword at your side.’

‘So I did.’

‘And what’s more,’ I observed as the memory of his part in the bloody fight surged back, ‘you used the sword as if it was second nature to you. Who taught you?’

‘My father,’ he replied. ‘When I was a boy at home.’

‘So you have worn a sword.’

There was a flash of anger in his face, quickly masked. ‘All men of my family are warriors. It would have been a dishonour for me not to have the skill.’

‘Then if your father taught you, and you can use it well, why not wear—?’

He silenced me with a glance. ‘I’ll not wear Llewellyn’s sword again until I can do so with honour. I will not speak of this, Katherine.’

I lifted my hands in exasperation and gave up. He would not admit it, but I could read all that he did not say in the dark bleakness of his eyes, the proud flare of nostril and edge of cheekbone. So his family had once been landowners. Was not a sword the symbol of a man of birth? It was so in France, and I saw no reason why England should be any different. An English or Welsh gentleman would feel the need to wear a sword at his side just as much as his French cousin. But what exactly was his family? Were they men of rank and social standing? I remembered that when I had asked him he had become marvellously reticent for a man so clever with words. There was still so much I did not know about Owen Tudor.

‘What would happen if you were caught wearing a weapon?’ I asked, ignoring, in true wifely fashion, Owen’s decision.

‘I don’t know.’ He hitched a shoulder, resulting in a grunt of discomfort at Alice’s tight bandaging when he forgot. ‘I might be fined. Clapped in prison perhaps?’ Carefully he began to shrug himself back into what was left of his tunic, to cover the remnants of his shirt.

‘No one would know, of course,’ I suggested. ‘If you did happen to wear one.’

He abandoned the attempt to dress. ‘By God, that woman’s ministrations are more incapacitating than the damned sword thrust!’

‘Owen!’

He shook his head, but relented under my persistence. ‘No one would know,’ he replied gently, ‘except those who make it their interest to watch what I do, and inform on me. The Council and Gloucester would be only too triumphant to find some excuse to move against me. And so I will not wear one. The last thing I want for you is to have you visiting me in the Tower of London. And because of that I’ll abide by the damned law. You once asked me why I did not use my true name—’