‘All men neglect their wives. In their absence we have to make lives of our own,’ Malde said gently.

‘I am not complaining, madam,’ Elene replied in a careful voice.

‘No, I can see that Renard should be proud of your duty,’ Malde looked wryly amused.

The leather ball, slimy with the hound’s saliva, smacked the floor near the women. The dog bounded past, swerved and spun and caught it up in its slavering jaws. Elene recoiled. Ever since seeing an alaunt run biting mad in her childhood she had nursed an aversion to large dogs no matter how friendly.

Prince Eustace ran up and caught the hound by the collar, prised the ball from its jaws, and threw it with malicious aim at the two musicians playing in the background. He shot his mother a sly glance to see if she would reprimand him.

She made a token gesture, shaking her head with a frowning smile. ‘Wait until you have sons,’ she said to Elene. ‘Naught but boisterous trouble, I warn you now!’ Her eyes were full of pride.

Elene smiled wanly. It would not be before next winter if she did. That first disastrous coupling had not resulted in any seed taking root. At Woolcot, ten days after their marriage, she had begun her flux at the allotted time and had been more than a little dismayed. When she thought about it logically, she knew that children were seldom begotten on the strength of one isolated mating.

‘If you did have a babe,’ Malde pursued, ‘whom would you choose for godparents? It is such a great responsibility.’

‘Oh, Renard has already asked Lord Leicester in antici — pation,’ Elene said with a bright smile. It was something to which she could admit without worrying that she was doing her husband a disservice, for Robert of Leicester was in high favour with the King and Queen. She knew that Malde was probing to try to discover the true direction of Renard’s sympathies, but Elene did not believe he had anything to conceal. He was essentially too busy strengthening their lands against attack to think about fomenting rebellion.

‘Ah.’ The Queen’s attention was suddenly diverted from Elene. ‘Here come the men from their sport.’ Her eyes lit on her husband and her breathing quickened. So did Elene’s as she looked at Renard, although her emotions were more ambivalent.

He was wearing the blue tunic she had made for him, already a firm favourite of his and worn frequently in marked preference to the wedding tunic. She had taken note, and a new robe begun for him in charcoal-grey wool was trimmed with thread-of-silver in sparse circumspection.

One of the Queen’s ladies, a vivacious russet-haired beauty who had been standing near the door, stepped across Renard’s path, and with a sly look over her shoulder at Elene, held a mistletoe kissing bunch over his head. Not being aware of her until the last moment, Renard stopped so abruptly and so close that he almost knocked her over. Elene saw a look of irritation flicker on his face before the courtier’s smile concealed it. Setting one arm around the girl’s waist, he drew her to him for an obligatory but perfunctory kiss. She said something to him. He arched his brow and murmured a curt reply that sent her flouncing away.

‘Heloise can never resist other women’s husbands,’ one of Malde’s older ladies whispered wryly to Elene. ‘Particularly when they are as dangerously charming as yours.’

Elene blinked. Dangerously charming? Was that how other women saw Renard? She had never really examined the thought herself. In childhood she had looked up to him with adoring awe, the ten years between them a vast gulf of expectation and experience, their daily exchanges those between adult and child. As her body matured she had dreamed unsettling dreams that left her hot and restless, seeking she knew not what. At one and the same time Renard had become more accessible and more distant, and her marriage had only consolidated the contrasts.

She looked at him as he approached. His strong bones, thick, black hair, his eyes the colour of a winter sea. His smile. Was that what the woman had meant by dangerous charm? He had stopped smiling now and she could tell from his bearing that he had recently been very angry.

His greeting to the Queen was civil enough but he made it obvious that he had no intention of dancing attendance on her and her women for longer than was strictly necessary. Even so, the tale of the horse race and all its accompanying drama had been related and embroidered upon at least twice by other barons before he finally succeeded in making his escape.

‘Did you really knock Ranulf de Gernons off his feet?’ Elene enquired as he lifted her down from the palfrey in the courtyard of the house they had rented for the duration of the Christmas feast.

‘I’m afraid I did. It has gone too far and too fast.’ His hands rested a little longer on her waist than was necessary, but when Elene glanced up at him, his gaze was preoccupied and she might as well have been that russet-haired court hussy for all the notice he was taking. ‘Stephen should never have tried to make us give each other the kiss of peace.’ Shaking his head, he released her and turned towards their dwelling.

‘Does that mean you’ll be returning to Caermoel?’ Her voice was neutral as they went up the outer staircase to the small solar and bedchamber. They had rented the house from a merchant, who had transferred himself and his family to his wife’s parents for the Christmas period, temporarily relinquishing his home for a tidy profit.

The merchant’s sharp business brain was attested to by the trappings of prosperity that adorned his home. A tapis rug hung on the wall and the furniture had obviously been constructed by a master craftsman. Elene paused beside a beautiful cherrywood cradle and gently tapped the rocker with her foot.

Renard sat down on the bed they had brought with them on the baggage wain and watched her at the crib. Her expression was guarded and he could not tell whether it disguised regret and longing, or if she just did not care. ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘it means I’ll have to go back to Caermoel. I can stay a few days at Woolcot if you want, and of course we’ll travel by way of Milnham and Ravenstow.’

‘Is war imminent?’

He lay back, tucking his arms behind his head. ‘I’m not the only thorn in Ranulf de Gernons’s side, and certainly not the largest or most painful. More than Caermoel, he wants Carlisle from the Earl of Huntingdon. I have a little space of time I think, at least until spring. Sieges in winter are always more demoralising for the attackers than the attacked.’

‘How will you raise the money?’ Elene asked. ‘Go in debt to the Jews?’

He looked thoughtfully at the scuffed toes of his boots. ‘There is enough income from the market and river tolls at Ravenstow and Ledworth to cover the initial cost, our marriage relief helped to swell the coffers, and Stephen has just given me a more than generous amount of silver from the Bishop of Salisbury’s fortune against the future services of Gorvenal on some of his mares.’

Elene’s stomach lurched as she stared at his lean length stretched out on the bed. ‘Will you visit Hawkfield too?’

He frowned. ‘I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose I will visit to see how she’s faring, more for Hawkfield’s sake. She called it a poky, back-of-beyond byre and threw a temper because I wouldn’t bring her to court.’

Elene turned away to remove her cloak, shielding her face from him.

He studied her rigid spine. ‘I won’t stay long, I promise you.’

‘Just long enough to …’ She bit her tongue and wrenched the pin out of the cloak, bending it.

Renard left the bed. ‘We’re back where we started, aren’t we?’ he said wearily, ‘with the ghost of our wedding night.’ He stretched his hand towards her. ‘Look Nell …’

Elene’s maid knocked on the door and poked her head around it. ‘My lord, there’s a Fleming here to see you. Pieter of Ypres. He says you have invited him to dine.’

Renard’s outstretched hand went to his forehead. ‘God’s teeth, I’d forgotten! That affair with de Gernons put it right out of my head. All right, Alys, give him some wine and tell him we’re coming.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

They heard her wooden pattens clattering back down the stairs.

‘Pieter of Ypres?’ Elene asked.

‘I met him this afternoon at the horse fair, although I knew of him already from his distant kin, William d’Ypres.’

Elene paused in a swift tidy of her veil, to regard him with surprise. ‘Isn’t he one of the King’s senior captains?’

‘ The senior captain,’ Renard corrected.

‘You want him for Caermoel?’ Elene guessed.

‘No.’ Renard gave her a look glinting with mischief. ‘I want him for you.’

‘For me?’ Elene stared at him. ‘Why? Do you mean as a body-guard in your absence?’

‘No, not as a body-guard. He isn’t a soldier, Nell, he’s a master cloth finisher — in exile for murdering his daughter’s husband. Apparently, he caught him thrashing the girl in a fit of drunken temper and gave him a taste of his own medicine. He went too far and the young man died. The lad’s family are influential among the merchant fraternity and Pieter had to flee here and take shelter with his cousin.’ Renard kissed her cheek and went to the door. ‘I told him that if he wanted employment in his own trade, you had a useful proposition to put to him.’

‘What!’ Elene gasped.

Renard laughed, highly pleased with himself and came over to slip his arm around her shoulders and draw her towards the door. ‘Was I wrong? You said that you needed people of the trade.’

‘No, not wrong,’ Elene said vaguely. ‘It’s just that you sprang it on me.’ Her mind raced with sudden possibil — ities. A master cloth finisher …