Adolescence had caught them both unawares. She had matured quickly, and at fifteen had married Ralf le Chevalier, a neighbour of theirs who was a past master in the art of training her father’s destriers. It had been her admiration for his dextrous handling of all that power that had first brought them together.

As her love for Ralf blossomed, Adam had retired into uncommunicative sulks, his natural reticence becoming a full-blown unwillingness to interact with anything or anyone. She could still see him now, his expression surly, his face cursed by a red gruel of spots, his body long-shanked and uncoordinated. Ye withal, he had had a peculiar grace, and a way with a sword. And even if he wore a constant scowl, he was always reliable and diligent.

Taking his shirt now, she clucked her tongue over its threadbare state. ‘I notice the Empress was not so finicky about garments not on display,’ she remarked. ‘You must let me measure you and get the seamstresses to stitch you some new clothes.’

‘Organising my life for me?’ he needled her.

Heulwen laughed and handed his remaining garments to the maid. ‘What else are sisters for?’ As she looked teasingly over her shoulder at him, the laughter left her face and her stomach wallowed. Her mind had been talking to the lanky, spotty boy of her childhood. Now the illusion was stripped bare, as if shed with his garments, and she found herself confronting Adam the man, a stranger she did not know. Renard had warned her and she had not listened, and now it was too late.

The spots had gone, replaced by the ruddy glint of beard stubble prickling through his travel-burned skin. His hair was sun-streaked, the russet-brown bleached to bronze where it had been most exposed, and his eyes were the colour of dark honey. His thin, long nose was marred midway by a ridge of thickened bone where it had been broken and reset slightly askew, and a faint white scar from the same incident ran from beneath his nose into the lopsided long curve of his upper lip. Her glance flickered lower, taking in a physique that was no longer out of proportion. There were a few scars on his body too that had not been there before. One of them, obviously recent and still pink, curved like a new moon over his hip. Hastily she looked away and gestured him to step into the tub. Her throat was suddenly dry and her loins, in contrast, were liquid. Never would she have thought to apply the term ‘beautiful’ to Adam de Lacey, but the cygnet had shed its down, and more besides. ‘You have seen some hard fighting recently,’ she said hoarsely, and busied herself finding a dish of soap.

He stepped into the oval tub and sat down. The water was hot, making him gasp and flinch, but at least it concealed the more unpredictable parts of his anatomy from her view. ‘We were attacked several times on the road by routiers and outlaws. They picked the wrong victim in me, but some of them took the devil of convincing. Am I supposed to use this?’

She took back the soap dish she had just handed to him with a puzzled look.

‘I shall smell as sweet as a Turkish comfit!’ he elaborated with a genuine laugh.

Irritated at her mistake, she replaced the rose attar lavender concoction with something less scented.

‘Renard told me about Ralf,’ Adam said into the uneasy atmosphere. ‘I’m sorry. He was a good man, and I know you loved him.’

Heulwen straightened up like a warrior preparing to resist a blow. Yes, Ralf had been a good man: a fine warrior and superlative horseman, all that men would admire. But he had been a poor husband and an unfaithful one, rutting after other women the way his stallions did after mares on heat — and then there was the matter of all that unaccounted-for silver in their strongbox. ‘It is never safe to build on quicksand,’ she said with a hint of bitterness, and fetched him a shirt and tunic of her father’s, his own baggage still being below in the hall.

‘What about Ralf ’s stallions?’

Heulwen shrugged her shoulders. ‘I thought I might sell them, but two of the three are only half trained and could be worth much more if they were properly schooled.’

He returned to his ablutions. Women and warhorses. Le Chevalier had been expert in the art of taming both. Adam only had the latter skill, learned out of a jealous need to prove that he was as good as the man Heulwen had chosen to love, a skill in which, as a mature man, he now took a deep and justifiable pride. ‘I could finish Ralf ’s work,’ he offered diffidently.

Heulwen hesitated, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of you when you’re so recently home.’

‘You would be doing me a service. I haven’t worked on a horse since leaving for Germany, and it will give me space to relax between curbing the Welsh and organising my lands. I am the one who would be beholden.’

His eyes met hers and then he averted them. ‘Well then, thank you,’ she capitulated with a nod. ‘There are two half-trained stallions as I said, and one that Ralf was hoping to sell at Windsor this Christmas feast.’

Adam stepped from the tub and dried himself on the towels laid out. Turning his back, he quickly donned the clothes she had found for him. Struggling with a sense of hopelessness, he felt like a fish caught by the gills in a net. Oh Heulwen, Heulwen!

‘They’re stabled in the bailey. My father and Renard have been exercising them since Ralf died.’ Her expression brightened. ‘You can see them now if you like — if you’re not too travel-worn. There’s time before dinner.’

‘No, I’m not too travel-worn,’ he said, glad of an excuse to leave this chamber and their forced proximity. Although she had made the initial suggestion, he was the one to move first towards the door. ‘I’m never too tired to look at a good horse.’

She smiled with sour amusement. ‘That’s what I thought you’d say.’


Hands on hips, Adam watched Eadric and two under-grooms lead the three destriers around the paddock at the side of the stables. There was a rangy dark bay, handsome and spirited, a showy piebald, eminently saleable but of less calibre than the bay, and a sorrel of Spanish blood with cream mane and tail and the high-stepping carriage of a prince. It was to the last that Adam went, drawn by admiration to slap the satin hide and feel it rippling and firm beneath his palm.

‘Vaillantif was Ralf ’s favourite too,’ Heulwen said, watching him run his hand down the stallion’s foreleg to pick up and examine a hoof. ‘He was riding him when he died.’

Adam looked round at her and carefully set the hoof back down. ‘And the Welsh didn’t keep him?’

‘I don’t think they had time. ’

‘I’d have made time if I were a Welsh raider.’ He nodded to the groom, and with a practised leap was smoothly astride the stallion’s broad, bare back. The destrier fought the bit, but Adam soothed and cajoled him, gripped with his thighs and knees, and urged with his heels.

Heulwen watched him take Vaillantif on a circuit of the paddock and her stomach churned as he went through the same routines as Ralf had done, with the same assurance, his spine aligned to every movement the horse made. Even without a saddle, his seat was easy and graceful. Vaillantif high-stepped with arched crest. He rapidly changed leading forefeet. A command from Adam and he reared up and danced on his hind legs. Another command dropped his forefeet to the ground and eased him into a relaxed trot and then a ground-consuming smooth canter. A quick touch on the rump and he back-kicked.

Adam brought him round before her and dismounted, pleasure flushing beneath his tan. ‘I’ve never ridden better,’ he declared with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Heulwen, he’s worth a king’s ransom!’

‘God send that you should ever look on a woman thus!’ she laughed.

His face changed, as if a shutter had been slammed across an open window. ‘What makes you think I haven’t?’ he said, giving all his attention to the horse.

Heulwen drew breath to ask the obvious question, but was forestalled by the noise of the hunting party clattering into the bailey, and turned to shade her eyes against the slant of the sun to watch their return.

Her father sat his courser with the ease of a born horseman. He was bareheaded, and the breeze ruffled his silver-scattered dark hair and carried the sound of his laughter as he responded to a remark made by the woman riding beside him.

A packhorse bearing the carcass of a roebuck was being led away towards the kitchen slaughter shed where the butchering was carried out. The houndkeeper and his lad were taking charge of the dogs that enveloped the humans knee deep. A white gazehound bitch clung jealously to the Earl’s side, nose thrusting at his hand.

‘Yes, he’s still got Gwen,’ Heulwen replied to Adam’s raised brows. ‘It’s the first time since her pups were born that she’s left them to run with the hunt. If you ask Papa nicely, he might give you one once they’re weaned.’

‘Who says I want a dog?’

‘Company for you at Thornford.’

He angled her a dubious look and started across the crowded bailey.

Lord Guyon, alerted by a groom, lifted his head and before Adam had taken more than half a dozen paces, was striding to meet him. His wife gathered her skirts and hastened in his wake.

‘We’d given you up for a ghost!’ Guyon clasped Adam in a brief, muscular bearhug.

‘Yes, graceless whelp, why did you not write!’ This reproach was from Lady Judith, who embraced him in her turn and kissed him warmly, her hazel-grey eyes alight with pleasure.

‘It wasn’t always easy to find a quiet corner, the places and predicaments I was in, and you know I have no talent with parchment and quill.’

Lady Judith laughed in wry acknowledgement. Her foster-son was literate through sheer perseverance — hers and the priest’s — but he would never write a fluent hand. His characters had a disturbing tendency to arrive on the parchment either back to front or upside down. ‘No excuses,’ she said sternly, ‘you could have found a scribe, I am sure.’