‘Is Mary well?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my lord. She is tired. But you will see her soon.’

‘And you are very formal, my lady. I recall you stripping me and dropping me in a bath of water when I had managed to fall into the midden at Kenilworth. You had no sympathy and scrubbed me unmercifully. You always used to call me Henry. What has changed?’ He paused, then added solemnly, ‘What is between you and my father does not alter my regard for you, Lady Katherine.’

How easy it was for control to slip away from me at the least show of affection, for the emotion to well up again, but I took the baby from him, moved beyond measure when he leaned to kiss my cheek in formal greeting, with the same elegant grace that his father might once have used towards me.

There was a shadow in the doorway that made Henry lift his head and turn. Henry must have heard the footsteps but, forsooth, I did not. I had no premonition of it, no sense that the Duke had accompanied Henry to Rochford Hall.

How could that be? Once I could touch his mind, at some immeasurable distance, when we were bound in love. It had proved on so many occasions to be a comfort, a strength. Now I could not sense his presence even when on the threshold of the same room. I had lost the ability to call him into my thoughts.

Had I closed my mind to him so effectively? Or had he closed his mind to me? A rank chill ran over my skin. How powerful, his betrayal of me. It was as if an impenetrable thicket of oaks stood between us, and I must accept that it no longer mattered. I no longer had any call on him.

But my loins clenched when the door to the antechamber was pushed wider, and there he was, striding across the room to his son’s side with loose-limbed elegance. The same imposing presence, the same statement of regal authority, and my wits, without time to marshal them, were scattered, my responses adrift. This was the first time we had stood together, sharing the same space, the same air, since his deliberate farewell on the road outside Pontefract. And between then and now rested the horror of the quitclaim. I could not decide what to do, what to say. For want of anything else, I held the baby tighter.

His eyes were on my face, light and calmly assessing, superbly confident in his powers, as if he had gone through some great passage of torment, and emerged on the other side, more certain, more driven, than ever. As I knew he must be. The Duke of Lancaster was once again accepted as a man to be reckoned with, at the right hand of King Richard. His rejection of a life of sin, together with the penance wrung from him, had been a resounding success.

Impressive as he was in that small room, even the youth and energy of his son, rejoicing in the birth of his own first-born, could not compete. It was as if, for the Duke, our parting was complete, the unpleasant reverberations in his life long gone. He had taken his decision to step away from me and was now at ease at its completion. The advantages for him had been momentous after all.

Whereas my heart thudded in my throat and the chill along my spine persisted, he was magnificently composed, but then, he had known I would be here. He had had time to order his initial response to me into strict line. I continued to stand motionless, a figure in a tableau, waiting to see what he would say, all the time wondering if I still had the power to move him. I could see no evidence of it in his clear gaze, his proud stance. There was no suffering here. I must accept that the alienation between us was for him a matter of no further importance.

In equally proud response I schooled my features into polite acknowledgement as I performed a brisk curtsy, the briefest bend of the knee.

‘Monseigneur.’ I was capable of wielding exquisite politeness like a weapon: like a battle axe to the head.

So, of course, was he. The Duke bowed, hand on heart. ‘My lady.’

And that was the sum of our exchange. The Duke turned from me, placed his hand on Henry’s shoulder.

‘A son.’

‘Yes.’

I saw the Duke’s grip tighten. ‘You must wait now, Henry. It is not fair on her.’

Henry understood very well. ‘I know. We will. Lady Katherine says I can see her soon. I need to tell her…’

He shrugged with a sudden blush from chin to hairline. He was a young boy again.

‘Soon,’ I reiterated, my smile for him, not the Duke. I spun on my heel to carry the baby away, managing a few steps before:

‘Madame de Swynford.’

I halted, but did not turn.

‘My thanks. For coming here.’

‘I was invited,’ I replied, addressing the space before me. ‘The Countess of Derby had need of me. I could do no other, my lord.’

‘Is the Countess of Hereford with her daughter?’

‘Yes. I will tell her that you are here.’

It was an agony as I took myself and the baby away from that cold impassivity. I reminded myself that he would be gone within the week. We had no relationship. What need had I to know what he was thinking?

And there was the Countess of Hereford, standing just beyond the doorway, where she had been all along. She nodded as I passed. Did she consider that we had been in need of a chaperone? That we might have fallen into each other’s arms and renewed our illicit affair?

How wrong she was. Henry and the baby had been chaperone enough. If the Duke of Lancaster and I had been alone on a deserted moor, he would not have touched me, nor I him. Neither of us was of a mind to do so. The Duke saw his path to the future at the side of Duchess Constanza, whilst I, unable to either forgive or forget, would walk mine alone.

And yet…

And yet there was one thought that accompanied me to my solitary chamber. I loved him. I loved him still. In spite of everything, I would always love him. I might rant and fume, but when the Duke had walked into that room, it had been impossible to deny that, for me at least, the distance between us had fallen away. The passion that had bound us was not dead.

It should have been a time for rejoicing. A new heir for Lancaster. The beginning of a new generation of Plantagenet princes to become, one day, owner of Kenilworth and all the power that was attached to it. A banquet was planned. A mass was held. Toasts were drunk.

The celebrating was short-lived. The child died after four days of life, succumbing to a virulent fever that refused to respond to any remedy that we knew. All was despair.

Mary wept. Henry was desolate.

And between the Duke and I there existed a yawning distance.

It was his obvious wish to avoid me.

Sometimes, when he behaved with the cold propriety worthy of the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than an erstwhile lover, I felt as if I carried a leper bell.

But then my own response in his company was that of a nun who had foresworn the company of all men.

If anything could have made it clearer to me that our estrangement was absolute, it was printed and illuminated on vellum in those brief days at Rochford Hall. The Countess’s constant and not always subtle presence was an irrelevance. There was nothing to say between us. We did not try.

Sometimes, almost drowning in my loss, regardless of my furious denial of him, I wept at my inability to reach him, or his desire to respond to me. I wished I was not there. I wished the Duke had not accompanied Henry. My only joy was that Thomas Swynford was there, in the retinue of his new liege lord. How proud Hugh would have been of his son.

The Duke gave no acknowledgement of me. It was an icy distancing on both our parts.

Except for that one shocking, inexplicable explosion of temper.

Our paths crossed, as it was impossible for them not to cross, in the rabbit-warren of Rochford Hall’s chambers and antechambers. My thoughts with the grieving Mary, my feet on a return from the stillroom with a bowl of dried herbs guaranteed to impart serenity and ease of heart, I stopped abruptly at the sight of the familiar figure just stepping through the opposite doorway, and immediately made to retreat. I was weary and drained by the excess emotion at Rochford, and was beyond verbal fencing.

The Duke too stopped, mid stride, face blandly indifferent. I might have been a servant, caught out where I should not have been.

‘If you will excuse me, my lord,’ I retreated another step. It would be simple to escape. One more step and I would be free of the room and him. I was becoming adept at it.

‘There is no need to run away,’ he remarked, his voice carrying clearly across the room.

I flushed. It was exactly what I had planned to do.

‘I had no thought of flight, my lord,’ I replied. Then could not resist. How illogical is the female mind? ‘Since you do not seek my company—nor have you for a se’enight—I am merely relieving you of it.’

I took another step in retreat. The door to my escape was close at my side.

‘I would say that you, for your part, have been remarkably invisible, Lady de Swynford.’

His tone was as dry as dust. I ignored it. And, with a surprising spurt of temper, I also ignored the threatening rumble of thunder beneath it.

‘I am surprised that you have noticed, my lord.’

It was like casting a torch onto a stack of timber at the end of a summer drought. His face blazed. So did his words, a blast from the fires of hell. How had I ever thought him to be unmoved by our close confinement? They were delivered with the precise exactitude of an arrow loosed from a bow. The arrow was aimed at me.

‘Do you think I have found it easy to preserve a distance between us, when you are in my line of sight day after day?’ He was approaching me slowly, inexorably, with the graceful step of a hunting cat, and his words cut me to the quick. ‘Do you think it was a matter of no moment for me, to make so public a confession of my sins? Do you think it gave me any satisfaction, having grovelled in the dust of Berwick, to have Walsingham pawing through the grubby corners of my life to extract what he would consider a mortal sin? And then to have him smile on me, on me, a royal prince, and grant me absolution so that England might once again rest in God’s good grace? Do you think these last months have had no impact on my soul? By God, they have, Lady de Swynford! There has been no self-satisfaction in any of this for me.’