Yet now there was a truce with France, a precarious amnesty negotiated by the Duke at Bruges last year. The thought of John's months at Bruges brought sharp pain to Katherine, though it was a pain to which she was well accustomed.

John had taken his Duchess with him to Flanders and there at Ghent, his own birthplace, Costanza had been delivered of a son - at last.

But the baby did not live! Katherine crossed herself as she sat on the bench in Kenilworth courtyard and thought, Mea Culpa, as she had when she first heard the news that the baby had died - for shame of the fierce joy she had felt.

My sons live, thought Katherine. She glanced up to the windows of the Nursery Chamber in the South Wing. A shadow passed behind the clear tiny panes, and Katherine smiled. That would be Hawise, or one of the nurses, tending the infant Harry in his cradle, or perhaps fetching some toy to distract little John as he ate his supper - for he was a fussy eater and prone to dawdle. Healthy rosy boys, both of them, golden as buttercups, with their father's intense blue eyes.

A high jeering singsong shattered the peace of the courtyard. "Scaredy cats! Scaredy cats! Cowardy cowardy custard, go get thyself some mustard! - Ye dursn't do what I do - -"

That was Elizabeth, of course. Katherine jumped up prepared for trouble and hurried through the arch to the Base Court. Though the Duke's younger daughter was twelve years old and near to womanhood, Elizabeth's reckless enterprises still had to be restrained before they led herself and the younger children into actual danger.

This time Elizabeth was hopping on one foot upon the slate roof of the ducal stable and clinging to the weather-vane. Tom, Blanchette and the three little Deyncourts were all cramped into various stressful positions on the slippery slates as they tried to climb up to the taunting figure above them. Blanchette, her mother saw at once, was crying while she teetered on a window-ledge, and fumbled for fingerholds in the stone gutter.

"Elizabeth!" called Katherine sharply, to the stable roof. "Come down at once!" She ran to rescue Blanchette by climbing on a mounting block and holding her arms up to the child, who dropped thankfully into them. "Little simpleton," scolded Katherine, kissing her. "When will you learn you cannot and must not do all Lady Elizabeth says?" She ran on from Blanchette and pulled down the Deyncourt children. But her own Thomas wanted no help. He turned a sulky face to his mother and said, "Let me be, lady. I shan't go to the roof, but I shall get down as I please," which was as typical of Tom at eight as it had been all his life. Never openly disobedient, but a headstrong sulky boy who reminded her often of his father, Hugh.

"Well, Bess," called Katherine to the culprit on the roof, "I told you to come down - -"

"Can't," quavered the child. Her swarthy little face had paled, she clung so hard to the weather-vane that its veering cock shook as in a high wind.

"Then be brave a few more minutes and hold tight," called Katherine more gently. She clapped her hands crying, "Groom! Here!" A stablerboy ran out, brought a ladder and soon had Elizabeth safe on the ground - safe and defiant. "I wasn't scared, I was just gammoning you, my lady."

Katherine wasted no time in dispute, Elizabeth was for ever getting into pickles from which she could not extricate herself. "Beat her!" advised Dame Marjorie Deyncourt, wife to the castle's constable. "You spare the rod too much." The Deyncourt children were beaten as regularly as they attended Mass. Five years back, when Katherine first assumed responsibility for the rearing of the Duke's two daughters, she had had recourse to frequent switchings as the only way to handle Elizabeth - Philippa needed no such measures, ever - but gradually Katherine had learned that firm kindness and the minimum of punishment better controlled the child. And John would seldom have her punished either; this giddly little daughter could always cozen him by climbing on his lap, shaking her dark curls and pouting her red lips, which were plump as cherries and gave promise of disquieting sensuality.

"Go, Bess, and find one of your maids," said Katherine sternly. "Tell her to wash you, you cannot greet your father in this state. Then stay in your chamber till you're summoned."

Elizabeth shrugged, but she went off to the castle, scuffing her feet. She liked Lady Swynford well enough and knew her to be just, but lately she had been puzzled by the situation between this lady and her father, which before she had accepted without interest. That the two baby boys called John and Harry Beaufort were her half-brothers, she knew, and that her father loved Lady Swynford she had seen often enough with jealous eyes; but no one had ever explained these matters and mention of them was shushed. Servants' gossip overheard last week had awakened her to the knowledge that there was something strange about her governess, something the tiring-women snickered about behind their hands, and Nan, the laundry maid, had cried dramatically, "Ah, me heart bleeds, indeed it do, for that poor betrayed Duchess, a-pining away at Hertford or in them North Country wilds at Tutbury. 'Tis a mortal shame."

But Elizabeth had not liked her father's Spanish wife at all, the time that she and Philippa had been taken to Hertford to call on her. The Duchess had glittering eyes like pieces of jet, while the touch of her bony hand was cold and moist as a fish. Nor would she speak one word of English. She had given Elizabeth and Philippa an unsmiling scrutiny, then turned to talk in Spanish with the Castilian ladies who hovered near. Elizabeth had been sent to play with little Catalina, who was her half-sister, too. Catalina was four years old like Lady Swynford's John Beaufort, but three months younger than he. This fact had been part of the servant's mysterious sniggers.

Katherine had felt a change in Elizabeth's attitude towards her of late, and thought, with the flinty resignation she had been learning, she's beginning to realise, and it may be will rebel against me completely. But there was nothing to be done. It is as it is, thought Katherine. This Plantagenet motto gave her sombre comfort; to John's amusement she had asked that it be graven on the gold rim of the diamond brooch he had given her last New Year's. She wore the brooch today on her apricot velvet bodice, and had long since put away the old Queen's trumpery little silver nouche with its saccharine "Foi vainquera."

Katherine walked back towards the Inner Court, while Blanchette skipped happily beside her. The other children had run off to the tiltyard outside the walls to watch the making of St. George's effigy for the games tomorrow. But Blanchette stayed with her mother whom, at nine, she already greatly resembled. She will be prettier than I could ever be, thought Katherine, rumpling the silky curls that were bright as new-scoured copper. The little girl's eyes were grey too, but darker than Katherine's, even as her hair was lighter. The round eyes looked up at her mother now with confiding sweetness, and Katherine kissed her again.

How strange that Blanchette, begotten by an unloved father, born in anguish and loneliness, should still be the dearest of all her children, precious though John's babies were. Was there always a special tenderness for the first-born? Yet John was less fond of his Philippa than any of the others. Was it then that Blanchette was a girl and Katherine saw there her own childhood, or was it that, because of John's arrival that morning of her birth, Blanchette had seemed like his own child? No use to question the mysterious alchemy of the heart, and certain it was that amongst the tormenting things her equivocal situation had brought to her, she had found solid material compensations, too. There was not one of her family who had not benefited, and John had provided lavishly for his godchild.

Last year he had granted to Katherine for Blanchette the wardship of the lands and heir of Sir Robert Deyncourt, cousin to the constable here at Kenilworth, and the marriage of this heir with all its fees and appurtenances. The wardship alone brought income to build Blanchette a handsome dowry. But, Katherine thought with relief, it would be some years before one had to think of Blanchette's marriage.

"Here comes Lady Philippa," announced the child, who had crawled up on the bench beside her mother and was playing with a kitten she had fished out from the throng of mewing cats that were gathered hungrily about the door of the great kitchens. Katherine looked up to greet this elder of her two ducal charges and felt, as so often with Philippa, a touch of exasperated pity. Here was a girl about whom one must indeed think of marriage for she was full sixteen, and the Duke had entered into tentative negotiations with the courts of Flanders, Hainault, and even Milan.

Yet it was impossible to imagine Philippa bedded. She was pale, devout, submissive and so sexless as to make virginity seem inevitable.

"Good even, Lady Katherine," she said curtsying and speaking in her whispering little voice. She glanced rather anxiously at the Mortimer Gate Tower, "No sign yet of my lord father?"

"No," said Katherine, making room for the girl on the bench. "Didn't you think to wear the new crimson gown he had sent you?" Philippa was swathed in a dun-coloured robe that spared none of her bad points, the flat chest and clumsy waist.

"I - I didn't-" said the girl fingering her sagging girdle nervously. "I feel so discomfited in crimson. Will he be angry with me?"

Katherine smiled reassurance, knowing that Philippa feared her father as much as she admired him. But he would not be pleased, and she would have to protect the girl from his annoyance that reduced Philippa to tears and long hours of penitence on the prie-dieu in her chamber.

"You're so beautiful, Lady Katherine," said Philippa wistfully. "He's never angry with you."

"Ah, but he is!" Katherine laughed. "At times. One must wait until it passes, it soon does."

Philippa pulled from her reticule a square of samite, part of the chapel altar cloth she was embroidering. She was shortsighted and, bending her long serious face close to the needleful of gold thread, said without rancour, "Ay, for he loves you."

Katherine started. The blush that still plagued her, despite her twenty-five years, stained her fine skin. Philippa had never said anything so frank, though a girl of sixteen could be in no doubt as to the situation. Still, it had been tacitly ignored.

In the beginning, when John brought Costanza back from France and for some years thereafter, the lovers had been very discreet. For little John's birth, Katherine had gone to Lincolnshire, not indeed to Kettlethorpe - that would have shamed her doubly, as a slur on Hugh's memory - but to Lincoln itself, to a house on Pottergate, privily secured for her by the Duke. And for a time, the exact date of Hugh's death abroad having been left uncertain, they had fostered the assumption that this was Hugh's posthumous child.

No such covering assumption was possible when little Harry was born. It was plain enough for all to see that Lady Swynford had no husband; and the Duke, welcoming his new son, had renounced all further pretence and bestowed on the little boys one of his territorial titles, Beaufort, for lands in Champagne, long since lost to France and unlikely ever to prejudice the interests of his legitimate heirs.

Katherine had been glad when concealment of their relationship was no longer possible and relieved that at the two of his castles where she chiefly stayed with the children, Kenilworth and Leicester, all the retainers, from the stewards and constables down, continued to treat her with obedient deference. The Duke would have seen to that had not her own dignity quelled any overt disrespect. But there were times when something pierced the tough shell she had grown, and Philippa's calm statement filled her with unease.

She glanced at the girl, then at Blanchette, who had wandered off with her kitten towards the kitchens; she held her head high and stiff, and said in a thickened voice, "Do you mind, Philippa?"

"Mind what, Lady Katherine?" The mild eyes stared. "Oh, that my father should love you? No. For I have loved you myself, ever since the time at Bolingbroke when you did get shriving for my blessed mother on her death-bed, God keep her soul in peace." She crossed herself and, bending close, took a slow stitch on her embroidery. "And you've been good to us since our father put us in your charge. But-" She moistened her lips, looked unhappily at Katherine, then away.