‘If the past ten years have not altered my heart, ten years forward will not change it either.’ He touched her shoulder, slid his hand down her arm until he reached her wrist and tugged her gently against him. ‘Heulwen, I love you,’ he whispered against the hammer-beat of the pulse in her throat. ‘Marry me?’

He felt her melt under the gentle persuasion of his fingertips and stretched out his free hand to remove the shift that she held as a barrier between them. ‘Marry me,’ he said again, and sought her mouth with small, nibbling kisses.

Heulwen gasped, torn between the demands of her senses and sense itself. ‘Adam, please I…give me time to. ’

Outside a maid cried a warning, the sound rising to a scream and then cut off short. Heulwen and Adam sprang apart and Adam shot to his feet. Heavy footsteps pounded up the wooden outer stairs, coming at a run, and the door crashed open upon its hinges. Wind-spun snow swirled round the threshold, and over it strode Warrin de Mortimer, his face a blizzard of furious emotions as he surveyed the scene within.

‘You misbegotten, hell-spawned son of a murdering pervert!’ he roared, and reached to his scabbard.

‘Warrin, put up that sword!’ Heulwen cried in alarm. He was blocking the doorway, their only means of escape, and he was a murderer with murder in his eyes. Pale as ice they flickered briefly to Heulwen where she sat, naked and shivering, clothed only in her hair and the shield of her crossed arms. ‘Hold your tongue, whore!’ he spat. ‘Am I supposed to believe that this is one of your foster brother’s “occasional presences” that I must by necessity tolerate?’

Adam had been sidling nearer to the bed. ‘I have the right,’ he said. ‘Heulwen has been vouchsafed to me this afternoon by the King himself.’ He arched a sardonic brow. ‘I am assuming you didn’t know?’

Warrin roared like an enraged bull and sprang. Adam flung himself sideways and the sword slashed across the pillow which Adam had managed to grab to protect himself. As the feathers snowed down, hampering Warrin’s vision, Adam dived across the room and grabbed Guyon’s shield from where it was leaning against the wall. He jammed his left arm into the leather hand-holds and tried to reach the scabbarded sword standing further along the wall.

Warrin got there first, and it was only the speed of Adam’s reflexes that saved him from being hacked open like a pig on a slaughterman’s trestle. A splinter of wood flew up from the surface of the shield and rebounded to stick like a quill in de Mortimer’s cheek. He plucked it loose and dark blood dripped down his face.

‘Do you enjoy murder?’ Adam asked, ducking another swipe of the blade. ‘A surfeit of Welsh hospitality for Ralf, and a sword through the belly for me. My Welsh hostage overheard a certain conversation between you and Davydd ap Tewdr, and was a witness to its result.’

Warrin’s guard dropped for an instant and Adam lunged, buffeting the shield boss at his face, then made a dive for the sword. The night-candle stand crashed over, and Judith’s expensive cedarwood box of tapestry silks tumbled with it. A hinge splayed and snapped, and the bright silks spilled out and were trampled underfoot.

Warrin recovered from his momentary recoil. ‘I’ll have your life for that foul slander!’ he choked, and came on fast as Adam strove to free the blade from the scabbard.

Heulwen darted for the open door and screeched at the full pitch of her lungs for help. In the courtyard, Renard and Henry, just returned from their visit to see the jousting and already alerted by the squawking of the maids that something was seriously wrong, hurtled up the stairs.

‘God in heaven!’ Henry’s eyes were huge with disbelief. From behind his naked half-sister, there came the sound of a muffled crash and a howl of fury.

‘More like hell to pay by the looks of it,’ Renard said. Pausing only to gesture at two gawking serjeants, he pelted up the stairs.

‘Renard, stop them, they’ll kill each other!’ Heulwen screamed at him.

He pushed his cloak at her. ‘Cover yourself,’ he snapped. Thrusting her to one side, he entered his parents’ bedchamber. A hurled goblet crashed against the wall, narrowly missing his head. The air was awhirl with goose feathers, some of which had drifted into the brazier — which was, remarkably, still standing — and the room was filled with the stench of burning. At the far side of the room, as mother-naked as Heulwen, Adam de Lacey was cornered behind a badly scarred shield, and Warrin de Mortimer was swinging murderously at him.

‘In the name of Holy Christ, stop!’ yelled Renard, his voice cracking as it sometimes still did when pressure was put upon it. He was ignored and his jaw, which was very much his royal grandfather’s, tightened. He leaped on to the bed, took three paces ankle-deep in feathers and jumped down between the antagonists, ensuring that he faced de Mortimer rather than presenting him with the target of the space between his shoulder blades.

‘Renard, keep out of this,’ Adam snarled at the youth’s turned back.

‘In my father’s absence I have the authority here,’ Renard answered, his voice once more on the level and controlled. ‘Put up your swords.’

Adam shot a sidelong glance at the two hesitant but brawny serjeants standing to either side of the doorway, Heulwen shivering beside them, her face pinched and blue. He grounded his own swordpoint in the rushes, but kept his fingers wrapped around the hilt, and did not lower the shield.

Warrin bared his teeth at Renard. ‘Don’t get ideas above yourself, whelp! What kind of authority is it that allows your sister to play the heated bitch across the sheets with this forsworn cur!’

Colour slashed across Renard’s cheekbones. ‘Put up your sword,’ he reiterated and nodded to the serjeants, who started forward. ‘I think you should leave.’

De Mortimer stared into Renard’s flint-dark eyes, then beyond them to where Adam stood poised, prepared to defend, or attack. ‘I’ll have a reckoning for this,’ he said thickly as he slotted his blade back into the scabbard, ‘on your body.’

‘My pleasure.’ Adam returned the sneer. ‘And you had better start praying because I can see the flames of hell encircling your feet already.’

There was a tense silence while their eyes met and held, will beating against will. Warrin pointed an index finger at Adam. An ostentatious gold ring trembled on his knuckle. ‘You’re dead,’ he said hoarsely, and turning on his heel, stalked to the door. As he reached Heulwen, he struck her backhanded across the face, knocking her hard into the wall. ‘Whore!’ he repeated, and slammed out into the bitter, snow-pocked wind.

Renard gestured the serjeants out after him. ‘Make sure he leaves,’ he said, and went to pick up his sister from the floor. Adam shouldered him roughly aside, and, dropping the shield, stooped to lift her himself. A furious red blotch was fast marring her cheek and closing one eye. Her breath came in great dry gasps.

Renard took a sheepskin from the devastated bed and threw it around her shoulders on top of his cloak. ‘You’ve really set the fat into the fire this time.’ He shook his head. ‘Couldn’t you have trysted somewhere less dangerous?’

‘It wasn’t intentional,’ Adam replied without looking round. ‘It just happened.’

Renard arched a sceptical brow, thinking of himself and the falconer’s daughter, or that engaging little laundress at the palace who was as soft as a kitten, neither of whom had ever fired him beyond the loss of all caution. He lifted the shield and replaced it against the wall.

‘The trouble is,’ he said, pursing his lips, ‘you are likely to burn a lot of other people too.’

‘Renard, leave it alone,’ Adam said with soft vehemence, and sat Heulwen down on the bed. ‘Come, love, let me look at your face.’

She pushed him away. ‘It’s nothing, the least of my wounds,’ she whispered and bent over, arms folded to her middle, her face screened in her coppery masses of hair, as she began to sob.

Adam stretched his arm around her shoulders, feeling helpless, and held her. ‘Hush, Heulwen, it’s all right,’ he murmured over and over again, fingers smoothing and stroking.

Renard cleared his throat. ‘I’ll see if there’s any usquebaugh below,’ he said, and headed for the stairs, only to collide with his mother and her maid advancing up them. From the expression on his mother’s face, it was obvious that the news was already on its way to scorching a path through the city.

Judith stared at the shambles of her bedchamber with a face that wore the calm expression of forewarned disbelief. She took in her work basket and the riot of spilled silks, the overturned candle-stand, the raw slashed wood showing its flesh through the leather skin of her husband’s shield, the hacked pillows and the feathers that puffed gently into the air as she trod forwards, and finally, her gaze came to rest on the bed.

Adam de Lacey looked up at her. One lean-muscled arm lay across Heulwen’s shoulder and his hand was buried in her tangled hair. ‘It’s all my fault,’ he said, meeting her eyes squarely. ‘I’ll make amends.’

Judith looked quickly around the wrecked room again and back to Adam. ‘Indeed you will,’ she said severely. ‘I suppose you were caught in the act?’

‘Not quite.’ Adam coloured. ‘I’m sorry I—’

‘It’s too late for apologies to be of much use,’ Judith said waspishly, but having removed her cloak, she sat down at her stepdaughter’s other side. ‘Adam, put some clothes on before you freeze to death,’ she said in a brusque tone, ‘and you’d better let me have a look at that wound on your arm. It needs salve.’

He looked with surprise at the oozing narrow cut running between wrist and elbow. ‘I did it on the candle-stand, ’ he said vaguely. ‘It wasn’t de Mortimer’s sword. You’d better look at Heulwen first. He struck her full force across the face as he was leaving.’

Judith contemplated her stepdaughter, or what could be seen of her through the screening swathes of tangled red hair. She was whimpering softly now, and Judith judged the pain of Warrin’s blow to be the least of her agony.

‘Adam, when you’re dressed, I think it would be advisable if you went below to wait for Guyon,’ she said in a gentler voice, and to Heulwen, ‘Come, child, calm yourself. No one yet died of shame.’ Under the weight of Judith’s stare, Adam reluctantly relinquished his hold on Heulwen and sought out his clothes. Stony-faced, the maid picked up his crumpled shirt from the floor and handed it to him at arm’s length. Awkward in the uneasy silence, he fumbled into it and struggled with chausses, hose and tunic.

‘I suppose,’ Judith said wearily, ‘that I should have seen it coming.’ And then on an angry, exasperated note, ‘If you wanted each other this badly, why in God’s sweet name did you not speak to me or Guyon!’

Adam stamped into one of his boots, then hunted around the room until he found its partner half buried beneath a trailing length of creased sheet. ‘I was going to if you had been here this afternoon, but…well, the wain came before the ox.’

‘Not just the wain but an entire baggage supply of trouble!’ Judith said tartly as he pulled on the other boot and began latching his belt.

Renard returned with the usquebaugh flask in his hand. ‘Papa’s just ridden in,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Good luck, Adam. I don’t know what he’ll do to you when he sees the state of his shield.’

‘Renard!’ Judith’s tone was peremptory.

He gave the flask to Helgund and came to the bed, where he squatted lithely on his haunches to peer under and within Heulwen’s curtaining hair. ‘Come on, Helly,’ he coaxed. ‘I’d have hated it to happen to me, but de Mortimer’s been deserving a kick in his arrogance for so long now that it’s a pleasure to see him get it. I’d rather have Adam for a brother-in-law any day than that conceited pea-brain…All right, Mama, I’m going.’ Grinning, less than contrite, he sauntered out of the door.

‘You’d better go down too,’ Judith said sternly to Adam.

He swallowed and nodded, but his feet drew him not to the door, but to stand and then crouch before Heulwen as Renard had done. He took her hands between his. ‘Heulwen, look at me,’ he pleaded.

She shook her head. He released one of her hands and parted her hair to expose her face. For an instant her eyes met his, and they were full of a furious misery before she turned her head aside.

‘Heulwen, please. ’

‘Adam, go!’ Judith snapped. ‘Can’t you see that she’s in no fit state to deal with herself, let alone the burden you are trying to set on her?’