Renard said unhelpfully, ‘You’ll only have to repeat it all later to my parents, and there’s no law against taking your wine upstairs.’

‘And since I have gone to the trouble of preparing a tub, the least you can do is sit in it. You stink of the road!’ It was hardly the way to speak to a welcome guest, and Heulwen could have bitten her tongue the moment the words emerged. Since Ralf ’s death she had found herself being irritable and snappish. People made allowances — those who knew her well — but it was a long time since she and Adam had shared the closeness of childhood friendship.

Adam stared obdurately at the wall beyond her head, refusing to meet her eyes. ‘Well that’s because I’ve been on it for a long time — too long, I sometimes think.’

She touched him again with eyes full of chagrin. ‘Adam, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said such a thing.’

‘Because you have gone to the trouble and I am not suitably grateful?’ he replied with a grimace that just about passed for a smile. ‘Well if I am not, it is because I’ve had a crawful of being ordered around by a woman.’

‘Straight to the middle of the target!’ crowed Renard at his blushing half-sister.

‘No insult intended in my turn.’ Adam put down the cup which was still more than half full of wine, and went towards the curtain that screened off the tower stairs. ‘Bear with me awhile until I’ve found the grace to mellow.’

‘Jesu,’ Renard said to her with a shake of his head. ‘He hasn’t changed, has he?’

Heulwen looked baffled. ‘I don’t know. When I mentioned the bath, I thought he was going to turn tail and flee.’

‘Perhaps the Germans mutilated him below,’ Renard offered flippantly, then shot her a shrewd glance. ‘Or perhaps they didn’t.’

Renard was like that. The unwary were lulled into seeing a likeable, shallow youth, wallowing through the pitfalls of adolescence towards a far-distant maturity, and then he would suddenly shatter that assessment with a piercing remark or astute observation far beyond his years.

‘Then he’s a fool.’ Heulwen tossed her head. ‘I’ve bathed enough men in courtesy to know what sometimes happens if they’ve been continent for too long. I won’t be embarrassed.’

‘No,’ Renard quirked his brow, ‘but he might.’


Adam stood in blank contemplation of the steaming tub, while around him the maids bustled, checking the temperature of the water, scattering in a handful of herbs, laying out towels of thick softened linen, setting more logs on the fire and fresh charcoal in the braziers to offset the seeping cold from the thick stone walls.

‘I’m sorry if I made a mistake,’ Heulwen said, lowering the curtain behind her. ‘I thought that a bath would be a comfort after a long day on the road.’

His mouth smiled, but his eyes remained on a distant point beyond her. ‘And so it is. As you said, I was just being a churl.’

She considered him. There had been no engagement in his voice; she might as well be speaking to a tilt yard dummy for all the response she was receiving, and her irritation flared. ‘Is it just a matter of venting the heat?’ she asked in a practical tone. ‘Shall I summon one of the soldiers’ sluts?’

That at least elicited a gratifying widening of his eyes. ‘What?’ The pitch of his voice revealed that he had heard her perfectly well, but did not quite believe his ears.

‘Well, what other reason could you have for refusing a bath? You can’t be shy and you are not the kind to take vows of abstinence in order to purify your soul.’

‘I didn’t refuse.’ He compressed his lips.

‘You tried.’

‘Because I’m tired and I haven’t the wit or patience to match bright talk with you!’ he snapped, and through the anger and shock, realised she was baiting him to see just how far his temper and credulity would stretch. As of old.

‘That’s better,’ she approved. ‘I was beginning to think you had remained in Germany and sent a wax effigy home in your stead, and were afraid of it melting in the bath water.’

Adam suppressed the urge to throttle her out of hand; and then his sense of humour fought its way to the surface and stepped carelessly upon the ruins of his pride. He snorted. ‘You did that apurpose.’

‘I wanted to destroy that mask you’re wearing, and I’ve succeeded, have I not?’ Her head cocked to one side, she studied him. ‘Was the Empress so awful, then?’

‘I’ve experienced worse,’ he said, smiling now.

‘Churl!’ she repeated, and laughed. ‘All right, I’ll stop plaguing you for the moment. Here, give me your surcoat!’ Efficiently, she whisked the garment from him, then exclaimed with pleasure at the quality of the silk, and with regret that it was snagged and marked with rust from his hauberk.

‘It keeps the sun off your mail,’ he said, laying aside the swordbelt, ‘and it’s good for impressing the peasants — essential to the escort of an empress.’

Heulwen helped him remove his weather-stained mail shirt. ‘This needs scouring before you can wear it again,’ she tutted as she dropped it on the floor and spread it out. ‘I’ll have it sent to the armoury. There have been several Welsh attacks this year, including the one that killed Ralf and you might need it.’ Carefully she rolled the hauberk into a neat but bulky bundle, and before he could protest that he was not intending to stay and that there was no need, the garment had been spirited away for refurbishing.

He sat down on a low stool to remove his boots and hose. ‘When I left, the Welsh situation was fairly quiet, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone.’

‘Well it’s fluid now. They have a new lord over the border and he’s been cutting his teeth on your lands during your absence and on Ralf ’s since early summer. My father hasn’t had the time to engage him properly. Miles would have been of an age to take some of the burden, but Miles is dead — we can’t even mourn his grave because he drowned.’ She bit her lip and steadied herself. ‘John’s chosen the church because he’s blind as a bat, so he’s little use. Renard’s shaping up well, but he’s not old enough to bear any serious responsibility yet, and Henry and William are still only children.’ She gave him a taut smile. ‘Still, now you are home you can set the worst of it to rights, I am sure.’

‘Oh, there’s nothing I enjoy better than a good fight,’ he said flippantly, and lowered his eyes to the unwinding of his garters.

Heulwen’s smile dropped, and faint vertical lines appeared between her brows. Adam had always been difficult. Although not her brother by blood, she had always regarded him as such. She had romped with him in childhood — climbed trees and swung from a rope in the stables, stolen apples from the undercroft and honey cakes from beneath the cook’s nose. They had shared a passion for the fine blood-horses that her father and grandfather bred. A bareback race for a dare had resulted in a thrashing. She had been confined to the bower for a week and Adam had been sent in disgrace to one of her father’s other keeps to ponder the folly of his ways.

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.’