The Duke inclined his head, before closing the door quietly at his back, then casting gloves onto the chest, dislodging a swirl of dust as he did so. Something I must take in hand, I thought inconsequentially. The room had not been used of late, nor would be, for we were in no mood for celebrations. What emotion would it witness now? The Duke made no further move to approach me, but stood, hands clasped lightly around his sword belt, the dim light glinting on the breastplate of his half-armour.

‘Well?’ When my voice sounded annoyingly shrill to my own ears, I tempered it. ‘I have remained here as ordered. What would you say to me, my lord?’

The pause was infinitesimal, but I noted it. ‘You will have heard by now.’

‘Yes. I think I have been the recipient of every piece of rumour about the pair of us that has run the length and breadth of the country.’

I would not make this easy for him.

‘They have destroyed The Savoy,’ he said.

I raised my brows. Did not all the world know of that? I would not respond.

A muscle in his jaw leaped beneath the fine skin, but so it often did when he might struggle with a document from a difficult petitioner. I folded my hands, one on the other, over the clasp of my girdle. I had had many days to consider all that I knew, almost as many days in which the developments had festered like an ill-tended wound. It would astonish him how much I had gleaned from the gossip of passing travellers. I tilted my chin, as if I might be mildly interested in what he had to say.

I stopped my fingers before they could clench into fists. I would hold fast to composure. I would be reasonable. Understanding. I would, by the Virgin!

‘Why have you come?’ I asked.

‘I had to know for myself that you were safe.’

‘Safe,’ I repeated unhelpfully.

‘But I knew you were. God sheltered you from all harm. I asked Him to.’

My brows remained beautifully arched. ‘I am flattered. Or I suppose I am.’

‘And I had to come and tell you myself.’

He took a step forward as if testing the water, as if there might be an unseen pit below the surface, into which he would haplessly fall and drown.

My lips thinned and curled minutely. ‘So you said.’

His spine was as straight as an ash sapling, his voice raw, but that might be thirst after a long journey. I offered him no refreshment. It was his castle. He could summon his own steward if he so wished.

‘It would be discourteous,’ he continued in the same limpid but impassive tone, ‘for you to be the subject of gossip and not know why I did…why I did what I did. I have come to try to explain…So that you would not remain ignorant…’

Not once had he moved, his breathing as level as if he were purchasing a horse.

‘Explain?’ I would be understanding, would I? My fingers clenched anyway, nails digging deep into my palms. I kept my voice low, yet even though, raised as I was to impeccable good manners, I knew it was unforgivably venomous, I chose every word with precise care.

‘Explain? And I should thank you for that? I have, of course, to be thankful that you have considered my situation to any degree. In the circumstance of my being—what was it you said?—an agent of Satan? But then, you have always considered the welfare of all your servants, have you not, my lord? How charitable of you to dismiss them from your service in Scotland, so that they need not suffer with you in your painful exile there, far away from friends and family. If I had been with you in Edinburgh, doubtless you would have done the same for me. Would you have wept over me, as I am told you did over them? For it seems I am no better than a servant to you.’

My tongue hissed on the word servant. I had not realised the true depths of my bitterness.

‘That is not so.’ His lips barely moved.

‘Ah…Were the rumours then false? I did not think so, but I am willing to be persuaded. Answer me one question, my gracious, chivalrous lord. Are you sending me away?’

The silence in the room was as taut as a bowstring before the release of the deadly arrow.

‘Yes.’ He took a breath as if he would have said more. Then repeated: ‘Yes. I am sending you away.’

My anger bubbled dangerously, too dangerously, near the surface.

‘I don’t think I can ever forgive you,’ I said between clenched teeth, ‘for the manner in which you did it.’

‘What have you heard?’

‘You would not believe what I have heard. I did not, at first. Until each repetition came as a slap in the face.’

‘And now you believe what is said? You hold it to be the truth without hearing me? To know why I took the decisions that I did?’ His hands remained clenched at his belt. ‘Do I not at least deserve a hearing from you, of all people? If you love me, you will hear me out.’

For a moment I closed my eyes against the pain of that thrust. But only for a moment.

‘Oh, I will give you a hearing, my lord. I will listen,’ I said. ‘But it is difficult to give you the benefit of the doubt, is it not? When Constanza rode past my door, intent on an emotional and intimate reunion with you.’

He had not expected that from me. His eyes widened a little.

‘Is that what happened?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

A flat affirmation, all I needed, all I dreaded. It was what I had feared more than any other. I turned my back on him because I could not look at him without weeping, and marched to the window, the thick glass grown opaque with rain and gloom, where I smacked my knuckles hard against the stone surround.

‘Oh, they relished telling me the detail of that little event,’ I announced to the view I could not see. ‘What pleasure to give all the details to the whore, of the triumphant victory of the ill-used wife.’ I looked back over my shoulder as I fought to control my voice. ‘They told me how you met on the road at Northallerton. How the distraught Duchess fell on her knees in the dust at your feet and begged your forgiveness for her lack of affection towards you. Three times she prostrated herself, so they told me. Three times, with tears and wailing, until you lifted her up and reassured her that all would be well between you. Is that how it went?’

I saw my lips curl again with wry appreciation, a grey reflection in the glass, but there was no humour in it. Poor Constanza. Had she accepted at last that she had had a part in causing the rift between them? Did the attack on her precious Hertford stir enough terror in her heart that she saw the need to humble herself and beg her husband’s protection? In my own loss I had no sympathy for her. I turned my face away, so that he would not note the gleam of moisture on my cheeks, to watch him in the reflection.

‘Did you? Did you lift her into your arms?’

‘Yes.’

I nodded as if in agreement. ‘Of course you did. That is exactly what you would do. And then you escorted her to the safe luxury of the Bishop of Durham’s house where you marked the occasion of your joyful reunion. Until daylight, I understand, with great merriment and celebrations. You asked pardon for your misdeeds and she willingly forgave you.’ I looked up, stretching my neck, noting the carving of a cat stalking some misbegotten creature in the stonework above my head. I had never spoken to him in this manner before, but I did not care. I did not care if it roused the fire of his temper. ‘Before God, John, I was not invited to the safety of the Bishop’s lodging, was I! No place for me. No place for the whore.’

‘No.’

Again that cold affirmation of my accusations, that flat acceptance, when my soul longed for his denial.

‘No,’ I repeated. ‘There could be no place for me, could there?’

In my mind I saw our two disparate reunions with the Duke, Constanza and I placed side by side, one dramatic and emotional, a true reconciliation for the Duchess, with intimate kisses and promises for the future. The other, as we stood here now, the width of the room between us, bitter and redolent of raw grief, a portcullis of iron lowered between us.

And as that vision filled my mind, without warning all control vanished. I swung round, pressing my back against the stone. ‘You rejected me. You denounced me. An evil life, you said, that you had led with me. A life of lechery.’ I all but spat the word. ‘Was our love lechery? You stated it, for all to hear. I’m amazed that you did not get your herald to announce it with a blast of a trumpet. You will drive me from your household, you said. Banish me. That’s what you said, isn’t it?’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘It is what I am told.’

Every muscle in his face was still. The jewels gleamed flatly, without movement. It was as if all his Plantagenet pride was under restraint. I had never seen it so. I could only attribute it to guilt.

‘And is it true that you labelled me a she-devil?’ My voice broke on the word. ‘An enchantress, who lured you into breaking your marital vows? Am I a snare of the Devil, to entice men into sin?’

I saw him take a breath.

‘They were not my words.’

‘No? Well, thank God for that!’

‘But you believe it of me.’

And there I heard a note of self-loathing, which I ignored. ‘I expect you implied them since they were well reported. Or you did not make too much haste to deny them. It would not be in your interest to do so, would it? What pleasure Walsingham must have had in putting such venom into your mouth. I expect he fell to his oh-so-pious knees before God and gave thanks for such a confession from the mighty Duke of Lancaster, the would-be King of Castile.’

His title shimmered into the silence as I drew breath at last. I was beyond remorse. He might have accepted for himself the vile charge of adultery, but he had coated me with the filth of witchcraft. What manner of attack would this lay me open to? I could not comprehend the horrors of my being brought to book for witchcraft.

‘Have you nothing to say?’ I demanded. ‘I accuse you, but you do not defend yourself. Is there no defence? Are you guilty as charged?’

For the briefest moment he studied his hands, then he looked at me, and I saw what I had not seen before. His eyes were tired. Hard and grim. The eyes of John, my love, they were not. They were those of the Duke of Lancaster, putative King of Castile. Here was a different creature, not the man I had thought I knew.

How easy had it been for him to stop loving me?

‘I did not put the blame on you, Katherine,’ he stated.

‘Ha!’

‘But yes, I said that we must part.’

‘Oh, I know you did. For the good of your immortal soul. Was I nothing more than a court concubine? Is that all I was to you, through nigh on ten years of sharing your bed and the travail of four children?’ My hands were clenched hard in my skirts. ‘I have given up everything for you. I was a respectable widow when you issued your invitation. Did I lure you into that? I don’t think so, my lord. As I recall the impetus was all yours. And yet you call me an enchantress, using witchcraft to undermine your strength of moral will.’

‘I have said…’ How quiet his voice, how undemonstrative, but now the engraved lines that bracketed his mouth were deep. ‘The words were not mine.’

‘Yet you have repulsed me. You have destroyed all we meant to each other, stripping it of all that was good, stamping it into the earth as the grossest of sins.’

As his nose narrowed on an intake of breath, I thought he would react but he did not, except to say: ‘It was a sin, our being together. We both knew it.’

‘Yes, we did. Both of us. And we were prepared to live with it. And yet you reject me now. I gave you my good name. I gave you my unconditional love, my body, my conscience. I put them into your safe-keeping.’

‘Perhaps you should not have done that.’

Which took my breath. I could not answer so monstrous an assertion, that I had been wrong to trust him with my life, my happiness. My soul.

‘And our children?’ I whispered against the grinding agony in my chest. ‘Are they also a sin?’

‘No, they are not.’ His hands now unclasped, he flung them out at his sides. ‘Katherine, the sin is mine.’

‘Forgive me. But a greater part of it seems to be mine.’ The edge that crept back into my reply could have sliced through a haunch of venison like Hugh the cook’s cleaver. ‘I am despised by all, but Constanza has emerged in glory, in blinding-white robes. Oh, I know I cannot defend myself in helping you to commit adultery, in undermining Constanza’s position in your life and household. I am not proud of my flaunting our love before her, or of stepping into the place she should have had at your side and in your bed. But she did not want you. I will not take all the blame.’