'Hugh, what are you doing?' Maeve struggled free and faced him gravely. 'For God's sake, it's the middle of the night! I awake and find my bed cold and you gone.' She smiled, letting her cloak drop to the floor, and put her arms round his waist. 'The King's letter, isn't it? The business at Godstowe?'

He took a deep breath.

'Yes, and tomorrow I must go there. As soon as Ranulf returns.'

She made him sit down on the edge of the bed beside her.

'The woman was murdered, wasn't she?' Corbett nodded. 'Yes, I fear so.' 'And the King will be held responsible?' Corbett rubbed his face in his hands. 'Yes, I mink he will. If a scandal breaks, God knows what will happen.' He took her hand in his.

'For forty years, Maeve, there has been no civil war in England. Yet the Lady Eleanor's death could cause one.'

She shivered and rolled under the thick coverlets.

'Hugh,' she murmured, 'you will not solve it now, in the middle of the night!'

He smiled bleakly.

'Perhaps there will never be a solution, not even in the full light of day.'

Ranulf-atte-Newgate, body servant to Hugh Corbett, turned his horse on to the sun-baked track which led round to Leighton Manor just as the bell of the village church tolled the Angelus. He turned and watched the labourers bent low in the fields gathering the stooks of corn and placing them in great two-wheeled carts. He heard the sound of their laughter, a woman singing a lullaby to a child held at her breast; now and again, carried on the breeze, the shouts of children playing on the banks of a brook as their busy parents gathered in the harvest

Ranulf had been up to London on his master's business in the Chancery as well as calling on certain goldsmiths in the Poultry. He had also visited his son, the glorious offspring of one of his affairs. Ranulf was pleased that the boy was looking more like him as every day passed: the same, spiked reddish hair, generous mouth, freckled face, snub nose and cheeky green eyes, sharp as a cat's.