Can such things be truly known? In any case, suspicious as he was, I do not think he would have suspected such lapses on my part; they were too far from his own practice of unremitting alertness. Anything could be useful, could be vital, even the smallest thing, the very smallest – who could know? The sign of treason can lie in the flicker of an eyelid, he had once said to me. Without this acumen in seeing the signs, what can avail the rack and the wheel? So he tried to mould me and so I tried to fit the shape. As I say, I wanted to please him. But I was lacking, I was not an apt pupil – I knew it even then.

When we were alone I stood silently before him awaiting his words. But he took my arm without speaking and walked with me to the smaller chamber that lay beyond, where his notary and scribes did their work, and through this to his own cabinet, closing the heavy door behind us and leading me to the narrow space within the embrasure of the window.

It was no more than the habit of caution, bred by his many years in the palace service. I did not take it to mean that the matter was serious, nor did his first words give me any indications of this.

"Well, Thurstan Beauchamp," he said, "is that a new sorcot I see this morning?"

"Yes" I said, "so it is."

He made game of me sometimes about my extravagance in dress, using, with an accent of irony, the French terms that had become fashionable of recent months in Palermo. I like to be clean and neat and make a good figure and I took much care with my appearance, shaving twice every week and spending a good part of my stipend on clothes and scent and oil for my hair, which is very light in colour and reaches to my shoulders. That morning I was wearing a coat of dark blue silk, padded at the shoulders and pinched in the sleeves.