Her hands were over her mouth, her shocked eyes looked at him in silence.

John hawked and spat like a soldier, as if the taste of bile was too bitter for him.

Without thinking, Elizabeth scuffed dirt over the spittle. ‘John,’ she whispered. ‘I never meant that you should lose your faith. I meant only to caution you –’

‘I am cautioned now,’ he said. ‘I am checked. I am stopped short.’

There was a silence. Somewhere in the fine woods of the duke’s estate the pigeons were cooing, warmly, easily. John looked up at the sky and saw a flock of rooks heading for home in the tall trees.

‘What shall we do?’ Elizabeth asked, as if she was in a wilderness with wreckage all around them.

He looked around, at the fine house and the garden, as if they gave him no pleasure at all. ‘I am his servant,’ he said slowly. ‘He has paid me all he is going to pay me, he told me that. He will use me as he wishes. When he needs me – I am to be there. I am the duke’s man, I have sworn a solemn oath to be his man till death.’

She took a sharp breath at that. ‘An oath?’

‘He asked it of me and I gave it,’ John said grimly. ‘I gave him everything he asked and I swore a solemn oath that I am his man. I will have to learn to live with that. I am a servant, I am lower than a servant, for he has commanded me to be his dog and I have licked his foot.’

‘You think he is a fool and a betrayer and you have sworn to be his man?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Just so.’

They were silent for long moments. She thought that some dark compact must have taken place between her husband and the master he now hated. She did not dare to think what one had done, what one had submitted to. Whatever had taken place it had sent John home as a broken man.

‘Do you hate him?’ she whispered.

The look he gave her was that of a man carrying a mortal wound deep in his belly. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I love him still. But I know that he is no good. That’s worse than hatred for me. To know that I have given my word and my love to a man who is no good.’

She took his hands in hers and felt how cold they were, as if his heart were beating slowly, painfully. ‘Can’t you escape him?’

He shook his head. ‘I am his, in every way that there is, until death.’