‘And don’t you see what you’ve paid for that?’ she asked him. ‘You can’t even choose where to eat your dinner. You can’t choose where to live. Sometimes I think you can’t even choose what to feel in your heart. It’s his feelings that matter. Not your own.’

‘It’s the way it is,’ he stated. ‘The way of the world.’

She shook her head. ‘Not in Meopham. Not in my family. Not in the country. It’s the way of the court where everyone has to have a great man’s favour and protection to rise, where every great man has to have his followers to show his importance. But there are men and women all over the country who live according to their own lights and call no man master.’

‘You think that’s a better life?’

‘Of course,’ she said, but she could see that what seemed to her to be a freedom from an onerous duty was to him a loss, an emptiness which he could not have borne.

‘I would have been a smaller man without my lord,’ he said. ‘And what you think of as freedom is a small price to pay for belonging heart and soul to a great man. It’s the price I pay gladly.’

‘But I pay it too,’ she said quietly.

For a moment he glanced down at her as if something in her voice had made him feel tender for her, regretful, as if they should have been more to each other. She thought that he would put his arm around her and cuddle her against his side and drive one-handed like a lover and his lass on the way to the fair. ‘Yes, you pay too,’ he admitted, keeping both hands on the driving reins. ‘You knew you were marrying a man who had a duty already promised. I was Cecil’s man before we were even betrothed, let alone married. You knew that, Elizabeth.’

She nodded and kept her eyes on the unwinding road ahead of them. ‘I knew that,’ she agreed a little grimly. ‘I don’t complain.’

He left it at that, with her acquiescence, and trusted to the house that his lord had provided for them to persuade her, as he could not, that it was better to be the follower of a great man than a small man on your own account. He saw her face as he drew up outside the cottage and knew that there would be no complaints for a while about the earl.