‘Not while Arthur lives.’

‘Not while I live either!’ she proclaimed fiercely, and then, recognizing her helplessness, she shrugged. She turned back to the window and let the brown robe drop. ‘I haven’t been a good mother,’ she said unexpectedly. I did not know what to say, so said nothing. I had never been close to Guinevere, indeed she treated me with the same rough mix of affection and derision that she might have extended to a stupid but willing dog, but now, perhaps because she had no one else with whom to share her thoughts, she offered them to me. ‘I don’t even like being a mother,’ she admitted. ‘These women, now,’ she indicated Morgan’s white-robed women who hurried through the snow between the shrine’s buildings, ‘they all worship motherhood, but they’re all as dry as husks. They weep for their Mary and tell me that only a mother can know true sadness, but who wants to know that?’ She asked the question fiercely. ‘It’s all such a waste of life!’ She was bitterly angry now. ‘Cows make good mothers and sheep suckle perfectly adequately, so what merit lies in motherhood? Any stupid girl can become a mother! It’s all that most of them are fit for! Motherhood isn’t an achievement, it’s an inevitability!’ I saw she was weeping despite her anger.

‘But it was all Arthur ever wanted me to be! A suckling cow!’

‘No, Lady,’ I said.

She turned on me angrily, her eyes bright with tears. ‘You know more than I about this, Derfel?’

‘He was proud of you, Lady,’ I said awkwardly. ‘He revelled in your beauty.’

‘He could have had a statue made of me if that’s all he wanted! A statue with milk ducts that he could clamp his infants onto!’

‘He loved you,’ I protested.

She stared at me and I thought she was about to erupt into a blistering anger, but instead she smiled wanly. ‘He worshipped me, Derfel,’ she said tiredly, ‘and that is not the same thing as being loved.’ She sat suddenly, collapsing onto a bench beside the wooden chest. ‘And being worshipped, Derfel, is very tiresome. But he seems to have found a new goddess now.’

‘He’s done what, Lady?’

‘You didn’t know?’ She seemed surprised, then plucked up the letter. ‘Here, read it.’

I took the parchment from her. It carried no date, just the superscription Moridunum, showing that it had been written from Oengus mac Airem’s capital. The letter was in Arthur’s solid handwriting and was as cold as the snow that lay so thick on the windowsill. ‘You should know, Lady,’ he had written, ‘that I am renouncing you as my wife and taking Argante, daughter of Oengus mac Airem, instead. I do not renounce Gwydre, only you.’ That was all. It was not even signed.

‘You really didn’t know?’ Guinevere asked me.