Ameline had drifted off into a short dreamless sleep. When she awoke Hezekiah had not moved but lay still with his arm, hot and moist, under her shoulders. She had not struggled or pleaded with him, she had been too scared, but he had not hurt her. His touch had been light and silky and he had patiently coaxed her young, inexperienced body until it was entirely relaxed and responsive. His expertise had magnified her terror, giving her shame, making her hate herself; it hadn’t been a natural loving gentleness but something pitiless and calculated to add to his own pleasure. There had been no pain and his body was smooth, light and strangely soft and warm. She felt strangely elated now, wanting to laugh, cry, shout, and sing. He had forced himself upon her and made himself her first lover, and yet, cruelly somehow, she felt he had taken her to the heights of fulfilment.

With a liberal-minded mother like Rachael she had not been brought up to think that the act of physical union was something a woman had to endure, but surely the first time was usually uncomfortable. Ameline knew now that Bartholomew Drannock had offered her no more than the selfish gropings of a lusty youth. With him it would have been clumsy, painful and far more degrading than what she had just experienced.

She raised herself on an elbow and looked down into Hezekiah’s face. He was over fifty, or so she thought, but there was hardly a wrinkle in his smooth, perfumed skin. If he had asked her at that moment, Ameline would have agreed to marry him, even become his mistress. Although he would undoubtedly have slit her throat if she had resisted him earlier, now, she would willingly have departed with him on the next tide. For one mad moment her mind and body surged with the desire to warm his ice-cold heart with the fire of her love. Hezekiah turned his head and looked back at her and his eyes deepened into shards of kaleidoscopic colours. She could see pure evil there. She gulped and shuddered. He returned his gaze to the canopy above them; Ameline was dismissed.

He made no attempt to stop her fleeing to the tiny connecting room where some of her clothes were kept and where Peters slept. Numbly she dressed herself. When she returned to the bedroom Hezekiah had gone, and with him the jewelled stiletto. The bedcovers were smoothed down without a crease. She sat back at her dressing table and trying not to think she proceeded to arrange her hair in its usual style.