“Aye, the elder daughter is here,” Marcus confirmed. It annoyed him to hear Stratford call Nesta a whore. After all, there were several stories about that encounter between Nesta and Edward eight years ago. If Llygad ap Madoc had broken with the King over it, rape was more likely, although Marcus did not want to believe that of the King he knew as a friend. Still, Edward had been very young at the time, little more than twenty years old, and very full of himself and his newly acquired power.…

He caught himself, and cut off the heated argument his head was making. Hadn’t he himself referred to her as the King’s whore? What did he care how it had actually been? No matter what the truth, the violation of his hospitality had been enough to send Llygad into the hills.

Stratford shook his head again. Despite his large-framed, powerful build, he had appeared shrunken and weary when Marcus entered his chamber at Westminster. His thinning grey hair was mussed, as if a hand had scratched at the scalp many times today. Governing the realm in Edward’s absence was not an easy task, Marcus guessed, no matter what skills a man brought to it.

“Thank the saints that the Queen is in Flanders with her husband,” Stratford said. “We had heard that Nesta was contented to go to the convent after her Scottish husband’s death. We received no word she had left it to journey here.”

“Actually, she said that she had not been there for some months now.”

Stratford’s veil of distraction instantly lifted. He pierced Marcus with the shrewd stare of a man who had played many dangerous political games in his life, and survived each time. “So much for the loyalty of a Scottish abbess. Some months, you say? Where has she been?”

Marcus shrugged.

Stratford muttered a curse hardly befitting a bishop.

“She does not appear accepting of this marriage between me and her sister, which is why I have come today,” Marcus said.

“There is naught she can do about it. Genith will not have the courage to stand against me, once I have her alone.”

The old resentment about this marriage twisted in the pit of Marcus’s stomach. He had always known that the match was not Genith’s choice, but he could do without it being so baldly stated. He reacted viscerally against the notion of having a woman coerced to his bed. He had seen far too much of that as a boy.

He suppressed the youthful memories that wanted to emerge, and the reaction itself. This was the way of such things for a man with his position. He had always known that whatever marriage he made would contain the shadow of it.

“I gave word to the men at the house to allow neither sister to leave the property until we are done with this,” Marcus said.