“Come along, then. Kitchen’s this way. Unless, being a king’s grand-bastard, or whatever it was you told him, you’re too proud to eat in the kitchen?”

“Just this once,” I said, “I’ll put up with it.”

He shot me a look, scowled, and then grinned. ‘You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that. You stood up to them a fair treat. Beats me how you thought of all that stuff quick enough. Rocked ’em proper. I wouldn’t have given two pins for your chances once Uther laid hands on you. You got yourself a hearing, anyway.”

“It was true.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Well, you can tell him all over again in a minute, and see you make it good, because he don’t like them that wastes his time, see?”

“Tonight?”

“Certainly. You’ll find that out if you live till morning; he doesn’t waste much time sleeping. Nor does Prince Uther, come to that, but then he’s not working, exactly. Not at his papers, that is, though they reckon he puts in a bit of uncommon hard labour in other directions. Come along.”

Yards before we reached the kitchen door the smell of hot food came out to meet me, and with it the sound of frying.

The kitchen was a big room, and seemed, to my eye, about as grand as the dining-room at home. The floor was of smooth red tiles, there was a raised hearth at each end of the room, and along the walls the chopping-slabs with store-jars of oil and wine below them and shelves of dishes above. At one of the hearths a sleepy-eyed boy was heating the oil in a skillet; he had kindled fresh charcoal in the burners, and on one of these a pot of soup simmered, while sausages spat and crackled over a grill, and I could smell chicken frying. I noticed that—in spite of Cadal’s implied disbelief in my story—I was given a platter of Samian ware so fine that it must be the same used at the Count’s own table, and the wine came in a glass goblet and was poured from a glazed red jar with a carved seal and the label ‘Reserve’. There was even a fine white napkin.