“My mother is dead,” I blurted out, too overset for any finesse.

Robert was still breathing hard and I could see the excitement of the joust was still in his blood. He was very still for a moment and I wondered if he had not heard me, but then his eyes blazed and he reached for me, and with horror I thought he was about to kiss me again.

“Robert!” I said. I knew exactly what he had been thinking and it was not of my mother’s death or my grief; it was of my father’s will and the money and the estates, and the fact that we could sell the land now and not be forever in debt or pinching and scraping to survive. I saw it all in his face before he said a word; he had spent my inheritance before he even offered his condolences.

Then the light went out of his face and he stepped back.

“I am very sorry,” he said formally. “You will wish to be chief mourner, of course. I will ask Hyde to arrange your journey to Norfolk.”

William Hyde was the weasel who managed our financial affairs, one of a group of unsavoury characters whom Robert seemed to collect around him like maggots to a carcass. I did not know the work they did for him and I took care not to enquire too closely but when there was a tavern brawl or a knifing down a dark alley it seemed one or other of them were often involved.

I stared at him. “Will you not accompany me?”

“I am to go abroad with His Majesty very soon.” Robert glanced across to where Philip was talking to one of his knights. “It is all agreed. There is talk of war with France.”

“You did not tell me.” Grief was making me stupid and slow.

He did not look at me. “It was only recently that His Majesty discussed it with me.”

I knew this meant that everyone else was aware of the plan and that as usual I had not been deemed important enough for Robert to tell me. I felt a huge surge of anger; I was aware that I was making a public scene, that men were watching us out of the corners of their eyes and some more openly, and that Philip himself was tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for Robert to rejoin him. The King had no time for awkward, clinging wives. He was cruel enough to his own and did not tolerate anyone else’s.

“And what will become of me?” I said. My voice shook. “Where am I to go whilst you play at heroics with His Majesty?”

“I have made provision for you,” Robert said. “You will be staying at a fine manor in the country, with goodly company.”

This evidence that he had planned my future as well as his own without any word to me knocked the breath out of me for a moment.