The thought had startled her, and now she could not rid herself of it. She sat and pulled a heavy piece of paper from the little wooden box Suzanna had given her, quill poised to write. But it was impossible to know what to put down in a letter to her friend. She could not find words to admit the difficulty of acting the part of Lady Morency day in and out. Nor could she say how she missed her fighting men, or of the secret and unexpected relief of not holding command. Most troubling was the shame and confusion that pressed on her each day so that it made her impatient with herself, and with these alien sentiments.

She stared at the page and listened to the distant sound of the sea, then closed her eyes. Immediately she thought of her husband. Of kisses and whispers in the dark, and his hands running gently over her hair. If her days were shame and confusion, her nights were only certainty and hunger. And yet of all the thoughts crowding her mind, this was the most overwhelming.

She wanted to ask Suzanna, so much more familiar with courtly ways, if this was how lovers spoke to ladies, for it could not be how husbands spoke to their wives. When in utter nakedness he stood her before the firelight, kneeling before her, and asked her where each mark on her had come from – and when she answered (a mishap while trying to learn the longbow, a poorly judged lunge in her first spar with Madog, an ill-fated fumbling while boiling nettles) he kissed each place, pulling from her a history of her body, of her life. But when he looked up at her, she touched her fingers to the scar on his brow and asked the same, and he only pulled her mouth down to his and all conversation was lost.

Of course she could not write these things, or ever say them. Nor could she speak of the sadness that rose in her every morning as she watched him leave her to her business as he went on his. It was plain he preferred to be outside the castle walls, and there was work enough without. She did not begrudge him this, fitting as it was with his duties as lord, but she could not help but feel the loss of him by her side. Unlikely as it seemed, she had come to be reassured by his very presence. It felt possible that she might learn to belong here, when he took her hand in his.