She bows her head and her lips move in prayer. ‘My king will send for me,’ she says trustingly. ‘Without a doubt he will send for me to come to him, and we can start our battles again.’

* * *

It grows even hotter in August, and my great-aunt rests on a daybed in her inner room every afternoon, with the light curtains of silk around the bed soaked in lavender water and the closed shutters throwing barred shadows across the stone floor. She likes me to read to her, as she lies with her eyes closed and her hands folded on the high waistline of her dress, as if she were a sculpted effigy of herself in some shaded tomb. She puts aside the big horned headdress that she always wears and lets her long greying hair spread over the cool embroidered pillows. She gives me books from her own library that tell of great romances and troubadours and ladies in tangled forests, and then one afternoon she puts a book in my hand and says, ‘Read this today.’

It is hand-copied in old French and I stumble over the words. It is hard to read: the illustrations in the margins are like briars and flowers threading through the letters, and the clerk who copied each word had an ornate style of writing which I find hard to decipher. But slowly the story emerges. It is the story of a knight riding through a dark forest who has lost his way. He hears the sound of water and goes towards it. In a clearing, in the moonlight, he sees a white basin and a splashing fountain and in the water is a woman of such beauty that her skin is paler than the white marble and her hair is darker than the night skies. He falls in love with her at once, and she with him, and he takes her to the castle and makes her his wife. She has only one condition: that every month he must leave her alone to bathe.

‘Do you know this story?’ my great-aunt asks me. ‘Has your father told you of it?’

‘I have heard something like it,’ I say cautiously. My great-aunt is notoriously quick-tempered with my father and I don’t know if I dare say that I think this is the legend of the founding of our house.

‘Well, now you are reading the true story,’ she says. She closes her eyes again. ‘It is time you knew. Go on.’

The young couple are happier than any in the world, and people come from far and wide to visit them. They have children: beautiful girls and strange wild boys.

‘Sons,’ my great-aunt whispers to herself. ‘If only a woman could have sons by wishing, if only they could be as she wishes.’

The wife never loses her beauty though the years go by, and her husband grows more and more curious. One day, he cannot bear the mystery of her secret bathing any longer and he creeps down to her bath-house and spies on her.