A tug at her skirt drew her attention. Theudovald, with a jerk of the head and a question in his eyes, was silently inviting her to go with him and leave the adults to their talking. She nodded eagerly, and cleared her throat for the formal address suitable to their company.

“Madam, my lord duke – Father. With your gracious permission –”

“I’m going to show Alice the horses, Grandmother,” said Theudovald, and, apparently in no need of permission, gracious or otherwise, he took Alice’s hand and pulled her to her feet. He was nearly as tall as she was. She threw a look, half-laughing, half-apologetic at her father, received his smiling nod, and followed the boy out into the sunlit yard. The queen glanced her way, but never faltered in something she was saying about her son King Chlodomer and the sacred trust he had inherited in the church of St Martin, with the constant stream of pilgrims to the holiest shrine in Europe and the great basilica that had been built over the site a few hundred years before.

Alice, with a bob of a curtsey, turned and ran across the courtyard after the prince.

8

The place – palace or farmstead – was even bigger than Alice had thought, a vast, sprawling complex of cottages and farm buildings, garths and orchards where men dug and planted, and yards where maids bustled with baskets of provisions or armfuls of clothing. In the stableyards, men – the guards and fighting men, one could guess – lounged idly about or sat over dice games on the warm flagstones, while grooms and cattlemen were busy about their charges. The prince led the way at a run between two rows of beehives and a pen crowded with white goats, and Alice, kilting up the primrose skirts, followed him, picking her way as best she could over cobbles which had certainly never been swept. They passed the forge, where the smith, at work again on the sword he had shown Queen Clotilda, gave them a nod of greeting. Behind him in the flickering firelight of the smithy Alice could see a forest of lances stacked in a corner. Queen Clotilda’s palace could probably supply, mount and equip a small army.

Theudovald paused to wait for her where a narrow archway, casting an arc of deep shadow, led out of the maze of buildings into the vineyards beyond. These stretched, open to the sun, right up the sloping valley-side to a crest of woodland nearly half a mile away. The wines were just budding, small stumpy plants set in careful rows up the hillside, with no promise of the harvest to come. Even so, it could be seen that they were better than the vines so carefully tended in the sheltered half-acre at Castle Rose. The sun was hot now, blazing down on the young leaves and rosy buds, and between the ranks of vines the soil was already drying to summer dust. No wonder, thought Alice, that the wines of the Loire tasted quite different from the vintages of Rheged.