Towards evening the breeze died down, and their progress slowed. The river had widened, and islands lay here and there; the ship had to pick her way carefully through the channels between them. A servant approached to ask if the evening meal should be served, and they went below.

The royal cabin was not large, but it was comfortable almost to luxury. Queen Clotilda’s new austerity had not yet found its way there. Two smaller cabins lay forward of it; in one of these Alice had her bed, with a pallet nearby for Mariamne; the duke slept in the other. As on their former voyage, guards would be set on deck at the head of the companionway.

Evening drew down, and clouds, massing in the west, brought darkness early. The Merwing was still making her way slowly between the islands which, with their willows and thickets of alder, showed only like darker clouds floating on the water.

Alice retired soon after supper was done. Mariamne, who had been understandably horrified, and also very frightened, at what Alice had told her of the boys’ murder, seemed to have forgotten her fears in the relief of going home; she was, indeed, inclined to be merry at the difficulties of attending her mistress in such cramped quarters, as she helped Alice undress and into her night clothing, brushed the long, shining hair, and then, having tidied the cabin as best she could, retired herself to the pallet no more than arm’s-length from her mistress’s bed. In a very short time she was asleep.

Alice did not find sleep come so easily. She lay on her back, listening to the creaking of timber and the sounds of water lapping along the ship’s side, her eyes on the small glow of the riding-light outside the square port-hole; smoky yellow light, patched with black shadows, that swayed and swung across the cabin ceiling. She moved restlessly, trying to hold her imagination back from the pictures that kept printing themselves on her brain: the three young princes, children still and surely blameless, who, thinking themselves safe and held in honour, had left their grandmother’s protection and gone trustfully to their uncle’s house and the foulest of murders …

Prayer helped, and the thought of home, and eventually she must have dozed, because when she next opened her eyes the pattern of light on the ceiling had changed. It was brighter and steadier. No sounds came now from on deck, but very near, close under where she lay, came a new sound; something bumping gently against the ship’s side.

Then voices, kept low; men’s voices, whispering, but echoing from the water, and carried up through the open port. Then the soft slap of rope against the ship’s side, and the creak and strain of the ladder as someone climbed it.

Alice sat up and threw back the rugs. Mariamne, undisturbed, slept on. Alice took the three steps to the port-hole and stretched on tiptoe to peer out.

Her cabin, on the starboard side, looked straight out over a narrow stretch of water towards a sizeable island thick with trees. The Merwing hardly seemed to be moving at all; the island seemed to float, still, black on smooth water.