I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. ‘I thought you were talking in general,’ I said. ‘D’you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?’

Mrs Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. ‘D’you call this clean?’ she demanded crossly.

‘Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?’ I asked.

‘He never offered her marriage,’ she said grudgingly. ‘He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised.’

‘Is she Jew, or Gentile?’ I whispered.

‘Gentile,’ she said. ‘But she would take our religion if Daniel married her.’

‘Married her?’ I exclaimed. ‘But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!’

She brought the pot to the kitchen table. ‘It was nothing,’ she said, trying to slide away from her own indiscretion. ‘Only something she once said to me.’

‘You spoke to her about Daniel marrying her?’

‘I had to!’ she flared up. ‘She came to the house when he was in Padua, her belly before her, wanting to know what would be done for her.’

‘Her belly?’ I repeated numbly. ‘She is with child?’

‘She has his son,’ Daniel’s mother said. ‘And a fine healthy boy, the very picture of him as a baby. Nobody could doubt whose child he is, not for a moment, even if she were not a lovely girl, a good girl, which she is.’

I sank to the stool at the table and looked up at her in bewilderment. ‘Why did he not tell me?’

She shrugged. ‘Why would he tell you? Did you tell him everything in all these long years when you made him wait for you?’

I thought of Lord Robert’s dark eyes on me, and the touch of his mouth on my neck. ‘I did not lie with another and conceive a child,’ I said quietly.

‘Daniel is a handsome young man,’ she said. ‘Did you think he would wait like a nun for you? Or did you not think of him at all, while you played the fool and dressed like a whore and ran after who knows who?’

I said nothing, listening to the resentment in her tone, observing the rage in her flushed cheeks and the spittle on her lips from her hissing speech.

‘Does he see his child?’

‘Every Sunday at church,’ she said. I caught her quickly hidden smile of triumph. ‘And twice a week, when he tells you he is working late, he goes to her house to dine with her and to see his child.’

I rose up from the table.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked, suddenly alarmed.

‘I am going to meet him as he walks home,’ I said. ‘I want to talk with him.’

‘Don’t upset him,’ she said eagerly. ‘Don’t tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing.’