'Do you swear to protect her?' Hugo asked. Alys met his intent gaze. 'I swear it,' she said easily. She felt the arid taste of the empty oath in her mouth.

'I must go,' Hugo said. 'They will be watching for me. Meet me tomorrow, Alys, come to the stables in the morning, my hunter is sick, you can look at him for me and we can be together.' He kissed her gently, quickly, on the mouth and then he turned and was gone. She heard the hall door slam as he went inside, leaving her alone in the garden.

'If she died… ' Alys said softly to the moonlit garden in the icy light. 'If she died he would marry me.'

Next day Alys could not get away to the stables until just before noon. Lady Catherine had an ache in her back and ordered Alys to rub it with oils and essences. Alys worked on the broad fleshy back with mounting impatience. Lady Catherine, prone and sighing with contentment, would not let her go. Alys' hands were hard, unloving on the other woman's flesh, drained of their healing magic by Alys' spite. She had to restrain an urge to pinch. After she had finished rubbing in the oil, Catherine's smooth white back was striped with red.

'That was good, Alys,' she said, in a rare moment of contentment.

Alys curtsied, collected her oils into her basket and shot from the room like a tom-cat. She half threw her basket at Morach and fled for the stairs, down the winding stony treads, across the hall, out of the kitchen door and around to the stables.

It was no good. Hugo had left. The simple lad who worked with the horses smiled his empty smile at her.

'Where is the young lord?' she asked abruptly. 'Was he here?'

'Gone,' the boy said. 'Long, long gone.'

Alys shivered and snapped her fingers under cover of her sleeves to recall her from a shadow of superstition.

'Long, long gone,' said the lad again.

Alys turned and went back to the castle. The stall for Hugo's favourite horse was empty, he had waited for her only a moment. She ached with resentment at his leaving so readily; and disappointment that he could so easily go. Alys knew that if she had been waiting for him she would have been there all day.

She saw him at dinner at midday and he gave her a rueful grin and a wink but they did not speak. In the dying light of the afternoon he took his horse and his great deerhounds down the valley, riding fast by the flooding river, and she did not see him again until suppertime. Alys sat at the little table with the other women and watched the back of Hugo's neck where the dark hair curled. She imagined the feel of that silky hair beneath her fingers and how it would be to grip the nape of his neck in one hand. She felt as if she could grip him and shake him with desire – and with anger too. They left the supper table early and Hugo joined them in the ladies' gallery.

'My back aches again,' Catherine said faintly and Alys watched as she leaned on Hugo's arm and walked slowly into her bedroom. As the door closed Alys' keen eyes saw Hugo's arm go around his wife's waist. Alys waited for him to bid her goodnight and come out again to Alys as she sat with the other women at the fireside. The door stayed shut. Alys felt Morach's mocking black eyes smiling at her. There was no sound from Catherine's bedroom.

'Aye, he's very tender all of a sudden,' Eliza said, her mouth muffled by a thread of embroidery silk. 'There'll be no more slaps and curses now she's in foal.'

Alys looked towards the door again. It stayed shut. 'He's bound to try to keep her sweet,' she said unwillingly. 'He has to have an heir, Catherine has to have her way – at least in these early months.'

Morach hawked and spat into the fire. 'He likes it,' she said contemptuously. 'He'll like the taste of her when she's big with his child. He'll like the thought of a baby in her belly. He'll like her breasts getting fatter and the richness of her body. Men are just babies themselves. He'll suckle from her breasts and roll on her round belly like a new-born infant himself. He's not a man right now, he's a little boy with a new toy.'

Eliza giggled. Alys said nothing. The women sewed in silence, each of them craning their heads to hear what passed in the next room.

The door opened. 'My lady is tired,' Hugo said. He looked towards Morach. 'You or Alys, prepare her a tisane to help her sleep. She needs her rest.'

Morach nodded towards Alys. Hugo smiled at her, one of his open-hearted sweet smiles. 'Thank you, Alys,' he said pleasantly. 'You can bring it in when it is ready.' Then he turned on his heel and went back to his wife.

When the tisane was ready Alys gave it to Ruth to take in. She waited by the fire to see if Hugo came out again. He did not. That night, for the first time in their long, loveless marriage, he stayed in his wife's bed all night long. For the first time in her life Catherine slept with her head on her husband's shoulder and her brown hair tangled across his chest.

Alys sat by the fire with the others and sewed. When she went to bed, with Morach's warm bulk beside her, she did not sleep. She watched the arrow-slit of silver light walk from one end of the chamber to the other as the moon nonchalantly traversed the sky. Alys lay on her back, her eyes open, seeing nothing, thinking nothing. She endured jealousy, as she might endure an attack of deadly ague, stoically; sickened to the heart, saying nothing.

The weather itself was against her, confining her to the castle. March was wild and full of rainstorms and flurries of thick wet snow which clogged doorways and blew into the west-facing windows, leaving puddles on the stone floors. The sky seemed lower than usual and it was dark every afternoon. The castle seemed to shrink in on itself, besieged by winter.

Alys was never alone. Morach shared her bed at night, Lady Catherine ordered her to the ladies' gallery very often, and the old lord took to sitting with them in the afternoons, so Alys could not escape to his chamber in the round tower. Hugo rode out every day, going further and further afield, as restless as a mewed falcon. They heard stories of his adventures: of an alehouse which had been a nest of poachers burned down and the men and women turned out on to the snow-driven moor, of a pitched battle on the highway with some beggars, of a small riot in a bawdy house with mummery and masquers and lechery in the street.

'He is a rogue!' the old lord said proudly when he heard of Hugo's ready violence.

Alys did not seek Hugo and neither did he summon her. A deep secret gulf of silence had opened up between them. She did not waylay him on the stairs, or even attempt to catch his eye when he was sitting with Catherine and her ladies. Alys waited, like the living water beneath the frozen ice of the river, for better times.

He was gentle with Catherine and she, eating well, sleeping well, attended by her ladies and popular with her father-in-law, gleamed with satisfaction. Hugo lay with her once or twice, and though the women listened they heard no screams of pain and pain-shot pleasure. On those two nights Alys sat up all night by the arrow-slit, watching over the white landscape on the other side of the river, chilled to the bone by the icy wind which blew off the high moor. All night she stared out over the desert of snow, white-faced and wide-eyed as a barn owl, seeing nothing. In the morning Morach exclaimed at the ice of her hands and the deep violet shadows in folds of skin beneath her eyes.

Towards the end of the month of March, Hugo came back from his ride, found his father in the ladies' gallery and asked him for permission to go away to visit his friends in Newcastle. Alys froze and kept her eyes on her sewing. Catherine was all smiling interest.

'Of course you must go!' she said confidently. 'We will be well enough here! Your father will guard us and Morach and Alys will keep me well!'