Alys turned around and looked at Morach. 'There is no magic in the world that can stand against an heir,' she said bitterly. 'All I can hope for is for the bitch to die in childbirth and the heir to die with her.'

Morach met her look. 'And me here to see she does not,' she said equably. 'It's a fine net you've meshed yourself in, little Alys.'

Alys turned her back on Morach again and thumped down into the bed.

'You must wish you were back at the abbey,' Morach said, rubbing salt in the old wound. 'You'd have been safe from all this uncomfortable reality there. Safe with your mother in Christ.' She paused. 'Pity,' she said cheerfully.

Alys had thought herself unhappy before, but after that night her days were harder still. The weather was against her through a long wintry April. Alys thought that the long season of darkness and cold would never end.

She had known harder winters in her childhood with Morach when food and even firewood had been scarce, and for frozen day after frozen day Morach had sent her out of the door of the snowed-in shanty to scoop a bucket of snow and set it to thaw on the little precious flame. At night they had huddled together for warmth and listened for the cry of the wolf pack which came nearer at twilight and dawn. Morach would throw another turf of peat on the fire and a handful of herbs and laugh as if the bitter cold and the pain in her belly and the long lonely cry of the wolves amused her.

'Learn this,' she would say to Alys – wide-eyed and thin as an orphan lamb. 'Learn this. Never cross a powerful man, my Alys. Find your place and keep it.' And the little child with the great blue eyes too big for her white face would nod and clench her little chicken-foot hands in the old sign against the evil eye. 'That farmer was a bad man,' she said solemnly. 'He was that,' Morach replied with relish. 'And dead now for his injustice to me. Find your place and keep it, Alys! And then avoid the hard men with power!'

Alys had been cold then with a deep iron coldness which had stayed with her for all her life like some incurable growth of ice in her belly. All the petting at the abbey, all the banked fires of blazing logs, all the sheepskin rugs and the wool tapestries could not cure her of it. When the wind howled around the walls of the abbey she would shiver and look up at Mother Hildebrande and ask:

'Was that wolves? Was that wolves, Mother Hildebrande?'

And the old abbess would laugh and draw the child's head against her knees and stroke her fingers through her fair curly hair and say, 'Hush, my little lapwing. What if there are? You are safe here, behind the thick walls, are you not?'

And the child would reply, with deep satisfaction: This is my place now.'

And now I have no place, and I am cold again, Alys said to herself.

She was seated on the kitchen step, her hands dug deep into her sleeves, her face turned up to the thin yellow light of the winter sun. All the other women were indoors, chattering and laughing in the warm gallery. Morach was singing some bawdy ditty to amuse them and Catherine was laughing aloud with one hand held over her swelling belly.

Alys had left them with an irritable shiver to run down to the garden to gather herbs. The old lord had a cough at nights which made him weary and Alys wanted the heads of lavender for him to help him rest. They were stunted and frozen, they should have been picked when the juice was in them, fresh and violet and sweet in midsummer.

'They were neglected and left, and now they are cold and dry,' Alys said, turning the arid handful in her lap. 'Oh God, Hugo.'

Between Catherine's demands for company and the needs of the old lord who sank one day but rallied the next, Alys should have been busy, with no time to brood. But all those long weeks, as it snowed deeper, and then thawed, and then snowed again, Alys moped at the fireside, at the arrow-slit window, or shivered on her own in the frozen garden.

'What ails you, Alys, are you sick?' the old lord asked.

David the dwarf peeped at her and gleamed his malicious smile. 'A sick physician? A foolish wise woman? A dried-out herbalist?' he asked. 'What are you, Alys? A gourd rattling with dried seeds?'

Only Morach in the dark room which they shared at night put her dirty finger precisely on the root of Alys' pain. 'You're dying for him, aren't you?' she said bluntly. 'Dying inside for him.'

Hugo barely noticed her in his busy days. He wrote a stream of letters to London, to Bristol and to Newcastle, and cursed like a soldier at the delay in their delivery and replies. He supervised the pulling-down of the big keystones of the abbey and the men dragged them over the snow on sledges to make a heap where he planned his new house. 'Not a castle,' he told Catherine. 'A regular house. A Tudor house. A house for a lasting peace.'

He drew plans for his new handsome house. It was to have windows, not arrow-slits. It was to have chimneys and fireplaces in every room. He would have had the men dig foundations, but no one could drive so much as a knife into the frozen ground. Instead, he measured up and drew it, and showed it to David, and argued about kitchens and the bakehouse and the number of rooms and the best aspect. When he strode into the castle, as the wintry darkness came down in the afternoon, all the women in the castle fluttered – like hens in a shed with a fox beneath the floor. Hugo let his dark laughing eyes rove over all of them, and then took his pick in a shadowed doorway for a few minutes of rough pleasure.

He rarely had the same woman twice, Alys saw. He never wilfully hurt them or played the mad cruel games he had done with his wife. He treated them with abrupt lust and then quick dismissal.

And they loved him for it. 'He is a rogue!' 'He is the old lord reborn!' 'He is a man!' she heard them say. He put his hand out to Alys once with a quizzical smile and a dark eyebrow raised. Alys had looked through him, her face as inviting as frozen stone, and he had laughed shortly and turned away. She heard him whistle as he ran down the stairs, accepting her rejection as lightly as he had accepted her invitation. She no longer ran deep in Hugo's blood – he had too many diversions. He never came again to her room while Catherine slept -

Alys never expected it. She had taken a gamble on her desire and lost him, and lost her desire too.

All she had left to her was a nagging knowledge that she needed him, at a level which ran deeper than lust. Alys felt she had tried his lust and found it wanting. In his easy dismissal of her she felt her power – over him, over herself, over all of them – drain away like the pale sunsets which bled light from the narrow line of the western horizon in the early afternoons of the dark winter days.

One day the crystal on the thread hung downwards heavy and still, like a plumb-line, when she laid her hand on the old lord's chest.

'Have you lost your power, Alys?' he asked sharply, his dark eyes wide open, alert as a ruffled old eagle owl.

Alys met his gaze unmoved. 'I think so, my lord,' she said, cold to her very bones. 'I cannot get the thing I desire, and I cannot learn not to desire it. I've no time nor appetite for anything. Now it seems I've no ability either.'

'Why's that?' he asked briefly; he was short of breath. 'Hugo,' Alys said. 'He wanted me to be an ordinary woman, a girl to love. Now I am so ordinary he passes me by. I threw my power away for love of him and now I have neither the power nor the love.'

The old lord had barked a sharp laugh at that which ended in him coughing and wheezing. 'Get Morach for me then,' he said. 'Morach shall tend me instead of you. Catherine says that she trusts her with everything. That she is a great healer, an uncanny herbalist.'

Alys nodded, her face pinched. 'As you wish,' she said. The words were like flakes of snow.