The door to the bathing chamber swung open and his wife walked in, averting her eyes from Hawkwood’s nakedness. She carried clean clothes and woollen towels in her arms, and bent to set them down on the bench that lined one wall.

She was wearing brocade, even in the heat. Her tiny fingers were covered with rings, like so many gilded knuckles, and the steam in the air made the tong-curled frizz of her hair wilt.

“I burned the other things, Ricardo,” she said. “They were fit for nothing, not even the street beggars . . . There is cold ale waiting in the dining chamber, and some sweetmeats.”

Hawkwood stood up, wiping the water out of his eyes. The air in the room seemed scarcely cooler than the liquid in the tub. Estrella’s eyes rested on his nakedness for a second and then darted away. She coloured and reached for a towel for him, her eyes still averted. He smiled sourly as he took it from her. His wife and he only saw each other nude when in the bed chamber, and even then she insisted on there being no light. He knew her body only by moonlight and starlight, and by the touch of his hard-palmed hands. It was thin and spare, like a boy’s, with tiny, dark-nippled breasts and a thick fleece of hair down in her secret part. Absurdly, she reminded Hawkwood of Mateo, the ship’s boy who had shared his bunk a few times on that last long voyage to the Kardian Sea. He wondered what his wife would make of that comparison, and his smile soured further.

He stepped out of the bath, wrapping the towel about himself. Ricardo. Like Galliardo, she had always used the Hebrionese rendering of his name instead of his native version. It irked him to hear it, though he had heard it ten thousand times before.

Estrella had been a good marriage. She was a scion of one of the lesser noble houses of Hebrion, the Calochins. His father had arranged the match, terrible old Johann Hawkwood who had wanted a toe in the door in Abrusio, even in his day the fastest-growing port in the west. Johann had convinced the Calochins that the Hawkwood family was a noble Gabrionese house when in fact it was nothing of the sort. Johann had been given a set of arms by Duke Simeon of Gabrion for his services at the battle of Azbakir. Before that he had been merely a first mate on board a Gabrionese dispatch-runner with no pedigree, no lineage, no money, but a vast store of ambition.

He would be pleased if he could see me, Hawkwood thought wryly, consorting with the emissaries of kings and with a Royal victualling warrant in my pouch.

Hawkwood dressed, his wife leaving the room before the towel fell from his waist. His hair and beard dripped water but the arid air would soon put paid to that. He padded barefoot into the high-ceilinged room that was at the centre of his house. Louvred windows far above his head let in slats of light that blazed on the flagged floor. When his bare foot rested on one of the sun-warmed stones he felt the pain and the heat of it. Abrusio without the trade wind was like a desert without an oasis.

High-backed chairs, as stiffly upright as his wife’s slender backbone, a long table of dark wood, various hangings as limp as dead flowers against the whitewashed plaster of the walls—they seemed unfamiliar to him because he had had no part in choosing them—and the balcony with its wooden screens, closed now, dimming the light in the room. The place is like a church, Hawkwood thought, or a nunnery.

He stepped to the balcony screens and wrenched them aside, letting in the golden glare and heat and dust and noise of the city. The balcony faced west, so he could see the bay and the Inner and the Outer Roads, as the two approaches to the harbour were called; the quays, the wharves, the seaward defence towers and the watch beacons on the massive mole of the harbour wall. He noted half a dozen vessels standing out to sea, their sails flaccid as empty sacks, their crews hauling them in with longboats. He listened to the clatter of wheels on cobbles, the shouts of hawkers and laughter from a nearby tavern.

Not for him the isolation of a nobleman’s villa on the higher slopes of Abrusio Hill. He was looking out from one of the lower quarters, where the houses of the merchants clung to the slopes like tiers of sand martins’ nests and it was possible to sniff bad fish and tar and salt air, a reek more welcome to him than any perfume.

“The ale will get warm,” Estrella said hesitantly.

He did not reply, but stood drinking in the life of Abrusio, the sight of the flawless sea, as calm as milk. When would the trade start up again? He did not want to begin the voyage with his ships being towed out of the bay, searching for a puff of air on the open ocean.

That thought made him feel guilty, and he turned back into the room. It was full of light now, the early afternoon sun pouring down to flood the stone and touch off the gilt thread in the tapestries, bring out a warmer glow from the dark wood of the furniture.

He sat and ate and drank, whilst Estrella hovered like a humming-bird unable to settle upon a flower. There was a sheen of sweat on her collar-bone, gathering like a jewel in the hollow of her throat before sliding gently below the ruff and down into her bodice.

“How long have you been back, Ricardo? Domna Ponera says her husband spoke to you days ago, when there was that shooting in the harbour . . . I have been waiting, Ricardo.”

“I had business to attend to, lady, a new venture that involves the nobility. You know what the nobility are like.”

“Yes, I know what they are like,” she said bitterly, and he wondered if court gossip about Jemilla had come this far down from the Noble Quarter. Or perhaps she was just reminding him of her own origins. It mattered not, he told himself, though again the remorse edged into his mind, making him defensive.

“Half my crew were taken away by the Ravens when we docked. That is why I stank like a privy when I arrived. I have been in the catacombs trying to get them released.”

“Oh.” Her face slumped, some of the energy going out of her. He noted with satisfaction that not even she could find fault with such a virtuous cause. She loved virtuous causes.

She sat down on one of the high-backed chairs and clapped her small hands together with a snap. A servant appeared at once and bowed low.

“Bring me wine, and see it is cold,” she said.

“At once, my lady.” The servant hurried away.

She could order the common folk like a true noble at any rate, Hawkwood reflected. Let her try that tone of voice once with me and we’ll see how that narrow rump of hers likes a seaman’s belt across it.

“Berio, was that?” he asked, slugging thirstily at his ale.

“Berio is gone. He was slovenly. This new one is named Haziz.”

“Haziz? That’s a Merduk name!”

Her eyes widened a little. He could see the pulse beat in her neck. “He is from the Malacars. His father was Hebrionese. He was afraid of the burnings, so I gave him a position.”

“I see.” Another stray dog. Estrella was a strange mixture of the petulant and the soft-hearted. She might take in a man off the street out of pity and throw him out again a week later because he was slow in serving dinner. Jemilla at least was unrelentingly hard on her attendants.

And her lovers, Hawkwood added to himself.

The wine came, borne by the ill-favoured Haziz who had the look of a seaman about him despite the fine doublet Estrella had procured for him. He looked at Hawkwood as though Richard were about to strike him.

They sat in silence, the husband and wife, drinking their tepid drinks slowly. As he sat there, Hawkwood had an overwhelming longing to be at sea again, away from the torrid heat, the crowds, the reek of the pyres. Away from Estrella and the silences in his home. He called it his home, though he had spent more time in either of his two ships and felt more at ease in them.