After five days Agnes felt she had known Gwenn for years, and she had to shake herself and pinch her arm to remind herself that a week ago she had not even met her. It was not hard for her to see why her son had loved her. Gwenn was kind and patient. She suffered Agnes’s many questions concerning her son with a tolerance unusual in one so young. And then, when Agnes’s greed concerning Ned was satisfied, Agnes started enquiring into Gwenn’s life. Gwenn was hesitant at first, not wanting to reopen old wounds, but Agnes sensed she needed to talk and persisted, and after a few days it all tumbled out, and Gwenn told Agnes the whole, not withholding anything, not even the fact that she and Alan had become lovers on the way to Sword Point.

Gwenn had given Agnes a straight look, and said with disarming frankness, ‘I won’t apologise, Agnes, for it did not affect my relationship with Ned. I never betrayed Ned. It was a comfort. But I do hope you don’t hate me for it.’

‘Hate you?’ Agnes had taken her hand. ‘I couldn’t hate you. My son chose you, and you kept faith with him and have brought me his child.’ Agnes guessed then that Gwenn loved Alan, and had loved him for a long time. She looked closely at her daughter-in-law, and wondered if she knew it, and then Agnes remembered how Gwenn’s brown eyes had stared hungrily after him till he had ridden out of sight round the bend in the road. She knew.

‘Does Alan know? That you love him, I mean.’

Gwenn gave her a startled look, and a faint flush stained her cheeks. She shook her head. ‘No, he doesn’t know.’

Agnes tried to analyse what it had been about the two of them when they had first ridden up and she had seen the ring that made her assume Gwenn was married to her nephew. She recalled Alan taking the Richmond road, riding stiffly in the saddle, carefully, oh, so carefully, not looking back. ‘Why don’t you tell him?’

‘No.’ Gwenn was adamant. ‘He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t need it. And I’m not sure I do. It will only lead to more pain.’

‘But, Gwenn,’ Agnes began to protest, but Gwenn was having none of it, and changed the subject to the Stone Rose, and how she had come to fear it. When she had done, Agnes examined the statue Gwenn had placed on the scrubbed oak table and the gemstone lying in her hand, and for a moment Gwenn’s fear infected her.

‘I have decided it must be evil,’ Gwenn whispered. ‘Everyone who keeps the Stone Rose comes to grief. What do you think will happen to me if I keep it?’

Throwing off her fear, Agnes ladled out some common-sense advice. She told Gwenn she was being over-imaginative. She was suffering from delayed reaction to the crises she had gone through. ‘The Stone Rose is only a statue,’ Agnes said firmly, ‘and a statue – especially one which represents the Mother of Our Lord – could not possibly be evil.’

***

It was Holy Rood Day, and roughly a month since Ned had been killed. Gwenn had been at Sword Point for almost a week. Dancer needed exercising, and Gwenn had fallen easily into her old habit of riding at dawn. Ned had always ridden out with her at Kermaria, and she found herself thinking of him, but as the days passed, the pain of his loss, though still keen, grew less piercing.

The upper road from Richmond to St Agatha’s was lightly wooded, and Gwenn liked to ride that way, for at that time of day she usually had the road to herself. Agnes had reassured her she was perfectly safe on that path, for it snaked round the White Canons’ monastery at Easby – the nearest village to Sword Point – and no outlaw in his right mind ever attacked anyone so close to habitation. From the road, Gwenn could not see the abbey or St Agatha’s Church which the White Canons attended, for their pale stone walls lay beyond a shifting screen of beech, hazel and oak. The trees were trying on their September colours, and ambers and golds were beginning to blend in with the green. They would soon loose their leaves, but for another week or so the abbey would remain concealed. Squirrels leapt and darted among the trees, dropping cob-nut shells onto the road. Pigeons clattered in and out of elders, gorging themselves on the dark, shiny berries. Rooks cawed, and the wind carried the rich, damp scents of autumn.

That Holy Rood Day, Gwenn came upon a White Canon from Easby Abbey. He was a garrulous Englishman with a sun-burned face and an unmonkish pride in his French which bordered on boasting. On discovering Gwenn’s fluency in that tongue, the canon eagerly displayed his erudition and spoke at length about his business in Richmond.

Gwenn gave him half an ear, for she was wondering what Alan had been doing this past week. The lovemaking had enchanted her, it had been more sweet and tender than she could ever have imagined. And on their way north, they had made love often after that first, glorious time. Each time it had been different, each time Gwenn had been more and more certain of her feelings. She loved Alan. Not as a friend, not in the gentle, platonic way that she had loved Ned, but deeply, fiercely, passionately. She loved Alan as a woman loves her man. Alan had had as much pleasure out of their union as she had done, she knew he had. She prayed that he reciprocated her feelings and that in time, he would reveal his love for her. But a week had dragged by. What was he doing? Had she misread him?

The canon, Stephen by name, rattled on. ‘It is no private matter, as everyone knows. Sadly, we are in dispute with the castle over milling rights. I have here,’ Canon Stephen patted his chest, ‘a letter from the steward. We are to discuss his answer in chapter, but I fear the matter is far from resolved. If the villagers at Easby prefer the convenience of our mill to that at the castle, I fail to see why they should not use it.’

Gwenn made sympathetic noises, though she understood that the castle miller would not want to lose the revenues gained from grinding the villagers’ meal any more than the canons would. Whatever this canon might say, the row concerned revenues, not the villagers’ convenience.

Canon Stephen seemed to come to the conclusion that he ought not to be discussing the abbey’s business so freely, for he changed the subject, ‘You speak French well, my child.’

‘So I should. My father was French.’

‘And you are newly come from there?’

‘Aye, though I count myself Breton, not French. I lived in Brittany.’

It was then that the canon loosed his thunderbolt.

‘There’s much traffic these days between Richmond and the Continent,’ he said. ‘People arrive almost every day. Yesterday, while I was consulting with the steward, a horseman rode in. He’d ridden across England, having caught ship in Dieppe.’

Gwenn felt a frisson of fear. She hoped the monk was referring to Alan. ‘What was he like this horseman? Was he a little above medium height, with striking dark features, the son of the castle armourer?’

‘You mean Alan le Bret, Ivon’s lad? I remember Alan. He’s back is he?’

‘He rode in last week.’

‘No, I wasn’t talking about Alan,’ the canon said, blithely unaware of the effect his words were having on the girl keeping pace alongside. ‘But this fellow must be a friend of his, because he came up to me and asked me if I’d seen him. I’m afraid I misled him – I didn’t know Alan was back.’

‘What...what did the horseman look like?’

‘Fair as an angel and fierce as St Michael.’

‘Not...not like a Viking?’

‘Very like. Pardon me, are you feeling alright, my child? You’re white as milk.’

Murmuring disjointedly, Gwenn took abrupt leave of the astonished canon and galloped back to Sword Point.

***

Shutters darkened the large, ground-floor room of the farm cottage. Agnes was still abed.

When Gwenn tore in, out of breath and with her hair hanging in a tangle about her cheeks, Agnes sat up in alarm. ‘Gwenn? What’s amiss? You’re pale as marble.’