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tariffs for lesser men, but all owed a fee to John which came as extra to his salaried marshal’s wage of two shillings a day.
    Having performed a circuit of the battlements, he descended to the ward and strolled to have a word with the porter who was sitting by the door, a pair of mastiffs couched at his feet. The dogs were accustomed to John and forbore to growl but he didn’t encourage their familiarity because they were guard dogs. Besides, they had a tendency to slobber.
    ‘All quiet, my lord.’ The porter rubbed the jowls of the nearest mastiff. A glint entered his eyes. ‘Apart from the comings and goings of folk in search of beds other than their own, of course.’
    John half smiled. ‘There are always those.’
    The porter sniffed the air. ‘Rain before dawn,’ he announced with the experience of one who spent most of his time outside officiating at doorways. John glanced skywards and made a face. That would mean a crowded hall and short tempers among men forced to wait outside. Mud, damp and the stink of wet wool.
    One of the dogs rumbled in its chest and a ridge of fur rose and darkened along its spine. The other lunged to its feet, its muzzle on a level with John’s hipbone. The porter ordered it down with a terse command and the mastiff sat on its haunches and stared into the night, its body quivering. ‘A bed-searcher,’ the porter said. ‘Hector can smell ’em a mile off. He knows the scent of a bitch in heat.’ He gave a salacious wheeze into the collar of his hood.
    John smiled wryly at the porter’s crude but apt assessment and, bidding the man goodnight, moved off into the dark, as quiet as a shadow himself. The guards stood aside for him as he entered the great hall. A few lamps burned to light men’s paths to the privy but the rafters were in darkness and the hearth was banked for the night, not even an ember’s glow filtering from beneath the close-fitting cover. There were moments of brighter light like stepping stones where a few souls were keeping late hours in the alcoves allotted to them. A couple of knights belonging to King David of Scotland were playing a protracted game of merels by a stub of candle and someone’s squire was sitting cross-legged on his pallet, mending a piece of harness. John picked his way between these islands of light to his own pallet-space, which was divided off from the others by a curtain of heavy Flemish wool. With sleeping room at a premium and so many magnates in residence, even the King’s marshal had to bed down in the hall tonight.
    Damette was waiting for him as he had suspected she would be. However, given that she was now the mistress of the King’s cup-bearer William Martel, he did not expect her to warm his sheets. Rings adorned her fingers tonight, and jewelled pins secured her veil to her hair. She smelled delicious: given other circumstances, he would have devoured her whole.
    ‘I hate those dogs,’ she said with a grimace. ‘They always growl.’
    ‘It’s their duty.’ He reached out to stroke one of the dark braids shining below the hem of her veil. ‘You are late abroad.’
    She gave him a conspiratorial look. ‘Since my lord has gone visiting, I thought I would too.’
    ‘Gone visiting where?’
    ‘To the Earl of Leicester’s lodging with Meulan, de Senlis and the Bishops of Winchester and Salisbury.’
    ‘A regular conspiracy,’ John said with a curl of his lip.
    Amused scorn glinted. ‘You expect anything else at court and you the King’s marshal? Henry is going to make everyone swear an oath on the morrow to uphold the Empress’s right to inherit when he dies. Many are not pleased.’
    He didn’t insult her by asking if she was sure. She wouldn’t be here otherwise. It puzzled him for a moment as to why Henry was intending to make men reiterate the oaths they had taken four years ago during the preparations for Matilda’s wedding to Geoffrey of Anjou, but then realisation dawned. ‘She’s going back to him,