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his father would have of Ralf, he thought. At four-and-twenty, brimful of anger and resentment, his half-brother was too old and dangerous to be whipped to heel like a raw adolescent. He regarded the skinned knuckles of his own right hand, flexed them and winced.
    Agnes stalked away from the trestle with a stony face. The servants suffered. Joscelin thought about holding his ground and decided that it wasn’t worth the aggravation. Cramming a final piece of bread into his mouth, he took his cup outside to finish his ale in peace. It was a mistake. As he sauntered into the warm morning air his father arrived, Ralf riding behind and both of them obviously in filthy tempers.
    Ironheart dismounted, cuffed the groom’s apprentice across the ear for being a fraction too slow at the bridle, and stamped towards the hall. His pace checked for an instant when he saw Joscelin and a muscle ticked beneath his cheekbone. Then he came on, his body stiff with anger.
    ‘Leicester’s house!’ he snarled at Joscelin as he came level. ‘You couldn’t have chosen a more public place to brawl had you scoured all of London! You shame me and you shame your blood!’
    Joscelin looked beyond his father’s mottled fury to where Ralf still sat on his horse. ‘I had good reason,’ he said quietly. His fist tightened around the cup.
    ‘Leicester says you were drunk,’ Ironheart snapped. ‘He was only too pleased to furnish me with the details while I dragged Ralf off some strumpet he’d fallen asleep on. I’d have done better to take a vow of celibacy than beget the brood of half-wit sons collaring me now!’
    ‘I wasn’t drunk, I was angry,’ Joscelin said.
    ‘And spoiling for a fight before you left me last night. A dozen eyewitnesses say that you started it. If you can’t control that anger then you’re not fit to lead men!’
    Joscelin’s shoulders went back as if he had taken a blow, but he said nothing. Not for the world would he repeat the insult that had goaded him to strike.
    ‘Oh, get out of my way!’ Ironheart snapped. ‘Let me swallow a drink before I choke!’ Thrusting past Joscelin into the house, he bellowed at his wife like a wounded bear.
    Ralf rode over to Joscelin, deliberately fretting the horse, making it prance. ‘I thought for the good of your hide you’d be long gone by now,’ he said.
    ‘As usual, you thought wrong,’ Joscelin retorted.
    Ralf’s complexion was pale and sweaty. An ugly bruise marred his left eye socket where Joscelin’s fist had connected the night before. Reddish beard stubble framed the compressed line of his mouth. ‘One day I’ll be lord of all my father owns and you’ll be nothing,’ he said, each word edged with bitterness. The horse stamped and sidled. The swish of its tail clipped the cup in Joscelin’s hands.
    Joscelin refused to be intimidated. ‘You really don’t know the difference, Ralf, between having nothing and being nothing,’ he said and poured the dregs from his cup onto the ground. The dust lumped and glistened. ‘I might sell my sword for money but never my integrity.’
    For a moment, the prospect of another brawl hung imminent but the sound of Ironheart’s choler-choked voice barking through the open hall doors held the brothers to caution. Ralf bestowed a single, glittering look on Joscelin that spoke more eloquently than words and snatched the horse around towards the waiting groom. In the course of its turn, his mount’s glossy shoulder brushed Joscelin, forcing him to step back. A hoofprint bit into the dark stain in the dust where the drink had spilled. Joscelin stared at it and then at his brother’s back. It was long and broad and the amount of fine Flemish cloth required to make his tunic must have cost Lady Agnes’s domestic budget several shillings.
    Ralf did not know the privation of lying down at a roadside because there was nowhere better to sleep. He had never had to fight for each mouthful of food or gather firewood in freezing,