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releasing the expensive scent of cinnamon bark. 'Have you been to see him?'
    'Not yet,' she said.
    'The guards wouldn't let me near. They said that no one was to see him until my stepfather had spoken to him.'
    The way he said 'stepfather' was telling. Matilda sighed and pushed her needle into the fabric. 'A day in a cell without company will do him no harm. He needs to reflect on the consequences of his actions.'
    'You see, you are blaming him already.'
    'It was his choice to visit the alehouse and drink himself into a stupor.'
    Simon made an impatient sound through his teeth. 'Sabin was right, you do wish him unborn,' he said with the unfairness of burning adolescence, and strode from the room.
    Matilda tried to return to her sewing, but she had no heart for the task and her concentration had departed in her son's stormy wake.
    Sabin. He had been christened Simon after his father, but she had quickly changed his name to the masculine version of his mother's. Simon was an appellation reserved for the legitimate heir to the earldom of Northampton. She had always felt guilty about that particular act. She had stolen the infant's given name. And because she felt guilty, she felt resentful. His father had yielded to her on the matter, a little too easily, she sometimes thought. Perhaps it was to appease her in the wake of his carnal sin, or perhaps to remind him of the boy's mother. She had never probed that particular sore spot too hard. Matilda had only met the mother once: at the convent of the Holy Redeemer in Evreux. Clothed in a nun's habit, Sabina had
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    possessed the grace of a Madonna, and an elegant bone structure dominated by tranquil violet-grey eyes. Her son had inherited her feline grace and owned a masculine version of her features, but his eyes were his father's and they held fire, not tranquillity. He had been born of a single coupling, so both Sabina and her husband had said. A brief slip from the path, before guilt and common sense had returned them to the straight and narrow, but the consequences had already taken root. Sabina had died of a flux when Sabin was five years old, and although Matilda had said the necessary prayers, she had not mourned too hard.
    Matilda gazed at her embroidery without seeing it. Dealing with Sabin had been easier when his father was alive. The boy had been less wild then. Into mischief, certainly, but reachable. All that had changed when Simon died. Suddenly it was like dwelling with a wild creature. It had been a relief to send him away to the royal court for training, and an even greater relief when her second husband had shouldered the burden of dealing with Sabin's waywardness on the occasions that the boy returned to their household.
    She felt uneasily that she had been shirking her responsibilities. She had promised Simon that even if she could not love his son, she would make sure he lacked for nothing to advance his life. A promise that she had not kept, for Sabin languished in a cell, manacled and involved in a man's death following a drunken brawl.
    The thought galvanised her to her feet and caused her attendant, Helisende, to glance up with a blink of surprise. Matilda went to the door and spoke to the guard. The man inclined his head, but looked doubtful.
    'Are you certain, my lady?'
    Her jaw tightened. 'Quite.'
    He bowed and departed on his errand. Rubbing her hands, Matilda returned to the centre of the room. 'Put some more charcoal on the brazier,' she commanded Helisende. 'I am feeling the cold today.'
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    Helisende, who had been her maid and companion since they were small children, busied herself with the task. 'Do you know what you're about, mistress?' she asked shrewdly.
    Matilda pressed her steepled hands to her lips. 'No,' she said. 'Only that there has to be a way of breaking this circle.' She looked at Helisende. 'What would you do? Would you leave him in the prison to stew?'
    The maid considered. 'Not beyond the time he has spent there now.' She dusted