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from a house he had seen in Normandy, he had had a stone wall built at the back of the hall to support a conical chimney that passed through the roof and took the smoke from the hearth beneath. Together with the stone-flagged floor, which his wife had insisted upon as being a cut above the usual rush-strewn beaten earth, it made his house one of the most up-to-date in the city, about which Matilda could boast to her snobbish cronies at St Olave's Church.
    She was sitting by the fire now, waiting for their serving woman Mary to bring in supper, another innovation, as most people were content with a single large dinner at noon.
    'My brother is calling upon me tomorrow, John,' she snapped, without a word of greeting. 'I trust that you can manage to be civil to him for once.'
    Considering that he had saved the man's life less than a month ago, de Wolfe thought this less than gracious, but Matilda was woefully short of grace. He rapidly scanned a mental list of possible excuses not to be at home for Richard de Revelle and hoped for a murder or a rape in the morning to keep him away.
    Sitting in a wooden monk's chair, which had side panels and a hooded top to deflect draughts, John looked across at his wife on the opposite side of the hearth. Matilda's stocky body was enveloped in a thick kirtle of heavy green wool, with a long velvet mantle around her shoulders for warmth. Her head was encased in a tight-fitting helmet of white linen, tied with laces under her double chin, framing a square, pugnacious face with heavy-lidded eyes. A big fire of crackling logs kept their faces scorched, but behind them the bleak hall, towering up into the darkness of the rafters, was icy.
    'Well?' snapped Matilda. 'Are you going to be here or not?'
    Bereft of any excuse on the spur of the moment, he nodded reluctantly. 'What brings him here tomorrow? I thought he would be at Revelstoke or up at Tiverton.'
    Richard had several manors in Devon and another in Somerset, and compared to John, he was a rich man. His wealth came both from lands inherited by his haughty wife Lady Eleanor and from his own incessant pursuit of money, some of which had come from his embezzling activities when sheriff.
    'You surely must know that he has recently bought a house in North Gate Street as a pied-de-terra' said Matilda sharply. 'Is it so unnatural for him to want to see his only sister when he is in our city?'
    John glowered at her, wondering again how he had survived seventeen years of marriage to this woman. Neither of them had wanted to be wedded to the other, but they were forced into it by their families, one lot anxious to see their plain daughter married off to a knight, the other keen to marry the youngest son into a richer family.
    'Richard is rarely happy to set eyes on me,' he replied dourly. 'So why do you want to inflict me upon him tomorrow?'
    His wife glared at him. 'Because he has asked to speak to you, that's why. Something about that fellow who was found dead in the school in Smythen Street.'
    De Wolfe groaned. 'I might have guessed that was it. He's afraid the gossip will harm his bloody purse, by putting off rich students from signing up to his poxy college. We don't yet know who the dead man was.'
    Matilda began a scandalised tirade against his denigration of her brother's educational initiatives, but was diverted by Mary bustling in with a tray bearing their supper. Ever eager for food and drink, Matilda heaved herself up and went to her stool at one end of the long table, ready to attack the spit-grilled trout that lay on a thick trencher of bread.
    Slitting it expertly along the backbone with a small knife, she picked up the succulent flesh in her fingers. Afterwards she washed them in a bowl of rosewater and wiped them on a napkin, all produced by the tireless Mary from her journeys back and forth from the kitchen hut in the backyard, where she cooked, ate and slept.
    John poured his wife a cup of wine, then went to sit at the opposite end of