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baby blinked from sleep and then crowed with him. “Any fool can have a son,” he said. “It takes a man to conceive a daughter.”
    That’s why I loved him.
    “Who’s her daddy’s little moppet, then,” he was saying, “who’s got eyes like cornflowers, so she has—yes, she has—just like her daddy’s. And teeny-weeny toes. Yumm, yumm, yumm. Does she like that? Yes, she does.”
    Adelia was helplessly aware of Father Paton regarding the scene. She wanted to tell Rowley he was giving himself away; this delight was not episcopal. But presumably a secretary was privy to all his master’s secrets—and it was too late now, anyway.
    The bishop looked up. “Is she going to be bald? Or will this fuzz on her head grow? What’s her name?”
    “Allie,” Gyltha said.
    “Ali?”
    “Almeisan.” Adelia spoke for the first time, reluctantly. “Mansur named her. Almeisan is a star.”
    “An Arab name.”
    “Why not?” She was ready to attack. “Arabs taught the world astronomy. It’s a beautiful name, it means the shining one.”
    “I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful. It’s just that I would have called her Ariadne.”
    “Well, you weren’t there,” Adelia said nastily.
    Ariadne had been his private name for her. The two of them had met on the same road, and at the same time that she’d encountered Prior Geoffrey. Although they hadn’t known it then, they were also on the same errand; Rowley Picot was ostensibly one of King Henry’s tax collectors but privately had been clandestinely ordered by his royal master to find the beast that was killing Cambridgeshire’s children and thereby damaging the royal revenue. Willy-nilly, the two of them had found themselves following clues together. Like Ariadne, she had led him to the beast’s lair. Like Theseus, he had rescued her from it.
    And then, like Theseus, abandoned her.
    She knew she was being unfair; he’d asked, begged, her to marry him, but by this time he’d earned the king’s approbation and was earmarked for an advancement that needed a wife devoted to him, their children, his estates—a conventional English chatelaine, not a woman who neither would nor could give up her duty to the living and dead.
    What she couldn’t forgive him for was doing what she’d told him to do: leave her, go away, forget, take up the king’s offer of a rich bishopric.
    God torment him, he might have written.
    “Well,” she said, “you’ve seen her, and now we are leaving.”
    “Are we?” This was Gyltha. “In’t we going to stay for supper?”
    “No.” She had been looking for insult from the first and had found it. “If someone has attempted to harm this Rosamund Clifford, I am sorry for it, but it is nothing to do with me.”
    She crossed the room to take the baby from him. It brought them close so that she could smell the incense from the Mass he’d celebrated clinging to him, infecting their child with it. His eyes weren’t Rowley’s anymore, they were those of a bishop, very tired—he’d traveled hard from Oxford—and very grave.
    “Not even if it means civil war?” he said.
     
    T he pork was sent back so that the smell of it should not offend Dr. Mansur’s nose and dietary law, but there were lampreys and pike in aspic, four different kinds of duck, veal in blancmange, a crisp, golden polonaise of bread, a sufficiency for twenty and—whether it displeased Mohammedan nostrils or not—enough wine for twenty more, served in beautiful cameo-cut glass bowls.
    Once it had all been placed on the board, the servants were sent from the room. Father Paton was allowed to remain. From the straw under the table came the crunch of a dog with a bone.
    “He had to imprison her,” Rowley said of his king and Queen Eleanor. “She was encouraging the Young King to rebel against his father.”
    “Never understood that,” Gytha said, chewing a leg of duck. “Not why Henry had his boy crowned king along of him, I mean. Old King and Young King ruling at