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Guillaume.
    His brother held it. At the distance of a yard, the creature’s fierce eyes pierced Henry so deeply he felt he was flying to another world. The Lion spoke to him. But its words were like pearls of light that shimmer on water then vanish, and after a moment he didn’t know what they had said – but he knew he had sailed to England, risked his life, suffered defeat, disgrace and humiliation for this instant, for this moment when a zephyr lifted the veil from his senses and somehow changed his life. But for what purpose? The change was at such a depth he did not know.
    Shame ruled him. He had shamed the Lion by his military failure and his stupidity.
    ‘You keep it,’ he said to Guillaume.
    His brother refolded the standard and stowed it in silence in his kit-bag.

CHAPTER TWO
    In Rouen, a fisherman sailed upriver with a letter addressed to the Duchess of Normandy. When her husband saw the seal of King Stephen, he took the letter himself and walked off a few paces to read it. It was short:
    Stephen, by the grace of God King of the English, to his cousin Matilda: bad news. Your son and his bastard brother came to beg me for gold. We have sent them away.
    ‘Is there a reply?’ the fisherman asked.
    The Duke shook his head, gave the man a coin, and entered his apartment. He flung himself on his bed and wept. Geoffrey was not a man who valued time spent in church, but after weeping he went to the castle chapel and prayed. He did so in the old style, standing, arms raised to heaven. Tears streamed down his broad, high cheekbones. He loved his many children. He loved immoderately his most difficult and vulnerable child, Henry. Matilda had poured into this boy all the fear, rage and resentment she felt for her father – and a mute, yearning, tender devotion.
    She and Henry lived with the lonely desperation of a parent and child whose love for each other is hidden beneath a mountain of anger.
    The Duke knew all this, and knew there was nothing he could do about it. He prayed so long his tears dried and he sank to his knees. His wife found him kneeling on a cushion.
    ‘What’s happened to Henry?’ she demanded.
    ‘He is well. I pray for his safe crossing.’
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You never pray unless you’re worried. Where is he?’
    ‘He returns to us. He’ll be home in three days.’ Geoffrey stood and swept his long fingers through his blond hair, dragging it away from his eyes.
    Scoundrel, his wife thought. There was little about her husband that pleased her. Not his magnificent bearing, nor his eye for elegance and beauty, nor the art treasures he collected, not even the way he played the lute. Especially she disliked the fact that he was of the Foulques clan. When her father told her the identity of the second husband he had arranged for her, she tore her hair. ‘Anjevins are thieves, barbarians and priest killers!’ she had wailed. ‘And he’s of the Foulques! Foulques the Black murdered two wives.’
    ‘He discovered his second wife riding a shepherd,’ the Lion replied irritably. ‘I have a border dispute with Anjou. This will end it. The Anjou lad is fertile. He already has a son. You need a fertile husband, after that …’
    The Lion could not bring himself to utter the name of her first husband, a man who had Matilda in his bed from the age of twelve to twenty-four and had produced nothing. Not even a miscarriage. His plan to encircle France had spent itself between those sterile sheets: his legacy now depended on Matilda and the youth from Anjou. He knew the boy had seduced the wife of a baron when aged only thirteen. The story reminded the King of his own younger days. ‘They say he’s charming,’ he added with a smile.
    For his part, Geoffrey Foulques was dismayed at being married off to a woman eleven years his senior, reputed to be as haughty as a pharaoh. She was tall, with large, intelligent eyes of slate-blue. She wore her light brown hair in the German