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which she explained the child’s routine and requirements, while a quartermaster made notes, like a commissary preparing for war. Everything she asked for she got. She enquired at which hours the child should be brought to his father, and was told that the boy should be kept out of sight unless summoned.
    ‘I knew it!’ said Pasque, when informed. ‘The man is set on chastising his lady, and the baby is nothing!’
    ‘Then we should be thankful,’ Mistress Clémence replied. ‘At least M. de Fleury has not abstracted the child in order to disfigure or harm it.’
    M. de Fleury himself, she had seen, bore a scar: a thin white line many years old, which scored his face from eye to mouth on one side. She studied him whenever she could, for much of a man’s nature by thirty could be judged from his body and face. It struck her, in those early days, that the well-dressed M. de Fleury looked jaded, bleak as a mercenary returned starving from war – although, of course, he had not come from war.
    His upbringing was not easy to guess. To carry such muscle and bone he had not been stinted in childhood; but then masters made sure of strong servants: the broad hands knew how to handle a sword, but might be equally at home in a workshop. Somewhere he had been taught to hold himself properly; or perhaps it was a trait born of pride. A straight back was worth more than a smile; she believed and taught that herself.
    This man did not smile. She registered the bulk of brown hair, professionally cut to dip under his cap, and the broad jaw and strong neck within it. The face was Burgundian; that curious mixture of races in which, here, the broad mask of the Low Countries predominated, although the austerely drawn nose hinted at some strain of Latin or Celtic. The whole was dominated by the pellucid and widely set eyes which in a boy’s face might spell merry innocence, but here produced the immense leaden gaze which had so alarmed Pasque. His skin was pale, unless you counted the faint jaundiced tint left by last year’s Egyptian sun. She thought, if he made a threat, he would fulfil it. She could detect no wish to be liked, or to like.
    The ship that carried them all was a small merchant vessel with no passengers but for themselves and the servants of M. de Fleury. Such a ship was almost independent of shore, carrying livestock and water and plentiful food with her cargo. There was a cow, milked every morning.
    M. de Fleury had been true to his edict, and had made no effort to see them. For the first day, in any case, she had kept the child quiet. Although it was February still, the waters of the Gulf of Venice were kind, and the boy slept to their motion. None the less, she assembled the ropes she had asked for, and by the time the child made his first journey on deck, she had arranged a composition of lashings among which he moved, a little uncertain, his brown hair flicked by the wind, his eyes round. That day she saw M. de Fleury in the distance, talking to one of the seamen. He moved off shortly without looking round, but she saw the child stand and gaze.
    The next day, she heard the page lifting the pail, and carried the child in his wake to witness the milking. The page, an unexceptional youth, expected the boy to be frightened or thrilled, as if dairies wereunknown in nunneries. Yet, having small brothers, he talked to the boy, and gave him a drink. Coming up, they saw M. de Fleury again in the distance, kneeling over something on the deck. She felt the child halt, but a moment later, M. de Fleury had gone. It annoyed her.
    She made no effort therefore, the following day, to stop the child when, seeing the familiar figure again, the boy suddenly tugged his hand free and went forward. Did the man think the child had no wits? This was the person who had brought him from Venice, who had stayed with him until she, Clémence, had reached him. Only perhaps a matter of hours, but a child, a friendly child, would remember all that.