“You have?” Eleanor asked, unable to hide the eagerness in her voice.

“Yes.” Henry smiled at her. “He is to be placed with my Lord Chancellor, my devoted Thomas.”

“Becket?” Eleanor echoed sharply.

“Yes, Becket. Why not? He has a great household, into which he has already accepted several noble boys. They will be companions for Young Henry. He will be well looked after.”

Eleanor was about to protest, but she could see the wisdom in the plan. Becket was often in attendance upon the King, and she and Henry were frequent guests at his table. Her lord was right: there would indeed be plenty of opportunities for her to see her child.

“When will he go?” she inquired.

“After Christmas,” Henry informed her.

She had three weeks, she reckoned quickly, before they took Henry from her. She vowed to herself that she would spend every possible moment with him. This was going to be far worse than parting from Marie and Alix had been. She’d had so little to do with them, those sweet girls, had been kept at a distance and never got to know them well. But Young Henry had been with her from birth, and she loved him fiercely; not quite as much as she adored Richard—her lion cub, as she thought of him—but deeply and protectively. Yet it would not be good-bye, she told herself resolutely. She must not think of the parting as final; she would see her son again, soon enough. And she would still have Richard, and Geoffrey, of course: if she could help it, she would never let her darling Richard be taken from her. He was to be her heir, so surely she would have some say in his upbringing. They would have to snatch Richard over her dead body.

“It is a wise decision,” she said evenly, conceding defeat. “But there was something else I wished to discuss with you, and that is what you have done in Aquitaine.”

“Aquitaine is quiet now,” Henry said, his tone final, indicating that was the end to the matter.

“Quiet, but seething under the surface, so I hear,” Eleanor persisted.

“From your uncle Raoul? I didn’t notice himkeeping your unruly vassals in check!” Henry smirked unpleasantly.

“No one has ever succeeded in doing that, not even my father or my grandfather,” Eleanor snapped. “The geography of my lands does not lend itself to unity; can’t you see that?”

Henry rose and began pacing up and down the room.

“Well, I’m not content with my authority extending only to the regions around Poitiers and Bordeaux,” he told her. “With my officials in place, answering directly to me, I intend to bring some order to your domains.”

“You are alienating mysubjects by doing that!” Eleanor flared. “They resent having strangers lording it over them. Things were bad enough before, when Louis sent in his Frenchmen to rule in his name; when I went home and they were sent away, the people rejoiced. It was very moving to see that. It meant everything to them to be governed by their own. Henry, I want my subjects to love you, but if you persist in this folly, they will only hate you.”

Henry had been listening with an irritated expression. He stopped his pacing by the door and turned to face her.

“I’m not doing it to win popularity,” he declared. “I mean to have your vassals bend to my will, like it or not. Theymust recognize my authority, and youmust support me in enforcing it.”

“Then you must go about it a different way!” Eleanor flung at him.

“No one says ‘must’ to me,” he snarled. “I don’t take orders from you, or anyone. You are in no position to dictate to me, Eleanor. Might I remind you that a wife’s duty is to obey her husband, to rear his children, and to warm his bed when he so desires. And there it ends.”

“If you think I’m in any mood to warm your bed after you’ve insulted my intelligence, then let me put you straight now!” Eleanor riposted, her face flushed with anger.

“Please yourself!” Henry said testily, and went out of the room, leaving Eleanor wanting to scream with frustration. She could never win with him. He was utterly incapable of seeing her point of view, and once his mind was made up, there was no moving him.

The King stormed down the spiral stairs and into the great hall of the castle, nearly colliding with two of the Queen’s ladies, who were making their way up to her chamber with their arms full of freshly laundered veils and chemises, smelling of sweet herbs. One of the ladies looked him boldly in the eye. She had a heart-shaped face set off to perfection by the widow’s wimple that framed her chin and her rosy cheeks. He knew who she was—what man didn’t? Rohese de Clare, Countess of Lincoln, had the reputation of being the most beautiful woman in England. It was well known that during the five years since her husband’s death, she had resisted all offers of remarriage, and it was also bruited about that it was because she enjoyed taking her pleasure where she listed, although Henry was of the opinion that people wouldsay such things about such a lovely widow.

Now he was not so sure. His eyes locked for a moment with the countess’s, then the moment passed and she and her companion dipped into quick curtsies and hurried on. But his blood was up. He was furious with Eleanor for questioning his rights in Aquitaine— again—and powerfully intrigued by the enigmatic Rohese. He’d long admired her from afar but had never quite seen in those slanting green eyes and pouting lips what other men had. There was something almost childlike about the woman, although the look she had just given him was anything but childlike. Now he could see what had made her so admired—and the promise in that brief moment of eye contact had fired his imagination.

That evening, after supper, he sought her out, and finally came upon her standing, wrapped in her cloak, gazing out over the battlements at the green fields of the Cotentin below.

“I thought you would come, my Lord King,” she said in a modulated, mellow voice. Again her eyes met his, boldly, vibrant with promise.

“People speak truth when they say you are beautiful,” Henry told her. “My wife is beautiful too, but in a different way, and I like variety.”

She came to him then, and he folded her in his strong arms. Both of them were trembling with desire.

“I want you,” Henry muttered gruffly against her veil. His hands delved inside her cloak, roved eagerly over firm breasts and hips. Rohese parted those full lips for him to kiss, and he obliged, tenderly at first, then hungrily, devouringly …

When they had taken their fill of each other, Henry returned alone to his bedchamber thinking how marvelous it had been simply to swive a woman without the added complications of having to enter into any other congress or pay heed to her whims. He loved Eleanor, there was no question about that in his mind, but she would insist on prolonging these endless, fruitless power struggles, and interfering in matters that were not her concern. He valued her judgment, of course he did, but only up to a point. She was a woman, God damn her, and as his wife, she owed him due obedience; he thought he had been unusually generous in allowing her some say in the governance of his domains.

He was still angry with her. Her denying him her bed yet rankled. Not that he would have sought it after their quarrel, but it was his right! It infuriated him that she had such scant regard for his rights. Sleeping with the beautiful Rohese had been his means of taking revenge on her, and he meant to go on exacting that sweet revenge. Even if Eleanor never got to know about it, he would enjoy his victory in private!

He lay down in his bed. His body was sated and ready for sleep, but his mind was strangely ill at ease. He was a plain man, a direct man, so this puzzled him. It would not have occurred to him to feel guilty for betraying his wife.

It was some time, in fact, before he realized that what he was feeling was an odd sense of loss.