Free The Winter Crown by Elizabeth Chadwick

window. Henry had gone. The hound-keepers were rounding up the last of the dogs and returning them to the kennels. She wondered if she should go and find Henry, but he would still be surrounded by the boisterous mêlée of the hunting party and she would be exposing her vulnerability to the world.
    The sun shadow had changed angle on the castle walls, blocking one side in gold, shading the other in ash-grey, when Henry finally arrived, entering the chamber in his usual brisk fashion. He had recently washed for his hair was dark auburn and sleeked back, and he wore a clean tunic imbued with the scents of rosemary and spikenard.
    For the time between one step and another he hesitated, and then came on, arms wide. She started to curtsey, but he seized her by the waist and pulled her into a hard embrace. ‘I have missed you,’ he said, and gave her a hard kiss. ‘You look good enough to eat!’
    Alienor gasped at the vigour of his greeting. His tone was open and jocular, as if he were still talking to his hunting cronies – as if nothing had happened and nothing was wrong. His smile was open and broad. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not this and she was dumbfounded.
    ‘Henry…’
    ‘Where is my daughter?’ He overrode her before she could speak, a sharp grey glitter in his eyes and his jaw taut. ‘Let me see her – and my son.’
    Filled with unease, Alienor went to the door and summoned the nurses to bring the children for his inspection.
    Henry’s keen scrutiny fixed on the baby girl in her nurse’s arms, a round little face and the rest bound in swaddling bands. ‘We shall make a fine marriage alliance for you,’ he said, chucking her chin. ‘The King of England’s firstborn daughter, eh?’ He gave Alienor a stiff smile. ‘I have no doubt she will grow into a beauty.’ He crouched to be at eye-level with his namesake, now sixteen months old and clad in a long linen smock. Little Henry’s hair was dark-blond rather than red-gold, and his eyes a mingling of blue and grey.
    ‘Walking now,’ Henry said with a grin. ‘Aren’t you a fine little man?’ He picked him up and tossed him in his arms until he squealed. Having handed him back to the nurse, he focused on the third child who stood on the threshold, half in the sun-ray slanting through the window, his coppery hair glittering. For an instant a look of surprise widened Henry’s gaze.
    ‘I have kept my word to you,’ Alienor said. ‘And I have brought him with me. Your mother has expressed an interest in fostering him.’
    ‘Yes, she said so in her letter.’
    So Matilda had written to him. Alienor wondered what else she had said.
    Henry beckoned the nurse and child forward. ‘I think it a good idea, but not quite yet.’ He rumpled Jeoffrey’s curls. ‘You have grown tall since last I saw you – almost a man!’
    Jeoffrey puffed out his chest, making Henry chuckle. ‘While you are here, we can spend some time together. Perhaps some riding lessons, hmmm? Do you have a pony of your own?’
    ‘No … sire.’
    ‘Would you like one?’
    Alienor’s throat tightened. This interaction should be Will’s, not this little cuckoo’s.
    Jeoffrey’s eyes shone. ‘Yes, sire.’
    ‘Good. Then we’ll find you one and I will teach you, and when you are older you can come hunting with me, eh?’
    ‘Yes, sire,’ Jeoffrey said, his expression wonderstruck.
    Henry smiled, and dismissed the nurses and their charges. His gaze lingered on Jeoffrey, before he turned round to Alienor, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. ‘We shall have a feast to welcome your arrival, and tomorrow we can go hawking along the river. We have a fine troupe of players from Quercy you will enjoy, and Thomas has some bolts of cloth for your inspection.’
    Alienor listened to him in stunned silence. He was filling his mind with loud and superficial things so that there was no opportunity for the deeper issues to leap upon him and take him where he did not wish to