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hate carp.’

Chapter Three
    Josse d’Acquin put his strong hands under his small nephew’s arms and, glancing back towards the house to make sure his sister-in-law wasn’t watching, hoisted the boy up on to the broad back of his horse.
    ‘Gee-up!’ cried the boy, his voice shrill with excitement. ‘Gee-up, horsey!’
    Josse quickly stilled the sharp little heels digging into the horse’s flanks; Horace was a good, strong mount, normally even tempered, but you never knew how even the calmest animal might react to such unexpected provocation.
    ‘Hush, Auguste my lad,’ Josse said. ‘I’ve told you before, gee-up isn’t the thing to say.’
    ‘What is the thing to say, Uncle Josse?’ piped the boy. ‘I keep forgetting.’
    ‘Well, you can go hup! if you must,’ Josse allowed. ‘But horses, as I’ve explained, respond to your legs, your hands and your voice, so you don’t use any of them without thinking about it.’
    ‘And your bum, Uncle Josse! You said you had to use your bum, for sitting down hard with!’ The child was squirming with mirth, loving the unaccustomed freedom of being with his lenient uncle. Being allowed to say ‘bum’ twice and get away with it.
    ‘Indeed I did.’ Josse grinned. ‘Sit down hard in the saddle, I said, let old Horace here know you’re on board.’
    ‘I want to go without you holding on!’ Auguste cried. ‘ Please, Uncle Josse!’
    ‘Certainly not!’ Josse took an even firmer grip on the rein. ‘Your dear mother would flay me alive if she knew I’d so much as put you on the horse,’ he muttered.
    ‘What’s flay, Uncle Josse?’ Auguste had sharper ears than Josse had realised.
    ‘Oh – er – nothing. Now, Auguste, laddie, once round the courtyard, then—’
    ‘Josse!’ shrieked a woman’s voice. ‘Josse, what do you think you’re doing! Oh, careful! Be careful !’
    Running out of the house and across the yard as she spoke, Theophania d’Acquin, wife of Josse’s youngest brother, Acelin, looked furious. Mother not only to the six-year-old Auguste, but to his younger sister and his baby brother, Theophania’s protective maternal urges were easily aroused. Particularly by Josse, and virtually any contact he had with her children.
    ‘The lad’s fine!’ Josse protested, trying to control Horace; largely untroubled by having a small boy on his back, even if the child were kicking and yelling, the horse was reacting to the shrieking woman. ‘Shut up, Theophania!’ Josse shouted, hanging on the reins in an effort to keep Horace’s heavy head down. ‘Can’t you see you’re unsettling him?’
    ‘Well!’ cried Theophania. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’
    Josse, preoccupied with supporting Auguste’s weight – the child had evidently decided that on the back of Uncle Josse’s horse was no place to be, not with Maman racing across the courtyard in full battle cry – and, at the same time, holding Horace, muttered under his breath.
    Again, he had underestimated a six-year-old’s acuteness of hearing. Just as Theophania, bristling with righteous anger, swept her child from Josse’s shoulder, Auguste asked innocently, ‘Uncle Josse, what’s salope ?’
    *   *   *
    There was, quite naturally, music to face.
    That evening, when Theophania had gone grumbling upstairs to see to the baby, Josse sat down with his brothers and his other sisters-in-law, aware that the assembled company was not entirely pleased with him.
    Hell and damnation, he thought, reaching for more wine, whose house is this? I’m the eldest brother, I can do what I like in my own home!
    But that, of course, was the problem. And Josse was fair-minded enough to appreciate it. Acquin, both the large fortified manor house itself and the wide estates, belonged legally to Josse: he was the heir, he had inherited both property and title on the death of his father, Geoffroi d’Acquin, fifteen years ago.
    But Josse had always known he was not destined to be a country