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like to go crusading, to lie under the stars at the other end of the world, to see places and people and lands that were not home?
    She wondered what it would be like to be a knight, and what her betrothed had done for all those years. And she tried to imagine what he looked like.
    Would he have a chin like an ax, hands like hams, and scars all over him? Was he called the Red Lion because his hair was bright red like the castle smithy’s? She hoped not. The smithy had hair coming out his ears and nose and it stuck out from his head like skimpy tufts of scallions.
    So many questions spun through her head that she could not possibly find sleep. No matter how she tried. She had just lain there, fitful, as she had for every night since she had arrived at the castle that had once been her home.
    But Camrose was not the same place she remembered from her youth. The castle had been taken by the Welsh shortly after her father’s death. She had thought of it as gone forever.
    Until she read the message her betrothed had sent to the abbess over a year ago. Camrose had been reclaimed by King Edward, who had been crowned the year before. Now both she and her lands belonged to her future husband by royal command.
    The castle did not feel like home. It was a strange place to her, cold and dark even in the light of midday. The walls were higher than before and now made of thicker, heavier stone, walls that made her feel as if she were locked away in a tower.
    There were solid shutters on the window openings instead of thinly tanned leather embellished with needlework of falcons twined with ivy and roses and inset into panes of polished horn. Her nurse had told her once that her grandmother had stitched those coverings herself, combining her grandfather’s coat of arms with that of her own family. Clio had loved the leather stretchings and panes because they had always allowed the light of the sun to come inside.
    But now even in the morning the chamber was dark and stank of smoke and must. The furniture was huge, roughly hewed and hard. There was nothing remaining that had belonged to her family.
    No tapestries. No fur rugs. No chests or fine linen sheets or goose-feather ticking. The bed was hard wood and thick rope and had a prickly hay tick tossed on it for a mattress. Atop it was one rough woolen blanket that still itched even after she had rid it of fleas.
    Sparrows and pigeons had been nesting in the window sills when she arrived and had flown freely in all the rooms from the looks of the filth on the floors. It had taken a few days for her and the few servants who had returned to the castle to clean it all out.
    There was little a woman could have pride in. Her children, perhaps her husband, and surely her home. For the sake of the women before her, she wanted Camrose to be as it had been. She wanted it to be lovely. But it wasn’t, so she kept to her old rooms, attending her own business while she waited for her betrothed to arrive.
    She tried to dispel the fear she felt deep inside at the thought of finally meeting the man face to face, a man known as the Red Lion. ’Twas not a name that conjured up a pleasant and tame image.
    But try as she might, she could not will her apprehension away. It was there, in her mind, clear and real and seeming like a bad dream from which you wanted to hurry and awaken so you could forget it. Though she could not forget, anymore than she could forget that her life and her future rested in the hands of a complete stranger.
    So she had decided to meet him on equal ground. She wanted to walk toward him with the same graceful swanlike motion of the ladies at the queen’s court, without fear, with only confidence. Her pride made her want to show him exactly what he had chosen to callously ignore.
    She tapped her finger against her mouth, closed her eyes, and thought about those elegant ladies. She tried to picture them in her mind, to capture the right image.
    After a moment she took two steps back,