The first night of the marriage between Sigward, Lord of Hatfelde, and Matilda de Risle of Normandy was more complex and less brutal than fourteen-year-old Matilda – whose ideas of human copulation were based on stockbreeding – had feared.

But her relief that things had gone comparatively well were as nothing compared to that of her lord.

So begins Hilary Norman’s The Morning Gift: Matilda de Risle is an heiress in the time of the civil war between Stephen and Maude, ward of the King and a pawn on the marriage market. She is more than a little embarrassed by being the recipient of her Saxon husband’s morning gift – for having pleased him on their wedding night – and the gift itself is baffling: a manor deep in the Fens of England, full of incomprehensible English peasantry. A bolt hole, her husband tells her, for when she needs it. The evocation of the rich, watery and now drained and vanished Fens is one of the beauties of this novel. As is the character of Matilda herself – snobbish, bossy, shrewd and conventional – who comes to love her Fens and her people of the Fens, the excommunicate mercenary who loves her, and the brilliant young Henry Fitzempress, who illuminates the novel with his every appearance.

There’s a marvellous description of what it is to love: “The fact that he (the mercentary) loved her was a constant surprise to him. She possessed no quality he admired, except courage. He didn’t love her because she was of the nobility or because she was beautiful, but because she was his completion. The way her hair grew out of her head, the way her mouth fitted over her teeth, the way she walked and talked and thought, made up a shape which fitted in every particular an empty place in his own soul. She was part of him if he never saw her again, which was likely, and if he never possessed her, which was likelier. He wasn’t going celibate on her account, but she was his lady. The place had been filled for better or worse and there was nothing he could do about it.”