“So it is!” Isabella laughed, more out of surprise than amusement, but she resisted a cutting rejoinder.

I could make silly, harmless love charms and potions to please the damsels, gleaned from my memory of Sister Margery’s manuscripts. A pinch of catnip, a handful of yarrow, a stem of vervain, all wrapped in a scrap of green silk and tied with a red cord. If they believed they were effective, I would not deny it, although Isabella swore I was more likely to add the deadly hemlock in any sachet I made for her. And I could read. I read to them endlessly, when they wanted to sigh over tales of courtly love between a handsome knight and the object of his desire.

Not bad. Not bad at all for a nameless girl from a convent, and an abandoned wife.

And Isabella was wrong. I would never use hemlock. I knew enough from Sister Margery’s caustic warnings to be wary of such satanic works.

But what service could I offer Queen Philippa when the whole household was centered on fulfilling her wishes even before she expressed them? That was easy enough. I made drafts of white willow bark.

“You are a blessing to me, Alice.” The pain had been intense that day, but now, propped against her pillows, the willow tincture making her drowsy, she sighed heavily with relief. “I am a burden to you.”

“It is not a burden to me to give you ease, my lady.”

I saw the lines beside her eyes begin to smooth out. She would sleep soon. The days of pain were increasing in number, and her strength to withstand them was ebbing, but tonight she would have some measure of peace.

“You are a good girl.”

“I wasn’t a good novice!” I responded smartly.

“Sit here. Tell me about those days when you were a bad novice.” Her eyelids drooped, but she fought the strength of the drug.

So I did, because it pleased me to distract her. I told her of Mother Abbess and her penchant for red stockings. I told her of Sister Goda and her inappropriate love poetry, of the chickens that fell foul of the fox because of my carelessness and how I was punished. I did not speak of Countess Joan. I knew enough by now not to speak that name. Joan, the duplicitous daughter-in-law, far away in Aquitaine with her husband the Prince, was not a subject to give the Queen a restful night.

“It was good that I found you,” she murmured.

“Yes, my lady.” I smoothed a piercingly sweet unguent into the tight skin of her wrist and hand. “You have changed my life.”

A little silence fell, but the Queen was not asleep. She was contemplating something beyond my sight that did not seem entirely to please her, gouging a deep path between her brows. Then she blinked and fixed me with an uncomfortable gaze. “Yes. I am sure it was good that you fell into my path.”

I was certain it was not merely to smear her suffering flesh with ointments. A shiver of awareness assailed me in the overheated room, for her declamation suggested some deep uncertainty. Had I done something to lose her regard so soon? I forced my mind to rove over what I might have said or done to cast her into doubt. Nothing came to mind. So I asked.

“Why did you choose me, Majesty? Why did you send for me?”

When the Queen looked at me, her eyes were hooded. She closed her hand tightly around the jeweled cross on her breast, and her reply held none of her essential compassion. Indeed, her tone was curt and bleak, and she drew her hand from my ministrations as if she could not bear that I touch her.

“I chose you because I have a role for you, Alice. A difficult one, perhaps. And not too far distant…but not yet. Not quite yet…” She closed her eyes at last, as if she would shut me from her sight. “I’m weary now. Send for my priest, if you will. I’ll pray with him before I sleep.”

I left her, more perplexed than ever. Her words resurfaced as I lit my own candle and took myself to bed in the room I shared with two of the damsels. Sleep would not come.

I have a role for you to play. A difficult one, perhaps. And not too far distant…



Chapter Five



It became my habit to keep a journal of sorts. Why? Did I need a reason? Only that I should not lose the skill I had learned with such painstaking effort. No one needed me to write in a palace where men of letters matched the number of huntsmen. Sometimes I wrote in French, sometimes in Latin as the mood took me. I begged pieces of parchment, pen, and ink from the palace clerks. They were not unwilling when I smiled, when I tilted my chin or slid a long-eyed glance. I was learning the ways of the Court, and the power of my own talents to attract.

And what did I write? A chronology of my days. What I wished to remember, I wrote for more than a year.

Did I ever consider that the damsels might discover what I wrote? Not for a moment. They mocked my scribbling. And what I scribbled was excruciatingly dull. Once, to satisfy their curiosity, I read aloud.…

“‘Today I joined the damsels in my first hunt. I had no enjoyment of it. The King celebrates his fiftieth year with a great tournament and jousting held at Smithfield. We all attend. I am learning to dance.…’”

“By the Virgin, Alice!” Isabella yawned behind her slender fingers. “If you have nothing better to write about, what in heaven’s name is the value of doing it? Better to return to scouring the pots in the kitchens.”

Dull? Infinitely. And quite deliberate, to ensure that no damsel was sufficiently interested to poke her sharp nose into what I might be doing. But what memories my writings evoked for me, rereading my trite comments when my life was in danger and turmoil. There on the pages, in stark letters, in the briefest of record, the pattern of my life unfolded in that fateful year, as clear as a flock of winter rooks digging in a snow-covered field. What a miraculous, terrifying, life-changing year it proved to be.

Today I joined the damsels in my first hunt. I had no enjoyment of it.… What a mastery of understatement that was. The gelding I was given was a mount from hell. I would never see the pleasure in being jolted and bounced for two hours, to come at the end to a baying pack of hounds and a bloody kill. Truth to tell, the kill happened without me, for I fell off with a shriek at the first breath-stopping gallop. Sitting on the ground, covered with leaf mold and twiggery, beating the damp earth from my skirts, I raged in misery. My crispinettes and hood had become detached. The hunt had disappeared into the distance. So had my despicable mount. It would be a long walk home.

“A damsel in distress, by God!”

I had not registered the beat of hooves on the soft ground under the trees. I looked up to see two horses bearing down on me at speed, one large and threatening, the other small and wiry.

“Mistress Alice!” The King reined in, his stallion dancing within feet of me. “Are you well down there?”

“No, I am not!” I was not as polite as I should have been.

“Who suggested you ride that brute that thundered past us?”

“The lady Isabella! That misbegotten bag of bones deposited me here.…I should never have come. I detest horses.”

“So why did you?”

I wasn’t altogether sure, except that it was expected of me. It was the one joy in life remaining to the Queen when she was in health. The King swung down, threw his reins to the lad on the pony, and approached on foot. I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun where it glimmered through the new leaves.

“Thomas—go and fetch the lady’s ride,” he ordered.

Thomas, the King’s youngest son, abandoned the stallion and rode off like the wind. The King offered me his hand.

“I can get to my feet alone, Sire.” I was ungracious, I knew, but my humiliation was strong.

“I’ve no doubt, lady. Humor me.”

His eyes might be bright with amusement, but his order was peremptory and not to be disobeyed. I held out my hand, and with a firm tug I was pulled to my feet, whereupon the King began to dislodge the debris from my skirts with long strokes of the flat of his hand. Shame colored my cheeks.

“Indeed you should not, Sire!”

“I should indeed. You need to pin up your hair.”

“I can’t. There’s not enough to pin up, and I need help to make it look respectable.”

“Then let me.”

“No, Sire!” To have the King pin up my hair? I would as soon ask Isabella to scrub my back.

He grunted, a sign of annoyance I recognized. “You must allow me, mistress, as a man of chivalry, to set your appearance to rights.…”

And tucking my ill-used crispinettes into his belt, he proceeded with astonishingly clever fingers to repin my simple hood to cover the disaster, as deft as if he were tying the jesses of his favorite goshawk. I stood still under his ministrations, a stone statue, barely breathing. Until the King stepped back and surveyed me.

“Passable. I’ve not lost my touch in all these years.” He cocked an ear to listen, and nodded his head. “And now, lady, you’ll have to get back on!”

He was laughing at me! “I don’t wish to!”

“You will, unless you intend to walk home.…” Thomas had returned with my recalcitrant mount, and before I could make any more fuss, I was boosted back into the saddle. For a moment as he tightened my girths, the King looked up into my face, then abruptly stepped back.

“There you are, Mistress Alice. Hold tight!” A slap of the King’s hand against the wide rump set me in motion. “Look after her, Thomas. The Queen will never forgive you if we allow her to fall into a blackberry thicket.” A pause, and the words followed me. “And neither will I!”

And Thomas did. Only seven years old, and he had more skill at riding than I would ever have. But it was the King’s deft hands I remembered, not Thomas’s enthusiastic prattling.