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.

The King celebrates his fiftieth year with a great tournament and jousting.… Magnificent! The King was superlative in his new armor. I could not find the words, burnished as he was by the sun, sword and armor striking fire as his arm rose and fell, the plumes on his helmet nodding imperiously. And yet I feared for him, my loins liquid and cold with fear. I could not look away, but when blood matted his sleeve, dripping from his fingers, I closed my eyes.

No need, of course. His energy always prodigious, he was touched with magic that day. Fighting in the melee with all the skill and dash and finesse of a hero of the old tales, he had the grace at the end to heap praise on those whom he defeated.

That day he was all hero to me.

Afterward, when the combatants gathered in the banter much loved by men, the Queen’s ladies threw flowers to the knight of their choice. I had no one. Nor did I care, for there was only one to fill my vision, whether in the lists or in the vicious cut and thrust of personal combat. And I was audacious enough to fling a rosebud, when he approached the gallery in which we women sat with the Queen. He had removed his helm. He was so close to me, his face pale and drawn in the aftermath of his efforts, that I could detect the smear of blood on his cheek where he had wiped at the dust with his gauntlet. I was spellbound, so much so that the flower I so ineptly flung in his direction struck the cheek of the King’s stallion; a soft blow, but the high-blooded destrier instantly reared in the manner of its kind.

“Sweet Jesu!” Startled, the King dropped his helm, tightening his reins as he fought to bring the animal back under control.

“Have you no sense?” Isabella snapped.

I thought better of replying, horrified at what I had achieved, steeling myself to withstand the King’s reproof. Without a word he snapped his fingers to his page to pick up the helm and the now thoroughly trampled flower. I looked at him in fear.

“My thanks, lady.”

He bowed his head solemnly to me as he tucked the crumpled petals into the gorget at his throat. My belly clenched; my face flamed to my hairline. Proud, haughty, confident, the King would treat me with respect when I had almost unhorsed him.

“Our kitchen maid cannot yet be relied upon to act decorously in public!” Isabella remarked, setting up a chorus of laughter.

But the King did not sneer. Urging his horse closer to the gilded canvas, the fire dying from his eyes as the energy of battle receded, he stretched out his hand, palm up.

“Mistress Alice, if you would honor me…”

And I placed mine there. The King kissed my fingers.

“The rose was a fine gesture, if a little wayward. My horse and I both thank you, Mistress Alice.”

There was the rustle of appreciative laughter, no longer at my expense. I felt the heat of his kiss against my skin, hotter than the beat of blood in my cheeks.

I am learning to dance. “Holy Virgin!” I misstepped the insistent beat of the tabor and shawm for the twentieth time. How could I appreciate the ability to count coins under the stern tutorship of Janyn Perrers, yet not be able to count the steps in a simple processional dance? The King’s hand tightened to give me balance as I lurched unforgivably. Should it not have been a graceful dance? The King was a better dancer than I. It would be hard to be worse.

“You are allowed to look at me, Mistress Alice,” he announced when we came together again and snatched a conversation.

“If I do, I shall fall over my feet, Sire—or yours. I’ll cripple you before the night is out.”

“I’ll lead you in the right steps, you know.” I must have looked askance. “Do you not trust me, Alice?”

He had called me by my name, without formality. I looked up at him to find his eyes quizzical on my face, and I promptly missed the next simple movement.