“Take this box and carry the Barbary.” The animal was pushed into my arms. “I’ll be at Windsor tomorrow and then we’ll see.…”

So this was to be the end of it—but there was one piece of knowledge I wanted from her. I had thought of this long and hard. If I did not ask now…

“My lady…”

“I haven’t time.” She was already walking through the doorway.

“What gives a woman…” I thought about the word I wanted. “What gives a woman power?” The word did not express exactly what I wanted to know—but it was the best I could do.

She stopped, turned slowly, laughing softly, but her face was writ with a mockery so vivid that I flushed at my temerity.

“Alice. It is Alice, isn’t it?” she asked. It was the first time she had addressed me by my name. “Power? What would a creature such as you know of true power? What would you do with it, even if it came to you?” The disdain for my naïveté was cruel in its sleek elegance.

“I mean…the power to determine my own path in life.”

“So! Is that what you seek?” She allowed me a complacent little smile. And I saw that beneath her carelessness ran a far deeper emotion. She actually despised me, as perhaps she despised all creatures of low birth. “You’ll not get power, my dear. That is, if you mean rank. Unless you can rise above your station and become Abbess of this place.” Her voice purred in derision. “You’ll not do it.”

Resentment flared in me at the ridicule, but I hid it well. “Still, I would know.”

“Then I’ll give you an answer. Since you have no breeding—beauty, then. But your looks will get you nowhere. There is only one way.” Her smile vanished and I thought she gave my question some weight of consideration. “Knowledge.”

“How can knowledge be power?”

“It can. It can if what you know is of importance to someone else.”

“But what would I learn in a convent that is of value to anyone?”

“I’ve no idea. How would I?” Her arch stare was pitying. “But beggars, my dear, cannot choose.”

And in her eyes I was most assuredly a beggar. What could I learn at the Abbey? The thin cloth of my learning was spread before me, meager in its extent and depth. To read. To dig roots in the garden. To make simples in the Infirmary. To polish the silver vessels in the Abbey church.

“What would I do with such knowledge?” I asked in despair, as if I had listed my meager accomplishments aloud. How I loathed her in that moment of self-knowledge.

“How would I know that? But I would say this: It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem. Do you have that?”

Duplicity? Did I possess it? I had no idea. I shook my head.

“Guile! Cunning! Scheming!” she snapped, as if my ignorance were an affront. “Do you understand?” The Countess retraced her steps to murmur in my ear as if it were a kindness. “You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy. I have made enemies all my life, but on the day I wed the Prince they will be as chaff before the wind. I will laugh in their faces and care not what they say of me. Would you be willing to do that? I doubt it.” The mockery of concern came swiftly to an end. “Set your mind to it, girl. All you have before you is your life in this cold tomb, until the day they clothe you in your death habit and sew you into your shroud.”

“No!” The terrible image drove me to cry out as if I had been pricked on the arm with one of Countess Joan’s well-sharpened pens. “Take me with you!” I pleaded. “I have served you well. I would serve you again, at Court.” I almost snatched at her gold-embroidered sleeve.

“I think not.” She did not even bother to look at me.

“But I would escape from here.” I had never said it aloud before, never put it into words. How despairing it sounded. How hopeless, but in that moment I was overwhelmed by the enormity of all that I lacked, and all that I might become if I could only encompass it.

“Escape? And how would you live?” An echo of Sister Goda’s words that were like a knife against my heart. “Without resources you would need a husband. Unless you would be a whore. A chancy life, short and brutish. Not one I would recommend. Better to be a nun.” She strode from the room, out into the courtyard, where she settled herself in her litter, and as I reached to deposit the monkey on the cushions and close the curtains, my services for her complete, I heard her final condemnation. “You’ll never be anything of value in life. So turn your mind from it.” Then with a glinting smile she clicked her fingers at her tire-woman. “Give her the Barbary, Marian. I expect it will give her some distraction—and I begin to find it a nuisance.…”

And the creature was thrust out of the litter, back into my arms.

Indignation rose hot and slick in my throat. I considered mimicking the gesture I had seen the louts in the town employ when challenged by their elders and betters, graphic and disgracefully expressive in its lewdness, and would have done so if Sister Goda’s eye had not fallen on me. As it was, I curtsied in a fine parody of deference, clutching the monkey—that scrabbled and fussed with no notion of its abandonment—to my flat chest.

Thus in a cloud of dust Countess Joan was gone with her dogs and hawk and all her unsettling influences. It was as if she had never set her pretty feet on the cold convent paving for even an hour, much less three weeks. It was like the end of a dream with the coming of day, when the light shatters the bright pictures. Fair Joan was gone to snare her prince at Westminster and I would never meet her again.

I would soon forget her. She meant as little to me as I to her.

But I did not forget! Countess Joan had applied a flame to my imagination. When it burned so fiercely that it was almost a physical hurt, I wished with all my heart I could quench it, but the fire never left me, and still it smolders, even today, when I have achieved more than I could ever have dreamed of. The venal hand of ambition had fallen on me, grasping my shoulder with a death grip of lethal strength, and refused to release me.

I am worth more than this, I determined as I knelt with the sisters at Compline. I will be of value! I will make something of my life!

I lost the Book of Hours, of course. Its value was far too great for such a creature as I was. It was taken from me. As for the monkey, Mother Abbess ordered it to be taken to the Infirmary and locked in a cellar. I never saw it again.

Considering its propensity to bite, I was not sorry.



Chapter Two



My crude, impassioned plea to persuade Countess Joan to be the instrument of my escape from the Abbey had, I was compelled to admit, failed miserably. When I achieved it, it was not by my own instigation. It came as a lightning bolt from heaven.

“Put this on. And this. Take this. Be at the Abbey gate in half an hour.”

The garments were thrust into my arms by Sister Matilda, Mother Abbess’s chaplain.

“Why, Sister?”

“Do as you’re told!”

I had been given a thin woolen kirtle, its color unrecognizable from much washing, and a long sleeveless overgown in a dense brown, reminiscent of the sludge that collected on the riverbank after stormy weather. It too had seen better days on someone else’s back, and was far too short, exhibiting, as I had feared, my ankles. As I scratched indelicately, a more immediate fear bloomed. I had inherited the fleas as well as the garments. A hood of an indeterminate gray completed the whole.

But why? Was I being sent on an errand? Anticipation shivered over my skin. Even if it was for only an hour, I felt the excitement of escape. The days of my transformation from novice to nun loomed, like the noxious, overflowing contents of the town drain after heavy rainfall.

“Where am I going?” I asked the wagon master to whom I was directed, a dour man with a bad head cold and an overpowering smell of rancid wool. Sister Faith, keeper of the Abbey gate, had done nothing but point in his direction and close the door against me. The soft snick of the latch, with me on the outside, was far sweeter than any singing of the Angelus.

“Where I’m instructed to take you,” he growled, spitting into a gutter already swimming with filth and detritus from the day’s market dealings.

“And where is that?” I stood beside a wagon loaded with bales of wool to be transported to London.

“To the house of Janyn Perrers.”

“Who is he?”

“A man of means.” The wagon master hawked and spat. “On the backs of those who have nothing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pawnbroker. Moneylender.” He sneered. “Bloodsuckers to a man. Leeches who’ll drain you dry.”

“Is he English?” The name did not seem so.

“A foreign bastard! From Lombardy! All grasping buggers are from Lombardy.”

“And where does he live?”

“London.”

He sniffed and spat again. He was a man of few words and no manners, but at least I now knew more than I had. So this was not an errand of an hour’s duration, but something quite different. Anticipation blazed into exhilaration, racing through me like the fever that had laid the Abbey low the previous year.

“Pull me up, then,” I ordered.

“Tha’s a feisty moppet, and no mistake!” he said, but he grasped my hand in his enormous one and hauled me up onto the bales, where I settled myself as well as I could.

“Why?” I asked when the oxen lumbered forward. The wagon master grunted, head cocked. “Why am I going to this man’s house? Does he know I am coming?”

He shrugged. “Is tha’ to ask questions all the road to London?”

“But I want to know…!” Happiness tingled through me, to my fingertips.

“God help th’man who weds you, mistress.…”

“I’m not going to be married! I have it on authority that no one will have me.”

“And why’s that, then?”

“Too ugly!”

“God help you, mistress. A man don’t need to look too often at the wench he weds.”

I did not care. I tossed my head. London! “If I wed, my husband will look at me.”

“Feisty!”

He cracked his whip over the heads of the oxen to end the conversation, leaving me to try to fill in the spaces. To my mind there was only one possible reason for my joining the household of this Janyn Perrers, moneylender: to work as a maidservant. My services had been bought. Enough gold had changed hands to encourage Mother Abbess to part with her impoverished novice, who would bring nothing of fame or monetary value to the Abbey. As the wagon jolted and swayed, I imagined the request that had been made.

A strong, hardworking, biddable girl to help run the house.

I hoped Mother Abbess had not perjured herself.

I twitched and shuffled, impatient with every slow step of the oxen.

“What is London like?” I asked.

The wagon master swigged ale from a leather bottle as if he did not hear. I sighed and gave up. I did not care. I was going to London. The name bubbled through my blood as I clung to the lumbering wagon. Freedom was as sweet and heady as fine wine.

The noisome, overcrowded squalor of London shocked me. The environs of Barking Abbey, bustling as they might be on market day, had not prepared me for the crowds, the perpetual racket, the stench of humanity packed so close together. But equally the city fascinated me: I did not know where to look next. At close-set houses in streets barely wider than the wagon, where upper stories leaned drunkenly to embrace one another, blocking out the sky. At shop frontages that displayed the wares, at women who paraded in bright colors. At scruffy urchins and bold prostitutes who carried on a different business in the rank courts and passageways. It was a new world, both frightening and seductive: I stared and gawped, as naive as any child from the country.

“Here’s where you get off.”

The wagon lurched and I was set down, directed by a filthy finger that pointed at my destination, a narrow house taking up no space at all, but rising above my head in three stories. I picked my way through the mess of offal and waste in the gutters to the door. Was this the one? It did not seem to be the house of a man of means. I knocked.

A woman, far taller than I, thin as a willow lath with her hair scraped into a pair of metallic cylindrical cauls on either side of her gaunt face, as if she were encased in a cage, opened it. “Well?”

“Is this the house of Janyn Perrers?”

“What’s it to you?”