AFTER A FORTNIGHT in bed, Alicia was surprised by how weak she felt when she first ventured outside. Tiring quickly, she sank down on a bench in the cloisters, taking pleasure in the warmth of the Sicilian sun upon her face. Brightly colored birds flitted from bush to bush and she tracked their passage with interest. It helped, she had discovered, to focus only upon the moment, and she resolutely refused to let herself dwell upon her fears, to think of the future she so dreaded. For now, the kindness of the nuns and her beautiful benefactor was enough.
Growing drowsy, she stretched out on the bench and soon fell asleep. When she awoke, she got hastily to her feet and greeted the abbess in the deferential manner that she’d copied from the nuns. Smiling, Blanche bade her sit back down again, saying she needed to regain her strength for the journey, and Alicia went suddenly cold. “A journey?” she whispered. “I am leaving here?”
“In two days’ time. I do not suppose you can ride a mule? No matter, I am sure Lady Joanna can provide a horse litter for you. Her lord husband has already returned to Palermo, but she remained behind, waiting till you were well enough to travel.”
Alicia didn’t understand. “Why is she taking me to Palermo?”
“Well, that is where she and Lord William live, child. They have a palace here in Messina, too, but their favorite home is in Palermo.”
“Am I . . . am I to live with her?” That seemed too much to hope for, though. “Why would she want me?”
That was a question some of Blanche’s nuns had been asking, too. But not the abbess. She had no doubt that this bedraggled, pitiful kitten had stirred Joanna’s thwarted maternal instincts. “Why not? There is always room for young women in the royal household, and taking you in would be a way to honor your brother, too. He died a martyr’s death, for he was on his way to the Holy Land and he sacrificed himself to save his fellow Christians.”
By now Alicia was thoroughly confused. “Does the Lady Joanna live in the royal household, then?”
The abbess looked at her in surprise. “You do not know who she is?”
Alicia flushed, taking those incredulous words as an implied rebuke. “I thought of her as my guardian angel,” she said, staring down at the ground.
“Well, she is indeed that,” the older woman acknowledged. “But your angel wears a crown, not a halo. Lady Joanna is the daughter of the English king, Henry Fitz Empress, and the queen of William de Hauteville, the King of Sicily.”
CHAPTER 2
AUGUST 1189
Palermo, Sicily
Alicia had no memories of her mother, who’d died when she was three. It took no time at all for Joanna to fill that empty place in the girl’s heart, for no one had ever shown her such kindness. She was so completely under Joanna’s spell that she was even able to overcome her panic when Joanna revealed that they’d have to travel to Palermo by ship, explaining that it was only about one hundred and forty miles, but the roads were so bad that the journey could take up to four weeks by land. They’d stay within sight of the shoreline, she promised, and although it took more courage than Alicia thought she had, she followed the young Sicilian queen onto the royal galley, for drowning was no longer her greatest fear.
She felt at times as if she’d lost touch with reality, for there was a dream-like quality to the weeks after the sinking of the San Niccolò. She’d never met a man as charming as Joanna’s husband, had never seen a city as beautiful as Palermo, had never imagined that people could live in such comfort and luxury, and at first Sicily seemed truly like the biblical land of milk and honey.
On the voyage to Palermo, Joanna had enjoyed telling Alicia about the history of her island home. Sicily was a jewel set in a turquoise sea, she’d said poetically, but its beauty and riches had been both a blessing and a curse, for it had been captured in turn by the Carthaginians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, Germanic tribes, the Greek empire of Constantinople, and then the Saracens. In God’s Year 1061, a Norman-French adventurer named Roger de Hauteville had been the one to launch an invasion from the mainland. It was so successful that in 1130, his son and namesake had himself crowned as Sicily’s first king, whose domains would soon encompass all of southern Italy, too.
“He was my lord husband’s grandfather,” Joanna said, smiling at Alicia’s wonderment. But it was not Sicily’s turbulent past that amazed the girl; it was that the Kingdom of Sicily was younger than her own father, who’d died the day after his sixty-fourth birthday. How could such a magical realm have been in existence for less than six decades?
She was captivated by Palermo, set in a fertile plain of olive groves and date palms, its size beyond her wildest imaginings; her brother had told her that Paris had fifty thousand citizens, but Joanna said Palermo’s population was more than twice that number. Alicia was impressed by the limestone houses that gleamed in the sun like white doves, by the number of public baths, the orchards of exotic fruit that she’d never tasted: oranges, lemons, limes, and pomegranates. But it was the royal palaces that utterly dazzled her, ringing the city like a necklace of opulent, shining pearls.
Joanna and William’s primary residence was set in a precinct known as the Galca, which held palaces, churches, chapels, gardens, fountains, a menagerie of exotic animals, and the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater. The royal apartments were situated in a section of the main palace called the Joharia, flanked by two sturdy towers. A red marble staircase led to the first floor, with an entrance to the king’s chapel, where Alicia came often to pray for her brother’s soul and to marvel at its magnificence. The nave was covered with brilliant mosaic stones dramatizing scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the floor inlaid with circles of green serpentine and red porphyry encased in white marble, and the ceiling honeycombed; one of the walls even contained a water clock, a device quite unknown in France.
The palace itself was splendidly decorated with vivid mosaic depictions of hunters, leopards, lions, centaurs, and peacocks. Alicia’s father had once taken her to the Troyes residence of the Count of Champagne, and she’d come away convinced that no one in Christendom lived as well as Lord Henri. She now knew better. Joanna’s coffers were filled with the finest silks, her chambers lit by lamps of brass and crystal and scented by silver incense burners, her jewelry kept in ivory boxes as well crafted as the treasures they held. She bathed in a copper bathtub, read books whose covers were studded with gemstones, played with her dogs in gardens fragrant with late-blooming flowers, shaded by citrus trees, and adorned with elegant marble fountains. She even had a table of solid gold, set with silver plate and delicacies like sugar-coated almonds, dates, hazelnuts, melons, figs, pomegranates, oranges, shrimp, and marzipan tortes. Alicia could not envision a more luxurious world than the one Joanna had married into; nor could she imagine a woman more deserving of it than the Sicilian queen, her “angel with a crown.”
But if she embraced Joanna and her handsome husband wholeheartedly, some of her initial enthusiasm for their lush, green kingdom soon dimmed. While there was much to admire, there were aspects of Sicilian life that she found startling and others that profoundly shocked her. Palermo seemed like the biblical Babel, for not only were there three official languages—Latin, Greek, and Arabic—people also spoke Norman-French and the Italian dialect of Lombardy. Even the realm’s religious life was complex and confusing, for the Latin Catholic Church vied with the Greek Orthodox Church for supremacy, and Palermo was home, too, to mosques and synagogues.
There had been Jews in Champagne, of course, but they were only allowed to earn their living as moneylenders. The Jewish community in Palermo was numerous, prosperous, and engaged in occupations forbidden to them in France; they were craftsmen, doctors, merchants, and dominated the textile industry. Alicia found it disconcerting to see them mingling so freely with the other citizens of the city, for her brother had told her that the French king, Philippe, had banished the Jews from Paris and he’d spoken of their exile with obvious approval.
She was uncomfortable in the cit
y markets, for while they offered a vast variety of enticing goods, they offered slaves for sale, too. They were Saracens, not Christians, and Alicia took comfort in that. But she still found the sight of those manacled men and women to be unsettling, for slavery was not known in France.
There was so much in Sicily that was foreign to her. It was easy to appreciate the island’s beauty and affluence, the mild climate, the prosperity of its people. Although its diversity was like nothing she’d ever experienced, she did not feel threatened by it. But she did not think that she could ever accept the presence of Saracen infidels living so freely in a Christian country, even allowed to be judged by Islamic law.
Every time she saw a turbaned Arab sauntering the city streets, she shrank back in alarm. When she heard the cries of the muezzin summoning Muslims to their prayers, she hastily crossed herself, as if to ward off the evil eye. She was baffled that there should be Arabic phrases on the gold tari, the coinage of the realm. She did not understand why young Sicilian women adopted Saracen fashions, often wearing face veils in public and decorating their fingers with henna. She was stunned when she learned that Muslims served in King William’s army and navy, and some were actively involved in his government. They were known as the Palace Saracens, men of odd appearance, uncommonly tall, with high-pitched voices and smooth skin, lacking any facial hair. She’d heard them called eunuchs; when one of Joanna’s ladies had explained the meaning of that foreign word, she’d been horrified, and for the first time she wondered if she’d ever feel truly at home in this alien land.
Her brother had said Saracens were the enemies of God, telling her how they’d desecrated Christian churches after capturing Jerusalem, exposing the precious fragment of the True Cross to jeering crowds in the streets of Damascus. The abbess had assured her that Arnaud died a martyr to his faith. So how could King William find so much to admire in Saracen culture? Why was he fluent in the tongue of the infidels and a patron of Arab poets? How could he entrust his very life to unbelievers? For he not only had a personal bodyguard of black Muslim slaves, his palace cooks, his physicians, and his astrologers were all Saracens, too.
Bewildered and deeply troubled, Alicia yearned to confide her fears to Joanna. She dared not do so, though, because of the Lady Mariam, with slanting eyes, hair like polished jet, and the blood of Saracens running through her veins. She spoke French as well as Arabic, and accompanied Joanna to church. But she was one of them, a godless infidel. And yet it was painfully obvious to Alicia that Joanna loved her. Of Joanna’s ladies, only two were truly her intimates—Dame Beatrix, a tart-tongued Angevin in her middle years who’d been with Joanna since childhood, and the Lady Mariam. The Saracen.
As the weeks passed, Alicia found herself becoming obsessed with the Lady Mariam, a flesh-and-blood symbol of all that she could not understand about Sicilian society. She studied the young woman covertly, watching suspiciously as Mariam dutifully attended Mass and prayed to the God of the Christians. She thought her scrutiny was unobtrusive, until the day Mariam glanced over at her during the priest’s invocation and winked. Alicia was so flustered that she fled the church, feigning illness to explain her abrupt departure. But after that, she had to know Mariam’s secrets, had to know how she’d embedded herself in the very heart of a Christian queen’s household.
While Joanna continued to treat her with affection, her other ladies had paid Alicia little heed, either jealous of Joanna’s favor or considering her too young to be of any interest. Alicia had been observing them for weeks, though, so she knew which ones to approach: Emma d’Aleramici and Bethlem de Greci. They’d shown Alicia only the most grudging courtesy. But they loved to gossip and she hoped that would matter more to them than her relative insignificance.
She was right. Emma and Bethlem were more than willing to tell her of Mariam’s scandalous history. Mariam was King William’s half-sister, they confided gleefully, born to a slave girl in his late father’s harim. William’s widowed mother had shown little interest in her son’s young, homesick bride, and so he’d turned Joanna’s care over to his aunt Constance, who was only twenty-four years old herself. It was Constance who’d chosen Mariam as a companion for Joanna, Bethlem revealed. Apparently she’d thought the fact that they were the same age was more important than her dubious background and tainted blood, Emma added, and that was how Mariam had insinuated herself into the queen’s favor.
Emma and Bethlem’s spitefulness awakened in Alicia an unexpected emotion, a flicker of sympathy for Mariam. She was impressed, too, to find out that Mariam had royal blood. But what was a harim? They were happy to enlighten her, explaining that all of the Sicilian kings had adopted the shameful custom of the Arab emirs, keeping Saracen slave girls for their pleasure. Mariam’s mother was one of these debased women, and Mariam the fruit of the first King William’s lust. And when Alicia cried out that surely Queen Joanna’s lord husband did not keep a harim, too, they laughed at her naïveté. Of course he did, they told her, and why not? What man would not want a bedmate who was subject to his every whim? A bedmate who could never say no, whose very existence depended upon pleasing him, upon fulfilling all of his secret desires, no matter how depraved.
Alicia did not know what they meant. What a man and woman did in bed was a mystery to her, something that happened once they were married. She knew that not all men were faithful to their wives, had heard her eldest brother Odo’s servants gossiping about his roving eye. But her brother’s wife was skeletal thin and sharp-tongued and Alicia could not remember ever hearing her laugh. Whereas Joanna was beautiful and lively and loving. How could William want any woman but the one he’d wed?
AS IT HAPPENED, Joanna was pondering that very question on a mild November night, lying awake and restless beside her sleeping husband. She had no basis for comparison, but she wondered sometimes if their love-making was lacking something. It was pleasant enough, but never fully satisfying; she was always left wanting more, even if she was not sure what that was. She did not let herself dwell upon these thoughts, though, choosing to laugh at herself instead. What did she expect? That flesh-and-blood men and women burned with the grand passion of the lovers in troubadour songs?
But on this particular night, she had more on her mind than the carnal pleasures which the Church said were sinful if not undertaken for the purpose of procreation. She was resentful that William had not come to her bed last week, when she’d been at her most fertile. It was every wife’s duty to provide her husband with heirs, a duty all the more urgent when a kingdom was at stake. Joanna’s yearning for a baby was much more than a marital obligation, though. It was an ache that never went away, hers the pained hunger of a mother who’d buried a child.
She still grieved for the beautiful little boy whose life had been measured in days, and did not understand why she’d not conceived again in the eight years since Bohemund’s death. She’d been worried enough to consult the female doctors at the famed medical school in Salerno, and had been told that a woman’s womb was most receptive to her husband’s seed immediately after her monthly flux ended. Joanna had relayed that information to William, but he did not always come to her at these critical times, and when that happened, she could only fret and fume in silence, angry and frustrated.
It seemed unfair that he should have complete control over conduct that mattered so much to them both. But she could not come to him unbidden. The few times that she’d done so, he’d obviously been displeased by her boldness. Although this passive role did not come easily to her, she’d done her best to play by his rules, for it would have been humiliating to go to his private chamber and find him in bed with one of his Saracen concubines. The Church might preach that husbands and wives owed a “marital debt” to each other, but how was a wife to collect it when her husband had a harim of seductive slaves at his beck and call?
She still remembered how shocked she’d been to learn of his harim, a year or so after her arrival in Sicily. As young as she was, she already knew that fidelity
was thought to be a mandate for women, not men; her father’s affair with Rosamund Clifford had been an open secret for years. But this was different. How could a Christian king embrace such a debauched, infidel practice? Why would he want to live like an Arab emir?
When she’d confronted William with her newfound knowledge, he’d been amused by her forthrightness, explaining nonchalantly that he was merely following in the ways of his father and grandfather. Sicily had its own customs, its own traditions, and his harim had nothing to do with her or their marriage, which he was sure she’d understand once she was older. Even at age twelve, Joanna had known she was being patronized. She’d consoled herself that surely he’d put these women aside after she was old enough to share his bed.
But he hadn’t. They’d consummated their marriage once she turned fourteen, yet nothing changed. By then Joanna fancied herself in love with him, and that had been a painful time for her. Looking back now, she felt a wry sympathy for that young girl, so innocent and starry-eyed. How could she not have been bedazzled by William, who’d seemed like one of the heroes in those troubadour tales she so enjoyed? He was tall and graceful, with long fair hair, compelling dark eyes, and an easy, engaging smile; he was also courteous, good-natured, and well educated. She’d felt herself so blessed, so fortunate that it seemed churlish to object to a few snakes in her Eden, even if they were alluring, dusky-skinned temptresses who were sleeping with her husband.
Joanna was not sure when she’d fallen out of love with William, assuming it had been love and not youthful infatuation. It may have begun after they’d lost their son, for they were both devastated by his death and yet they grieved alone. She’d turned to him for comfort, but he’d withdrawn into his own sorrow, and instead of coming closer together, they’d drifted further apart.