longer able to endure his odious presence, she was about to end the audience when the door burst open and the Archbishop of Monreale strode into the chamber, flanked by her seneschal, Mariam, Beatrix, and a monk clad in the black habit of the Benedictine order.
Joanna was startled by this blatant breach of protocol, but Archbishop Walter was incensed. “How dare you come into the queen’s presence unbidden and unannounced! You’ve the manners of a lowborn churl, a great irony given how often you’ve maligned my family origins!”
Archbishop Guglielmo responded with the most lethal weapon in his arsenal; he ignored the other prelate entirely, not even deigning to glance in his direction. “My lady queen, I seek your pardon for my abrupt entrance; I mean no disrespect. But it was urgent that I speak with you at once. I bear a message of great import from the English king. I regret to be—”
It had been months since Joanna had heard from either of her parents, and she interrupted eagerly. “A letter from my lord father? Where is it?”
The archbishop hesitated. “No, Madame,” he said at last, “a letter from your brother.”
“But you said the king . . .” Joanna’s words trailed off. “My father . . . he is dead?”
“Yes, Madame. He died at Chinon Castle in July, and your brother Richard was crowned in September.”
“July? And we are getting word in December?” Archbishop Walter was incredulous. “What sort of scheme are you and the vice chancellor hatching now?”
The Archbishop of Monreale swung around to confront him. “How could I possibly benefit by lying to the queen so cruelly? King Richard sent a messenger several months ago. But the man fell ill on the journey, got no farther than the abbey at Monte Cassino. He was stricken with a raging fever and the monks did not expect him to live. But after some weeks, he regained his senses and confided his mission to the abbot. Since he was too weak to resume his travels, the abbot dispatched Brother Benedict with the letters, one from King Richard and one from Queen Eleanor. He took the overland route, loath to sail during winter storms, and just reached my abbey this morn—”
“Your abbey?” Archbishop Walter was sputtering, so great was his fury. “And why should the letters—assuming they are even genuine—be sent to you? What greater proof of a plot—”
“He sent the letters to me because Monreale is a Benedictine abbey like Monte Cassino and he knew I could be trusted to deliver these letters to the queen!”
By now they were both shouting at each other, but Joanna was no longer listening. William had often told her about the great earthquake that had struck Sicily twenty years ago, describing the sensations in vivid detail, and she felt like that now, as if the very ground were quaking under her feet. Turning aside, she clung gratefully to Beatrix for support as she sought to accept the fact that her world had turned upside down yet again.
WORD HAD SPREAD swiftly through the palace and Joanna’s chaplain was awaiting her by the door of the palatine chapel. He’d been in her service since her arrival as a child-bride, and after one look at her face, he knew she did not want his comfort, not yet. “I would have a Requiem Mass for my lord father on the morrow,” she said, her voice sounding like a stranger’s to him, faint and far away. When he would have followed her into the chapel, she asked to be alone and he positioned himself in the entrance, ready to repel an army if need be to give her privacy to pray and to grieve.
Joanna felt as if she were in a waking dream; nothing seemed familiar or real. How could her father be dead? He had dominated his world like the Colossus of Rhodes, towering above mortal men, stirring awe and fear in his wake for more than thirty years. To imagine him dead was like imagining the sun blotted out. Stumbling slightly, she knelt before the high altar and began to recite the Pater Noster. “Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra.” She still clutched the letters, not yet ready to read them. She found herself struggling to remember the rest of the prayer, one she’d known by heart since childhood, and then she crumpled to the ground, overwhelmed by a torrent of scalding tears, her body wracked with sobs as she wept for her father, for