Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,7

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