Lionheart A Novel - By Sharon Kay Penman Page 0,9

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