The count and countess and their more important guests ate from bronze bowls, drank from cherrywood cups with silver rims, and held parcel-gilt knives and spoons—costly tableware, though not extravagant.

The English monk, Brother Aldred, was miraculously handsome. He reminded Ragna of an ancient Roman marble sculpture she had seen at Rouen, the head of a man with short curly hair, stained with age and lacking the tip of the nose, but clearly part of what had once been a statue of a god.

Aldred had arrived the previous afternoon, clutching to his chest a box of books he had bought at the great Norman abbey of Jumièges. “It has a scriptorium as good as any in the world!” Aldred enthused. “An army of monks copying and decorating manuscripts for the enlightenment of mankind.” Books, and the wisdom they could bring, clearly constituted Aldred’s great passion.

Ragna had a notion that this passion had taken the place in his life that might otherwise have been held by a kind of romantic love that was forbidden by his faith. He was charming to her, but a different, hungrier expression came over his face when he looked at her brother, Richard, who was a tall boy of fourteen with lips like a girl’s.

Now Aldred was waiting for a favorable wind to take him back across the Channel to England. “I can’t wait to get home to Shiring and show my brethren how the Jumièges monks illuminate their letters,” he said. He spoke French with some Latin and Anglo-Saxon words thrown in. Ragna knew Latin, and she had picked up some Anglo-Saxon from an English nursemaid who had married a Norman sailor and come to live in Cherbourg. “And two of the books I bought are works that I’ve never previously heard of!” Aldred went on.

“Are you prior of Shiring?” Ragna asked. “You seem quite young.”

“I’m thirty-three, and no, I’m not the prior,” he said with a smile. “I’m the armarius, in charge of the scriptorium and the library.”

“Is it a big library?”

“We have eight books, but when I get home we’ll have sixteen. And the scriptorium consists of me and an assistant, Brother Tatwine. He colors the capital letters. I do the plain writing—I’m more interested in words than colors.”

The priest interrupted their conversation, reminding Ragna of her duty to make a good impression. Father Louis said: “Tell me, Lady Ragnhild, do you read?”

“Of course I do.”

He raised an eyebrow in faint surprise. There was no “of course” about it: by no means could all noblewomen read.

Ragna realized she had just made the kind of remark that gave her a reputation for haughtiness. Trying to be more amiable, she added: “My father taught me to read when I was small, before my brother was born.”

When Father Louis had arrived a week ago, Ragna’s mother had drawn her into the private quarters of the count and countess and said: “Why do you think he’s here?”