She need not have worried. When Goren came back he did not come alone, but with Barnabas himself, and half a dozen servants, and a mule litter containing his stout wife, who greeted Anna with kisses and tears of pleasure, then took her and the boy into the litter for the ride home.

“For your home it is, and his,” she said, “and you are welcome. No, say no more. You look weary to death, and no wonder! Come now, and after a rest and a good dinner you shall tell us all that has happened.”

“Anna,” said Barnabas, a heavily built greybeard with kind eyes and a ready smile, who limped from a wound sustained in Arthur’s wars, “if King March of Cornwall seeks you here, as well he may, we shall know how to keep him out, and drive him back into his own borders. So rest you now in peace, cousin, and trouble yourself no more, but look to your son, and we will keep this castle and these good lands for him till he is grown.”

And the Princess Anna, for the first time since her husband Baudouin had been murdered, put her hands to her face and wept.

TWO

Alice the Motherless

5

The little girl lay on her stomach, flat in the dust, watching a pair of lizards. They were fighting – or mating; she did not know which. The two occupations were, she thought, much the same. The lizards writhed and wrestled, hissing with wide, melon-coloured mouths, as they darted in and out of the shade of the tamarisk tree. Then they flashed up the rough stones of the garden wall, and disappeared.

“Alice! Alice!”

It was a man’s voice, high and rather toneless.

“Alice!”

The child made a face at the crevice where the lizards had vanished, and did not reply, but she rolled reluctantly over in the dust, ready to rise. From somewhere above and beyond the feathery branches of the tamarisk, a bell began a sweet, cracked chiming.

“Alice?” The voice was anxious now, and nearer.

“I’m coming, Father.” She got to her feet, unkilting the long gown which she had worn hitched up to the knee, and shaking the dust out of its folds. Then she picked up her sandals from among the roots of the tree where they had been thrown, and slipped them on over bare, grubby feet. The long gown, trailing, hid them. She smoothed the long, lovely mane of tawny-gold hair, folded her arms so that the loose sleeves hid her dirty hands, then, with downcast eyes, decorous, composed, beautiful, the Lady Alice followed her father the duke into the chapel of St Jerome at Jerusalem.