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strong enough. I will manage something. The only thing I could not bear to lose, my love, is you.”
    “I am not so frail as you think,” Alys replied, smiling. “I am as strong as ever I was. And I still think that it would be wise to make ourselves scarce.”
    “I agree.” Raymond tilted his wife’s head up and kissed her again, more lingeringly, on the lips. “But I cannot leave here without some good excuse. To do so would anger not only Leicester but the king also. I wish your father would write. I cannot imagine why he has not.”
    Alys’s clear eyes shadowed with worry. “I hope no ill has befallen Elizabeth. She was with child again, and she is not as young as I. It is too soon for the babe to be born, but she has lost others. God forbid she is…is not well.”
    “Do not even think about it,” Raymond urged, but his heart sank at the reminder. It was true that if anything happened to Elizabeth, William would be perfectly indifferent to a political cataclysm, not to mention what to him was a minor problem in Gascony.
    “What I will do now,” he continued, “is ride into Bordeaux to speak to my kinsman Rustengo. He has several times suggested that the king come here himself. In the past, I was not so eager—you know what Henry is—but I am certain others have received letters similar to the one I have. I am now leaning toward Rustengo’s opinion. Let Henry confront Leicester. The king in person can excuse us from obeying Lord Simon and pardon those who have been treated too harshly. So, if Rustengo is still of the same mind, our letters to Henry begging him to come in his own person, can go together. Then I will approach the council of Bordeaux and see whether they wish also to appeal to the king to come.”
    “And while you are running hither and thither,” Alys said, “I will try to think of a very good reason why you must be in Provence at the earliest opportunity.”
    Raymond laughed. “So long as it is not a political reason, my love. Eleanor is too well informed about what is happening in and about Provence. I do not think she would tell Henry anything that could hurt me—Eleanor is fond of me—but if a smell of bad fish reached her, it might raise questions in her mind, and I would not want her to be uneasy about my good faith.”
    “Or to discover that you think her husband is an untrustworthy idiot?” Alys asked tartly.
    “Henry is not an idiot,” Raymond protested, tactfully ignoring Alys’s criticism of the king’s untrustworthiness. “And I wish you would not say things like that. I know you are careful in public, but if you make a habit—”
    “I am sorry.”
    Alys did not, of course, point out that Raymond himself, only a few moments earlier, had said just about the same thing. A good wife does not bring to notice such contradictions in her husband’s speech or behavior. Instead, she put out her hand, and Raymond took it and kissed it to show he accepted her apology. Alys smiled at him, well content.
    “I will write to your father,” she said. “He will find a good and sufficient reason, and probably something he has already mentioned to Eleanor in a letter so that she will be satisfied.”
     
    About a week after this conversation took place, the good and sufficient reason Raymond needed to leave Gascony peered nervously into the dark depths of the convent church. Fenice had made her way safely to the church, but her flitting passage through the black corridors of the convent and the minimally lighted cloister, where every moving shadow took on the mantle of a damned spirit reaching out for her to punish her for striking down a holy woman, had set her heart pounding so hard, there was a pain in her chest and she found it hard to breathe. Only the small, ever-burning light flickered on the altar, but it was enough. If a nun had been in the church, Fenice’s dark-adapted eyes would have caught the sheen on the white headdress. She slipped through the door and staggered