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deposit the monkey on the cushions and close the curtains, my services for her complete, I heard her final condemnation. “You’ll never be anything of value in life. So turn your mind from it.” Then with a glinting smile she clicked her fingers at her tire-woman. “Give her the Barbary, Marian. I expect it will give her some distraction—and I begin to find it a nuisance.…”
    And the creature was thrust out of the litter, back into my arms.
    Indignation rose hot and slick in my throat. I considered mimicking the gesture I had seen the louts in the town employ when challenged by their elders and betters, graphic and disgracefully expressive in its lewdness, and would have done so if Sister Goda’s eye had not fallen on me. As it was, I curtsied in a fine parody of deference, clutching the monkey—that scrabbled and fussed with no notion of its abandonment—to my flat chest.
    Thus in a cloud of dust Countess Joan was gone with her dogs and hawk and all her unsettling influences. It was as if she had never set her pretty feet on the cold convent paving for even an hour, much less three weeks. It was like the end of a dream with the coming of day, when the light shatters the bright pictures. Fair Joan was gone to snare her prince at Westminster and I would never meet her again.
    I would soon forget her. She meant as little to me as I to her.
    But I did not forget! Countess Joan had applied a flame to my imagination. When it burned so fiercely that it was almost a physical hurt, I wished with all my heart I could quench it, but the fire never left me, and still it smolders, even today, when I have achieved more than I could ever have dreamed of. The venal hand of ambition had fallen on me, grasping my shoulder with a death grip of lethal strength, and refused to release me.
    I am worth more than this, I determined as I knelt with the sisters at Compline. I will be of value! I will make something of my life!
    I lost the Book of Hours, of course. Its value was far too great for such a creature as I was. It was taken from me. As for the monkey, Mother Abbess ordered it to be taken to the Infirmary and locked in a cellar. I never saw it again.
    Considering its propensity to bite, I was not sorry.

Chapter Two
    M y crude, impassioned plea to persuade Countess Joan to be the instrument of my escape from the Abbey had, I was compelled to admit, failed miserably. When I achieved it, it was not by my own instigation. It came as a lightning bolt from heaven.
    “Put this on. And this. Take this. Be at the Abbey gate in half an hour.”
    The garments were thrust into my arms by Sister Matilda, Mother Abbess’s chaplain.
    “Why, Sister?”
    “Do as you’re told!”
    I had been given a thin woolen kirtle, its color unrecognizable from much washing, and a long sleeveless overgown in a dense brown, reminiscent of the sludge that collected on the riverbank after stormy weather. It too had seen better days on someone else’s back, and was far too short, exhibiting, as I had feared, my ankles. As I scratched indelicately, a more immediate fear bloomed. I had inherited the fleas as well as the garments. A hood of an indeterminate gray completed the whole.
    But why? Was I being sent on an errand? Anticipation shivered over my skin. Even if it was for only an hour, I felt the excitement ofescape. The days of my transformation from novice to nun loomed, like the noxious, overflowing contents of the town drain after heavy rainfall.
    “Where am I going?” I asked the wagon master to whom I was directed, a dour man with a bad head cold and an overpowering smell of rancid wool. Sister Faith, keeper of the Abbey gate, had done nothing but point in his direction and close the door against me. The soft snick of the latch, with me on the outside, was far sweeter than any singing of the Angelus.
    “Where I’m instructed to take you,” he growled, spitting into a gutter already swimming with filth and detritus from the day’s market