Read The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers for Free Online Page B

metallic cylindrical cauls on either side of her gaunt face, as if she were encased in a cage, opened it. “Well?”
    “Is this the house of Janyn Perrers?”
    “What’s it to you?”
    Her gaze flicked over me, briefly. She made to close the door. Forsooth, I could not blame her: I saw myself through her eyes. My borrowed overgown had collected a multitude of creases and any amount of woolen fiber. I was not an attractive object. But this was where I had been sent, where I was expected. I would not have the door shut in my face.
    “I have been sent!” I said, slapping my palm boldly against the wood.
    “What do you want?”
    “I am Alice,” I said, remembering, at last, to curtsy.
    “If you’re begging, I’ll take my brush to you.…”
    “I’m sent by the nuns at the Abbey,” I stated with a confidence I did not feel.
    The revulsion in her stare deepened, and the woman’s lips twisted like a hank of rope. “So you’re the girl. Are you the best they could manage?” She flapped her hand when I opened my mouth to reply that yes, I supposed I was the best they could offer, since I was the onlynovice. “Never mind. You’re here now, so we’ll make the best of it. But in future you’ll use the door at the back beside the privy.”
    And that was that.
    I had become part of a new household.
    And what an uneasy household it was. Even I, with no experience of such, was aware of the tensions from the moment I set my feet over the threshold.
    Janyn Perrers: master of the house, pawnbroker, moneylender, and bloodsucker. His appearance did not suggest a rapacious man, but then, as I rapidly learned, it was not his word that was the law within his four walls. Tall and stooped, with not an ounce of spare flesh on his frame, and a foreign slur to his English usage, he spoke only when he had to, and then not greatly. In his business dealings he was unnervingly painstaking. Totally absorbed, he lived and breathed the acquisition and lending at extortionate rates of gold and silver coin. His face might have been kindly, if not for the deep grooves and hollow cheeks more reminiscent of a death’s head. His hair, or lack of, some few greasy wisps around his neck, gave him the appearance of a well-polished egg when he removed his felt cap. That was rare, as if he regretted his loss. I could not guess his age, but he seemed very old to me, with his uneven gait and faded eyes. His fingers were always stained with ink, his mouth too when he forgot and chewed his pen.
    He nodded to me when I served supper, placing the dishes carefully on the table before him: It was the only sign that he noted a new addition to his household. This was the man who now employed me and would govern my future.
    The power in the house rested on the shoulders of Damiata Perrers, the sister, who had made my lack of welcome patently clear. The Signora. There was no kindness in her face. She was the strength, the firm grip on the reins, the imposer of punishment on those who displeased her. Nothing happened within that house without her knowledge or permission.
    There was a boy to haul and carry and clean the privy, a lad who said little and thought less. He led a miserable existence, but his facewas closed to any offers of communication. He gobbled his food with filthy fingers and bolted back to his own pursuits in the nether regions of the house. I didn’t learn his name.
    Then there was Master William Greseley, who was and was not of the household, since he spread his services farther afield, an interesting man who attracted my attention but ignored me with a remarkable determination. He was a clerk, a clever individual with black hair and brows, sharp features much like a rat, and a pale face as if he never saw the light of day, a man with as little emotion about him as one of the flounders brought home by Signora Damiata on market day. He ate and slept and noted down the business of the day. Ink might stain Master Perrers’s fingers, but I swore