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way; his breathing still troubled him sometimes, and the incessant fighting between the Franks and their neighbours, as King Clovis struggled to bring all Gaul under Frankish rule, made overland travelling dangerous; but he went by ship to Italy, and then to Greece, where he stayed for a month or so before undertaking the final stage to Acre and Jerusalem. And in Athens, at the house of a friend, he met a girl who – though she was unmarried and, indeed, a virgin – so captivated him that he married her out of hand and took her with him to the Holy Land . Her name was Alice, and her disposition was as discreet in its own way as his: she was a silent girl, who, having been reared as a penniless dependant, had learned very early not to let her beauty – which was undoubted – throw that of her cousins into the shade. To her, my lord Ansirus was an escape, an establishment, a fortune: if he was more, only Ansirus knew. She was a quiet and dutiful wife, who managed her domestic affairs with careful efficiency, and kneeled meekly beside her lord as he thanked God at some length daily for his restored health and now for his happiness.
    She did not have long to enjoy the wealth and comfort of Ansirus’ castle, back in the rich heartlands of Rheged. A year after the couple’s return to Britain, Alice died in childbed, and the baby girl was handed to nurse.
    It might have been supposed that the grief-stricken widower would blame the child for her mother’s loss, and thrust her from him, but the past year’s happiness had been intense, and his repentance of the sins of his youth was genuine. He transferred all he had of love to the baby. He had vowed himself, at his wife’s deathbed, to chastity, and this vow he kept. He had vowed, too, to make another pilgrimage, and undertook this within the year. He would have taken the child with him, but the women who looked after the nursery were so horrified that he, remembering the discomforts of the journey, and the dirt and disease of the Holy Land, let himself be persuaded to go alone. But by the time the little Alice, at five years old, was growing impatient with her nurses , and running freely about the castle gardens, she was so like her mother that the bereaved father could hardly bear to let her out of his sight, and when he planned his next pilgrimage he insisted – and this time Alice insisted, too, and she had a habit of getting her own way – that his daughter should go with him. So here they were at last, kneeling side by side in front of the picture of St Jerome with his scarlet robe and his pet lion, Ansirus with closed eyes and moving lips, his mind fixed on prayer, and the child Alice, her young face sweet as an angel’s, the grey eyes lifted towards God.
    I wonder, she was thinking, when the figs come ripe on that tree outside the window? Those lizards were funny, weren’t they, the way they jumped and twisted together? I wonder if they have babies the ordinary way, or if they lay eggs like the newts in the pond at home? Eggs must be so much easier. Why do people have to do it the other way? Oh, and do you think we might go back in the same ship, with the captain who wore the gold earring, and used all those strange words to the sailors, and had that bird that talked, but Father wouldn’t buy it for me? Perhaps – if
you
spoke to him? I know you often do. And I’d love to have that bird, I really would.
    Odd as it may seem, the Lady Alice, too, was talking to God.

    For the more important days – saints’ days and Sundays – the duke and his daughter attended the great church of the Resurrection, but for their daily prayers they used the chapel of St Jerome, a small oratory set in one of the aisles of the church of St Mary, which had been built two centuries before by the Roman Emperor Constantine. This church, built of vast stones, was richly decorated, being the repository of the wealth of the thousands of pilgrims who nowadays flocked to the Holy City. It