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finding her dressed in those black rags, unevenly dyed, I had to make an effort to hold my tongue. I saw how much she loved the Reverend Mother, and how a harsh word from me to that old woman would hurt her. It was one of the first times I held my tongue for Alais’ sake, and stayed my hand. It was not the last.
    I held myself apart from her at first, to see what she was made of. Though I loved her, and would always love her, until darkness took me from this earth, I did not tell her so. I watched her walk and stand in the sunlight. I met her gaze as she searched my cool green eyes.
    She saw nothing of my feelings until I allowed her to, but my heart swelled at the sight of her, sitting there in the sunlight of that cloister garden. As she bent over a clerk’s task, the vellum under her hand became something else, not a book to be read by fools, but a work of art. I stood looking over it a long while. I am not sure whom that prayer book was meant for; I had it bound and wrapped in silk. I took it away with me.
    I do not read it, of course. Hearing the Gospel once, I found, was enough for me. I never listen to the words even when my women read them. But the paintings in that book were a miracle, so small that the largest one fit into the palm of my hand. Those paintings I look over every day. I marvel that the hand of a princess, meant only for what tasks men ordered her to, could make one of these. That first day, as I gazed down at those paintings, the brush still in her hand, I considered what other wonders lay within Alais, undreamt and unlocked for, but by me.
    There were many things to be proud of in my daughter. Her newfound skill at painting was only one of them. She spoke low, her voice soft and resonant. When she laughed, I heard the siren song; it was music to bring men to their knees.
    I knew when I first saw her that she would fit with my plan as smoothly as the next piece of a puzzle fits into its joints. For the child I had left behind me was gone as if she had never been. In that child’s place stood a woman.
    As I looked into the quiet depths of Alais’ eyes, at first I wondered if by sending her to that forsaken place I had gotten only a beautiful nun out of her. I remembered well how she had clung to her father’s religion when I left her there. I was thinking already of how to break her of it when she smiled.
    That first smile was like a curtain lifting before an altar that hid precious things. I got a glimpse of heat beneath that smile, a sense of layers beyond the heat, and strength underlying that.
    I thought of myself at the age of fifteen, how, even then, men had written songs in my honor. I thought of how my father had seen my strength and had left the duchy to me, when my male cousins would have taken up the Aquitaine, and gladly.
    I saw that if I gave my son to this woman, she would know what to do with him. She was strong enough to hold Richard, even then.
    Richard was a man for strong women, as his father had been before him. As indeed, his father still was, though Henry fought to deny himself, and lay down among fools. I took a sort of perverse satisfaction in the thought of Henry taking his first look at Alais, once I had her dressed from head to toe in silk again. It gave me pleasure to know that Henry, too, would fall under her spell, for he loved strong women, especially strong women who knew how to hold their tongues, and who knew also when to speak. Alais was such a woman.
    Alais and I broke our journey to Winchester at an abbey also loyal to me. The abbot fawned on us, offering me his own rooms. Alais looked askance at those fine stone walls, with their brocade tapestries and their sconces of bronze. We ate off gold that night, and Alais was shocked to see such things in a house of God. She did not say so, for my sake, but even after the years we had been apart, I could read her eyes.
    “Alais, surely you know by now that most religious houses are not like the one you come from,” I