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Stephen and Matilda, news of their comings and goings was vital, so you could know in advance—and hopefully escape—whichever king’s, queen’s, or baron’s army was likely to come trampling your crops. Since much of the trampling had taken place in the fens, Gyltha had then been as aware of politics as any.
    But out of that terrible time had emerged a Plantagenet ruler like a king from a fairy tale, establishing peace, law, and prosperity in England. If there were wars, they took place abroad, blessed be the Mother of God.
    The wife Henry brought with him to the throne had also stepped out of a fairy tale—a highly colored one. Here was no shy virgin princess; Eleanor was the greatest heiress in Europe, a radiant personality who’d ruled her Duchy of Aquitaine in her own right before wedding the meek and pious King Louis of France—a man who’d bored her so much that the marriage had ended in divorce. At which point nineteen-year-old Henry Plantagenet had stepped forward to woo the beautiful thirty-year-old Eleanor and marry her, thus taking over her vast estates and making himself ruler of a greater area of France than that belonging to its resentful King Louis.
    The stories about Eleanor were legion and scandalous: She’d accompanied Louis on crusade with a bare-breasted company of Amazons; she’d slept with her uncle Raymond, Prince of Antioch; she’d done this, done that….
    But if her new English subjects expected to be entertained by more naughty exploits, they were disappointed. For the next decade or so, Eleanor faded quietly into the background, doing her queenly and wifely duty by providing Henry with five sons and three daughters.
    As was expected of a healthy king, Henry had other children by other women—what ruler did not?—but Eleanor seemed to take them in her stride, even having young Geoffrey, one of her husband’s bastards by a prostitute, brought up with the legitimate children in the royal court.
    A happy marriage, then, as marriages went.
    Until…
    What had caused the rift in the lute? The advent of Rosamund, young, lovely, the highest-born of Henry’s women? His affair with her became legendary, a matter for song; he adored her, called her Rosa Mundi , Rose of all the World, had tucked her away in a tower near his hunting lodge at Woodstock and enclosed it in a labyrinth so that nobody else should find the way through….
    Poor Eleanor was in her fifties now, unable to bear any more children. Had menopausal jealousy caused her rage? Because rage there must certainly have been for her to goad her eldest son, Young Henry, into rebellion against his father. Queens had died for much less. In fact, it was a wonder her husband hadn’t executed her instead of condemning her to a not uncomfortable imprisonment.
    Well, delightful as it was to speculate on these things, they were all a long way away. Whatever sins had led to Queen Eleanor’s imprisonment, they had been committed in Aquitaine, or Anjou, or the Vexin, one of those foreign places over which the Plantagenet royal family also ruled. Most English people weren’t sure in what manner the queen had offended; certainly Gyltha was not. She didn’t care much. Neither did Adelia.
    There was a sudden shout from the bedroom. “It’s here ? She’s brought it here ?” Now down to his tunic, a man who looked younger and thinner but still very large stood in the doorway, staring around him. He loped to the basket on the table. “My God,” he said, “my God.”
    You dare, Adelia thought, you dare ask whose it is.
    But the bishop was staring downward with the awe of Pharaoh’s daughter glimpsing baby Moses in the reeds. “Is this him? My God, he looks just like me.”
    “She,” Gyltha said. “ She looks just like you.”
    How typical of church gossips, Adelia thought viciously, that they would be quick to tell him she’d had his baby without mentioning its sex.
    “A daughter.” Rowley scooped up the child and held her high. The