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now—” He became aware of Alys’s wide-eyed attention, stopped
abruptly, and said, “But you do not need my help at all, do you? There is no
need for you to hang on my arm, of which you spoke so ill.”
    “No, no. It is the sweetest arm in all the world,” Alys
assured him. “I am sure it would cook up tender as a suckling pig… No! Do not
dare desert me, James. Please? Pretty please? All honey-coated please?”
    They were both giggling, and another head or two turned to
examine them. Tactfully, they withdrew farther from the circle of older people,
Alys in the lead this time. When she stopped in a window embrasure, however, she
was no longer smiling.
    “All jesting aside, James,” she said, “I hope Richard and
the king have not quarreled, especially over Gascony.”
    “Why especially over Gascony?” James asked, rather surprised
by Alys’s intensity.
    “Because Raymond has lands there—oh, you do not know about
Raymond. He is—there is some chance that I will marry him—Raymond d’Aix.”
    “Another of the queen’s relatives?” James asked rather
stiffly.
    “Well, yes, but he is not seeking office or lands here in
England, so you can stop looking like a stuffed bear,” Alys replied.
    “Then how does it come that you are going to marry him?”
    James knew Alys was heiress to two substantial keeps. This
did not make her a great prize, but, quite aside from her beauty, he would not
have considered her beneath his own touch, especially not since Sir William had
become Cornwall’s marshal. And one could not put Alys’s beauty aside. That was
worth a keep in itself. She was a little small, perhaps, but everything else
was perfect—the oval face set atop a long, graceful neck, a complexion of milk
flushed with rose, lips like ripe, wild strawberries, full and sweet, a thin,
short nose and eyes like twin lakes, cerulean blue, all crowned by the gold of
her hair. And, James reminded himself, a tongue like a viper and a spirit
forged of steel that would bend for no man. He was lucky that she was already
spoken for and not available.
    “Raymond came…on a visit to England, and…and accompanied
Papa to Wales.” Alys was picking her way carefully, not wishing to lie, but
unwilling to give all the facts.
    “Accompanied Sir William… Raymond? You mean he is really d’Aix,
not just from that area? That Raymond? But why was he acting as your
father’s man?”
    “Oh…it suited his humor,” Alys replied. Even to a trusted
servant of Richard of Cornwall, Alys was not prepared to tell the truth—that
Raymond had been sent by the king to spy on her father, and that the stratagem
had backfired, Raymond having fallen in love with her.
    “You mean,” James said sardonically, “that it suited your humor.”
    Alys opened her mouth to deny this emphatically, and then
merely looked arch. It was better for James to think Raymond had been so
smitten with her that he had lingered and taken service with her father than
that James seek further for the truth. Then she smiled and shrugged. “In any
case, he wishes to marry me, and—”
    “Who does not?” James asked wryly.
    “You, for one,” Alys replied tartly, then laughed. “You know
me too well.”
    “Poor Raymond,” James sighed.
    It was obvious that he was jesting, and Alys laughed again,
but there was a quiver of doubt in her. Did Raymond know her? Alys wondered.
She had never tried to seem different from her real self, but had he been
blinded by desire? He said not. He said it was not for her beauty, but also for
her spirit, her skills in housewifery and leechcraft, and her courage that he
loved her, but when he compared her with his own women, would he not think her
coarse and common? Alys could ape the ways of the court ladies well enough that
she was accepted among them, but it was an effort. She did not wish always to
be under such constraint in her own home.
    “Perhaps Raymond will not be so fortunate after all,” Alys
snapped. “I said he