“I would ask this of you all. Could this sickness be a sign from God? A warning that I need to atone for my sins and lead a more godly life?”
John saw at once where this was heading and did not like it in the least. If his brother decided to “lead a more godly life,” he’d reconcile with his wife, and the last thing John wanted was for Richard to spend enough time in Berengaria’s bed to sire a son. “You cannot mean that mad hermit, Richard. He was spouting nonsense!”
But the three churchmen were already assuring Richard that God may indeed have been warning him, and both doctors agreed that the strange nature of his illness could be explained if it had been divine chastisement. Will was the next to speak. It was not Richard’s sickbed he was seeing; it was his brother Hal’s deathbed. God is punishing me for my sins, Will. His eyes dark with fear, Hal had cried out despairingly that it was too late, that Lucifer was in the chamber with them, waiting to claim his soul. Nigh on twelve years later, that memory still brought tears to Will’s eyes, for he’d loved his young lord, even though Hal had lost his moral bearings and had been no better than a bandit in his last weeks of life. Will had helped Hal to make a good death, and now he told Hal’s brother what he’d once told Hal, saying with such passion that he choked up, “The Almighty has given you a great mercy, sire—time to repent and seek His forgiveness.”
Morgan added his voice to Will’s, remembering a warning more credible than the hermit’s, Bishop Hugh of Lincoln’s. André and Eleanor were not sure how to answer; André in particular was dubious, for he thought John was likely right and the hermit mad. But it was always better to err on the side of caution, and Eleanor thought it logical that the Almighty would care more for the soul of a king. Then, too, Richard could not beget a son and heir unless he mended his broken marriage.
When she did not argue against it, John knew that his voice would go unheeded. Richard would make another spectacular repentance as he had in Messina, wanting to be judged worthy to lead the fight against the infidels. And with his accursed luck, Brother Richard would get his little Spanish bride pregnant ere the month was out. Wishing he could hunt that wretched hermit down with lymer hounds and feed him his own entrails, John lapsed into a morose silence that no one noticed.
JOANNA KNEW THAT SOMETHING was wrong. While Richard was meeting with Constance in Angers, Morgan had paid a visit to Mariam at Beaufort-en-Vallée. It had been a very brief one, and in the two and a half weeks since then, Mariam had been quiet and withdrawn, rebuffing all of Joanna’s questions. But Joanna was nothing if not persistent, and when Mariam slipped out into the garden after hearing Easter Mass in the castle chapel, she followed.
She found Mariam sitting on a turf bench by the fishpond. “Yes, I know I am meddling,” she said before the other woman could speak. “But you are as dear to me as my own sisters, and I can see you are in pain. Let me help.”
“As if I could stop you.” Mariam’s compelling golden eyes were brimming with tears, though, and once Joanna sat beside her, she began to unburden herself. “Morgan came to tell me that Richard had given him and Guillain very generous grants, large estates in his ducal domains in Normandy and Aquitaine. He was so joyful, Joanna, saying that now we could marry. It well-nigh broke my heart to turn him down.”
“But why? I know you love him.”
“Yes, I do love him, and I would not burden him with a barren wife.”
Joanna reached over to take Mariam’s hand in her own. “How often have you been able to share a bed with Morgan? A few times in the Holy Land, an occasional tryst in the past year. That you did not conceive yet proves nothing, Zahrah.”
The use of that Arabic endearment, her brother William’s pet name for her, caused Mariam’s tears to overflow. “You are forgetting that during four years of marriage to Bertrand, not once did I conceive.”
“That does not mean you cannot conceive,” Joanna insisted, for the female physicians she’d consulted at Salerno had espoused the revolutionary view that a childless marriage was not always to be blamed upon the woman. “Many wives conceive after years of a supposedly barren marriage. What of Constance? Who expected her to become pregnant in her fortieth year?”
Mariam merely shook her head. But after a few moments of silence, she said, “I was not being entirely truthful, Joanna. Yes, I have worried that I might not be able to conceive. But that is not why I cannot wed Morgan. Our children would never be welcome here. I have seen how people stare at me, whisper behind my back. In Poitiers, they called me ‘the Saracen witch.’”