“I believe you, Madame,” he said, and he meant it, greatly heartened by the reemergence of the Eleanor of legend, the woman who’d dared to go on crusade, to choose her own destiny, to do what no other queen had ever done—rebel against the man who was her liege lord and husband. Richard’s courage and boldness had not come entirely from his sire, he thought, but then his hand tightened on hers. “Madame . . . it cannot be allowed to drag out. Richard must be freed soon.” He paused and then said, so softly that his words reached her ears alone, “A caged eagle does not thrive in captivity.”
Eleanor was chilled to hear her own fears given voice so eloquently. But as her eyes and André’s caught and held, she nodded, for this man knew her son as well as anyone on God’s earth, possibly even better than she herself did. “I know,” she said quietly. “But we must never forget this, André. Whilst Richard could not come back to us from the grave, he can come back from Germany. And he will.”
AT FIRST, RICHARD’S QUEEN and his sister had been enjoying their stay in the Eternal City. The Pope had made them welcome and they’d soon been installed in the palace of the Frangipani family on the Palatine, the most famous of Rome’s seven hills. Joanna had visited Rome on several occasions during her marriage to the Sicilian king, William II, and Berengaria had been there when she and Eleanor had traveled from Navarre to join Richard in Sicily. But Anna was keen to see all of the ancient sites and so the queens hired guides to take them to the Temple of Apollo, the Palace of Nero, and the underground crypts in the Baths of Diocletian, for indulging the girl called the Damsel of Cyprus had become a habit with them by then.
Anna was an object of considerable curiosity and gossip, for Roman society did not know what to make of her. It was known that she was the daughter of Isaac Comnenus, the self-proclaimed Emperor of Cyprus, who’d been deposed by Richard, and people were puzzled that she was neither a prisoner nor a hostage. It seemed obvious that she was now part of the royal household and Romans did not understand how this had come to pass. They did not know that Isaac Comnenus had been a father no girl could love, a man who’d been so hated by the Cypriots that they’d cooperated in his overthrow. Thirteen-year-old Anna and her stepmother, Sophia, had been happy to leave Cyprus and its bad memories behind, and she’d soon embraced her new life as the English king’s ward.
On this January afternoon, Anna was playing tables with Alicia, the young girl Joanna had taken in after her Templar brother had been drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. But she was finding it difficult to concentrate upon the game. Each time she glanced around the hall, she could see that the other women were just as distracted, too.
After nigh on two years in their company, Anna knew them all well by now. Her private name for Dame Beatrix was “the dragon,” for the tart-tongued Norman had been with Joanna since childhood and she was not to be crossed. Berengaria’s ladies were of little interest, for they spoke no French, just the Romance tongue of Navarre and the lenga romana spoken in Aquitaine, and they seemed boring and dull to the fifteen-year-old Anna. But there was nothing boring or dull about the Lady Mariam, whose family history was as exotic as her appearance. Her sun-kissed skin and slanting golden eyes proclaimed her Saracen blood, and although Anna knew she was a Christian, chosen as a companion for Joanna, King William’s homesick child-bride, her mother had been one of the slave girls in the harim of King William’s father. Her scandalous background made her a source of fascination for Anna, as did the fact that she’d been conducting a clandestine love affair with Joanna’s Welsh cousin Morgan.
Anna wondered sometimes if Joanna and Berengaria knew of Mariam’s trysts with Morgan. She was sure Berengaria would not approve, for Richard’s queen adhered to a strict Spanish code of morality that made her seem older to Anna than her twenty-three years. Anna had been a bit bedazzled by Berengaria’s husband, and she’d adopted the Saracen name for him—Malik Ric—because she knew it amused him. She did not think Berengaria was the best mate for such a man. She still liked Berengaria, though, for she had a good heart. Isaac Comnenus’s daughter knew better than most how rare true kindness was in their world.