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aunt Constance, who was only twenty-four years old herself. It was Constance who’d chosen Mariam as a companion for Joanna, Bethlem revealed. Apparently she’d thought the fact that they were the same age was more important than her dubious background and tainted blood, Emma added, and that was how Mariam had insinuated herself into the queen’s favor.
    Emma and Bethlem’s spitefulness awakened in Alicia an unexpected emotion, a flicker of sympathy for Mariam. She was impressed, too, to find out that Mariam had royal blood. But what was a harim ? They were happy to enlighten her, explaining that all of the Sicilian kings had adopted the shameful custom of the Arab emirs, keeping Saracen slave girls for their pleasure. Mariam’s mother was one of these debased women, and Mariam the fruit of the first King William’s lust. And when Alicia cried out that surely Queen Joanna’s lord husband did not keep a harim , too, they laughed at her naïveté. Of course he did, they told her, and why not? What man would not want a bedmate who was subject to his every whim? A bedmate who could never say no, whose very existence depended upon pleasing him, upon fulfilling all of his secret desires, no matter how depraved.
    Alicia did not know what they meant. What a man and woman did in bed was a mystery to her, something that happened once they were married. She knew that not all men were faithful to their wives, had heard her eldest brother Odo’s servants gossiping about his roving eye. But her brother’s wife was skeletal thin and sharp-tongued and Alicia could not remember ever hearing her laugh. Whereas Joanna was beautiful and lively and loving. How could William want any woman but the one he’d wed?

    AS IT HAPPENED, Joanna was pondering that very question on a mild November night, lying awake and restless beside her sleeping husband. She had no basis for comparison, but she wondered sometimes if their love-making was lacking something. It was pleasant enough, but never fully satisfying; she was always left wanting more, even if she was not sure what that was. She did not let herself dwell upon these thoughts, though, choosing to laugh at herself instead. What did she expect? That flesh-and-blood men and women burned with the grand passion of the lovers in troubadour songs?
    But on this particular night, she had more on her mind than the carnal pleasures which the Church said were sinful if not undertaken for the purpose of procreation. She was resentful that William had not come to her bed last week, when she’d been at her most fertile. It was every wife’s duty to provide her husband with heirs, a duty all the more urgent when a kingdom was at stake. Joanna’s yearning for a baby was much more than a marital obligation, though. It was an ache that never went away, hers the pained hunger of a mother who’d buried a child.
    She still grieved for the beautiful little boy whose life had been measured in days, and did not understand why she’d not conceived again in the eight years since Bohemund’s death. She’d been worried enough to consult the female doctors at the famed medical school in Salerno, and had been told that a woman’s womb was most receptive to her husband’s seed immediately after her monthly flux ended. Joanna had relayed that information to William, but he did not always come to her at these critical times, and when that happened, she could only fret and fume in silence, angry and frustrated.
    It seemed unfair that he should have complete control over conduct that mattered so much to them both. But she could not come to him unbidden. The few times that she’d done so, he’d obviously been displeased by her boldness. Although this passive role did not come easily to her, she’d done her best to play by his rules, for it would have been humiliating to go to his private chamber and find him in bed with one of his Saracen concubines. The Church might preach that husbands and wives owed a “marital