The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was the best I could do.
    She stopped, turned slowly, laughing softly, but her face was writ with a mockery so vivid that I flushed at my temerity.
    “Alice. It is Alice, isn’t it?” she asked. It was the first time she had addressed me by my name. “Power? What would a creature such as you know of true power? What would you do with it, even if it came to you?” The disdain for my naïveté was cruel in its sleek elegance.
    “I mean…the power to determine my own path in life.”
    “So! Is that what you seek?” She allowed me a complacent little smile. And I saw that beneath her carelessness ran a far deeper emotion. She actually despised me, as perhaps she despised all creatures of low birth. “You’ll not get power, my dear. That is, if you mean rank. Unless you can rise above your station and become Abbess of this place.” Her voice purred in derision. “You’ll not do it.”
    Resentment flared in me at the ridicule, but I hid it well. “Still, I would know.”
    “Then I’ll give you an answer. Since you have no breeding—beauty, then. But y our looks will get you nowhere. There is only one way.” Her smile vanished and I thought she gave my question some weight of consideration. “Knowledge.”
    “How can knowledge be power?”
    “It can. It can if what you know is of importance to someone else.”
    “But what would I learn in a convent that is of value to anyone?”
    “I’ve no idea. How would I?” Her arch stare was pitying. “But beggars, my dear, cannot choose.”
    And in her eyes I was most assuredly a beggar. What could I learn at the Abbey? The thin cloth of my learning was spread before me, meager in its extent and depth. To read. To dig roots in the garden. To make simples in the Infirmary. To polish the silver vessels in the Abbey church.
    “What would I do with such knowledge?” I asked in despair, as if I had listed my meager accomplishments aloud. How I loathed her in that moment of self-knowledge.
    “How would I know that? But I would say this: It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem. Do you have that?”
    Duplicity? Did I possess it? I had no idea. I shook my head.
    “Guile! Cunning! Scheming!” she snapped, as if my ignorance were an affront. “Do you understand?” The Countess retraced her steps to murmur in my ear as if it were a kindness. “You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy. I have made enemies all my life, but on the day I wed the Prince they will be as chaff before the wind. I will laugh in their faces and care not what they say of me. Would you be willing to do that? I doubt it.” The mockery of concern came swiftly to an end. “Set your mind to it, girl. All you have before you is your life in this cold tomb, until the day they clothe you in your death habit and sew you into your shroud.”
    “No!” The terrible image drove me to cry out as if I had been pricked on the arm with one of Countess Joan’s well-sharpened pens. “Take me with you!” I pleaded. “I have served you well. I would serve you again, at Court.” I almost snatched at her gold-embroidered sleeve.
    “I think not.” She did not even bother to look at me.
    “But I would escape from here.” I had never said it aloud before, never put it into words. How despairing it sounded. How hopeless, but in that moment I was overwhelmed by the enormity of all that I lacked, and all that I might become if I could only encompass it.
    “Escape? And how would you live?” An echo of Sister Goda’s words that were like a knife against my heart. “Without resources you would need a husband. Unless you would be a whore. A chancy life, short and brutish. Not one I would recommend. Better to be a nun.” She strode from the room, out into the courtyard, where she settled herself in her litter, and as I reached to