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

Sister Goda. If I had a father, surely he would not be deaf to my entreaties.
    “God is your Father.” Sister Goda’s flat response discouraged me from pursuing the matter as she turned the page of a psalter. “Now if you will pay attention, my child, we have here a passage to study.…”
    “But who is my father here —out there !” I gestured toward the window that allowed the noise of the town to encroach, its inhabitants gathering vociferously for market.
    The novice mistress looked at me, faintly puzzled. “I don’t know, Alice, and that’s the truth.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth as she always did when short of an explanation. “They said that when you were brought here, there was a purse of gold coins.” She shook her head, her veil hanging as limp as a shroud around her seamed face. “But it’s not important. Now if we can…” She shuffled across the room to search in the depths of a coffer for some dusty manuscript.
    But it was important! A purse of gold? Suddenly it was very important. I knew nothing other than that I was Alice. Alice—with no family, no dowry. Unlike more fortunate sisters, no one came to visit me at Easter or Christmas. No one brought me gifts. When I took the veil, there would be no one to hold a celebration for me to mark my elevation. Even my habit would be passed down to me from some dead nun who, if fate smiled on me, resembled me in height and girth; if not, my new garment would enclose me in a vast pavilion of cloth, or exhibit my ankles to the world.
    Resentment bloomed in me at the enormity of it. Why? The question beat against my mind. Who is my father? What have I done to deserve to be so thoroughly abandoned? It hurt my heart.
    “Who brought me here, Sister Goda?” I persisted.
    “I don’t recall. How would I?” She was brusque. “You were left in the Abbey porch, I believe. Sister Agnes brought you in—but she’s been dead these last five years. As far as I know, there is no trace of your parentage. At that time it was not uncommon for unwanted infants to be abandoned at a church door, what with the plague.…Although it was always said that…”
    “What was said?”
    Sister Goda looked down at the old parchment. “Sister Agnes always said it was not what it seemed.…”
    “ What wasn’t?”
    Sister Goda clapped her hands sharply, her gaze once more narrowing on my face. “Mother Abbess said that Sister Agnes was mistaken. She was very old and not always clear in her head. Mother Abbess says you’re most likely the child of some laborer—a maker of tiles—got on a whore of a tavern slut without the blessing of marriage. Now—enough of this! Set your mind on higher things. Let us repeat the paternoster in the very best Latin. No slurring of your consonants.”
    So I was a bastard.
    As I duly mouthed the words of the paternoster , my mind remained fixed on my parentage or lack of it, and what Sister Agnes might or might not have said about it. I was just one of many unwanted infants and should be grateful that I had not been left to die. But it did not quite ring true, did it? If I was the child of a tavern whore, my parents from the lowest of the common stock, why had I been taken in and given any teaching? Why was I not set to work as one of the conversa , the lay sisters, employed to undertake the heavy toil on the Abbey’s lands or in the kitchens and bake house? True, I was clothed in the most worn garments passed down from the sick and the dead. I was treated with no care or affection; yet I was taught to read and even to write, however poorly I attended to the lessons.
    It was meant that I would become a nun. Not a lay sister.
    “Sister Goda…” I tried again.
    “I have nothing to tell you,” she snapped. “There is nothing to tell! You will learn this Latin text!” Sister Goda, crippled with painful limbs, used her cane across my knuckles but without any real force.Perhaps she had already decided I was a lost cause. “You