by Jack Whyte
She hesitated there, debating whether to walk boldly by, hoping that there would be no one in the first room, or to turn tail and go back down to the floor beneath, then around to the rear passageway that would allow her to enter her own rooms from the other side. She chose the former option and stepped forward boldly, holding her head high, but her mother’s voice greeted her as soon as she reached the open doorway, almost as though she had been waiting for her.
“Alice? Alice, in Heaven’s name, child, what is the matter with you? You look as though you have been to war and assaulted by bandits. Come in here at once.”
Alice stopped dead, muttering words beneath her breath that would have astonished and angered her mother, then turned and looked into the room beyond the open doors, where Queen Morfia stood gazing at her imperiously, surrounded by her women.
“Mother,” she said levelly, nodding her head in a tiny greeting, “I thought you were unwell, confined to bed.”
“I was.” Her mother’s tone was icy with disapproval. “But I am restored, and now feel much better than you appear to be. Where have you been, child, and what have you been doing that makes you so disheveled?”
“I’ve been weeping, Mother. Tears of rage and humiliation.” Alice’s voice matched her mother’s in coolness, completely devoid of inflection.
“Tears? Occasioned by what, may I ask?”
“Occasioned by life, Mother, and no, you may not ask anything more.”
Morfia’s face smoothed out in anger and she held her head higher. “You are insolent, and although that is unsurprising in itself, nevertheless it ill becomes you. I suggest you go and bathe the puffiness from your eyes before your father sees you. You may return to us when you have overcome your silliness and can at least pretend to be sociable.”
Alice turned on her heel and stalked away to her own rooms, aware that none of her mother’s women had so much as glanced at her in the course of that exchange. Not that she had expected any of them to do so. They would not dare, because they had to live in the same house as Alice and they knew better than to antagonize her. They were her mother’s creatures, but they had learned that, ubiquitous and all-knowing as Morfia seemed at times to be, they could not always rely upon the Queen’s presence for protection from Alice’s vengeance if they presumed to be amused by Morfia’s treatment of her, even as a child.
Morfia of Melitene was her daughter’s nemesis, the bane of her life, although Alice held her mother, albeit grudgingly, in great respect. In truth, Alice considered her mother to be ten times the man her father was, for although it had always been incontestably clear that Baldwin ruled his County of Edessa with an iron hand when it was needed, Alice had known since infancy that her formidable mother ruled the Count with equal severity. For that achievement alone, Alice had respected Morfia ever since she was old enough to know what respect entailed. But respect was not the same as liking, and although Alice had long since stopped caring, there was no liking between mother and daughter.
She had gone through a period, around the age of ten and eleven, when she had examined everything she did, trying to identify what it might be about her—her appearance, her behavior, or her temperament—that unfailingly brought out her mother’s dislike and disapproval, but she had never been able to identify anything, and so she had finally decided that it must have something to do with her physical appearance, her resemblance to her father.
Alice had been born with her father’s coloring and features, with golden hair, fair skin, and hazel-colored eyes, and she was the only one of the four siblings who resembled him in any way. The other three all favored Morfia, who, even today, as the mother of four grown daughters, was exotically beautiful, her flawless face and delicately sculpted bones proclaiming her aristocratic Armenian ancestry. From the outset, Alice discovered years later, Morfia had been besotted with her firstborn daughter, Melisende, fascinated with the child’s perfection and by the indisputable fact that the infant was her mother in miniature. By the time Alice had been born, eighteen months later, she was already too late even to think about competing with her sibling for their mother’s affections. Melisende became a diminutive replica of her mother, dressed in the same colors, a tiny creature of astounding beauty who drew sighs and cries of admiration from everyone who ever saw her. Alice’s appearance, on the other hand, was commonplace. She was not unattractive, but beside her older sister she was plain and pedestrian. She was, however, quick witted, highly intelligent, and clever, in the way of her father. And as time passed and she developed the ability to discern such things, she found herself becoming more and more aware that her beautiful sister Melisende had been born with great beauty but little in the way of wit or intellect and was, in fact, a lusterless and boring person.
Soon after, Alice turned her developing powers of critical observation upon others around her, and most particularly upon her mother the Countess. She found the exercise to be enthralling, for she became aware, gradually over more than a year’s observation, that her mother was a fascinating person in her own right and eminently worthy of study, particularly when removed from her husband the Count and pursuing her own designs. And Morfia, Alice quickly discovered, had many designs and a wide variety of means that she used in executing them.
Watching her mother put those designs into motion, however, was a far more complicated and clandestine process than the mere word watching implied, because Morfia of Melitene had decided, many years earlier, that what she did within her own personal time was very much her own affair. In public with her husband, playing the dutiful spouse to Baldwin, Count of Edessa, she was the embodiment of dignitas and decorum; in more intimate surroundings, with her family and friends, she played the role of caring friend and concerned mother perfectly, winning herself a reputation as a living saint whose entire existence was dedicated to the welfare of her husband and her daughters. In private, however, Morfia was Morfia, and rigidly private to the point of being reclusive in her solitude, and people who knew her otherwise would not easily have recognized her. Alice was quickly forced to realize that if she really wished to watch her mother during her hours of isolation, she would have to do so from hiding, as a spy.
Alice found nothing strange in her mother’s behav-ior; on the contrary, she accepted it as being unremarkable because that was the way that she herself, given the choice, would have preferred to live. Within a very short time, she learned the secrets of every nook and alcove, high and low, in the rooms her mother used, and she could make herself invisible, sitting or crouching or lying silent and unseen in any room in the Count’s palace. And over time, as she watched and listened, she came to appreciate that her mother had much to teach her. Morfia, however, had made little effort, ever, to teach her anything. And so Alice became almost slavish in studying her mother’s ways, learning and absorbing Morfia’s techniques for achieving her designs.
For years, throughout Alice’s entire childhood, she had been jealous of her elder sister, Melisende, who seemed to receive all the attention her mother had to lavish on anyone but herself, but as the two youngest children matured, their mother had taken note of their resemblance to herself and had begun to spend more time with them, too, fussing over them constantly and grooming them from earliest childhood to be the wives of wealthy and powerful men. Melisende, Morfia had clearly decided, was already taken care of and would present no difficulties when it came time to find a husband for her. But throughout that time, save for the most superficial scrutiny and unfailing, sharply pointed criticism, Morfia had neglected her second daughter, never seeing or sensing the child’s need for affection and approbation, and never suspecting that, through her own neglect, she had bred an implacable enemy within her own family. She noticed only that Alice was constantly sullen and unsmiling, ill tempered and waspish, unpleasant and unappealing to her guests, drably and unprepossessingly dressed, and forever requiring correction and reprimand.
For her part, Alice had decided, by the time of her thirteenth birthda
y, that her primary role in life must be to confound and frustrate her mother in everything to which she could turn her hand. Since the union of Baldwin and Morfia had produced no sons, she knew that her sister Melisende, her father’s legitimate firstborn, was the legal heiress, destined to marry the most suitable future Count of Edessa who could be found. But Alice’s contempt for her beautiful, empty-headed sister was so great that she anticipated little difficulty in removing Melisende from contention when the time was right, and replacing her as the future Countess. That decision made, she regarded it within her own mind as an inevitability, and she won countless hours of pleasure in contemplating her mother’s fury and frustration when it came to pass. And she knew it would come to pass, because her mother had taught Alice, unwittingly, a secret that her sister Melisende would never have the need for, or the brains to use: Morfia had taught Alice how to manipulate men.
Alice had watched, for years, how men behaved in her mother’s presence, and how, sometimes surprisingly, her mother herself behaved in the presence of men she wished to influence or bend to her will. She had seen many of these men—for Edessa, and even Outremer in its entirety, was a small community—interacting with her mother in public, where Morfia was the wife of the Count and they, no matter how great their power in other areas, were her husband’s feudal subjects. When they came to her mother in privacy, however, Alice paid attention to how they danced to an entirely different pattern, equally formal but more intimate, with nuances of meaning and intent that were the more resonant for being left unstated and unavowed.
In all her hours of watching such encounters, Alice never saw her mother indulge in even the slightest impropriety, but she watched avidly as the men preened like exotic birds around the Countess, strutting and sometimes fawning over her, each of them plainly convinced that he was within grasp of having this haughty and beautiful royal consort succumb to him. And on several occasions, always with an excitement that forced Alice to hold her breath in anticipation of what might happen next, she watched her mother respond alarmingly to such overtures, blatantly flirting, fluttering her eyelids outrageously and sometimes moving in ways that brought her full, ripely female body—Morfia could have been no more than thirty-five or -six at that time—into unmistakable and highly charged erotic prominence. And yet never once did Morfia permit a situation to go beyond her control, or allow a single man to touch her in any way. One man, and only one, had gone so far as to expose himself after such a dalliance, defiantly thrusting his hips and his engorged phallus forward in silent invitation and challenge. Alice, watching from a hiding place on an upper balcony, almost hiccoughed with excitement.
“It is plain, my lord,” her mother said, smiling and looking directly up into the man’s eyes and betraying no awareness of any threat to her dignity, “that I have something you desire. And to match it, as you know, you have something I desire in turn. Either wish would be simple to gratify, with no one but we two being any the wiser, but the challenge lies in deciding which of us should first commit, does it not? Now, you may quibble and complain and swear that I am in error, but deep in your heart you know, and I do, too, that I would be a fool to be the first to commit in this instance.”
The man swayed towards her, but at the first hint of movement Morfia had raised her hand, palm outward in warning, and he had remained as he was, gazing at her as his manhood began to wilt and droop, and then he nodded, brusquely, and readjusted his clothing before telling her that she was correct and should watch his behavior in the coming days. He did not quite say that he would return to claim his prize, but Alice was filled with admiration for her mother’s coolness, and took careful note of that word, commit, and what it signified.
She learned other lessons, spying thus from conceal-ment, but they all culminated in a powerful awareness that men, faced with erotic possibilities of pleasure and conquest, could be molded like clay in the hands of a cool-headed, determined, and resourceful woman. Alice learned that lesson well in theory, but at the age of thirteen she had yet to put her theory to any kind of test. She had no interest in boys, and none, yet, in sexuality for its own sake. She had seen sex in almost all its manifestations, from rutting animals to coupling people, and by the age of eleven she had been well aware of what a man or a boy could do to himself with his hand. She even knew that older women found sex and copulation pleasurable, for she had heard them talking about such things, but from all that she had seen, she had her own doubts about what pleasure might be gained from such a violent and earthy procedure. What interested her was the power she could gain from it, and the acquisition and the use of that power through the suggestion of erotic satisfaction. And she knew that when she became Countess of Edessa, she would need all the help she could garner from all the powerful men she had ever known, in order to outwit and outmaneuver her dull and empty-headed older sister. She was prepared to do anything she might have to do in order to enlist that help.
She had long since learned the importance of discretion and subterfuge, for her father would have spilled blood on many occasions, probably including his wife’s, had he ever suspected what was happening beneath his roof. She had also become profoundly aware of the awe-inspiring power that could be generated by sexual suggestion and allusion. And perhaps more important than either of those, she had learned the benefits of feelings of guilt, not with any application to herself but when they were brought into play deliberately against a sexual opponent. What she needed then was an opportunity to test herself, and she did so by relying strongly on the restraining powers of guilt as she seduced one of her mother’s coterie of friends, an aging bishop called Grosbec, who would soon be returning to the Kingdom of France, to the home in Paris that he had left decades earlier.
Alice had studied this man around her mother for some time, observing how he watched her avidly all the time, but particularly when he thought Morfia was unaware of his gaze. Of course, Alice had quickly become convinced that Morfia was never unaware of Grosbec’s gaze, but merely pretended to be, using that pretense somehow as a means of manipulating the man, who yet wielded a great degree of power and influence among his clerical peers, even as he was preparing to quit the Holy Land forever. Morfia had need of Grosbec’s influence at that time, to ensure that she could retain control of one particular matter being weighed by a panel of clerics appointed by the young and zealous Bishop of Edessa, Odo of Fontainebleau. Grosbec, the oldest and most highly respected cleric in the county, had the ear, and the respect, of all the panel members, and so Morfia had gone to greater lengths than usual in seeking to please the elderly bishop and to persuade him to use his influence on her behalf. Inexperienced as she was when she first noticed her mother’s peculiar deportment around Grosbec, Alice had been slow to understand what was happening when the two conspirators met, for conspirators they were, and they always met in the chapel closest to the Countess’s rooms. They spoke little about anything in particular. And they certainly did not pray together. It seemed strange to Alice that they should spend ages simply sitting together, wasting time to no purpose.
She knew exactly what her mother wanted the bishop to do; she had heard them talking plainly about it on several occasions. But as the days went by, Grosbec would report that the judging panel had not yet come close to ruling on the matter, and then he and Morfia would simply sit together at the front of the chapel, seldom speaking to each other, and Alice could not understand how Morfia, who was not usually religious, could spend so much time doing nothing but staring up at the altar while Grosbec sat staring at her. Puzzled, Alice would sit in her hiding place above and behind the pair of them every day, peering through the dimness of the chapel, her eyes moving constantly from Morfia to Grosbec and back. They always met at the same time, the third hour of the afternoon, and they would remain together for anything from a quarter to half an hour, at the end of which time the bishop would stand up, and Morfia would bow her head for a blessing and then return to her own rooms, leaving Grosbec behind.
It was on a Friday afternoon that the bishop gasped aloud, his entire body quivering suddenly and spasti-cally as he grasped the back of a pew for support, then stood where he was, head down, making no further movement. Morfia had been kneeling on a prie-dieu before the altar, and he had been standing close to her, gazing down at her for some time, swaying slowly, as though swiveling his hips. Morfia had not been praying. She had been sitting erect and staring straight ahead at the altar, her shoulders back so that her breasts, and the dark valley between them, were thrust into prominence. When Grosbec suddenly shuddered and appeared to be choking he almost startled Alice into betraying herself, but she caught herself in time, noticing that Morfia, who was much closer to him than Alice was, appeared to have taken no notice of his outburst. She merely rose to her feet and turned to where he stood facing her. She looked at him for long moments in silence, with a strange expression on her face, a look that Alice had never seen before, and then she bowed her head demurely to await the bishop’s blessing. When it was done, she simply left, and Grosbec stood gazing after her, his face drained and haggard.
After thinking about all that had occurred in those few moments, Alice not only understood what had happened but she also grasped, intuitively, the dynam-ics of the interplay between the two that had been so baffling to her before. Grosbec was a watcher, and she knew what that entailed. Even at her young age, she saw nothing shocking in the revelation that Bishop Grosbec was sexually active. Licentious clerics were everywhere, and no one thought anything about it. The only unusual element in what she had learned was that the bishop was a watcher. Alice knew another watcher, a boy living in her father’s enclave, a strange character two, perhaps three years older than she was, who liked to watch while other people did those things, and Alice had once watched him as he pleasured himself openly while they did. She had asked about him later, and discovered that he had absolutely no desire to share the act with a girl. His friends laughed at him because of it and called him names, but he made no attempt to change. He enjoyed watching people copulating, and made no secret of it or of how it excited him, and Alice had been surprised to hear how many people encouraged him and even seemed to enjoy having him watch them as they did it. Grosbec, Alice now knew, was a watcher, but more important than simply knowing that, she now realized that Morfia knew it, too, and was using the knowledge for her own purposes.