Knights of the Black and White

SIX

When Odo finally departed that afternoon, Alice lay down again on her divan, fanning herself languidly and thinking long and carefully. Odo had been in her quarters for close to three hours, a scandalous length of time for any man to be closeted alone with a woman, young or otherwise, but that concerned Alice not at all. Her personal staff were all fully aware that their discretion in such matters was the key to their continuing enjoyment of a life of great privilege. None of them, she knew, would dare to breathe a word of what she did with her private, personal life, on peril of their own lives.

Despite what she had said to Odo, Alice really had no idea of how to uncover the secret of the knight monks. She knew Hugh de Payens only slightly, but even that was enough to make it clear to her that she would be wasting her time to try bending him to her will and wishes. For one thing, the man was too unyielding, and too set in his warrior ways even to consider a dalliance with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. His closest associate, Godfrey St. Omer, was cut from the same cloth, likable enough but impermeable when it came to resisting blandishment. Alice had met men of their ilk before, and she found them, without exception, to be humorless and intractable, the only male animals in the world whom she could not sway to her will.

That left her with only one remaining source of information, Stephen St. Clair, and she felt sufficiently uncomfortable about her chances of success with him that she found herself unable to consider him objectively. He was the only young man in all her experience who had successfully resisted a full frontal assault from her, and she had no confidence at all that she could change anything on another meeting, because it seemed to her that she had used all her cunning, and all of it uselessly, in their last, ill-fated encounter. For months afterwards, she had been furious that he should run away from her, as a frightened peasant might flee the plague, and yet she had made no effort to punish him. She told herself that her reasons for that were humane, because he was a monk and therefore unworldly and socially inept, but she knew that she had left him unmolested purely for her own protection. No one knew anything about her and him, and she was afraid that should she pursue the matter, someone might learn the truth of what had happened, and she would become a laughingstock.

Out of sheer necessity, she had eventually convinced herself that the young monk knight’s behavior that day had been a personal thing, born of his own inner conflicts and containing nothing insulting to her. His terrified pallor and his abject flight from her presence might have been born purely out of his religious conviction, although—and this was something she had come to consider only long after the event—it might equally have been born of simple nausea, engendered by the hashish that had been liberally mixed into the honeyed cakes they had eaten that afternoon. After years of using the drug, she herself was immune to the nausea it sometimes caused, but to a neophyte like St. Clair, it could have devastating results.

Be that as it may, however, Alice found little to look forward to in the prospect of facing the monk knight again, and yet she knew she would have to were she to have any hope of discovering anything about what they were up to, there in their holy stables. She knew she could not simply go riding in there, not even as Alice, Princess Royal of Jerusalem. The temple stables were now genuinely regarded as holy ground, given to the knight monks by her own father, and since dedicated to their use by the Patriarch Archbishop himself. As a woman, Alice had no right to enter there. She had known that for months, but she knew, too, that no man who was not of their brotherhood was allowed to enter there either. Only the knights of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ were admitted, and they were very few.

An idea, unsought and unbidden, flickered at the edge of her consciousness. She picked up a tiny set of three brass bells and rang it, and within moments Ishtar, the head of her household staff, came in response.

“Princess?”

Alice looked at him, frowning in thought. “Did you tell me yesterday that Hassan the horse trader is back?”

“I did, Princess. He rode into the market with a new herd—a very small herd, I noticed—while I was there, just after dawn.”

“Did you notice anything spectacular in his small herd?”

“Aye, my lady, I did. Two things, in fact. He has a pair of white ponies that look to be litter twins. From the little I saw, they appeared to be flawless.”

Alice nodded, her upper lip caught between her teeth. Ishtar had been born and raised among horses, and she valued his opinions, since horses were the single thing in her life that she found she could trust and love without reservation. “Summon him, as soon as you can. Have him come directly to me. I will await him here.”

Ishtar bowed deeply and hurried away to do her bidding, and Alice moved to stand by a window, hugging herself, elbows in hands, as she stared out into the late-afternoon light, seeing nothing except the images in her mind.