For Love And Honor (24 page)

Yolande’s
baby was born on the Feast of the Epiphany, a daugh
ter as
delicately made and as
beautiful as her mother, with a cap of straight black hair
like her father’s.

“You must have her baptized Epiphania, for
the feast,” said George of Antioch, who had come to the house
immediately upon learning that Yolande was in labor, and who had
waited with Piers and Alain through a long night. “Since you have
asked me to be a godfather I ought to have some say in the choice
of name.”

“
So
should I, if I’m to be a godfather, too,” Alain put in, looking at
the tiny creatu
re nestled
in her mother’s arms. He poked a finger at the miniature
hand, and it opened and closed like some fragile sea star. “What
name would you like, little one?”

“Alain, you might choose Maria for the name
you give her, in honor of the Blessed Virgin,” Father Ambrose
suggested.

“Yolande and I were thinking of Samira,”
Piers said.

“But isn’t that a Moslem name?” Father
Ambrose shook his head. “Still, I suppose it would not be
inappropriate for a child born in Sicily, so long as she has a
proper Christian name as well.”

“I shall please all of you.” Yolande was
almost as pale as the bed linens, and she had dark circles beneath
her eyes after her long ordeal, but her smile was brilliant and her
face was alight with happiness. Piers had told her several times
that he did not care if their first child was a girl. Piers loved
her so well that she could not doubt they would have other
children, sons and daughters to fill their home with laughter and
love. Smiling at the men who surrounded her bed, she held up the
baby so they all could see the little face. “Good sirs, may I
present to you Epiphania Maria Samira.”

“A long name for so small a child,” Alain
said, smiling.

“But a good name. Yolande learned diplomacy
at my knee,” George confided to Ambrose.

Epiphania Maria Samira was baptized the next
day by Father Ambrose, with George and Alain as godfathers and
three noblewomen, all wives of highly placed Palermitan officials,
as godmothers. Once the celebrations were over, her parents ignored
the long official name and called their daughter Samira. She was a
happy and naturally sociable baby and soon had both George and
Alain, as well as all the members of Piers’s household, wound about
her tiny fingers.

“She has Norman eyes,” Alain said when Samira
was six months of age. “Yolande, have you noticed how they’ve
changed from blue to a lovely shade of gray-green? How could that
happen when you and Piers have dark eyes?”

“If you did not spend so much time at sea,
you would have heard the discussion long before this,” Yolande told
him. “My father was a Norman baron and my mother often told me
about his beautiful gray-green eyes. We have concluded that Samira
inherited the color from him.”

“I believe she must have inherited her
grandfather’s Norman tenacity, too,” Alain said, laughing. “See how
she clutches my finger and won’t let go. I do believe she remembers
me from the last time I saw her four months ago.”

“You ought to have children of your own,
Alain.” Sitting on the garden bench beside him while he tried to
pry his finger out of Samira’s grasp, Yolande looked hard at him.
“You ought to have a wife. I know several lovely young girls of
good parentage.”

“No.” Alain let Samira pull his finger into
her mouth and suck on it. He met Yolande’s glance with fierce eyes.
“I will take no wife in Sicily. This sweet infant will be my
daughter. You and Piers will be my brother and sister. You are all
the family I need.”

Samira grew bright and healthy, a joy to her
doting parents. Unhappily, after her first child Yolande’s future
pregnancies ended in miscarriages or stillbirths. Her inability to
give Piers strong sons was a continuing sorrow to Yolande, but
never did he speak a word of blame to her. Instead, they grew
closer with each sad loss, their love never wavering.

Their lives settled into a pattern, with
Piers away for part of each year, on the mainland with Roger. The
danger there from the armies of the various holy Roman emperors who
invaded South Italy with disturbing regularity, coupled with
Yolande’s dislike of the sea and her fear of seasickness, kept
Piers from asking her to accompany him. She had never seen the
lands or his castle in Ascoli that he held in fief from Roger.

Piers did not mind if Yolande stayed at home.
Palermo provided a far more luxurious environment than Italy, and
it pleased him to think of his wife supervising his household or
tending to her garden, with Samira sleeping in her padded basket
or, when she was old enough to walk, playing near her mother. It
was a picture he could conjure into his mind when he was lonely, or
when he was preparing to go into battle. Knowing they were safe
gave him peace; the desire to return to them inspired him with
greater courage than he otherwise would have shown. Soon he had new
titles and more grants of land in reward for his devotion to
Roger.

Alain, too, fared well during the bright
afternoon of Roger’s long reign. He held the title of emir now, and
had his own lands in Italy, as well as property in Sicily at
Trapani and near Taormina. From contacts he made through George,
Alain invested in businesses with several Greek merchants who
shipped goods throughout the Middle Sea. Both Alain and Piers were
becoming richer than they had ever dreamed of being.

After spending nearly ten years in Sicily,
eight of those years living with Piers and Yolande and acting as
their private chaplain while he pursued his studies, Father Ambrose
was called home to England.

“I have been elected to lead the Abbey of St.
Justin, where I lived before I came to Sicily,” Ambrose told his
friends. “I suspect the choice devolved upon me only because I have
been away for so long that I am not involved in any of the quarrels
that have divided the abbey in recent years. It seems even monks
and priests cannot prevent themselves from taking sides in a
dispute between rulers, and of course, we have all heard the tales
of the civil war now tearing England apart. The abbacy of St.
Justin’s is not a position I can welcome, but I feel called to do
what I can to bring peace to that house of God.”

“I am sure you will succeed,” Yolande said,
“but how can we manage without you here? What other priest can so
completely rejoice with us in our happiness or grieve with us in
our sorrows? Dear Uncle Ambrose, who will hear my confessions?”

“I know one or two priests who have come to
Palermo to study Greek and Arabic as I once did,” Ambrose told her.
“I will find someone to minister to your needs before I go.”

“St. Justin’s Abbey,” Alain said
thoughtfully, “is not very far from Banningford Castle.”

“It is nearer to Haughston,” Ambrose said. “I
will be certain to send you word of my arrival at St. Justin’s and
I’ll tell you how our old friends fare.”

“And our enemies,” Alain added.

*
* * * *

Ambrose left Sicily in the early spring of
the Year of Our Lord 1144. It was two years later when his first
letter from England reached Alain.

I
arrived safely in time for Christmas, but with
the abbey in sad disarray there was little to celebrate
,
Ambrose wrote.
On my
way here I saw how much of England has been laid waste by this
terrible war between Stephen and Matilda. Villages in this area are
destroyed with such regularity that the inhabitants have no desire
to rebuild. Farmers fear to plant crops, for the contending armies
steal the food before it can be harvested, leaving the peasants to
starve. I pray constantly for peace.

Baron Radulf still rules at Banningford, and
at Haughston, too. I have learned that the lady whose name is ever
in your heart remains in her tower room, confined by her father’s
orders. More than that I have not been able to learn, for Radulf s
lands, though not distant in miles from St. Justin’s, are
completely self-sufficient and thus separate from the surrounding
countryside. Radulf entertains few visitors; his wife never leaves
the castle; the villeins who live on his lands do not speak to
outsiders. Somehow, through all the vicissitudes and shifting
loyalties of this war, Radulf has maintained his independence and,
if anything, has grown steadily stronger and more entrenched in his
own lands, as well as in the bordering lands that once belonged to
Crispin.

Ambrose ended his letter with affectionate
prayers for the well-being of all his friends in Palermo, and
especially for Alain, Piers, Yolande, Samira, and George of
Antioch.

Not wanting to add to Piers’s present
burdens, Alain did not mention England or show the letter to him.
Yolande was recovering from yet another stillbirth and Piers was
seriously concerned about her health. Piers himself had been ill,
of an infected battle wound.

During that summer, while at sea, Alain often
thought about returning to England. Joanna, kept in a tower room by
her father, called to him across half the known world. In his mind
her bright image had faded somewhat during the years since he had
last seen her, but he felt duty-bound to carry out his promise to
return to her. He even went so far as to suggest that Roger might
send him on an embassy to England.

“To what end?” asked Roger. “Can the king of
England support me in my constant battles against the holy Roman
emperors? Or against the Byzantines, who would also like to unseat
me from Sicily? No, my friend, there is nothing your countrymen can
do for me and, therefore, no need for an embassy to whoever may
presently be ruling that unhappy land. But if you are in the mood
for a delicate task, I will send you to Rome to speak with the
pope, whose support I do need.”

Thus, once more, the return to England was
delayed. The years passed and, ever obedient to the oath of fealty
he had sworn to Roger, Alain sailed with the navy to Italy under
George’s command, to Corfu, even to the Greek mainland, on
successful campaigns. His honors and his wealth accumulated. When
he was at home in Palermo Alain often visited Piers and Yolande.
Samira called him Theo Alain. Had it not been for his nagging sense
of guilt over Joanna, he would have been happy.

And then everything in Roger’s kingdom began
to change. Roger had at last paid heed to his advisers and agreed
to remarry.

“You ought to think of marriage, too,” he
said to Alain. “You aren’t getting younger, you know, and men were
not meant to live out their years alone. No one can ever take my
dear Elvira’s place in my heart, but Sibyl of Burgundy is a good
woman and I will be content with her. Alain, you should do as I am
doing, and marry for the sake of convenience.”

But Alain could not reconcile himself to a
marriage of convenience, and more and more often he wished his
sworn duty to Roger did not keep him in Sicily.

Once married, Roger stayed in Palermo more
than he had done in the past, and George, too, remained at home.
Both were aging, and George in particular was often unwell,
suffering from painful kidney stones and from a wasting disease
that slowly sapped his once great strength. Yolande tended George
during his ailments, often staying at his house for days at a
time.

On Easter Sunday in the Year of Our Lord
1151,in the cathedral at Palermo, Roger had his eldest surviving
son, William, crowned as co-king of Sicily, a sure sign that the
old warrior understood how badly his own health was failing. The
event was attended by anyone of note in the kingdom and by many
foreign dignitaries.

Shortly
after the coronation, with its attendant exhausting social
activities, George of Antioch became seriously ill. Yolande spent
long days by his side, but neither her loving care nor the skills
of hi
s doctors could save him. George lingered
painfully through the summer and early
autumn, dying as the old year moved toward its end. They buried the
great Emir al-Bahr on a rainy, windswept December day, with Yolande
shivering between Piers and Alain.

“You should not have come to the cemetery,”
Piers said to her. “You are wet and chilled.”

“
Of
course I should be here,” Yolande responded. “And now I’ll see to
the reception at his house. I was hostess for Theo Georgios often
enough in my youth; today I
will be his hostess one last
time.”

When she moved away from her husband to speak
to a member of the Curia, Piers and Alain exchanged worried
glances.

“
I can
see to it that she does not get with child again,” Piers said in a
low voice. “There are enough different ways of loving to make
certain of that, and I would not put her into such danger after the
last time. But I cannot stop her from tending to the needs of
everyone she loves; it is her nature to care for others, and so she
overtires herself, as
she has done for George.”

“Perhaps now that George is gone you can make
her rest,” Alain suggested.

But Piers’s concern was well-founded. Shortly
before Christmas, worn out by the long hours she had spent with
George, Yolande fell ill, and grew steadily worse.

“I have explained your absence from court to
Roger,” Alain said early in the new year. “He understands that you
don’t want to leave Yolande. How is she today?”

“
No
better.” They were in Piers’s private study, a pleasant room that
Yolande
had furnished for
him with a large writing table and chairs well padded with
cushions for comfort. Shelves on one wall held rolled-up scrolls,
maps of southern Italy and Sicily, and a few bound books. Two tall
windows looked out to the garden. Piers rubbed his hands across his
face. “Samira is with her. We take turns, so she is never alone.
Dear God, Alain, what am I going to do if -? No, I won’t think
about it. I can’t. Yolande will get better. When the spring comes,
when the sun is warm again, we’ll ride
up into the hills and
eat almond
and honey pastries
and laugh and make love, just as we’ve always done.”