Read Online The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers by Anne O'Brien - Free Book Online

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    I know you have it! I’ll get my hands on it; you mark my words.
    Greseley frowned, his spiky brows meeting over his unprepossessing nose. Janyn did not notice. Meanwhile, I preserved a perfectly bland insouciance.
    Fool! Idiot girl! I berated myself with increasing fury over the following days. A sensible woman, he called you. A businesswoman. And you let yourself be gulled. He knew how to dupe you, to wind you ’round his grubby fingers!
    By God he did! By the end of the week I knew I had seen the last of my morning gift. Greseley was elusive, exchanging not one word with me and avoiding my attempts to catch his eye. And when my impatience overcame my discretion…“What have you done with…” I hissed in his ear as he slid onto a stool to break his fast.
    “Pass the jug of ale, if you please, mistress,” was all I got. With one gulp he emptied his cup, crammed bread into his mouth, and left the room before I could pester him further.
    “Stir this pot,” Signora Damiata ordered, handing over a spoon.
    So there was no chance of my hunting him down, and later that day he was sent into the city on business that kept him away overnight.
    How could I have been so ingenuous as to trust a man I barely knew? I had lost it. I had lost it all! I would never see one of those coins again, and my misery festered, even though I was kept hopping from morning to night. My mind began to linger on the effect of a large spoonful of wolfsbane on the scrawny frame of the clerk.
    And then Greseley returned. Well, he wouldn’t get away with ignoring me this time. Was he suffering from guilt? If he was, it did nothing to impair his appetite, as he chomped his way through slices of beef and half a flat bread, completely undisturbed by my scowling at him across the board.
    “We need to talk,” I whispered, nudging him between his shoulder blades when I smacked a dish of herring in front of him.
    His answering stare was cold and clear and without expression.
    “Careful, girl!” snapped the Signora. “That dish! We’re not made of money!”
    Greseley continued to eat with relish, but as I cleared the dishes, he produced a roll of a document from the breast of his tunic, like a coney magicked from the sleeve of a second-rate jongleur, and tapped it against his fingertips before sliding it into an empty jug standing on the hearth, out of the Signora’s line of sight. It was not out of mine. My fingers itched to take it. I could sense it, like a burning brand below my heart.
    At last. The kitchen was empty: Janyn closed the door on himself and his ledgers, the Signora climbed the stair to her chamber, and I took the scroll from its hiding place and carried it to my room. Unrolling it carefully, I read the black script. No easy task! The legal words meant nothing to me, the phrases hard on my understanding, the script small and close written. But there was no doubting it. He had done what he had promised. There was my name: Alice Perrers. I was the owner of property in Gracechurch Street in the city of London.
    I held it in my hands, staring at it as if it might vanish if I looked away. Mine. It was mine. But what was it? And more important, what did I do with it?
    I ran Greseley to ground early the next morning with his feet up on a trestle and a pot of ale beside him.
    “It’s all very well—but what am I expected to do with it?”
    He looked at me as if I were stupid. “Nothing but enjoy the profits, mistress.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I doesn’t matter whether you do or not. It’s yours.”
    He was watching me closely, as if to test my reaction. I did not see why he should, so I said what I wanted to say.
    “It does matter.” And in that moment it struck home how much it meant to me. “It matters to me more than you’ll ever know.” I glowered. “You won’t patronize me, Master Greseley. You will explain it all to me, and then I will understand. The property is mine and I want to know how it