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Page 168
''How do I know it? It is whispered all over Europe, and spoken aloud here in England."
"Yes," the Queen said bitterly, "because Harry did not wish you to marry her and have anything that was truly your own. Do not you be a fool, Richard. Your father may have been a lecherous old goat, but he was never, never the kind of fool that would let a woman interfere with his political purposes. There were women enough to come running at the crook of his fingerwomen many times more beautiful than the Capetian."
"He hated me enough to take her, then push her on me and laugh that I had been cuckolded even before marriage."
There was another silence. Then the Queen said slowly. "I do not believe he ever hated you. It was a kind of fear, mixed up with the desire to keep you in his power, like a child. He could not let his children go. But I will swear to you Alais is a clean maid."
"Well, what if she is?" Richard replied, the sulky note clearer and more dangerous. "I cannot marry her anyway. The rumors were enough to make me the laughingstock of the world if I took her now. And," he added hastily, "you need not read me a long lecture on political necessity. I will find a way to keep Alais' dowered lands, Gisors and the Vexin, do not fear for that."
"Light of my eyes!" the Queen's voice broke and then continued wavering, "I do not doubt your strength and skill to keep anything you desire. But neither strength nor skill can keep you safe from what I fear. You do not know the heat that can strike a man dead in the saddle without a wound on him, and the strange diseases that waste men to bones, or eat them up with sores, or make them vomit their lives away."
"I have taken God's Cross and do God's work. He will protect me. Do you doubt the Divine Power, Madam?"

 
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