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Updated: June 26, 2025
The young King, without consulting his powerful uncle, declared his second cousin, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, heir presumptive of England, and in obedience to a previous suggestion of the Princess broke off March's engagement with a lady of the Arundel family, and married him to Richard's own niece, the Lady Alianora de Holand.
And you, then, are a daughter of that proud jade Alianora of Lancaster, for whose indwelling the fiend swept the Castle of Arundel clean of God's angels? I do not think she made up for it." Philippa's own interest was painfully aroused now. Surely Mother Joan knows something of that mysterious history which hitherto she had failed so sadly to discover. "I cry you mercy, Mother," she said.
Alianora looked at what was in her hand, and saw it was a goose-feather, in nothing resembling the feather which, when she had fled in maidenly embarrassment from Manuel's over-friendly advances, she had plucked from the robe of the Apsarasas, and had dropped at Manuel's feet, in order that her father might be forced to proclaim this quest, and the winning of it might be predetermined.
Then Alianora looked at Manuel. Now before her the queer unequal eyes of this big young man were bright and steadfast as altar candles. His chin was well up, and it seemed to her that this fine young fellow expected her to declare the truth, when the truth would be his death-sentence. She had no patience with his nonsense.
"Very certainly," declared Alianora, with that slow, lovely, tranquil smile of hers, "I shall have my portion of to-morrow. I would have made you a king, and by and by the most powerful of all kings, but you followed after your own thinking, and cared more for messing in wet mud than for a throne.
"I shall send to my Lord, of force," she answered coldly, "and desire that he come and fetch me hence." "And your sister, the Lady Alianora?" The child was kneeling by the side of her dead mother, wrapped in unutterable grief. Isabel cast a contemptuous glance upon her. "No sister of mine!" she said in the same tone. "I cannot be burdened with nameless childre."
Then Manuel sent a gold-crested wren into Provence: it entered through an upper window of the King's marmoreal palace, and went into the Princess Alianora's chamber, and fetched hence a handkerchief figured with yellow mulberries and wet with the tears which Alianora had shed in her grieving for Manuel. And Dom Manuel sent also a falcon, which returned to him with Queen Freydis' handkerchief.
And what does it matter, on this November day which has a thin sunlight and no heat at all in it? No, that girl yonder has to-day. But Alianora and I had each her yesterday; and it may be the one or it may be the other of us three who will have to-morrow, and it may be also that the disposal of that to-morrow will be remarkable."
This image also was in the likeness of a young man, but it had the fine proud features and the loving look of Alianora. Manuel confessed to being fairly well pleased with this figure, but even so, he did not quite recognize in it the figure he desired to make, and therefore, he said, he deduced that love was not the thing which was essential to him. Alianora did not like the image at all.
For she had learned, long years ere this, that to her father himself, or to the Lady Alianora, or to her half-brothers and sisters, she must never look for any shadow of love. The "mother-want about the world," which pressed on her so heavily, they would never fill. The dull, blank uniformity of simple apathy was all she ever received from any of them. Her very place was filled.
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