The Prince and the Pilgrim by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online

a few days’ growth of beard, and dressed in a brown kaftan girded with a knotted red cord. His feet were bare.
    The sheep called and crowded close to him. He saw Alice on her perch at the top of the garden wall, in the shade of the tamarisk tree, and looking up, he smiled.
    That made it certain. Alice said, a little breathlessly, though it was not possible, in the blazing sunshine, with the noise and the smell of sheep all around, to feel awe: “You did come back, then! I knew you would!”
    He stopped, leaning on his crook. The lamb on his shoulder made a small sound and he slanted his head, caressing it with his cheek. “I come this way often.”
    Though she had spoken in Latin, he answered her in her native tongue, but that was no surprise. He would, of course.
    “And you, little maid?” he said. “You are a guest here, I think, a pilgrim to my city. It must be very different from your home in Britain. How do you like it, here in the land you call holy?”
    “I do like it, a lot. But I was wondering –” began Alice, then was suddenly seized with a shyness that was normally foreign to her. What in fact did one say to someone who had come back from the dead, and to a place where he had been so cruelly killed? She swallowed and was silent.
    “You were wondering?” he prompted. He had very kind eyes, which were still smiling, but she found herself quite unable to go on with her questions.
    “Oh, just about the sheep,” she said quickly. “Those long legs, and the funny droopy ears. They’re quite different from ours. And the ones we have at home in Rheged are special. They’re little, with furry legs and blue fleeces, and they stay in the hills all winter. We don’t have to move the flocks about like you do. Where we live there’s always plenty of grass.”
    “I know something of your country.” Of course he did. “It must be beautiful in all the seasons.”
    “It is. It’s lovely. You will come there one day, won’t you? People say that some day –”
    “Lady Alice? Lady Alice?” The interruption came from Maria, her nurse, newly waking from a nap in the sunshine, and hunting the garden for her charge.
    “Some day, I hope,” said the shepherd, and raising the crook in a gesture of farewell, he turned away.
    Alice slid down from the wall and ran to meet her nurse, whom she astounded by her good behaviour for the rest of that day.

6
    “Have you noticed,” said Alice, who was eleven now, and as pretty as a girl of that awkward age has any right to be, “that my father always starts talking about his soul when the wind’s in the north, and the castle’s full of draughts?”
    She was talking to her maid Mariamne, who giggled.
    “Well, it wouldn’t do if the wind was from the south, would it? As it is, we’ll get a good fast passage, and be in the sunshine before the end of April, God be thanked! It’ll be good to be home again.” For Mariamne came from a village barely two miles from Jerusalem. She had been taken into the duke’s service on the previous pilgrimage.
    Alice gave a little sigh. “It was lovely, wasn’t it? The voyage out was best – you weren’t with us then, though – such good weather as we had, and all the places we saw – Rome, and Tarentum, and then staying with my mother’s family in Athens. You did see Athens on the way home. And then the pilgrimage itself … Of course Jerusalem’s wonderful, though there’s never a lot to do apart from – I mean, I know one really goes for the good of one’s soul, only –” The sentence died on something very like a sigh.
    Mariamne’s hand paused in its task of stitching a new shift for her mistress. The needle flashed in the sunlight which, for March, was surprisingly bright, and, in Alice’s chamber which faced south, reasonably warm, though to Mariamne, even after nearly three years, the chill of the British winter still struck deep.
    “Only?” she prompted.
    “Oh, it’s just that I don’t want to leave home