"I do not want to marry, Papa. I want to remain with you," the girl told him.

The physician chuckled as they began to move north into the storm. "It is your duty to marry, mignon, so your papa may have a warm place by the hearth in his old age," he teased her. "Unless, of course, you wish to enter a convent."

"Nay, Papa, I am not meant for the church," Alix assured him.

"Then we must find you a good and generous husband who will take us both in," Alexander Givet said. "Or perhaps I could find a nice wealthy widow who would have us. But two women in a household is rarely a good thing. And besides, I could never marry again after all my years with your mama."

"Oh, Papa," the girl responded, "why did Mama have to die?"

"Her heart was not strong in these last years," the physician told his daughter. "The strain and the tension surrounding the royal couple over the past months were finally too much for her, Alix. I would have taken her home to Anjou, but she would not hear of it. She loved her mistress, and they had been friends since they were girls. Loyalty to each other was something that both the queen and your mother possessed in abundance." He sighed gustily. "I miss her greatly, mignon. Blanche de Fleury was the only woman for me." The tone of his voice was sad, and trembled just slightly as he remembered.

Alexander Givet had met Blanche de Fleury at the court of the Count of Anjou. It was a busy court forever on the move, for Rene, the count, who was also the titular king of Naples and Sicily, and his first wife, Isabelle, the Duchess of Lorraine, were sovereigns without a real throne. The youngest son of minor Anjou nobility, Alexander had become a physician. Brought to the court by his father to gain a place among the count's retainers, he quickly found himself assigned to the household of Yolande of Aragon, the count's mother, who was raising his second daughter, Margaret. He was twenty-two at the time.