A Murderous Procession (41 page)

PALERMO
CATHEDRAL
has been altered and restored so many times—and not, in the opinion of many, to its advantage—that it no longer has the splendor it had in the twelfth century, so I have transferred to it the wonderful and great mosaic Pantocrator of its more untouched rival, Cefalu, a building which John Julius Norwich describes as “not just the loveliest Norman exterior in Sicily, but one of the loveliest cathedrals in the world.”

THE
DISINTEGRATION
OF
SICILY
. The glory of enlightenment that was the Kingdom of Sicily lasted only sixty-four years. The marriage of William II and Joanna was apparently happy, but also tragic in that it was childless. William himself was not statesman enough to preserve what his country had been, nor to pass it on to good hands. He died at the age of thirty-six and his kingdom descended into violence and medieval bigotry. For a while Joanna was virtually imprisoned by her husband’s illegitimate successor, Tancred, and had to be rescued by Richard the Lionheart. In 1196 she was married off again, this time to the Count of Toulouse, to whom she bore three children, dying in childbirth with the third, aged thirty-four, outlived by the indomitable Eleanor of Aquitaine, her mother.

EXCALIBUR
. Nobody knows what happened to it. In the upheaval that followed William’s death, King Arthur’s sword disappeared—like the great kingdom to which it had been given.

MY
GRATITUDE
, as always, to my editor, Rachel Kahan, for her excellent and painstaking judgment. And to my agent, Helen Heller, who, like Rachel, knows how a plot should be shaped. I rely on them both. And I would like to thank the whole team at Putnam for the work that makes my books look as well as they do. Also, the staff and stacks of the wonderful London Library provide me with everything I need for the immense amount of research that goes into every novel. Thanks, too, to my daughter, Emma, for taking so much secretarial work off my shoulders, and to my husband, Barry, the rock to which I cling.