Studied history carefully and loved lost love. Eleanore of Castile, for instance, (the name also of a fine soap) who died at Harby in 1290, was so mourned by her husband, Edward I, that he erected crosses at each place where her cortege stopped between Lincoln and Westminster where she was buried. (How he must have loved her.) Three crosses remain, at Hardingstone, Geddington and Waltham Cross. Others were in Lincoln of course, and Woburn, Stony Stratford, Dunstable (a name Eleanore, this one, loved for its sound), as well as at St. Albans, Cheapside and Charing Cross. Legend has it that there may have been two more. One day Eleanore hopes to visit England and to see. For now she has retreated to the mountains (although she is college educated, at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island). "Providence looks over her," her mother often said before she died. It was a joke between them. (Don't you mean "looks after?" she would ask, but her mother said she meant what she said.) Eleanore weaves wreaths and crosses from wild grape vines which she pulls down from trees in winter (this is February, mild this year, in the mountains at least) and sells at craft fairs in the spring. Otherwise she lives on her wits and a small pension from the King. She's vowed to murder Ed Stanko before summer.

Her heart is broken.

Once she lost a baby, its father Javier, a Portuguese sailor.