The Iron King

by Maurice Druon

  Blanche trembled all over and shook her shaven head upon which the razor had left red patches. She looked like a bird in moult.

  ‘I didn’t know … I didn’t want to … Charles,’ she said, bursting into tears.

  At that moment Isabella said in a hard voice, ‘No weakness, Charles. Remember you are a Prince.’

  Upright beneath her narrow crown, she too had remained, like a guard, a line of contempt about her lips.

  At this moment the long-contained fury of Marguerite of Burgundy was released.

  ‘No weakness, Charles! No pity!’ she cried. ‘Copy your sister, Isabella, who runs no risk of understanding the weaknesses of love. She has nothing but hatred and gall in her heart. But for her, you would never have known. But she hates me, she hates you, she hates us all.’

  Isabella crossed her hands upon her breast and gazed at Marguerite with cold anger.

  ‘May God forgive you your crime,’ she said.

  ‘He will forgive me my crime more readily than He will make you a happy woman.’

  ‘I am a Queen,’ replied Isabella. ‘Even if I lack happiness, I have at least a sceptre and a kingdom.’

  ‘And I, even if I have not had happiness, at least I have known pleasure, which is worth all the crowns of the world, and I regret nothing.’

  Face to face with the Queen of England, this woman with her shaven head, her face furrowed with fatigue and tears, had still the strength to insult, wound, and plead for her bodily rights.

  ‘It was springtime,’ she said in a hurried, breathless voice, ‘there was the love of a man, the warmth and strength of a man, the joy of taking and of being taken, everything of which you know nothing, which you would give your life to know and which you never will. Ah! you can’t be very good in bed since your husband prefers boys!’

  Ghastly pale, but incapable of reply, Isabella made a sign to Alain de Pareilles.

  ‘No,’ cried Marguerite, ‘you can have nothing to say to Messire de Pareilles. He has been at my orders in the past, and perhaps one day will be at my orders again. He will not refuse to go at my orders this once more.’

  She turned her back upon the Queen and Charles, and made a sign that she was ready. The three prisoners went out, crossed the corridors and the courtyard under escort, and returned to the room which served as their prison.

  When Alain de Pareilles had closed the door upon them, Marguerite ran to the bed and threw herself upon it, biting the sheets.

  ‘My hair, my beautiful hair,’ sobbed Blanche.

  11

  The Place du Martrai

  DAWN CAME SLOWLY FOR those who had spent the night without rest and without hope, without forgetfulness and without illusion.

  In a cell in the prison of Pontoise two men, lying side by side on a heap of straw, were awaiting death. Upon the order of Guillaume de Nogaret, the brothers Aunay had been solicitously cared for. Thus, their wounds no longer bled, their hearts beat more strongly, and some particle of strength had returned to their torn muscles and crushed flesh, the better to suffer and experience the horror of the sentence to which they were condemned.

  Neither the condemned Princesses, nor Mahaut, nor the King’s three sons, nor indeed the King himself, slept that night. Nor was Isabella able to sleep; the words of her sister-in-law Marguerite throbbed in her head. Only two men had fallen asleep without difficulty: Nogaret, because he had accomplished his duty, and Robert of Artois because, in order to satisfy his vengeance, he had ridden sixty miles.

  A little before prime,18 heavy footsteps sounded on the stones of the corridor; the archers of Messire Alain de Pareilles were come to fetch the Princesses. In the courtyard, three carts draped in black awaited them with an escort of sixty horsemen clothed in leather jerkins, coats of mail and steel helmets. Alain de Pareilles bade the Princesses get on to the carts, gave the signal for departure, and the punitive procession set itself in motion in the clear rose of the morning.

  At a window in the castle, the Countess Mahaut stood with her forehead pressed against the pane, her wide shoulders shaking with sobs.

  ‘Are you weeping, Madam?’ asked Beatrice d’Hirson.

  ‘It can happen to me too,’ answered Mahaut in a hoarse voice.

  Beatrice was dressed to go out.

  ‘Are you going out?’ said Mahaut.

  ‘Yes, Madam; I am going to see … if you permit me.’

  The Place du Martrai at Pontoise, where the execution of the Aunay brothers was to take place, was already crowded. Townsmen, peasants and soldiers had been flowing into it since dawn. The landlords of the houses giving on to the Place had let their windows at advantageous prices; people could be seen at every opening. The fact that the condemned were noble, that they were young and, above all, that they were lords of that region exacerbated curiosity. And the very nature of their crime, this huge sexual scandal, excited all imaginations.

  The scaffold had been built during the night. It was raised six feet above the ground, and the two gibbets rising above it attracted every eye.

  The two executioners arrived, their red caps and jerkins heralding their approach from afar. Behind them, their assistants carried the black chests containing their tools. The executioners mounted the scaffold and a sudden silence fell upon the crowd. Then one of the executioners turned one of the wheels with a creak. The crowd laughed as if at a mountebank’s trick. They made jokes, nudged each other, a jug of wine was passed from hand to hand up to the executioners. The crowd applauded as they drank.

  As the tumbril containing the brothers Aunay appeared, a great clamour arose, becoming louder as the crowd distinguished the two young men. Neither Gautier nor Philippe was able to move. Without the ropes that bound them to the tumbril’s rail, they would have been unable to remain upright.

  A priest had visited their prison to receive their mumbled confessions and the last words to be sent to their family.19 Exhausted, gasping, half-insensible, they were incapable of making any stand against their fate, they had but little realisation of what was happening to them, and wished only for a rapid end to their nightmare and annihilation.

  The executioners hoisted them on to the scaffold and stripped them naked.

  Seeing them thus, like two huge rose-coloured puppets, the crowd shouted as if at a fair. As the two men were being tied to the wheels, their faces turned towards the sky, a flood of gross and obscene remarks spread across the crowd. Everyone waited. The executioners were leaning against the poles of the gibbets, their arms crossed. Several minutes went by. The crowd began to grow impatient, to ask questions, to become turbulent. Suddenly, the reason for the delay became evident. Three carts draped in black arrived at the entrance to the Place. Nogaret, in agreement with the King, and through a superb refinement of punishment, had ordered that the Princesses should be present at the execution.

  Blanche fainted when she saw the two naked bodies tied in the form of crosses to the wheels.

  Jeanne, in tears, clutching the side of her cart, screamed to the crowd, ‘Tell my husband, tell Monseigneur Philippe that I am innocent.’

  Until that moment she had been able to control herself, but now her nerves gave way, and the crowd laughed at her despair.

  Marguerite of Burgundy, alone, had the courage to look at the scaffold, and those about her wondered for a moment if she did not feel an appalling, an atrocious pleasure at seeing, exposed to every eye, rosy under the sun, the man who was about to die for having possessed her.

  As the executioners raised their maces to break the bones of the condemned, she cried, ‘Philippe!’ in a voice that seemed far removed from anguish.

  Then the maces fell; there was a cracking of bones, and for the brothers Aunay the sky above them went out. With iron hooks, the executioners tore the skin from the insensible bodies; blood flowed down from the scaffold.

  The crowd was moved to a sort of hysteria when the two master executioners, with long butchers’ knives, mutilated the two culprit lovers and, at one and the same time
, with the precision of jugglers, threw the offending parts high in the air.

  The crowd jostled forward the better to see. Women cried to their husbands, ‘This doesn’t mean you can do the same thing, you lecherous old man!’

  ‘You see what will happen to you!’

  ‘You deserve as much!’

  The bodies were taken down from the wheels and the axes glinted in the sunlight as the heads were cut off. Then, what remained of Gautier and Philippe d’Aunay, those two fair equerries who but a day or two ago were still riding upon the road to Clermont, was hoisted, shapeless bloody masses, on to the forks of the gibbets. And the crows from the neighbouring churches began already to circle about them.

  Then the three black-draped carts began to move again; the Provost’s sergeants-at-arms began to empty the Place, and everyone went back to his business, his forge, his butcher’s shop or his garden, with the strange spiritual calm of people for whom the death of others was no more than a spectacle.

  For, in those centuries, when numbers of children died in the cradle and half the women in childbirth, when epidemics ravaged adult life, when wounds were but rarely cured, and sores did not heal, when the Church’s teaching was ceaselessly directed towards a consciousness of sin, when the statues in the sanctuaries showed worms gnawing at corpses, when each one carried throughout his life the spectre of his own decomposition before his eyes and the idea of death was habitual, natural and familiar, to be present at a man’s last breath was not, as it is for us, a tragic reminder of our common destiny.

  While upon the road to Normandy, a woman with a shaven head in a black-draped cart, was screaming, ‘Tell Monseigneur Philippe that I am innocent! Tell him that I have not deceived him!’ the executioners, upon the Place du Martrai, divided in the presence of some determined loafers the belongings of their victims. Indeed, the custom was that the executioners should keep for themselves everything worn by the condemned ‘below the belt’. Thus it was that the handsome purses from the Queen of England fell into their hands. Each of the master executioners took one; it was a rare piece of good luck, something that might happen only once during the whole of their lives as executioners.

  They were engaged in this division when a handsome dark woman, clothed more as a daughter of the nobility than as a townswoman, approached them and, in a low, somewhat languorous voice, asked for the tongue of one of the executed men. This beautiful girl was Beatrice d’Hirson.

  ‘They say that it is good for the stomach-ache,’ she said. ‘The tongue of whichever one you like; it’s all the same to me.’

  The executioners looked at her somewhat suspiciously, wondering whether this had not something to do with sorcery. For it was well known that the tongue of a man who had been hanged, particularly one who had been hanged upon a Friday, was useful for raising the Devil. But could the tongue of a man who had been decapitated serve the same purpose?

  However, since Beatrice had a handsome shining piece of gold in the palm of her hand, they acceded to her request and discreetly gave her what she desired.

  12

  The Horseman in the Dusk

  WHILE THE BLOOD OF the brothers Aunay dried upon the yellow earth of the Place du Martrai, where the dogs, for many days, came to sniff and yelp, Maubuisson was slowly recovering from its nightmare.

  The King’s three sons remained invisible till evening. No one visited them, except for the gentlemen attached to their persons; everyone kept clear of the doors of their apartments, behind which the three men were in the profound grip of anger, humiliation or sorrow.

  Mahaut, with her small escort, had returned to Paris at midday. Distracted with hate and sorrow, she had tried to force herself into the King’s presence. Nogaret had come to inform her that the King was working and did not wish to be disturbed. ‘It is he; it is this watchdog who bars the way and prevents my reaching his master.’ Everything confirmed the Countess Mahaut’s impression that the Keeper of the Seals was the sole artisan of the disaster which had overtaken her daughters and of her own personal disgrace. Everything tended to make her believe this: Nogaret was capable of anything.

  ‘I leave you to God’s mercy, Messire de Nogaret, God’s mercy,’ she said in a threatening voice as she left him.

  Other passions and interests were already in question at Maubuisson. The familiars of the exiled Princesses tried to renew the invisible threads of power and intrigue, even by denying the friendships of which they had been so proud but a short time before. The loom of fear, vanity and ambition set itself going once more to weave again, upon a new design, the cloth so brutally torn.

  Robert of Artois, always prudent, had the cunning not to boast of his triumph; he waited merely to harvest its fruits. But already the respect that normally was given to the Burgundy clan was turning towards himself.

  In the evening, at supper, the King had about him not only his two brothers and his daughter, Marigny, Nogaret and Bouville, but also Robert of Artois; from which fact it became evident that he was already regaining favour.

  It was a small supper; almost a mourning supper. In the long narrow room, next to the King’s chamber, where the repast was served, there reigned a heavy silence. Even Monseigneur of Valois was silent, and the greyhound Lombard, as if he felt the diners’ embarrassment, had left his master’s feet to go and lie before the fireplace.

  When the equerries, between two courses, were changing the slices of bread, Lady Mortimer came in, carrying in her arms the little Prince Edward, so that he might kiss his mother good night.

  ‘Madame de Joinville,’ said the King, calling Lady Mortimer by her glorious maiden name, ‘bring my grandson to me.’

  ‘My only grandson,’ he added to himself.

  He took up the child and for a long moment held him before his eyes, studying the little innocent face, round and rosy, the dimples marked by shadows. ‘Whose child will you show yourself to be?’ Philip the Fair wished to ask. ‘Your weak, unstable and debauched father’s, or my daughter Isabella’s? For the honour of my blood, I should like you to take after your mother; but for the welfare of France, I pray heaven that you should only be your weak father’s son.’

  ‘Edward! Give a smile for Monsieur your grandfather,’ said Isabella.

  The child appeared to have no fear of the unblinking stare fixed upon him. Suddenly, putting out his little hand, he buried it in the sovereign’s golden hair, and pulled out a curly lock.

  Philip the Fair smiled. At once there was a sigh of relief among the diners, everyone laughed, and dared at length to speak.

  When the child had gone and the meal was over, the King dismissed everyone but Marigny and Nogaret whom he signalled to remain. For a long moment he said nothing and his counsellors respected his silence.

  ‘Are dogs creatures of God?’ he asked suddenly, though his audience had no idea from what train of thought the question arose.

  He had risen to his feet and placed his hand on the warm neck of the greyhound who had got up at his approach and was stretching himself before the fire.

  ‘Sire,’ replied Nogaret, ‘we know a great deal about men because we are men ourselves, but we know very little about the rest of the phenomena of nature.’

  Philip the Fair went to the window and remained there looking out, though he saw nothing but the confused shapes of stone and vegetation. As often happens to men in positions of great power on the evenings of days when they have assumed tragic responsibilities, his mind was engaged with a vague and mysterious problem, seeking some certainty in the order of the universe which might justify his life, his position and his acts.

  At last he turned round and said, ‘Enguerrand, what is done is done, and the marks of fire and steel cannot be effaced. The culprits are at this moment face to face with God. But where tends the kingdom? My sons have no heirs.’

  Marigny said without raising his head, ‘They will have, Sire, if they take new wives.’

  ‘They have wives before God.’

  ‘God can effac
e,’ said Marigny.

  ‘God does not obey the laws of the earth. God does not consider my kingdom but only His own. It is not by prayer that I shall free my sons from their ties!’

  ‘The Pope can free them,’ said Marigny.

  The King then turned to look at Nogaret.

  ‘Adultery is no motive for annulling a marriage,’ said the Keeper of the Seals drily.

  ‘We have no other recourse today but Clement,’ said Philip the Fair. ‘And my first consideration must not be the common law, even if it is in the hands of the Pope. A King must foresee the fact that he may die at any time. To whom, Nogaret, and you Enguerrand, would you first go to announce my death, if it occurred at this moment? To Louis. He is the eldest; so he must be the first to be freed.’

  Nogaret raised his long thin hand which caught the light from the hearth.

  ‘Indeed, I cannot see how Monseigneur of Navarre can ever wish to take back his wife, nor can I see that it would in any circumstances be a desirable thing for the kingdom.’

  ‘I feel sure,’ said Philip the Fair, ‘that you will know how to convince the Curia and Pope Clement that a King’s reasons are not those of an ordinary man, but that they are, in short, reasons.’

  ‘I will devote myself to it with the utmost zeal, Sire,’ replied Nogaret.

  There was a sound of galloping hooves. Marigny rose and went to the window, while Nogaret said to the King, ‘The Duchess of Burgundy20 will most certainly do the best she can to put obstacles in our way with the Holy See. Monseigneur Louis must be warned not to destroy his chances by his temperamental peculiarities.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philip the Fair. ‘I will speak to him tomorrow and you will go as soon as possible to see the Pope.’

  The noise of galloping hooves, which had drawn Marigny to the window, ceased upon the flagstones of the courtyard.

  ‘A horseman, Sire,’ said Marigny. ‘He seems to have come a long way; his clothes are covered with dust and his horse is exhausted.’

  ‘From whence does he come?’ asked the King.