The Sister Queens

by Sophie Perinot

  “So I see.” De Joinville laughs. As the laughter is warm and lacks any touch of ridicule, it relaxes rather than offends me. “His Majesty must be delighted. Sadly, I have not yet had the pleasure of being a father.”

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, again heedless of propriety.

  “Well, I hear there is to be a crusade.” His eyes sparkle teasingly. He is more mature now; his jaw firmer; his stance more confident. He is altogether charming.

  “You will join us?” I feel my cheeks grown warm with pleasure. I could say they do so because every man Louis gathers behind his banner is important, but I would be lying.

  “How could I fail to when I heard that my queen was going? I am at least as brave as she is.”

  “Then His Majesty and I shall see more of you.”

  “Most assuredly.”

  Oh, how I wish the nefs were ready at this moment. But as it is, even the port from which they will eventually sail is not completed.

  Before either of us can speak again, there is a sound of someone approaching. Marie and Yolande round a nearby corner. Marie says nothing. She sees only a seneschal conversing with his queen.

  Yolande, however, has wise eyes. “It seems we have left Your Majesty too long.” She bustles forward and gives de Joinville a sharp look before continuing. “You ought to be inside where it is warmer.”

  Instead of putting down the stool tucked under her arm, she reaches out to help me rise. But I will have none of that. I am no invalid to be hauled up. I rise unaided and, I hope, gracefully despite my size and shape.

  “You will excuse me, Sieur.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.” He gives a bow, then waits respectfully for my ladies and me to pass. Do I imagine it, or as we do so, does his hand brush the skirt of my gown?

  THIS TIME I REALLY AM dying. It is not the pain that tells me so. The pain of birth no longer has the ability to either surprise or terrify me. No, it is the tone of the murmurings, and the expressions on faces around me that tell me something is wrong. Faces that include Louis’s. Louis has never before been with me during my lyings-in. It is neither a man’s place nor a king’s. There is a false brightness in Louis’s looks. It has been there ever since he entered. I wonder who summoned him.

  At first all seemed well. I was struck with my pains midmorning and took to my bed around midday. My midwife rubbed my belly and the insides of my legs with oil, and all the women who faithfully attend me at such times gathered about. From that point it was expected I would deliver quickly. The milk was warmed for the washing of a new child. It is too early in the year for rose petals.

  After what seems like an eternity of pushing, my baby still has not come. Lying limp in another short, blissful, lull between pains, I feel a sudden sting as the midwife opens a vein at my ankle to bleed me. Elisabeth is praying audibly to Saint Margaret. I close my eyes.

  “What ails her?” The voice is Louis’s, and the concern is gratifyingly real.

  “Your Majesty, the child is prodigiously large. Much larger than His Highness the prince. The position is good, but Her Majesty’s strength fails. I think we must pull the child forth.”

  “Then do so.”

  I can feel the woman’s hand upon me and then inside me. The ordinary agony of such a thing seems oddly muted, though my eyes do spring open and find Louis’s face. He looks pale as death.

  Yolande and Matilda raise me from my prone position, propping my back up against pillows at the head of my bed. The next pain grips me, they pull back upon my knees, and once more I strain to produce the baby. As I do so, I feel a sudden and excruciating pressure. The midwife has tied something around the babe within me, and she is pulling with all her strength. I can see the muscles in her sinewy arms shining with sweat and effort in the fading red-colored daylight. I scream wildly and stop pushing, but to no effect. The midwife is relentless.

  “Push,” she cries.

  And when I do not, Yolande places both her hands on my belly and presses with all her might, while the midwife hauls the child out of me inch by agonizing inch.

  Then I am gone.

  When I regain consciousness, my first thought is that there is blood everywhere—all about me, on my legs, on my sheets.

  Louis has hold of my hand. “We have another prince,” he says, his blue eyes searching my face. What is he looking for? “I do not know if she hears me.”

  Yolande leans over me, and I try to focus my eyes on her. “She breathes.”

  “There has been much blood lost.”

  I cannot locate the figure attached to this voice.

  Suddenly there is someone beside Louis. It is the dragon. Her voice I hear all too clearly. “Come away, Your Majesty. You can do nothing here.” She has her hand on Louis’s shoulder; he turns toward her. Again she admonishes him, “Come.” He rises.

  “No!” Without knowing how I got so, I am sitting up. “I see how it is! Whether in living or in dying you will not let me see my lord!”

  Louis turns back, a look of panicked contrition on his face. I have won.

  But then I know no more.

  When I awake, it is dear Yolande’s face hovering above me, not His Majesty’s.

  “Am I dead?” The sound of my own voice brings me an answer, for surely if I were a corpse being prepared for burial, I could not speak.

  “No indeed,” Yolande replies. “Though it was with greatest difficulty that the midwife brought you round.” She sounds almost smug. “Once she did, His Majesty would not leave you but ordered his mother from your rooms in a tone I have never heard before.”

  I can remember none of this.

  Perhaps sensing as much, Yoland continues. “You delivered three days ago.” She offers me something to drink. “Prince Philippe is a magnificent child.” She smiles again.

  Philippe? Who is Philippe? She must mean my little Louis. Then I recollect myself. “Is that what the king calls him?”

  “Indeed. After Philippe Augustus who was also a mighty thing.”

  CHAPTER 15

  My dearest Marguerite,

  Henry’s letters sound much alike. He is grown tired of North Wales and of separation from myself and our children. Gratifying sentiments to be sure, as I do miss him terribly, but not what I most wanted to hear. His last, however, brought the news I have been waiting and praying for. A truce has been reached with Dafydd ap Llywelyn. The king and his men are on their way home. My heart celebrates, and I count the days until Henry can reasonably be expected, cheating in the king’s favor by assuming nothing but good weather and good roads.

  Yours,

  Eleanor

  ELEANOR

  AUTUMN 1245

  WINDSOR CASTLE, ENGLAND

  “I love no place in the world so much as this nursery.”

  “No one doubts it, Your Majesty,” replies Edward’s nurse. She glances at me, sitting on the floor, with a slight shake of her head, but early in the prince’s six years Lady Alice learned it was useless to suggest more dignified—or, as she liked to couch things, “comfortable”—arrangements. Beatrice sits before me, attempting to stuff a hand full of my skirt into her mouth. Her nurse, once my own, shuffles forward to extricate her.

  “Leave her, Agnes,” I say. “She does no harm.” A mother four times over, I am too smart to wear my best things into the nursery.

  “Why does Beatrice eat everything?” my little Margaret asks. At five she is such a solemn thing. She is pretty, but always wears an expression that suggests she is puzzling over something.

  “Because that is what babes of two do.”

  “She looks like one of my dogs.” Edward laughs, and so do the rest of us, which greatly assists me in removing the fabric from between Beatrice’s teeth.

  Now Edward is barking and racing up and down the room. Beatrice, standing up, toddles after him, yipping delightfully. Margaret takes the opportunity to claim Beatrice’s place, sitting down and sliding close to me, until she leans against my side. “How fine and tall your
brother is getting,” I say.

  “Will I be as tall as Edward?”

  “No, my darling.” I run my hand through her hair, even though I know that being tousled offends her juvenile sense of order. “Princes are taller than princesses.”

  “But you are taller than Father, and he is king.”

  This time I laugh so hard that I cry. She is right, of course. When I came to England, I looked up at Henry, but I have grown and he has not, and now I am the taller one. “It is time to learn the role of diplomat, my girl,” I say, shaking my head slightly. “Some things we observe and keep to ourselves—women, I mean. Nothing good can come of reminding your father of my advantage in height. Men like to feel taller even when they are not.”

  Margaret turns this information over for a moment, her little face scrunched in concentration. “Do men like to feel wider too? Because Father is certainly that.”

  “I think I cut a fine figure.” The voice from behind startles me.

  “Henry!” I am on my feet in an instant, but my quickness avails me nothing. The children reach Henry before I do and are upon him like hounds on cornered prey. The king’s eyes are alight and he is laughing. Then he glances at me and something changes. His eyes grow flat and his smile has a look of labor about it.

  “Agnes, Alice, Mary, the children will tire His Majesty.” The nurses rush forward, each to collect her own charge. Henry sends the girls off with a kiss and Edward with an exchange of solemn bows.

  “Henry, the road home has fatigued you,” I say with concern.

  “Nonsense.” But his eyes avoid mine when I try to find them.

  I begin to feel uneasy. My stomach gives an odd little flip that has nothing to do with the babe inside it. In the nine years of our marriage, Henry has never taken up with another woman, but perhaps being so far away …I fight down the combination of anger and panic that rises in my throat like bile, threatening to choke off my breath. If I do not calm myself, I will have one of my breathing episodes.

  “Shall we go out and visit your gardens? The sun is warm today.” The invitation is correct in every particular—exactly what I would expect Henry to ask me and jovial in tone. But still I sense something. When I rest my hand on Henry’s arm, the hand he places over mine seems tentative.

  Windsor’s gardens are a wonder. They are my favorite among all the gardens of the royal residences. But today, instead of seeing the new beds that have been added by my direction, my eyes are drawn to the patches of autumn leaves that have collected along the bottoms of the shrubs. “Edmund has begun to crawl.”

  “Has he! Well, the Confessor be praised.”

  Our second son, born at the start of the year, seems to be rather late in doing some of the ordinary things. His back is not straight. Henry and I are both concerned by it.

  We walk in silence for a few moments. Then Henry says, “Eleanor, I have something unpleasant to tell you—something I wish for all the world I did not have to say.”

  I stare particularly hard at the withered foliage of my rosebushes.

  “Your father has died.”

  My eyes rise to my husband’s face to find his wet with tears.

  “When?”

  “August.”

  “But I have had no word!” I say in disbelief.

  “That is my doing, I fear.”

  “Why?” My voice cracks as I speak, yet I do not cry. I am too stunned. My father has been dead two months, perhaps a bit more, without my knowing? How can it be possible?

  “How could I let them tell you when I was not here?”

  The sobs break loose from me with force. Henry pulls me to him, and I lean my head on his shoulder. “I have had masses said for the count every day since I heard. And I have dispensed alms.”

  I have not seen my father in nearly ten years, and I knew that he ailed. Many times before this moment, as he wasted ill, I thought that he must die. But now, in my mind’s eye, I can only see him hale and hearty, dressed for my departure. “You will always be my Eleanor,” he said, “even if you are also England’s.”

  CHAPTER 16

  My dearest Marguerite,

  I continue to ache. Not only in my heart, but in every limb. If I could but see you. See our sisters and our mother. If we could but be together at Aix. Surely in a place so full of Father and our memories of him, this burden of sorrow would be eased. As it is, I am wont to break into tears at the slightest provocation and then be regarded strangely for doing so, at least by some. I was glad that you wrote in such detail of the sepulcher you commissioned for Father. Though neither of us was present to see him laid to rest in it, it gives me a measure of peace to know that he lies at the Eglise de Saint Jean de Jérusalem in Aix in such splendor and dignity. I pray that it likewise comforts you.

  Your devoted sister,

  Eleanor

  MARGUERITE

  DECEMBER 1245

  CLUNY, FRANCE

  After four months I still cannot believe that my father is dead. He is dead, and has left me nothing.

  All the grief I felt at his passing has hardened inside me, hardened into a tenacity of purpose as strong as the stone I selected for his sepulcher. By my father’s bequest, the whole of the County of Provence belongs to my youngest sister, Beatrice, or will upon her marriage.

  Well, I will not be deprived of my rights so easily! My father may have had the legal right to dispose of Provence and his unencumbered worldly goods however he wished, but what he had already promised to others he had no right to give, upon his death, to Beatrice. At very least, the unpaid portion of my dowry is therefore owed me as a debt, and I shall insist upon its payment. If my sister has not the ready money, then she can surrender the castles that secured the pledge. This is what I plan to press for presently, with Louis’s help, but I want more; I want one-quarter of the lands in which I was born and raised.

  My horse stumbles slightly, bringing my attention back to the road. I pull my dun-colored balandrana more tightly closed at the neck. We are passing through the gates at Cluny. Anyone bothering to look up from his business at the sound of our horses would see a party of nobles and suspect nothing more. We have ridden nearly one hundred thirty leagues in anonymity because ours is a secret delegation. Ahead, on a slight rise, I can see our destination, a massive abbey. I notice a distinctive octagonal bell tower standing in sharp relief against the slate gray winter sky.

  Inside the courtyard, my uncles Boniface and Philippe are waiting. They arrived with His Holiness the Pope a few days ago. They are each archbishops now: Philippe of Lyon where Pope Innocent IV recently held his great Council of the Church, and Boniface of Canterbury in Eleanor’s England.

  Eleanor. A lump rises in my throat at the thought of my sister and the deception we practice upon her. She does not know of this meeting. Does not know that Uncle Boniface, whom her husband has promoted to such wealth and power, is here. I force the lump down. I am sorry that Eleanor was betrayed by our father, as I was. It smacks of injustice that her interests will be overlooked at this meeting, but it is up to her husband and not to me to press for what is rightfully hers. She will doubtless be vexed when she finds that Louis and I have taken possession of Tarascon, but it is not my fault that our father pledged the same castle twice, and my claim on it predates her own.

  Besides, Eleanor knows as well as I do that Henry of England was prepared to take her without a dowry. From all she has written me over the years, I can hardly imagine he will put her aside now because there is trouble over her marriage portion. No, Eleanor has an adoring husband; she can well afford to let me have the castle at Tarascon.

  Uncle Philippe comes over as I dismount. “Your Majesty.”

  “Your Grace.” Despite the bone-chilling cold and my fatigue from the road, I cannot resist giving my uncle a smile.

  “May I escort Your Majesty to your rooms?”

  “Please.” I place my hand on my uncle’s arm, eager to be out of the weather and to hear what he will tell me. Perhaps the Holy F
ather has agreed already to endorse French demands.

  We make our way quickly to the chambers set aside for my use. I have no patience with the servants who carry in my personal effects and wish to begin making up my bed. I dismiss them by gesture, and even turn away the boy sent to bring me refreshment, unburdening him of his tray at my threshold. The niceties of arranging this place for my physical comfort can wait until I have heard what my uncle has to say.

  “His Majesty wants Beatrice for his brother Charles d’Anjou.”

  “If he can get her. My sister is the most sought-after bride in Europe, thanks to a few strokes of my father’s quill.” I know that I sound unbecomingly bitter, but who would not be resentful in my place? “Thirteen and endowed with all of Provence. Men would take her were she ugly as a crone. And, as she was a pretty child, I suspect she is not.”

  “No. All my nieces are women of great beauty.” Uncle Philippe hesitates for a moment. Regarding me oddly, as if something is out of place on my face and it puzzles him, then he says, “Louis will have to pay the pope to get her for his brother, and so will you.”

  “Me?” And though I sit in front of a roaring fire to restore some warmth to my frozen limbs, the flames have no effect. The cold I feel at the moment cannot be dispelled by fire. How could I have failed to foresee this? “Do you mean my ten thousand marks? My castle?” The thought of forgoing the portion of my dowry still owed me raises an icy anger in my blood.

  “Boniface and I would not have you blindsided.”

  “But Louis promised to insist upon the payment of my marriage portion. He is prepared to help the Holy Father in his struggles to unseat Emperor Frederick. Surely that will be enough.” I feel as if I am pleading.

  Uncle Philippe shakes his head. “When your mother made the pope Beatrice’s guardian, she likely saved Provence from being torn to bits. Even if His Holiness might consent to a division of Provençal holdings, we must take actions here to see that the county stays whole. It is in the Savoyard interest. It is in Your Majesty’s interest.”