The Sister Queens

by Sophie Perinot

  “They are also the sons of my mother, Eleanor. My mother.”

  Henry’s voice drops, and I see the pain in his eyes. I cannot understand his sentimentality over his mother, which has only increased since her death. Isabella treated him pitifully while she lived—deserting him to remarry and flouting his interests whenever they did not correspond with her own. I hate her for how she neglected my husband, and for how she played upon his loving nature. But right now I hate her even more for the brood of noisome, oafish sons she allowed Hugh of La Marche to breed from her.

  “How can I turn on my brothers? Would you want Edward to turn on Edmund?”

  Henry’s question brings a sudden flash of clarity. Henry wants these brothers, and he needs to believe they are good and that they love him. This complicates things—not the least among them my feelings. I know how Henry ached for family before I came to him. He has said it to me a thousand times—how sorry he is that he and Richard grew up strangers; how he would have our family be as close as the one I came from; how much he wants to know his sons as his father never knew him. Now it is my turn to feel the sting of tears.

  Henry walks to my side and, in a single deft motion, breaks the stem I was struggling with and hands me the flower. “Invite the Countess of Pembroke to court,” he suggests, looking sheepish, “and I will suggest to William that if he cannot abstain until his wife is delivered, then at least he ought to be less public in his activities.”

  I know this will not be the end of our troubles with the Lusi-gnans. Yet what is damage to the stores of the bishop of Ely, or any of the damage caused by William de Valence’s bad behavior for that matter, compared to the serious heartache Henry will suffer if I press my point? Surely my own people can work round the Poitevins or just ignore them, as can I personally. And should they do something to more directly damage me, there can be no question as to the winner in such a battle. The Savoyards will not be bested by some drunken riffraff no matter whom they are related to.

  UPON RETURNING FROM THE GARDEN to my apartment, my first order of business is a letter to Uncle Peter. He is stopped at Windsor to settle a matter with Edward’s tutor and will be waiting for a report of my conversations with the king. To be honest, he might have resolved the issue that takes him to Windsor by letter, but with the Lusignans’ sniffing around for everything they can get, it is more important than ever that Peter and I assert control over matters pertaining to the Lord Edward.

  Protecting my son’s lands and interests is the great work of my life. In fact, in addition to discussing the Lusignans with Uncle Peter by letter, I must write of Edward’s Gascony. My uncle and I are supporting the candidacy of Simon de Montfort for seneschal there. It is our opinion that he is the perfect man to put that critical but ever-troublesome part of Edward’s appanage in order. But, despite my ongoing attempts at persuasion, Henry does not, at the moment, see things as we do. Henry wants to send Richard, but I know that gentleman will have Gascony for himself if he can. He has always angled for it, and all the more so since it was given him and then snatched back five years ago.

  No, Peter and I must continue to press most firmly for de Montfort. Simon will wish to be paid, and paid handsomely, but he will not poach the territory itself. This suits me as I will never rest until Edward is invested with those lands and holds them secure from threat.

  I sit down at my writing table and look down on the garden I just left, but, instead of thinking how best to set things forth for Peter, I find myself distracted by my new windows. My eyes follow their delicate silver-gray grisaille pattern. I wonder if I might have something similar done in fabric for a patterned gown. Perhaps in the lovely gold and warm pink of my new tile floor—or am I too old at twenty-four to wear pink? I get up and, ignoring the inquisitive glances of my ladies, hurry to my bedchamber to consult my mirror. No, by God’s coif! My looks are as good as they ever were. Moving to my dressing table, I eye the finely carved casket I keep there. I need not open it to know what is inside—every letter that Marguerite has written me since Beatrice was married. Although I have not answered a single one, I have not had the heart to dispose of them. Running my finger over the box’s top, I think how strange it is that before I broke with Marguerite, I felt no pressing need to keep her letters. A few, to be certain, are tucked away, but most, once answered, I simply burned.

  I take out Marguerite’s last letter. Like so many before it, it pleads for an answer. And in its closing lines, my sister posits that perhaps I do not read her missives at all anymore—that they are sent in vain. Just because I do not speak, Sister, I think, does not mean I have not been listening.

  Family. Henry forgives his everything, and I am the loser by it. I, on the other hand, am more wary of clemency. I have repaired my relationship with Boniface because practical and political necessity demanded it. And my relationship with my mother is mended as well, a task materially assisted by a recent visit during which she assured my husband that, whatever the rumors to the contrary, she did not surrender the rights to castles pledged to us to secure Beatrice’s marriage.

  Yet I have not forgiven Marguerite. Perhaps I cling to my anger at my sister because her betrayal hurt me more than the others and deep cuts are not easily healed.

  I have not forgiven Marguerite, and who is hurt by it? Marguerite to be sure. She makes no attempt to hide it. But I am also. “Stubborn Eleanor. You are too stubborn for your own good.” I can hear Marguerite saying the words as if she were in the room. And why not? She has sounded some variation on this theme countless times over the years. And now, if her nef sinks at sea, if she is killed or captured in the desert, if not a single word of hers ever reaches me again, what stain will I carry on my soul? Who will mourn her more than I?

  Taking her letter with me, I return to my writing table. The garden no longer has the power to draw my eye. Uncle Peter can wait.

  CHAPTER 22

  Marguerite,

  …We are sisters. People have been wont to tell us since infancy how different we are. But in truth, Marguerite, when compared to those not of our blood, we are more alike than different. Too much alike to be unforgiving of each other’s faults. Whatever part you may have played in the marriage of our sister Beatrice, it is forgiven. Can you forgive likewise my stubborn obstinacy in neglecting you for so long? I have been foolish, but I have learned from my error. I swear to you there is no act of yours sufficient to permanently harden my heart against you. This I learned, and I will not forget it again.…

  Your sister,

  Eleanor

  MARGUERITE

  AUGUST 1248

  AT SEA

  I have my letter! It arrived yesterday, on our very last afternoon in France. Standing on the deck of the royal nef, near the ship’s castle, I say a prayer of thanksgiving. Marie, at my elbow, thinks I pray for the safety of all the thousands of souls at sea since this morning. And I will do that too, but later.

  Moving away from my lady, I open Eleanor’s pages again. I have plenty of room and quiet for my reading and reflections. A majority of the ladies on board have not yet become accustomed to the effects of being at sea, but it agreed with me from the very first moment the anchor was drawn up. The wind feels good, and the sun on the crests of the waves sparkles like diamonds. Having finished Eleanor’s letter for a third time, I gaze out over the water and begin to count ships. I can see thirty in addition to our own. I wonder if the Sieur de Joinville is aboard one of them. Having failed to catch sight of him on land, it will be some weeks now before I have any hope of seeing him. And in truth, I had very little hope of glimpsing him at Aigues-Mortes, though I could not stop myself from closely examining every knight who passed.

  With the sound of the seabirds in my ears, I recall the day we arrived at Aigues-Mortes. Louis was ecstatic as the city came into view, for though he planned it, and paid for it, before the moment it rose on the horizon, the king had never seen the result of his labors save in his own imaginings.

  “Look at it!�
�� he exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Out of nothing we have built a city with a single purpose—to launch the crusade that will take back the Holy Land.” And I knew I ought to admire Aigues-Mortes—that Louis was waiting for me to comment on its fine wooden wall and imposing towers. Ordinarily I am sure I would have, but all I could see at that moment were the tents. Hundreds upon hundreds of tents of every size and color girdled the city walls. When I asked how many men had gathered, how many stood ready to ride and march into battle behind the oriflamme standard, Louis’s constable, Humbert de Beaujeu, reported that more than two thousand knights were already present, with more arriving. More astonishing still, two times that many archers had been assembled, and twice again as many men-at-arms as archers. For the first time I grasped the full magnitude of our undertaking. I found myself wondering whether the many ships and crews that my husband commissioned from Genoa and Sicily would be enough to carry so many to the Holy Land.

  I am called back to the present by the touch of sea spray on my face. I tuck Eleanor’s pages into the bag at my waist—it is Eleanor’s aumônière, the one covered in poppies that she gave me all those years ago. The new letter joins the last she wrote me before Beatrice was married. I’ve been carrying that missive as a talisman to bring me luck—luck in the form of the letter that will now displace it. It is time for me to go to my cabin, not to eat, as Marie has been urging for hours, but to begin a letter to Eleanor. I will tell her of the great city that Louis and I built in the marshes, and how we make first for Cyprus where the stores that we purchased for our army lie waiting.

  “TO WASTE SUCH WEATHER IS a sin. We should never have left Limassol and come to Nicosia.” Louis’s voice is soft, but it brims with dissatisfaction. I slip silently into the room, unwilling to interrupt the discussion.

  “And I say again, Your Majesty, we do better to act as we have—to wait for all the ships that have not yet landed and the men who have not yet arrived.” The voice of Humbert of Beaujeu is equally composed and equally urgent.

  “Even with the hand of God upon us, it is prudent to have the largest possible force at Your Majesty’s disposal when we go into battle,” adds Philip of Nanteuil. “If those knights and armed men who were separated from us at sea do not find Your Majesty here, in Cyprus, there is some chance that they might come to harm trying to join us in the Holy Land.”

  I can see at a glance that Louis has called together his good knights, those half-dozen or so preudommes in whom he places the most faith and respect. When we landed at Limassol last month, Louis was as excited as any child to see the massive stores we had paid for heaped in fields and waiting according to plan. Having worked for three years, and spent more than one and a half million livres to be ready to fight, Louis is eager to be in battle. It was with difficulty that his noblemen persuaded him not to set sail immediately for the Holy Land. And the greater part of him needs to be convinced of the wisdom of that decision again regularly.

  “I would not abandon any of my men,” Louis concedes. “But it is already October—” Noticing me, my husband stops abruptly. His eyes seem confused and his mouth sets into a straight line. “What do you do here?”

  I hesitate for a moment, biting my lower lip, embarrassed by his reception. I thought to be a partner to Louis in this undertaking, as I was when we were recruiting knights, but the closer we get to the Holy Land, the more I am treated as a distraction. “Your Majesty, the Countess of Provence has been delivered of a fine, fair son, and she and the count have named him in Your Majesty’s honor.”

  The king starts visibly. In his obsession with Egypt, it seems he forgot that my sister has been laboring for two days. I know that he did not miss me in bed last evening, for since we left French shores he has chosen to keep himself pure, but I am surprised he did not notice my absence from High Mass this morning.

  “This is good news.” The Count of Artois shows all the warm enthusiasm his brother lacks. After eleven years of marriage, he became a father for the first time before we left France. Matilda, good soul, pines daily for the daughter she waited so long to have and was then forced to leave behind to be with Robert on crusade.

  “Indeed,” Louis says, his eyes still on me and still disinterested. I wonder if he notices that my eyes are bloodshot. They are not so only from bearing my sister company. I have been crying with frequency these last days. My foolish heart believed that Louis the crusader and Louis the golden prince whom I met at Sens as a bride would be one and the same. The disappointment of my hopes is hard to bear.

  “Shall I convey Your Majesty’s pleasure in the event? Perhaps a small gift?” And then, as Louis’s expression remains vacant, “Some masses?”

  “Masses, yes, the very thing.” For a moment his face is enlivened and then, like that, he turns from me. I am dismissed—forgotten entirely. I feel my eyes begin to sting again, and I slide toward the door. Louis speaks to the Lord of Nanteuil. “When we dined yesterday, I overheard Erard of Brienne say that the Count of Sarrebruck and his cousin have arrived.”

  I stop in my tracks. The “cousin” of whom Louis speaks must be the Sieur de Joinville.

  “Yes, Your Majesty, I believe les deux are in the city.”

  “Send word to the Sieur de Joinville. He impressed me from the first, and I would have him as my man.”

  JEAN DE JOINVILLE IS WITH the king. I have stationed Marie outside Louis’s rooms. When Joinville comes out, she will bring him to me. If Yolande were alive and here, she would know better than to do so, but Marie is devoted without feeling that she dare try to influence me.

  I am in a small courtyard at the castle in which Henry I, king of Cyprus and regent of Jerusalem, so kindly installed us. I found this spot while exploring. It is removed from the main rooms—an interior courtyard space, narrowly pressed by white stone walls and distinguished by a single twisting tree at its center. I believe I am the only one who knows of it. Its weathered door is off the kitchen garden, and I myself opened it expecting to find nothing more than gardener’s tools.

  In my solitude I allow myself to relax. The weather is calfar, like the autumns of my long-ago home. As warm as a Parisian summer. I am comfortable in Cyprus. The clear blue sea at Limassol and the outline of the Troodos Massif in the north, seem familiar. This is a land with some of the same languid grace of Provence. Yet it is exotic too, and the very newness of its sights and smells excites my curiosity and my senses.

  There is a soft rapping at the door, and it opens to reveal the Sieur de Joinville. He is so bèl, more handsome than I remembered him, and not because of the finery he wears in honor of seeing the king. He looks directly at me, in a way that Louis never does anymore—making me feel a person of interest and importance.

  “Your Majesty.” He gives a bow as I sweep forward to greet him.

  “Sieur de Joinville, I had begun to think you lied to me.”

  “Lied?” The bridge of his nose furrows slightly.

  “Three years ago, when you told me you were coming on crusade.”

  “And here I am.”

  “Yet I did not see you in Aigues-Mortes.”

  “Did you look?”

  I search Joinville’s face for any touch of amusement or incredulity, but instead I see only an earnest desire to know. “Of course.”

  “My cousin and I hired a ship in Marseilles.”

  Marseilles. My mind’s eye sees its port, the sea glittering in the sunlight. “His Majesty has retained you?”

  “Fortunately. I have nine knights dependent upon me and awoke this morning with less than three-hundred livres in my purse.”

  Joinville does not ask why I wanted to see him; nor does he question that we are alone. This is just as well, for I have no satisfactory explanation. I only know that from the moment I learned yesterday that he was in Nicosia, seeing him became a thing so important that I did not sleep last night.

  “I gather,” Joinville continues, “that, despite His Majesty’s wish it might be otherwise, we will pass the whole
of the winter here in Lefkosia.”

  “Lefkosia?”

  “A servant, a Greek, told me that is what his people call this city.”

  I like that. I like that Joinville is interested in this place as more than a delay in our expedition. I too am on this journey not merely to conquer, but to absorb. To taste, touch, and see that which is different. “I believe, Sieur, that we will stay because, enfin, His Majesty’s common sense is stronger even than his desire to be in Egypt.”

  “What do the ladies do to pass the time?”

  “My sister complains bitterly about everything that is not like home. And the rest are content to behave as if we were at home, embroidering, gossiping, dining.”

  “But not you.” He makes the statement with a certainty bespeaking far closer acquaintance than we have.

  “If I wanted to be in France, I could easily be there. I am in Cyprus, and I would see something of it.”

  It is clear that Joinville is thinking. We stand in silence for more than a moment, but there is nothing at all awkward about it. Then he says, “Would Your Majesty allow me to take you to see the monastery at Politiko? I am eager to see it, as Saint Paul once preached there.” His eyes shine. Do they do so at the prospect of being with me, or, as my husband’s would in this situation, at the prospect of beholding a holy site?

  I laugh. “A monastery! My Lord of Joinville, I am a very pious woman, but I visited enough monasteries en route to my ship to satisfy me for a very long while.”

  “Where shall I take you then?”

  “To Curias, to see the ruins.”

  “So far as that?” Joinville’s eyes open wide. In this shaded place they are dark almost to blackness, but they are far from dead.