Four Sisters, All Queens

by Jones, Sherry

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Why would I lie? Everything I want is mine, thanks in part to your indiscretion.”

  “I don’t see what my private life has to do with your ambition.”

  “Beatrice paid a price for your privacy. At the time I told her my informant’s tale, she was preparing to petition the pope, asking him to grant Tarascon to you.”

  She reaches out and finds the edge of her bed, then slowly sits. Beatrice had intended to keep her promise, after all. She was never the enemy.

  “I forbade her to send the letter, of course. But Beatrice was not a submissive woman. She agreed, in exchange for my silence, and Bartolomeu’s.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” Marguerite begins to cry again.

  “That was our agreement—that she never tell anyone, especially you. I would not wish to be known as a man who must utter threats and make bargains to control his wife.”

  “And now—what? Do you think you can threaten me? Go! Tell Louis what you think you know. I will deny it, and so will Joinville.” Already, a lie has begun to shape itself. Joinville, on the deck, heard her screams. He rushed inside as she was running out with the burning gown. When she ran back into the cabin, he stood by the bed with his eyes shut, offering her a blanket with which to cover herself.

  His smile is ghastly. “Why would I threaten you? You have nothing that I want.”

  “Provence is no longer yours. According to my father’s will, it goes to Beatrice’s son. I’m going fight your attempt to rule the county. And I will win.”

  His laughter sends her leaping to her feet, her fists balled. “You will not win,” he says. “Your father’s will has been changed. The pope of Rome amended it—at Beatrice’s request.”

  Marguerite stifles a cry. How can anyone amend a man’s will after he is dead? But Charles, she sees, has found a way.

  “Your sister Eléonore paid a high price for her ambition. She promised the very stars to the pope of Rome in exchange for the Sicilian crown. But revolutions are expensive.”

  “That’s why you helped Simon—because you wanted Sicily!”

  “My tactic succeeded. After spending every coin in the treasury fighting rebels, Queen Eléonore could not deliver the sum she had pledged to the pope. He threatened to excommunicate King Henry. Had he done so, his reign—and your sister’s—would have ended. Beatrice pleaded with me to help. So of course I offered to pay their debt—for a price.”

  If she must endure his smug smile for even one more moment, Marguerite will be ill. “I am going now,” she says. She turns away—but his words stop her.

  “Beatrice would have given anything for your love. To be one of you—one of the sisters of Savoy—was all she ever wanted. Yet she gave up that desire for your sake. Now you can repay her by allowing her body to be buried next to her father’s.”

  Marguerite sighs. How did she misjudge her sister so completely? “I shall agree to it,” she says. “It is the very least I can do for her, given all she has done for Eléonore and me.”

  He bows. “And you agree to my burial there, as well?”

  Marguerite bursts into laughter. She would sooner see him eaten alive by wild boars.

  A knock on the door. Gisele enters. “My lady, King Louis summons you and Sir Charles to the great hall.”

  “I am a king now,” Charles tells her. “‘Your Grace’ is the appropriate title.”

  “If you call him ‘Your Grace,’ I will dismiss you,” Marguerite murmurs to her on the way down to the main floor, where a crowd of hundreds surrounds the dais.

  Charles is forgotten at the sight of Louis on his throne in full royal regalia—furs, silks, gold cloth, even his crown—for the first time since their return from Outremer. As she wends her way through the crowd, Jean approaches, his expression bleak.

  “The king intends to take the cross again,” he murmurs. “And he will ask us to accompany him.”

  Marguerite’s step falters; his hand reaches out and she takes it, steadying herself. “Sir Jean,” she hears, and turns to see Charles standing beside her, eyeing their linked hands.

  “Charles,” she says, letting go of Jean, “Louis is going to take the cross.”

  Charles’s eyes narrow. Marguerite can almost hear his plot hatching: how can I benefit?

  As she steps up onto the platform, Louis begins to bounce in his seat. Excitement dances in his eyes. As soon as Marguerite has sat beside him, he leaps to his feet. The crowd’s murmurs fade to silence. Louis makes his announcement.

  Marguerite, thinking of the heat and dust, the bloodthirsty Saracens, the scorpions, the stinking camels, wonders—why? Why does he want to return? An eternity in hell would be preferable to another year in Outremer.

  The Lord has called him, he says, to a “most noble and sacred purpose.” The holy city, he says, is like a damsel in distress, awaiting a chivalric rescue. “We must save her from the heathens,” he cries. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

  It is a rousing speech, but the response is mild. Only a few young knights—boys too young to join the previous campaign—step forward to pledge their assistance. And then—a dagger in Marguerite’s throat, stopping her cry of No!—Jean Tristan, born in Egypt amid fear and sorrow, now a winsome young man of seventeen, as fragile as his father and too sweet-natured for battle, steps forward and declares that he will join his father. She forces a smile, wills her gaze to admire and shine for her courageous son while on the inside she shrieks at Louis and scratches his face. Are you insane? Of course he is. I won’t let you do this! Yet—how will she stop him?

  Their son Peter, just sixteen, and daughter Isabelle, the Countess of Champagne—said to be the very likeness of Marguerite—step forward. They, too, will go. And then Philip steps up to the dais. He bows his dark head before Louis. Gasps arise. The heir to the crown! Will the king allow it?

  “This is my son,” Louis says, “in whom I am well pleased.” In an obviously rehearsed scene, Philip climbs the steps to the dais and kneels before him. Louis pulls his sword from the scabbard on his hip and touches the blade to each of his shoulders and then to the top of his head, knighting him. Marguerite wipes the tears from her face, still forcing a smile.

  And then he turns to her. “My queen,” he says, “your valor and ingenuity saved our life on our last campaign in Outremer. I trust that we can count on you to join us again?”

  The eyes of the nobles and knights, their wives, the servants, her sons and daughters turn to her as she stands silent, perspiration drenching her gown, her pulse hammering in her ears. Beatrice, I am sorry. Jean’s dark gaze soothes her. His head is moving almost imperceptibly from side to side, telling her the answer she already knows.

  “No, my lord,” she says. The room is a held breath. “God has not called me to this journey. He would have me remain in Paris to rule our kingdom.

  “And besides”—she finds Charles in the crowd and smiles warmly at him—“I know you will be in the best of hands. Your brother Charles, the King of Sicily, plans to accompany you.” She is already basking in Charles’s cold glare. “He promised me today that he will remain by your side until the end of your campaign.”

  Eléonore

  Family Comes First

  London, 1271

  Forty-eight years old

  GRIEF HANGS AS thick as a shroud over the funeral of Henry of Almain. Remorse bitters Eléonore’s tongue. She’d hoped to bring her nephew into the court as her steward, to reward him for helping to free Edward from captivity. But with Henry weakened by illness and Edward seeking his own glory in Outremer with King Louis, Eléonore has been occupied putting down minor rebellions by hotheads and glory seekers. Six years after Simon’s defeat at Evesham, England still surges and plummets like a storm-tossed ship—with Eléonore its only anchor.

  The monks lay the coffin in the grave, next to where Sanchia is buried. Across from Eléonore, Richard begins to sob, clinging to the arm of his new, beautiful, sixte
en-year-old wife, Beatrice of Falkenburg, whose distaste for marriage to a sixty-two-year-old man shows on her face like a bad smell. Eléonore watches Richard closely. When he lifts his eyes to hers, she sees hatred. As she knew she would.

  She approaches him when the service is finished, as they walk past the lovely old chapel and majestic spires of the abbey he and Sanchia founded. His tears have stopped, but he looks as if he might explode.

  “I know what you are thinking, and I beseech you to think again,” she says. “This fighting must stop, for England’s sake.”

  “Simon de Montfort’s sons are the ones who need stopping. For England’s sake.”

  “We will find them, Richard, and we will hang them high.”

  “Using a garotte, I hope.” His mouth twists. “I want to see them suffer.”

  He wants revenge. Eléonore would feel the same, no doubt, if the Montforts had killed Edward in such a cowardly manner. Poor Henry of Almain: he had never the chance to defend himself, for the Montfort brothers stabbed him in the back while he prayed, on his knees in the chapel of Viterbo.

  “Richard, their mortal souls will suffer in hell. Isn’t that enough?” The pope of Rome has already excommunicated them for the shocking murder.

  “Will it bring back my son?”

  A shout arises, and the rumble of running horses, six of them, stampeding through the cemetery, kicking up clods of grass and heath, headed their way as if to trample them down. Edward lifts his sword but Hamo Lestrange, Roger Leybourne, and his Lusignan cousins cut him off, begging him to take refuge in the chapel. Eléonore takes Henry by the arm and runs as fast as she can drag him on his arthritic legs—which is not quite fast enough.

  “Death to the monarchy!” the riders shout. “Death to the killers of Simon de Montfort!” An egg hits Eléonore’s gown, streaming yellow yolk on dark blue; Henry cries out as another splats against the side of his head.

  “Come on, let’s get them,” she hears Hamo say.

  Eléonore turns abruptly. “No!”

  Why don’t these men see that fighting begets fighting, that killing only causes more killing? “I forbid you to attack,” she says. Edward sends her a dark look but his men hold their swords by their sides as the horses speed past, the youths laughing and taunting as they disappear into the woods.

  “Why did you stop them?” her daughter-in-law Eleanor of Castille asks. “Don’t you care that we are mocked and ridiculed?”

  “By youths such as those? No.” Edward’s wife purses her lips in obvious disagreement—an expression she wears often in Eléonore’s presence. “Idle young men spend most of their time plotting and committing mischief. I’m sure Edward has told you about his own marauding years.”

  “That was a long time ago. England has changed. Our subjects need stability.”

  Our subjects? “Stability is what I am trying to give them.”

  “By shrugging your shoulders when these incidents occur? You make us appear weak.”

  “Refusing to fight requires more strength than attacking every downy-cheeked lad who waves his sword at us.”

  “The people want a strong ruler. That’s why they supported Simon de Montfort.”

  “Oh, is that why?” Eleanor of Castille wears the look of a hound on the scent of a hare these days. She has begun to hunger for queenship.

  At Berkhamsted Castle, men are running across the lawn toward them, waving their hands. Richard leans over his horse, exchanges words with one of them, then spurs his horse to a gallop. Edward follows close behind, with his knights. Eléonore, too, races across the lawn, around the château, dodging shadows, determined to stop the fighting, ignoring Henry’s attempts to call her back to him. She follows the men to a stone house behind the castle and dismounts in a hurry to run after them.

  “Mother! By God’s head, leave this place,” Edward says, but it is too late. Eléonore has seen the hanged man swaying from the rafters, his open and bulging eyes, his blue face. Bile rises to her throat, but she cannot look away. Edward’s face is pale as he and his friends hold the body while Hamo, who has climbed up to the ceiling, cuts the rope with his knife.

  “Why, O Lord?” Richard sits on the floor, tearing at his hair. “Why take my man from me today, of all days? Haven’t you punished me enough with the death of my son?”

  Eléonore bends over, touches his elbow, helps him gently to stand. She leads him to a chair and sits near him, hand on his arm, trying to comfort. Who was he? she asks.

  “Abraham,” he says, weeping. His Jew, who murdered his wife all those years ago. “My most loyal servant. My most trusted friend.” His sobs increase. “Dear God, why didn’t you just take me, instead?”

  Edward hands him a parchment, sealed with Richard’s wax seal, bearing his name in ink. Richard opens it with trembling hands. As he reads, emotions sweep across his face: Sorrow. Disbelief. Anger.

  “Damn him to hell,” he mutters, dropping the letter. Eléonore scoops it up. “Damn his Jewish bastard soul to the hottest hell forevermore.”

  “Let me have that, Mother.” Edward holds out his hand but she will not take orders from her son, not until he is a king and perhaps not even then. She unfolds the parchment and reads.

  You will never forgive me. Nor can I forgive myself, which is why I must leave this world. I have killed an innocent woman. Not my beautiful wife Floria—beloved by you, also, my lord, yes, I knew. Although I was accused of her death, I was not her killer. Yet I am a murderer, and so I must die.

  As she reads, she discovers the circumstances, at last, of the Jewess Floria’s death sixteen years ago. She reads how Abraham’s young servant Samuel came to him as he worked in the treasury, his eyes filled with a horror that sent Abraham racing across the meadow to his house. He found his wife on the floor, blood pooled under her head, a large chess piece—the queen, my lord, from the set that I gave to you—matted with blood and hair on the floor beside her. Samuel told me of a quarrel that he had heard only moments earlier between Floria and the Lady Sanchia. Abraham sent him to find his father, Joseph, but Sanchia soon appeared and began to call out for Richard.

  How cruel of her, I thought, to blame me for her crime, to kill my Floria and then allow me to be locked in the London Tower, where I signed a false confession that slandered my entire race. I might have been hanged if not for you, my lord. You saved my life, which makes my crime against you all the more egregious.

  I killed your wife, the Lady Sanchia, by means of a poison mixed into her wine.

  “Sanchia!” The words begin to swim. A teardrop falls on the letter, smudging the fresh ink.

  I killed her in an act of revenge that any man would take, and I never thought about her again. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But today Samuel came to me. His father is dying, and Samuel blames himself. “There is a blot on my soul,” he told me. “I must atone, or God will kill my father.”

  Samuel murdered Floria, he confessed, in a fit of passion. He had professed his love to her (Alas, who did not love Floria?) and she rebuffed him, saying she was a married woman and an honorable one. So he contented himself with spying on her. One day he spied her embracing the Lord Richard, in the gardens; running from the horrid scene, he collided with the Lady Sanchia’s sister, Beatrice, who had also seen them. Floria was a wanton, she told him, who had broken many hearts at Berkhamsted.

  Seeing Samuel’s anguish, she tucked her arm into his. Floria had mocked him, she said, telling everyone in the court how he cried for love of her. Having stirred his wrath, she then encouraged him to kill Floria.

  The lad protested, saying that he would suffer guilt and shame all his life for committing such a deed. “Perhaps this will ease your pain,” she said, and gave him a pouch filled with silver coins—more money than he had ever seen.

  Still he hesitated. He spent many days and nights watching his beloved from behind the hedge by her front window, agonizing. Then one day, he heard Sanchia and Floria within, shouting. He heard Floria say she carried Ri
chard’s child. His mind went blank with rage. When Sanchia tried to leave, Floria clung to her. Sanchia flung her to the floor and ran out, and Samuel saw his chance for revenge. He threw himself upon Floria and hit her with the object nearest at hand—the chess piece, which lay on the floor beside her.

  Abraham forgave the lad, he said, knowing that he was the victim of womanly wiles. He forgave Richard, too, long ago. Being an old man, and unable to please my wife, I looked away when I saw you together. But women are jealous creatures, and cunning. Would that I had killed the Lady Beatrice instead of your innocent Sanchia! I hope that you will find it in your heart someday to forgive me, as well.

  When she has finished, Eléonore throws the parchment into the fire, before anyone else can discover the scandalous truth about Richard (An affair with a Jewess! His name would never recover.) or Beatrice’s awful crime. Edward scowls—his usual expression with her these days—and reaches toward the fireplace.

  “Let it burn,” she says.

  “I would know its contents,” he says, reaching for the document.

  “I am yet queen, and still your mother, and I say, ‘Let it burn.’”

  His jaw thrust forward, he touches the edge of the parchment, as if to pull it from the flames. Eléonore would knock his hand away and box his ears—how dare he defy her, and before all these people!—but Richard interrupts.

  “Your mother is right, Edward. Let it burn. Abraham’s confession was meant for me alone.”

  “But Mother read it.”

  “Yes, I did,” she says.

  “As heir to the throne—”

  “Which currently belongs to me, and to your father. I am yet the queen. And I am telling you now to let it burn.”

  His friends, having laid Abraham’s body on a table, gather around him. Hamo folds his arms across his chest, his expression hooded. Roger Leybourne smirks and the Lusignan cousins eye her warily, as if afraid she might attack her own son.