The Girl Who Would Be Queen

by Jane Ann McLachlan

“Do not tell me you fed them. Please!”

  “They may have stopped by the kitchens on their way out.” She smiles at my shocked laughter.

  “At least you did ban them. They are no longer to be seen at the castle gates.”

  “I ordered them not to approach too near the castle. Perhaps if they have to walk farther, the cool night air will bring our lords to their senses and help them resist temptation.”

  “Or ride into town for it.”

  “So the townspeople hope.”

  I shake my head. “After such solemn judgments, you must take some rest. Come and walk in the gardens with me.”

  I see she is about to refuse, and forestall her. “If you have no time for a walk, at least have dinner with me. This grueling workload is not good for your child. I am sure you are not eating enough.”

  I have taken a chance, speaking with such liberty, but she smiles. I recognize in her expression that she, too, has been missing the comfort of being guided by those we have lost, however chafing that guidance may have felt at the time.

  “Set up a table in the shade by the fountain,” I order a servant. “And have our dinner sent there. A good dinner, mind, not a paltry bit of cheese and some olives. Have you any quince preserves?” Joanna laughs as I ask this. I grin at her, an expression straight from our childhood, and tell the boy watching us, perplexed, “Well, bring what you have, and be quick. Do not keep your Queen waiting!” He bobs into a hurried bow and races off to alert the kitchen.

  “I do not have time for all this,” Joanna murmurs, but she lets me lead her outside. I notice her glance behind to make sure her guards are following us, but do not comment on it as we wait for the servants to set up our table and chairs. A man hurries over with a platter of meat and a girl, sweating from the ovens, brings us bread and preserves. It is not quince, Joanna’s favorite, but it is orange spice, almost as good. A man from the cellars follows them with a bottle of cool wine and two cups. One of Joanna’s guards steps forward and samples everything on our food platters, even the orange spice preserve. He nods and steps back beside the other guard.

  “What are you afraid of?” I ask her when we are finally alone, save for her guards, who stand in sight but outside hearing distance of our conversation.

  “What every ruler fears.”

  “No one in Naples would harm you. Your people love you, even the prostitutes. Everyone here with us supports you. Even Andrew, now that he will soon have joint power, has no cause to harm you.” I reach for her hands and clasp them in mine. They are cold, even on such a warm day.

  She pulls her hands back gently and takes a chunk of the meat. “My advisors tell me they uncovered a plot against Duke Andrew. A hunting accident, it was going to be.”

  I stop eating and look at her in alarm. Charles goes hunting with Andrew. “You caught them?” I say. “It is finished?”

  She nods, spearing another piece of venison on her knife. “I am glad it came up, in fact. Andrew will be more cautious now, his guards more alert. As are mine.” She glances at her guards, watching us. Watching me.

  “They do not think I—”

  “They suspect everyone, Maria. They are not pleased at having to stand so far from me.” She smiles at me, lifting her wine cup.

  “Stop!” I grab the cup. “Let them taste it!” I wave the guards over. “Are there guards in your kitchen? In the wine cellar? Standing by the roast pit?”

  “My guards are everywhere.” She sighs, but she lets one of her guards taste her wine.

  I do not sleep well that night. It is near the end of my time, I cannot get comfortable, and have to rise often to use the privy room. Even when I go to sleep, I am disturbed by dreams. I wake imagining I hear footsteps in the hall, and hushed voices. I tell myself I am imagining it, and slowly, like a beached sea creature, roll onto my side, close my eyes and sleep again.

  Suddenly, the night is rent with screams. I wake in a terror, my heart pounding, ready to scream myself. I shake my head, dispelling the nightmare image of someone creeping up behind me, but the screaming continues.

  “Andrew!” someone is screaming, “Prince Andrew!” and other voices, male ones, take up the cry, “The Duke of Calabria!”

  I jump out of bed and stand at my door, shaking. Is it safe to go out, to see what is happening? Are there others coming for us? For Charles because he has spoken for the duke? For me, the heir to the throne? For Joanna?

  Joanna! I pull the door open and run barefoot down the dark hall toward her rooms. I can think of nothing else but that I must get to my sister, get to her now!

  The closer I get the louder the voices become, men and women shouting, screaming, weeping! The thudding of my heart fills my ears as I run, propelled faster by the cacophony of voices. I am panting with terror, heavy with child, but all I can think as I race toward the rooms at the end of the hallway is Joanna! Joanna! My sister!

  I run through the open door into the sitting room Joanna and Andrew shared between their bedchambers. It is crowded with people—guards and servants, courtiers and ladies, dukes and nobles, Neapolitans and Hungarians. Across the room I see my sister as stiff as a statue at the door to her bed chamber, unmoved by the clamor around her. She is clad only in her nightdress, her face as white as a ghost!

  “Joanna!” I scream. Is she dead? She is dead, and this her ghostly presence, haunting us because we did not value her enough in life, did not protect her—

  “Joanna!”

  —And I am Queen! In my nightgown, barefoot, with my hair down!

  She turns her head, and sees me, and lifts a hand, as though reaching for support—

  Alive! Alive and unharmed.

  “Joanna!” I throw myself into the crowd of people, pushing my way through them, desperate to reach her, until at last I can touch her, catch her outstretched hand, pull myself into her arms and feel hers holding me.

  “Andrew,” she chokes against my hair. “They have murdered him. They have murdered the duke! What will I do? Merciful Lord, whatever will I do to appease his family when they learn of it?”

  “Hush,” I whisper. “Hush. You are alive. You and your child are safe. You will know what to do.” I close my eyes. I am shaking with shock. Murdered! A royal prince, an Angevin, murdered in our own castle! Thank God I am not Queen!

  Joanna lets me hold her for a moment, and be held by her. Then she straightens and moves into the room, calling her guards to report what they have found. I listen, clutching the wall for support, as they describe the shocking state of the body. His body. Andrew’s body. The next King of Naples’ murdered and mutilated body.

  He was found lying in the garden beneath their balcony, half-undressed, his face and bare arms bruised from a violent struggle with his assailants. A rope was tied around his neck, sawed off a few feet above the noose, as though he had been hanged from the balcony and was later cut down from above.

  “I heard him fall! The awful sound! The awful sound of it!” his nurse, Isabelle the Hungarian, wails at this point, her hands covering her face.

  “It was she who raised the alarm,” a servant beside me whispers. “She chased the murderers away with her screams. Woke us all, she did, a wonder she didn’t wake the dead duke, as well.”

  I shudder, looking at Andrew’s blood-crusted body, laid out on a table for washing as soon as it has been examined to learn as much as it can tell us, now that his voice is silenced forever.

  He can never tell our secret now. We have been bound together by that secret, each of us humiliated that night and terrified the other would tell. One of us had to die to free the other, and I am glad it is him. His was the greater offense, though mine would have been the greater shame. I look at his still, bruised body and I can feel no pity, I can only think, I need never fear him again!

  A sheet has been laid on the table beneath him, a stiff cloth of some sort... With a start of horror I recognize his banner. His mutilated corpse has been laid out on the axe and stake, a gory offering upon the platte
r he threatened to serve up to others! I cover my mouth to stop myself screaming, but it is so awful I am beyond screaming.

  Joanna seems oblivious to what I have seen. While others are still wringing their hands and weeping, she has taken command of the situation as she always does, sending the courtiers and the few court ladies who have dared come to see what has happened back to their rooms, ordering servants to bring water to wash Andrew’s body, and others to bring the duke’s best clothes to dress him in. She sends two of her men to Naples to prepare the clergy at the Cathedral of Naples for Andrew’s interment there the following day, and another to arrange his eventual burial in the chapel of Saint Louis, next to his grandfather Charles Martel, our grandfather King Robert’s older brother.

  I look around for Louis of Taranto. He will help Joanna, he has always supported her. But I cannot see him, or either of his brothers. Can they still be sleeping? Did they make so merry that all this outcry has not wakened them? I saw them yesterday, I am sure of it, walking with Charles of Artois and his son Bertrand, and the Count of Terlizzi. None of them has gathered about Joanna now, though they are her closest councilors at court.

  I am about to step forward, to circle the room to see if I can find them, there are so many people here, when Charles appears beside me. Shock has made him suddenly sober, despite the stink of drink on his breath and clothes. I expect him to chastise me for coming out of my room in my nightdress and bare feet, but he does not seem to notice, any more than anyone appears to notice that the Queen of Naples is standing in public in only her nightdress.

  “A gruesome deed, a foul, unholy night’s work,” Charles mutters in a toneless voice, staring at Andrew’s corpse.

  I cannot look at my husband. He has made us vulnerable. He has made it possible for men to lay hands on those God anoints to rule them, Joanna told me. Is Charles pretending to be horrified, or does he truly not see laying hands on a royal female as being in any way equivalent to raising one’s hand against a male one? I thought he was caught up in passion when he had me abducted, I thought we were lovers in a troubadour’s song, in a fairy tale where anything is possible and everything is permitted. Why did I not see this before, where we were all headed with that first act to control a throne guarded only by two girls and an aging dowager queen?

  Charles stares gloomily at the prince nobody loved, the prince he has recently aligned himself with, a cause now lost.

  “Your plans have been thwarted once again,” I observe dryly. I leave before he can point out a worse truth: that I, too, agreed by omission to align myself to this most unfit prince, in order to keep my children out of the path of his vengeance.

  None of us need fear him now. At last I feel pity, remembering the dark-haired, frightened boy left here at six years old, a lost and lonely little misfit in our glittering, sophisticated court.

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Rumors and Veils

  Joanna retreats to her privy chamber with her advisors, her lawyers, her court seneschal, and fights for her crown in the only way she knows how: an army of letters marches forth to Clement VI, to Dowager Queen Elisabeth and King Louis of Hungary, to all the allied governments and influential figures whose support she needs. Letters informing them of her grief and horror at the crime, letters arranging daily masses to be said for the duke, letters assuring her kingdom’s partners in trade and commerce that Naples is secure and stable and the situation is under control, letters ordering an investigation to find the murderers. This last is tricky. Someone must be blamed and punished, but the most likely culprits are Joanna’s closest allies.

  However quickly these letters sally forth, proclaiming the Queen’s shock and sorrow, they cannot keep up with the rumors of the Queen’s dry-eyed indifference—and, it is hinted, her shame—when confronted with the murder. Vile rumors of her culpability in the crime.

  Two days after Andrew’s death, while we are still at Aversa, Charles comes into our sitting room. “They have captured one of the murderers,” he announces.

  I drop my sewing. While I stare at him, unable to speak, the other ladies-in-waiting in the room exclaim and beg Charles to tell what he knows. I do not want to know. I am sick with fear, dreading to learn who it is, afraid to even think the names of those I could not find in Joanna’s sitting chamber two nights ago.

  “Tommaso Mambriccio,” Charles says.

  Tommaso? Who is Tommaso Mambriccio? Then I draw my breath in sharply. Tommaso, who came to Charles asking for a position.

  “But who is he?” one of the ladies asks.

  What if Charles had said yes? What if the man had worked for Charles? What if he had murdered my husband in the night?

  “He was the duke’s chamberlain,” Marguerite of Taranto answers. “He is the son of a nobleman ruined by the Florentine bankers.”

  “But why would he murder the duke?”

  “Has he confessed, my Lord?” I ask quickly, before Marguerite can answer. I send her a sharp look, hoping she will heed the warning in my eyes. I do not want anyone to wonder why Marguerite of Taranto knows so much about one of the murderers.

  “He has,” Charles answers. “He said the duke threatened to execute him when he was crowned.”

  There is an embarrassed silence in the room. Now that he is dead, no one wants to remember that Andrew was hated in life, and with reason. No one wants to acknowledge how relieved they are that the Pipini brothers have lost their royal protector.

  “The duke must have perceived the evil in Tommaso’s nature. His life might have been saved if he had acted sooner,” Charles continues, easing the awkwardness with an image of Andrew’s misplaced leniency.

  I think of Tommaso’s wife and infant son.

  “The duke, our would-be king, was always too trusting,” Charles continues. “Many took advantage of that, as did this false servant, a sinner hateful in the sight of God and men.” The ladies lean forward in their seats, hanging on his words as though he was a troubadour entertaining them with a story. The lords nod sagely as though this twist he is giving to Andrew’s character is just what they have always thought.

  I feel a little nauseous, but then I am late in my pregnancy.

  Charles takes out a letter. “Here is an account of what occurred, gathered from the scoundrel’s confession under questioning.” He opens the letter and begins to read it to us: “The duke and his men had dined gaily that night, anticipating the joy of his coronation, and he arrived late back at the royal residence. Her Majesty, our beloved queen, a pious woman wearied by her condition, retired early and fell asleep before he returned. The good duke, mindful of her need for sleep at this time, did not awaken her but went quietly to his bedchamber. As he prepared for bed, his chamberlain, this most deceitful servant Tommaso, came to him and told him a courier had arrived bearing papers that needed his immediate attention, concerning his coronation. In his youth and trustfulness, he followed the man out.”

  The room is silent. Not so much as the rustle of a silk gown or crackle of the floor rushes mars the stillness. I wonder if anyone is breathing, so intent are they all upon this story of trust and treachery. I am fascinated myself; only the memory of Tomasso’s desperate eyes when he begged my husband’s help keeps me from falling completely under the spell of this written account given to my husband. I do not doubt the facts, only their interpretation.

  “No sooner had the young duke left his bedchamber than he saw a group of armed men waiting for him. He would have fled, but his faithless servant leaped to close and bolt the door, barring his escape. The traitors seized him, overpowering the duke by their numbers. They covered his mouth to prevent him summoning help and tore his hair, his clothes and beat him savagely, leaving the bruises we all witnessed. They dragged him to his balcony, and hung him from it with the rope they had brought, while others, waiting below, leaped to grab his legs and pull him as he hung there, hastening his death.”

  When Charles has finished, no one speaks. I raise my hand to my neck, half-expecting to find a noose,
so real and immediate do these events seem, only two days after the terrible deed.

  “Who...” Marguerite clears her throat as though she too, feels the noose there. As well she might if she is not more cautious.

  “Who has he named as his accomplices?” I ask before she can, because everyone knows my husband spoke up for Andrew, we had nothing to gain by his death.

  Charles turns from Marguerite back to me. “He would not name them,” he says. “But he will be tortured again, publicly, tomorrow. God willing we will learn the names of all those involved in this horrible crime.” He looks again at Marguerite, who averts her eyes, picking up her sewing again with hands that tremble.

  “Who is questioning him, my Lord Duke?” one of the young nobles asks.

  I hold my breath. The question hangs in the air, strangling me. Not one of Andrew’s court! If there were time to pray between the question and the answer I would fall to my knees and press my cross to my lips, but I can only think, Dear Lord, dear Holy Mother Mary and all the saints and angels, not the Hungarians who hate us...

  “Lord Charles of Artois and the Count of Terlizzi.”

  I let out my breath in a gasp. So great is my relief that I am dizzy. I sway in my chair, lean forward quickly, and vomit onto the rushes.

  ***

  I hear them before I see them. The yells and jeering of the crowd lining the narrow streets rise in an oncoming wave as the cart approaches the wider main road where Charles has brought me. We are all—the lords and ladies of the court—crowded onto the balconies of the dwellings that line this road, their owners mingling with the crowd so that we may watch from above.

  I stand away from the balcony edge. Charles leans over it to see the cart as soon as it turns onto our road. I had hoped to be excused from this after my embarrassing deportment yesterday, but Charles insists we be seen. The cloud of suspicion that has fallen over everyone at court here in Aversa is so great that I do not argue. Anyone might be dragged off for questioning. I would be eager to go into my confinement where no one will think of me if it were not that I am as desperate as I am terrified to know who will be proclaimed guilty of the foul act. I hear the nervous whinny of a horse, the rumble of wagon wheels, the roar of the crowd below me. The cart turns onto our street. I cannot help myself, I push forward, grabbing the railing of the balcony so tightly it hurts, and strain to see.