The Strangled Queen

by Maurice Druon

  ‘I will give orders to your bailiwick,’ he said. ‘The cashier will bring your account up to date before the week’s out. How much are you personally due?’

  ‘Fifteen pounds and sixpence, Monseigneur.’

  ‘You shall receive thirty at once.’

  And Marigny rang for his secretary to show Bersumée out and pay him the wages of obedience.

  Left alone. Marigny read Marguerite’s letter over again with great care, thought for a moment, and then threw it into the fire.

  With a satisfied smile he watched the parchment curling up in the flames; at that moment he felt himself to be in reality the most powerful personage in the kingdom. Nothing escaped him; he held everyone’s fate in the palm of his hand, even the King’s.

  PART THREE

  THE ROAD TO MONTFAUCON

  1

  Famine

  THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE people of France was greater that year than it had been for a hundred past, and a scourge that had ravaged previous centuries reappeared: famine. In Paris the price of a bushel of salt was ten silver pennies, and twelve bushels of wheat sold for sixty pence, a price never before reached within living memory. This increase in prices was primarily caused by the disastrous harvest of the preceding summer, but was also largely contributed to by the disorganized state of the administration, by the disturbances created in a number of provinces by the barons’ leagues, by people panicking and therefore hoarding, and by the cupidity of speculators.

  February is undoubtedly the most difficult month in a year of scarcity. The last supplies from the previous autumn are exhausted, and so is the physical and mental resistance of human beings. Cold is joined to hunger. It is the month which has the highest death rate. People despair of ever seeing the spring again; in some despair becomes despondency and in others turns to hatred. As the road to the cemetery becomes familiar, everyone begins to wonder when his own turn will come.

  In the country dogs that could no longer be fed were eaten, and cats had become wild again and were hunted like game. For lack of fodder cattle were dying and people fought over the carrion. Women plucked frozen grass for food. It was common knowledge that the bark of the beech made a better flour than that of the oak. Day by day young people were being drowned beneath the ice on the lakes attempting to catch fish. There were practically no old people left. Carpenters, weak and emaciated as they were, were in constant employment making coffins. The mills had ceased to grind. Mothers who had gone insane still held in their arms the corpses of their children who clutched a handful of rotten straw in their dead fingers. From time to time a monastery could be importuned; but charity itself was powerless, for there was nothing to buy except shrouds for the dead. Tottering crowds evacuated the countryside for the towns in the vain hope of finding bread; but they only met another procession of skeletons who, coming from the towns, seemed to be walking towards the Last Judgement.

  Things were in this state in those regions normally considered rich as well as in the poorer ones, in Valois as well as in Champagne, in Marche as in Poitou, in Angoumois, in Brittany, and even in Beauce, even in Brie, even in the Île-de-France. It was the same at Neauphle and at Cressay.

  Guccio, on his way from Avignon to Paris with Bouville, had noted the evidences of the state of the country but, since he had lodged only with Provosts or in royal castles, had provisions for the journey, good gold in his pocket to meet the exorbitant prices of the inns, and had been in a hurry to get back, he had not seen want near at hand.

  He was no more aware of it when, three days after his return, he was trotting along the road that leads from Paris to Neauphle. His travelling cloak, lined with fur, was warm, his horse going well, and he was going towards the woman he loved. He spent the time polishing phrases for the beautiful Marie in his head, perhaps to tell her how he had spoken of her to Madame of Hungary, future Queen of France, and that the thought of her had never left him, which was in fact the truth. Because chance infidelities do not prevent one thinking, indeed rather the contrary, of the person to whom one is being unfaithful; indeed it is the most frequent manner of being faithful that men have. Then he was going to describe to Marie the splendours of Naples. He felt himself, as a result of his journey, clothed in an aura of importance and high diplomacy; he intended to make himself loved.

  It was only when he reached the neighbourhood of Cressay, because he knew the district well and had a tenderness for it as the scene of his springtime love-making, that Guccio began to become aware of things other than himself.

  The deserted fields, the silent villages, the rare column of smoke from a hovel, the absence of livestock, the few thin and filthy people he met, and above all the looks they gave him, began to give the young Tuscan a feeling of disquiet and insecurity which grew stronger with every step he took. And when he entered the courtyard of the old manor upon the banks of the Mauldre, he had an intuition of disaster. There was no cock upon the midden, no lowing from the cowhouse, not the bark of a dog. The young man went forward but no one, servant or master, appeared to greet him. The house seemed dead. ‘Have they left?’ Guccio wondered. ‘Have their goods been seized and have they been sold up during my absence? What can have happened? Or has the plague been raging in these parts?’

  He tied the reins of his horse to a ring in the wall – he had brought no servant with him for so short a journey so as to be the freer – and went into the living-house. He found himself face to face with Madame de Cressay.

  ‘Oh, Messire Guccio!’ she cried. ‘I thought … I thought … and so you have come back …’

  There were tears in Dame Eliabel’s eyes, and she sought support from a piece of furniture as if faint with the surprise of seeing him. She had lost a stone and a half and aged by ten years. Her dress now hung about her where before it had stretched tautly across her breast and hips; her complexion had turned grey, her cheeks were sunken and quivered beneath the widow’s veil framing her face.

  In order to dissimulate his astonishment at seeing the change in her, Guccio looked round the Great Hall. Heretofore it had had all the appearance of a dignified way of living in spite of straitened means; today it revealed utter poverty, a dusty and chaotic penury.

  ‘We are in no condition to receive a guest,’ said Dame Eliabel sadly.

  ‘Where are your sons, Pierre and Jean?’

  ‘Hunting, as they are every day.’

  ‘And Marie?’ asked Guccio.

  ‘Alas!’ said Dame Eliabel, lowering her eyes.

  Guccio felt icy claws at his head, his throat and about his heart.

  ‘Ch’e successo? What has happened?’

  Dame Eliabel shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of despair.

  ‘She is so low,’ she said, ‘so weak that I can no longer hope for her recovery, nor even that she will see Easter.’

  ‘What is the matter with her?’ said Guccio, feeling the claws relax because he had at first imagined the worst.

  ‘The same thing that is the matter with all of us and of which we are all dying in these parts! Hunger, Signor Guccio. And you can well imagine, if stout bodies such as mine are so exhausted that they are afraid of falling, what ravages hunger inflicts upon a constitution like my daughter’s, which is still immature.’

  ‘But good God, Dame Eliabel,’ cried Guccio, ‘I thought that famine only affected the poor!’

  ‘And what else do you think we are but poor?’ replied the widow. ‘We are in no better case merely because we are noble and own a tumbledown manor house. For squires like us, all our wealth consists in our serfs and the work they do. How can we expect them to feed us, when they haven’t anything to eat themselves and come to die before our door with outstretched hands. We have had to kill off our livestock in order to share it with them. Add to that that the Provost has been requisitioning, here as elsewhere, upon orders from Paris, so he said, doubtless to feed his Sergeants-at-Arms, for they are still fat. When all our peasants have died, what will remain to us but to follow their exampl
e? Land in itself is worth nothing; it is only valuable if it is worked, and putting corpses into it won’t make it productive. We no longer have any servants either male or female. Our poor lame old man …’

  ‘The one you called your carver?’

  ‘Yes, our carver …’ she said with a sad smile. ‘Well, he left us for the cemetery a few weeks ago. It was in keeping.’

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Guccio.

  ‘Marie? Upstairs in her room.’

  ‘May I see her?’

  The widow hesitated a moment; even in disaster she preserved a sense of convention.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ she said, ‘I will go and prepare her for your visit.’

  She went upstairs with heavy steps and a moment later called Guccio. He reached the top of the stairs in a few strides.

  Marie de Cressay was lying in a narrow bed in the old-fashioned way, the bedclothes not tucked in and the mattress and cushions piled so high behind her back that her body seemed to be at an angle to the ground.

  ‘Signor Guccio … Signor Guccio …’ Marie murmured.

  Her eyes looked bigger for the blue shadows that surrounded them; her long chestnut and gold hair was spread out over the velvet pillow. Upon her thin cheeks and fragile neck her skin had a disquieting transparency. And the impression that she had formerly given of having drunk the sunlight had disappeared, as if a great white cloud had come to rest over her.

  Dame Eliabel left them, to avoid showing them her tears; and Guccio wondered whether the lady of the manor knew, if Marie in her illness had admitted the love she bore in her heart.

  ‘Maria mia, my beautiful Marie,’ said Guccio going close to the bed.

  ‘There you are at last, come back at last. I was so afraid, oh so very afraid, of dying without seeing you again.’

  She looked at Guccio with searching intensity, and her eyes were anxiously questioning.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Marie?’ he asked, because he didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Weakness, my beloved, mere weakness. And the great fear I had that you had abandoned me.’

  ‘I had to go to Italy on the King’s service, and leave so suddenly that I had no chance of letting you know.’

  ‘On the King’s service …’ she murmured.

  The anxious, silent questioning still lay behind her eyes. And Guccio suddenly felt ashamed of his good health, his furred clothes, the heedless weeks he had spent in travelling. Ashamed even of the Neapolitan sun and of the vanity which had filled him till an hour before, of having lived among the great of the world.

  She stretched out her beautiful emaciated hand towards him; and Guccio took it in his; and their fingers met once again, wonderingly, and at last were intermingled in a clasp, a surer promise of love than any kiss, as the two stranger hands were joined in the same prayer.

  The dumb questioning faded from Marie’s eyes and her eyelids drooped.

  They stayed thus a moment without speech; the girl felt that she was drawing renewed strength from Guccio’s fingers.

  ‘Marie,’ he said suddenly, ‘look what I have brought you!’

  He took from his purse two stars of wrought gold encrusted with pearls and cabuchon precious stones, which it was at that time fashionable for rich people to sew into the collars of their coats. Marie took these jewels and carried them to her lips. And Guccio felt a tightening of the heart, for gold, however exquisitely wrought by the most cunning of Venetian goldsmiths, cannot relieve hunger. ‘A pot of honey or preserved fruits would have been a better present today,’ he thought. He was seized with a great longing to act.

  ‘I am going to find something to cure you,’ he cried.

  ‘That you should be here, that you should have been thinking of me, I ask for nothing more … Are you going already?’

  ‘I shall be back in a few hours.’

  He was at the door.

  ‘Your mother, does she know?’ he asked in a low voice.

  Marie shook her head.

  ‘I was not certain enough of you to reveal our secret,’ she murmured; ‘I shall do it only when you wish me to.’

  Going down into the Great Hall, he found Dame Eliabel with her two sons who had just come in from hunting. Their faces unshaven, their eyes bright with fatigue, their clothes torn and ill-repaired, Pierre and Jean de Cressay also bore about them the marks of distress. They showed Guccio all the joy they felt in seeing a friend once more. But they could not escape a certain jealousy and envy in seeing the young Lombard’s prosperous appearance, particularly, moreover, as he was younger than they were. ‘Clearly a bank gets on better than the nobility,’ thought Jean de Cressay.

  ‘Our mother will have told you everything, and you have seen Marie …’ said Pierre.

  ‘A crow and a fieldmouse are the only results of our hunting this morning. And a fine soup for a whole family we shall make out of them! But what can you expect? There are snares everywhere. One can promise a peasant a beating for hunting as much as one likes, but they would rather be beaten and have a little game to eat. One can well understand it; in their place we should do the same.’

  ‘I hope at least that the Milanese falcons I brought you last autumn render you good service?’ asked Guccio.

  The two brothers looked away in embarrassment. Then Jean, the eldest and more surly of the two, at last brought himself to say, ‘We had to surrender them to Provost Portefruit so that he would leave us our last pig. Besides, we no longer had anything to set them on.’

  He was ashamed and very unhappy to have to admit the use to which they had put Guccio’s present.

  ‘You were perfectly right,’ the latter said; ‘when I have a chance, I will try and get you others.’

  ‘That dog of a Provost,’ cried Pierre de Cressay in fury, ‘I can promise you he has not improved since the time you snatched us out of his clutches. By himself he is worse than the famine and doubles its disastrous effects.’

  ‘I am very ashamed, Messire Guccio, of the stringent fare I am asking you to share with us,’ said the widow.

  Guccio refused with the utmost delicacy of politeness, alleging that he was awaited for dinner at the bank of Neauphle.

  ‘The important thing is to find proper food for your daughter, Dame Eliabel,’ he added, ‘and not to let her die. I am going to get some.’

  ‘We are extremely beholden to you for your thought, but you will find nothing, except grass along the roads,’ replied Jean de Cressay.

  ‘Oh well!’ cried Guccio, tapping the purse that hung from his belt, ‘I am not a Lombard if I don’t succeed in doing something.’

  ‘Even gold is useless now,’ said Jean.

  ‘That’s what we shall see.’

  It was fated that Guccio, whenever he met this family, should play the role of knight-errant, rather than that of the creditor he still was for a debt of three hundred pounds, which remained undischarged since the death of the late squire of Cressay.

  Guccio rode towards Neauphle, persuaded that the clerks of the Tolomei branch would arrange things for him. ‘If I know them, they will have hoarded prudently or at least know where to go if one has the means of paying.’

  But he found the three clerks huddled round a peat fire; their faces were waxen and their heads hung low.

  ‘For the last two weeks there has been no business, Messire Guccio,’ they said. ‘We don’t even have one client a day. Loans are not being repaid and there would be no advantage in ordering distraint: you can’t seize nothing. Food?’ They shrugged their shoulders.

  ‘We are shortly going to feast off a pound of chestnuts,’ said the manager, ‘and lick our lips for the next three days. Is there still salt in Paris? It’s the lack of salt above all from which people are dying. If you could only send us a bushel! The Provost of Montfort has some, but he won’t distribute it. He lacks for nothing, I promise you; he has plundered all the neighbourhood as if the country were at war.’

  ‘What, that man again! He’s a disaster, that Porte
fruit!’ cried Guccio. ‘I shall go and find him. I’ve already checkmated him once, the thief.’

  ‘Messire Guccio …’ said the manager, wishing to persuade the young man to prudence.

  But Guccio was already outside and mounting his horse. He felt a surge of hatred in his breast such as he had never known before.

  Because Marie was dying of hunger, he suddenly found himself on the side of the poor and suffering; and he might have guessed from that alone that his love was real.

  He, a Lombard, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had taken up his position beside the poor. Now he noticed that the walls of the houses seemed redolent of death. He felt himself at one with these families staggering behind their coffins, with these men whose skin was drawn tight across their cheekbones and whose eyes had become like those of beasts.

  He was going to strike his dagger into Provost Portefruit’s stomach; he had made up his mind. He was going to avenge Marie, avenge the whole province and accomplish an act of simple justice. Of course he would be arrested, he wanted to be, and the affair would make a great stir. Uncle Tolomei would move heaven and earth; he would go and see Monseigneur de Bouville and Monseigneur of Valois. The case would come before the Parliament of Paris, even before the King. And then Guccio would shout aloud, ‘Sire, that is why I killed your Provost …’

  After galloping for some three miles his imagination grew somewhat calmer. ‘Remember, my boy, that a corpse pays no interest,’ Messire Tolomei was in the habit of saying. And in the last resort people fight well only with weapons that are proper to them, and if Guccio, like every Tuscan, know how to manage a short blade reasonably well, it was not his speciality.

  He slowed his pace, therefore, at the entrance to Montfort-l’Amaury, calmed both his horse and his temper and went to the Provost’s office. As the sergeant of the guard did not show him all the courtesy he should have done Guccio took from his pocket a safe-conduct, sealed with the private seal of Louis X, which Tolomei had obtained through Valois for his nephew’s mission to Italy.