The Poisoned Crown

by Maurice Druon

  ‘It’s to decorate our chapel,’ she said.

  ‘Madam, you must hurry,’ the servant said, ‘you’ll get into trouble when you get home.’

  Marie arrived back at the Manor, went straight up to her room and, as she opened the door, felt the ground giving way beneath her feet. Dame Eliabel was standing in the middle of the room and gazing at a surcoat which was unstitched at the seams about the waist, and upon which Marie had been working that morning. All Marie’s wardrobe was spread out upon the bed, and each garment had been enlarged in the same fashion.

  ‘Where have you come from that you’re so late back?’ Dame Eliabel asked dryly.

  Marie replied not a word and let the irises she was still holding in her hand fall to the ground.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, I know,’ replied Dame Eliabel. ‘Undress.’

  ‘Mother!’ said Marie in a strangled voice.

  ‘Take your clothes off, I order you!’ cried Dame Eliabel.

  ‘Never,’ replied Marie.

  Her refusal was answered by a loud smack in the face.

  ‘I have not sinned!’ replied Marie with equal violence.

  ‘And what’s the meaning of this? What does it mean?’ asked Dame Eliabel indicating the clothes.

  Her anger was increased by being face to face, not with a child submissive to the maternal will, but suddenly with a woman who stood up to her.

  ‘All right, yes, I am to become a mother; yes, and it’s Guccio,’ cried Marie. ‘And I don’t have to blush for it, for I have not sinned. Guccio is my husband.’

  Dame Eliabel didn’t believe a word of the story about the midnight marriage. Even if she had believed it, it would have changed nothing in her eyes. Marie had acted against the paternal wishes, exercised by herself and her eldest son. Besides, this Italian monk might very well not be a monk at all. No, she quite decidedly did not believe in the marriage.

  ‘Even in the face of death, Mother, do you hear, even in the face of death I should confess to nothing else!’ Marie repeated.

  The storm lasted a whole hour and Dame Eliabel placed her daughter under lock and key.

  ‘To a convent! We’ll send you to a convent for fallen women!’ she shouted through the door.

  And Marie collapsed in tears amid her scattered dresses.

  Dame Eliabel had to wait till evening, when her sons had returned from hunting, to give them the news. The family council was brief. Both the boys were furiously angry, and Pierre, feeling himself almost at fault for having until then defended Guccio, now showed himself the most eager for vengeance. Their sister had been dishonoured and they had been abominably betrayed beneath their own roof! A Lombard! A usurer! They would nail him through the stomach to the door of his bank.

  They armed themselves with their hunting spears, mounted their horses, which they had just stabled, and galloped off towards Neauphle.

  Meanwhile, Guccio, too excited that night to be able to sleep, was walking up and down the garden. The night was ablaze with stars and filled with scents. The springtime of the Ile-de-France was at its height; the air smelt fresh, laden with sap and dew.

  In the silent countryside Guccio listened with delight to his shoes crunching on the gravel, one step heavy, one lighter, and his breast had not room enough to contain his happiness.

  ‘And to think that for six months,’ he thought, ‘I lay upon that horrible bed in the Hôtel-Dieu. How good it is to be alive!’

  He was dreaming. And while his fate was in fact sealed, he was dreaming of his future happiness. He was already seeing numerous children growing up around him, born of a wonderful love, who would have mingled in their veins the free blood of Sienna and the noble blood of France. He would be the great Baglioni, head of a powerful dynasty; turn his name into French, become Baglion of Neauphle. The King would certainly confer a lordship upon him, and the son Marie was carrying, for he never doubted that it was a boy, would one day be dubbed knight.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of horses galloping over the cobbles of Neauphle and then coming to a halt before the bank, and the knocker resounding violently at the door.

  ‘Where is the knave, the rogue, the Jew?’ cried a voice which Guccio immediately recognized as that of Pierre de Cressay.

  And as the door was not opened quickly enough, the two brothers began banging on the oak panels with the shafts of their spears. Guccio put his hand to his belt. He hadn’t got his dagger on him. He heard Ricard descending the stairs with a weighty step.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m coming,’ said the clerk in the voice of a man who is angry at having been woken up.

  Then there was a sound of bolts being drawn, bars being raised and, immediately afterwards, the sound of an angry argument of which Guccio could only catch occasional words.

  ‘Where’s your master? We want to see him at once!’

  Guccio couldn’t hear Ricard’s replies, but the voices of the Cressay brothers sounded again more loudly.

  He has dishonoured our sister! The dog, the usurer. We won’t leave till we’ve had his hide!’

  The discussion ended in a loud cry. Ricard had certainly been hit.

  ‘Bring us a light,’ cried Jean de Cressay.

  And Guccio then heard Jean’s voice shouting again through the house, ‘Guccio, where are you hiding? You can only show courage with the girls! I dare you to come out, you stinking coward!’

  Shutters had opened at the windows on the Place. The villagers were whispering, but none of them showed himself. At bottom they were not displeased; they’d have something to talk about for a long time. Moreover they rather liked the idea of a trick being played on their little lords, on these two boys who treated them so haughtily and requisitioned them so often for forced labour. If they had to make a choice they preferred the Lombard, but not to the point all the same of risking a flogging for having taken his part.

  Guccio was not lacking in courage; but he still had some sense. Without even a dagger at his side, it would not have done him much good to hand himself over to two furious armed men.

  While the brothers Cressay were searching the house, and venting their wrath upon the furniture, Guccio ran to the stables. He once again heard the voice of Ricard groaning through the night, ‘My books! My books!’

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ thought Guccio; ‘anyway they won’t be able to open the strong-boxes.’

  The moon was bright enough to enable him hastily to saddle and bridle his horse; he girthed it in the dark, seized hold of the mane to assist him in mounting, and escaped through the garden door. It was thus that he left the bank.

  The brothers Cressay, hearing him break into a gallop, rushed to the windows of the house.

  ‘He’s running away, the coward, he’s running away! He’s taking the road to Paris; after him! Hi, you clodhoppers, cut him off!’

  Naturally no one made a move.

  Then the two brothers rushed out of the bank and set out in pursuit of Guccio.

  But the young Lombard’s horse was well bred and fresh from the stable. The horses of the Cressays were poor country-bred nags who were already tired from a day’s hunting. Near Renne-Moulins one of them went so badly lame that it had to be abandoned; and the two brothers had to get on the same horse which was, moreover, gone in the wind, that is to say it made a noise in its nostrils like a rasp on wood.

  Thus Guccio had plenty of time to increase the distance between them. He arrived in the Rue des Lombards at dawn and found his uncle still in bed.

  ‘The monk? Where’s the monk?’

  ‘What monk, my boy? What’s happened? Do you want to take holy orders now?’

  ‘No, of course not, zio Spinello, don’t laugh at me. I must find the monk who married me. I’m being followed and I’m in peril of my life!’

  He quickly told his story; he had to find the monk in order to prove that he was in fact Marie’s husband.

  Tolomei listened to him, one eye open, the other closed. He yawned twice, w
hich exasperated Guccio.

  ‘Don’t get so excited. Your monk’s dead,’ said Tolomei at last.

  ‘Dead?’ said Guccio.

  ‘Yes, he is! This ridiculous marriage of yours has at least saved you from suffering his fate; for if you had gone, as Robert of Artois wanted you to do, and taken his message, you would doubtless no longer have to worry yourself about the great-nephews you seem prepared to give me without any encouragement from me. Fra Vincento has been killed in the neighbourhood of Saint-Pol by Thierry d’Hirson’s people who caught him. He had a hundred pounds of money on him. Oh, Monseigneur Robert of Artois costs me dear!’

  ‘Questo e un colpo tremendo!’fn6 groaned Guccio.

  Tolomei rang for his valet to bring him a basin of warm water and his clothes.

  ‘But what am I to do, zio Spinello? How am I to prove that I really am Marie’s husband?’

  ‘That’s not the most important thing,’ said Tolomei. ‘Even if your name and that of your girl were properly written in a register, it would change nothing. You would none the less have married a daughter of the nobility without the consent of her family. The gallants who are in pursuit of you may well draw every drop of blood from your body because they are running no risk. They’re nobles, and those people can massacre with impunity. At the most they would have to pay the fine appropriate to the life of a Lombard, a few pounds more than for the hide of a Jew and less than for the bones of the least clodhopper, provided he’s a French clodhopper. For two pins they’d be complimented.’

  ‘Well, I seem to have got myself into a fine mess.’

  ‘You may well say so,’ said Tolomei, plunging his fat face into the water.

  He washed himself for a minute, and then dried himself with a towel.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to have time to get myself shaved today. Oh, per Bacco! And I have been as foolish as you.’

  For the first time he seemed really concerned.

  ‘The first thing you’ve got to do is to go undercover,’ he went on. ‘There can be no question of your hiding at a Lombard’s. If your pursuers have aroused a village, they’ll equally well go and appeal to the Provost if they don’t find you here, and send the Watch to search the houses of all our people. You’d be taken within forty-eight hours. Oh, you’re making me cut a fine figure before our Company! There are monasteries, of course ...’

  ‘Oh, no, no more monks!’ said Guccio.

  ‘You’re quite right, one can never trust them. Let me think ... What about Boccaccio?’

  ‘Boccaccio?’

  ‘Yes, your good friend Boccaccio, the traveller for the Bardi.’

  ‘But, Uncle, he’s a Lombard as much as we are, and besides, he isn’t in France at the moment.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s having an affair with a woman who is a citizen of Paris and by whom he has had an illegitimate child.’

  ‘I know, he told me.’

  ‘I know she’s a nice woman, and she, at least, will understand your problem. You’ll go and ask her to hide you. And I’ll receive your charming brothers-in-law; I’ll take care of them, provided they don’t take care of me and you find that by tonight you have no uncle.’

  ‘Oh, no, Uncle, I don’t think you need fear them. They’re violent, but noble. They’ll respect your age.’

  ‘Weak legs are a fine suit of mail!’

  ‘Perhaps they will have grown weary on the road and won’t come here at all.’

  Tolomei’s head appeared out of the robe that he had just put on over his day-shirt.

  ‘That would surprise me exceedingly,’ he replied. ‘In any case they’ll lay an information and begin an action against us. I shall have to consult some highly placed person who is in a position to squash the affair before it causes a scandal. Valois? Valois promises but never keeps his promises. Robert? One might as well go to the City Heralds and get them to announce it with trumpets.’

  ‘Queen Clémence!’ said Guccio. ‘She grew very fond of me during our journey.’

  ‘I’ve answered you that one before! The Queen will talk to the King, who’ll talk to the Chancellor, who’ll set all Parliament by the ears. We shall have a fine case to make!’

  ‘Why not Bouville?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a better idea,’ cried Tolomei, ‘and the first you’ve had in six months. Bouville, of course. He’s not brilliantly intelligent, but he has a good deal of credit from the fact that he was King Philip’s chamberlain. He is not compromised by any faction and is generally considered an honest man.’

  ‘Besides, he’s very fond of me,’ said Guccio.

  ‘Yes, of course! It appears that the whole world’s fond of you! We should get on better with a little less of it! Go along, go and hide yourself with your friend Boccaccio’s woman and, for God’s sake, don’t let her get fond of you too! As for me, I shall go to Vincennes and talk to Bouville. Really, the things you expect me to do! Bouville is probably the only man who owes me nothing, and it’s precisely to him I must go to ask a favour.’

  9

  Mourning Comes to Vincennes

  WHEN MESSIRE TOLOMEI, riding his grey mule and followed by his servant, entered the first court of the Manor of Vincennes, he was surprised to find a considerable concourse of people busily rushing to and fro, men-at-arms, servants, equerries, lords, ministers, and citizens; but this coming and going was taking place in complete silence as if men, beasts, and things had all lost their capacity for making sounds.

  The ground had been covered with a thick layer of straw to muffle the rolling of coaches and the sound of footsteps. Everyone spoke in whispers.

  ‘The King is dying,’ said a lord of his acquaintance to Tolomei when he spoke to him.

  Within the castle all security seemed to have lapsed and the archers of the guard let all comers pass. Murderers and thieves could have entered amid the disorder without its occurring to anyone to stop them. One merely heard murmurs such as ‘The apothecary, let the apothecary pass.’

  The officers of the household, passing through secret doors, carried basins covered with towels, which they went to present to the physicians.

  The latter, who were recognizable by their dress, were holding council between two doors; they were wearing brown capes over their serge gowns, and upon their heads little skullcaps resembling those of monks. The surgeons wore stuff gowns with long narrow sleeves and, attached to their round hats, was a sort of white scarf which covered their cheeks, necks, and shoulders.

  Tolomei sought information. The King had suffered from a stomach-ache for the last two days, but had not paid any particular attention to it since he was accustomed to indispositions of that nature, and had indeed played tennis on the previous afternoon; he had got very hot and had asked for a drink of water. Shortly afterwards he had been seen suddenly to bend double and vomit, and had had to take to his bed. His condition had grown so much worse during the night that, of his own accord, he had asked for the last sacraments.

  The physicians could not agree upon the nature of his illness; some, taking their stand upon the choking-fits to which the King was subject, announced that the cold water he had drunk after his exercise had caused the indisposition; others affirmed that the water could not have corroded his stomach to the point of a haemorrhage.

  Perplexed by the mysterious origin of the disease, and also somewhat paralysed, as frequently happens when too many doctors are called to the bedside of an illustrious invalid, they were counselling only the milder remedies, not one of them daring to take the responsibility of recommending strong measures for fear of being later accused of having killed the patient.

  The noble courtiers were hinting to each other about the spell that had been cast upon the King, and adopting airs of knowing more than they were prepared to say. And already other problems were being mooted. Who would become Regent? Some regretted that Monseigneur of Poitiers was absent, others were, on the other hand, delighted. Had the King expressed any formal wish in the matter? No one knew. But he had summoned h
is Chancellor to dictate a codicil to his will.

  Making his way through the silent chaos, Tolomei was able to reach the very room in which the Sovereign was dying. There the crowd was being held back by the Chamberlain, who only allowed the members of his family and his most intimate attendants, which already mounted to a considerable number of people, to come close to his bed.

  Standing on tiptoe, the Chief of the Lombard banks was able to see, over a wall of shoulders, Louis X, his body supported upon cushions, and his hollow features grown suddenly thin, wearing the stigmata of the end. One hand upon his breast, the other upon his stomach, his teeth clenched, he seemed to be forbidding himself to groan.

  Someone came by and whispered, ‘The Queen, the Queen. The King demands the Queen’s presence.’

  Clémence was in the next room, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, by the fat Bouville who was managing to contain his tears with difficulty, and Eudeline. The Queen had not slept for twenty-four hours, and indeed had remained upon her feet practically all that time. And now, at this moment, she was still standing, motionless, her eyes staring, like the effigies of saints upon the churches of her country, while Monseigneur of Valois, all dressed in black, as if he had already donned mourning, said to her, ‘My dear, dear Niece, you must be prepared for the worst.’

  ‘I am prepared for it,’ thought Clémence, ‘and have no need of him to know the truth. Ten months of happiness, is that all I have a right to? And yet it may be much, and God is kind to have vouchsafed it, and I have not thanked Him enough. The worst that can befall us is not death, since we shall come face to face again in the life eternal. The worst feature of the case concerns my child who will be born five months hence, whom Louis will never have known, and who will never know his father till he goes to heaven himself. Why does God permit such things?’

  ‘You may count on me, Niece,’ said Valois; ‘I shall not cease to protect you and this will make no difference to my attitude towards you. You must let me deal with everything, and merely think that you carry all our hopes in your womb. It really must be a son! Of course your condition will not permit you to assume the task of Regent; moreover the French would take it ill to be governed by the hand of a foreign woman. Blanche de Castille, are you suggesting? Of course, of course, but she had been Queen for many years. The French have not yet learnt to know you well enough. I must relieve you of the duties of the throne, which basically, of course, will make no difference to our relationship.’