The Sister Queens

by Sophie Perinot

  Eleanor moves forward, reaching her hand to take Beatrice’s. “I am sorry, Sister,” she says. But she is far from contrite and, it seems, also far from finished. “But I do wish you would keep up. You are worse than a pebble in my shoe.”

  Little pebble. Beatrice hates this moniker, which has lately begun to stick, but she smiles in a self-satisfied manner nonetheless. I know she will tell my father what has happened. Surely Eleanor must know it as well. Eleanor hands Beatrice off to Sanchia, who comes forward to hoist the toddler to her slender hip and bear her home again. As Sanchia struggles off uncomplaining under her burden, I lower my voice and say to Eleanor, “She will have your new samite mantle for this.”

  “It is far too big for her.” Eleanor’s confidence does not match her comment. She loves that cloak, all deep blue and gold, and knows better than any of us, as Beatrice’s most frequent tormentor, that the youngest of us all is my father’s openly avowed favorite.

  “You must be nicer to her when I am married and gone,” I coax Eleanor, “more fair in your treatment. She cannot help being little. Nor can she help being spoiled.”

  Eleanor looks as if she would take issue but instead changes the subject. “Are you frightened, Marguerite?” She reaches out to take my empty right hand and we begin to walk toward home.

  “Why should I be frightened? All girls must marry unless they become nuns. And there is no question of that in my case. Father has dowry enough.” I feel my face grow warm the moment the words are out of my mouth. Eleanor and I both know that while the word of my betrothal to Louis of France was greeted with great joy by all of Provence, the ten thousand silver marks that the White Queen, Blanche of Castile, demanded in recognition of our unequal ranks were not easy for my father to come by. He had not a thousand marks of ready money. The mighty castle of Tarascon had to be pledged to the French king as surety. And if de Villeneuve had not managed by many clever means to raise one-fifth of the sum in plate and coin, this marriage, so provident for my family, might well have fallen by the wayside.

  “Yes,” Eleanor agrees, squeezing my hand, “but you will be so far away. And it is cold in France—both the weather and the people.”

  “Not Louis and my new mother, surely,” I say with cheerful conviction. “Mother showed me one of Queen Blanche’s letters. She seems a cordial lady and a charmingly attentive mother. As for King Louis, you know what Uncle Guillaume says of him.”

  “‘The handsomest man and finest king in Christendom,’” Eleanor recites in a singsong voice.

  Perhaps my Savoyard uncle has gone on a bit in praise of my betrothed’s accomplishments and attributes, but I think Eleanor’s constant impatience to do as I do and go where I go contributes materially to her mocking tone. A moment later I am sure.

  “Will you not be lonely?” Eleanor asks. Her eyes show every evidence that she will be the next of my sisters to cry.

  “I am not going alone. Uncle Guillaume and Uncle Thomas will accompany me,” I remind her, “and at least one is sure to stay at the French court to provide me with good counsel in my role as queen.” I wonder for a moment if my mother’s powerful brothers, concerned as they will be with protecting the family’s interests in my marriage, will have time to keep me company. Then, brightly, I plunge onward. “My nurse, Lisette, goes as well, along with a number of ladies-in-waiting. And surely you heard Father’s fair promise to me last evening as we dined that I might take my favorite of the minstrels?”

  Then, allowing myself to think for a moment of the greater separations lying at the heart of Eleanor’s concern, I stop walking and throw my arms around my sister’s neck. “I will miss you, my dearest Eleanor. If only you could come with me to France! How I wish King Louis could have two wives.”

  Standing back from her again, I clap my right hand over my mouth, horribly conscious of the blasphemous nature of my utterance. Men do not have two wives at once; this I know for sure. But as I look at my sister doubled over in mirth where only moments before she was on the verge of tears, I realize with a sudden ache that there are many things I do not know about husbands and their wives.

  I glance into the distance and see that Sanchia has placed Beatrice on the ground and taken a seat beside her. I am conscious that I have shirked my duty as the eldest and allowed Sanchia, the frailest among us, to overtire herself. “Come, Eleanor. We had best go. There is still a long walk back, and you must carry Beatrice as your penance.” I brace myself for the complaint that I know is coming. How many times in the last weeks have I heard her say, hands on hips, “You are not Queen of France yet, Marguerite, and even when you are, I do not live in France.” To distract her from repeating this retort, I add, “Surely Father will pay less heed to her tale when he sees how gently you bear his little angel home.”

  Eleanor smiles slyly. The mantle is not lost yet. “You will be a good queen, Marguerite. You have the skills of a diplomat already.”

  MY UNCLE GUILLAUME ARRIVES FIRST. He is thirty-three and has been the bishop-elect of Valence for most of my life. I think he looks more like my mother than any of her other brothers. Besides being handsome, he knows everyone—His Holiness the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and my soon-to-be husband, King Louis of France. He sweeps into my mother’s apartments, where we ladies have gathered to pass the afternoon.

  “Beatrice,” he says, embracing Mother warmly before his eyes turn naturally to me. “And here is the little bride. Come, Marguerite, see what I have brought you.” Drawing a small velvet bag from the pouch at his waist, he upends it into my eager hand.

  “Uncle!” I hold a ring-brooch more beautiful than any I have ever seen, even among my mother’s ornaments. Gold with rubies, it is certainly of great value.

  My mother must be thinking the same thing, because even as I throw my arms around my uncle’s neck in thanks, she chides him, “Guillaume, it is too generous a gift.”

  “Shall I tell King Louis to take it back then?” he teases. “For ’twas he who sent it and he who selected the inscription.”

  I look more closely at the treasure in my hand and find the words Ave Maria G, a Latin abbreviation for “Hail Mary, full of grace.” I wonder, does my betrothed call down the Virgin’s blessing upon me, or does he compare me to Our Blessed Lady?

  “This will be a great match,” my uncle continues, rubbing his hands together; then, noticing Eleanor’s poorly guarded jealous look in my direction, he puts a hand under her chin, draws her face up ever so slightly, and adds, “for all the members of the houses of Provence and Savoy. Make no mistake, Niece, you may perchance make a better marriage because your sister marries well before you. Now, help Marguerite to pin that on.”

  I hand the brooch to my sister, who does as she is bid. And if she pricks me in the process, there is no point in my mentioning it. No one will believe the gesture intentional because no one else saw the flash in her dark brown eyes as she did it.

  Before the sun sets, Uncle Thomas arrives. He is older than Guillaume, but neither so handsome nor so prominent in the church. Mother always says she would not be surprised to see Uncle Thomas leave the church entirely and marry should a good opportunity present itself. Eleanor is Uncle Thomas’s favorite, and, although she is nearly eleven years old, he swings her up in the air when he thinks no one is looking. He has a mind for detail. “I will see the clothing before retiring,” he tells my mother as we settle down to dine. He is speaking of what I will wear on the long progress from Avignon to Lyon and then onward to Sens where I am to be wed. “And the list of those courtiers and clergy who will accompany Lady Marguerite’s train.”

  My father, far from being put out by these demands, laughs aloud. “My Lord of Piedmont, I have it on good authority that when the archbishop of Aix heard you were to be one of our party, he summoned his tailor at once. I hope you come prepared to compete.”

  “Always, Raymond, and in every venue.”

  “Well, I will lay odds on you every time.” My father slaps Thomas on the back and then summ
ons a nearby servant for more wine. “Perhaps alone you can be bested, but you are never alone, not with six brothers for support.”

  “Do you hear this, Beatrice?” Uncle Guillaume speaks over my father, appealing to my mother who sits on Father’s other side. “Your husband slights you.”

  “By no means!” Father takes Mother’s hand on top of the table and regards her with the frank admiration that I am used to seeing and she is used to receiving. “To the contrary, my lady wife has political and diplomatic skills equal to either of yours in every respect. Why do you think I married her?”

  “Because I was beautiful,” my mother suggests playfully.

  “That too,” Father replies, “and you still are.” He raises Mother’s hand to his lips, then calls for the evening’s entertainment to begin.

  Sitting between Eleanor and Sanchia with the latter’s drowsy head in my lap, listening to my father’s best minstrel play his harp and sing, I cannot imagine a life better than my own or a place warmer than the bosom of my family. Why am I leaving? I touch Louis’s brooch to ward off tears.

  TWO WEEKS LATER I PONDER the same question. The party from Sens arrived at Avignon three days ago.

  We went in great splendor to the gates of the city to meet them. I rode the most beautiful palfrey imaginable, a white of great price selected by my uncle Guillaume as a symbol of my purity. The smooth, ambling gait of the beast did little to slow the agitated beating of my heart. I could not wait for someone to spot the French.

  Like the animal beneath me, I was bedecked in every splendor. Each detail of my attire had been carefully selected and approved by Uncle Thomas, who sought to present me as the queen I will shortly become. My tunic was made of the rich blue perse for which my father’s county is so rightly famous. Elaborate bands of golden embroidered orphrey decorated its bottom as well as the ends of my tightly fitting sleeves. My surcote, of heavy samite the color of fresh cream, was so luxurious that I had to remind myself not to keep fingering it as we sat waiting. Finally, my mantle, held fast by Louis’s ruby brooch, was the orchil of a spring violet and lined in softest gray and white vair, with a rolled trim of that same luxurious fur.

  I sat between my mother and father, each also magnificently mounted. Beatrice, too young to be thought any competition to me, sat before Mother on her saddle. But Eleanor, nearly marriageable herself, and Sanchia, so beautiful that from the youngest age she stopped the breath of men, were kept well back with their nurses. It would not do, my uncle Thomas told my father solemnly, for there to be any confusion as to the identity of the bride or any opportunity for comparison that might render me less superior in the minds of the Frenchmen. So, arranged on either side of my mother and father, instead of their remaining children, were my Savoyard uncles—not just Guillaume and Thomas, but the Count of Savoy, Amadeus IV, who made the journey with his family and a portion of his court and men-at-arms for the occasion, and Mother’s younger brothers, Peter and Boniface. It is a firm tenant of the Savoyards that in family lies the root of all power and glory.

  We were so many and so lively a party that I was certain we would dazzle the archbishop of Sens and the senior ambassadors of my betrothed. Nor was my confidence much shaken when the French at last arrived, for while the days they passed among us showed them to be elegant and well educated, my father’s court did not suffer by comparison.

  But now, on the evening before I must leave my home forever, with all the preparations for my departure complete, I feel neither dazzling nor confident. My mother orders me early to bed. I must be well rested; a journey of more than one hundred thirty-five leagues lies before me. I take leave of my parents with only muted sadness. They will ride with me as far as Lyon, so separation from them is still distant enough to forestall the melancholy that must accompany it. But my eyes linger long on the great hall itself, and on every feature of my walk to my bedchamber.

  Eleanor is with me, uncharacteristically solemn and silent. Her nurse and mine trail behind. Tonight every moment of our ordinary readying for bed seems to take on the sanctity of ritual: the stirring of the embers into a cheery fire by Lisette; the undressing; our sitting side by side on matching stools while our nurses comb through our waist-length hair thrice with different combs—each finer toothed than the one before it—as a remedy against lice; the warming of our cups of spiced wine. But it is not the same as most nights. Not a word passes between me and Eleanor. The only conversation is between Lisette and Agnes who natter in the background, their words no more distinct to me than the humming of bees.

  Then, as Eleanor and I sit beside the fire to take our evening libation, she speaks at last. Turning partway round, she regards the nurses where they are carefully laying out my garments for the morrow and covering them with chainsil cloths.

  “Leave us!”

  For a moment I hear not my Eleanor, but the commanding and sometimes imperious voice of my father. Such hauteur from a girl only now approaching the age of marriage! I am astounded. I do not know whether to admire it or fear where it may lead my sister. Upon the nurses, who are accustomed to doing without complaint the bidding of others, the effect is immediate. They slip from the room, gone too quickly to see that Eleanor’s firm self-possession is illusory.

  As the door shuts behind them, my sister begins to weep. But she does not surrender quietly, even to sobs. Rounding on me with near-wild eyes, she demands, “How can you leave me? Who will I have to gossip with when I surprise one of the serving girls in a corner of the garden with a stable boy? Who will sing me to sleep when the air is so full of summer flowers that my head aches and I have difficulty drawing breath?”

  Now I am crying too.

  Eleanor throws herself into my arms, equally heedless of the cup she casts aside and the wine that spills from it.

  “Oh Eleanor, if only you could come with me! How cruel that Jeanne de Toulouse is betrothed to one of the king’s brothers rather than you! The lady is no doubt vile like her father, and even were she not, even were she all accomplishment and good humor, no one can bear me such company as you do. You hold all my secrets and I yours.”

  My chest is heaving. I am crying so hard that I cannot continue. Even if I could, what would I say? No words of mine uttered in either protest or prayer can change my destiny. I will be Queen of France and must therefore be parted from the sister whom I love more than any other person.

  Her continued distress allows me to rein in my own. I must make an effort to support her spirits. “Eleanor, do you remember the time, at Mother’s castle, at Brignoles, when we planned to run away and become trobairitz?”

  Eleanor sniffs, and, wiping both eyes, manages to look ever so slightly saucy. “Are we going now?”

  “That would be ill-advised,” I reply. “For, if you remember, we gave the scheme a miss, upon discovering that neither of us has a facility for rhyme, though I sing as beautifully as a lark.”

  “You? I have the sweeter voice.” Eleanor is smug, and that is better than seeing her miserable.

  “And I the sweeter temperament.” I feel my own spirits rise as the evening suddenly becomes very much like thousands of others we have passed in similar banter. A friendly competition, like a joust or a contest among troubadours, is what we have. Eleanor may win one day and I another, but the pleasure lies in contesting the other, not in vanquishing her.

  “You must write to me often,” I demand.

  “What shall I tell? Nothing will change here.”

  “And that is precisely what I will wish most to hear; that all I love remains as I left it.”

  “Then I promise to write to you nearly as often as I will think of you.”

  “Nearly?”

  “I cannot be at my escritoire every minute. And you must write to me in return. As queen, you will be better able to command messengers into the saddle than I will.”

  “I will write,” I reply, suddenly feeling solemn again. “And let us exchange tokens of our promise.” I rise and go to the foot of our bed,
expecting to find my trunk, but it is not there. I stop dead, feeling panic rising within me. All my things are packed away for my journey north. I have nothing left in the rooms of my childhood but the clothing I took off this evening and the clothing I will don at sunrise.

  Lifting the protective coverings from my new garments, I wonder what I can give to Eleanor without being caught by my mother or my eagle-eyed uncle Thomas. My glance alights on my new slippers with the wonderfully pointed toes and a strap that closes them at the ankle above an open instep. Made of soft, light-colored doeskin, they are embroidered with a myriad of small gold stars. Such shoes are meant to be seen protruding from the bottom of my skirts once I am astride my horse rather than to be walked in. However, if I am careful with my skirts, I may easily wear the plain black slippers that I took off this evening with no one being the wiser. So I catch the pretty slippers up and hold them out to Eleanor. “Here. Only pray don’t lift your skirts when you wear them, or Mother will know.”

  Eleanor laughs. “And what do you expect her to do? You will be many leagues away, a married woman.”

  “But not, I suspect, safe from maternal scolding. Mother can write to me as easily as you can.”

  Eleanor appears genuinely puzzled by my reply. When she is convinced she is right, words have never been enough to persuade her otherwise. She doubtless cannot imagine being chastened by a letter. Going to her own things, she returns with the fine woolen broadcloth aumônière she has been laboriously embroidering for months. Eleanor does not like to embroider; she has not the patience for it, while I excel at it. But, having been struck by the idea of decorating the bag with the poppies that are everywhere about Aix by the beginning of the summer, she has lavished much attention on this particular work. Always drawn to displays of finery, she planned to wear the aumônière suspended from her favorite scarlet girdle.