Blanche comes in but Marguerite averts her eyes, unable to bear the sight of that white face and exposed forehead, the very image of death. The healer stands by the bed, feeling Louis’s pulse, ordering wet cloths to be placed on his forehead. Louis groans and trembles, bathed in sweat. To lie on his back, on his fresh, inflamed welts, must be excruciating, but Marguerite says nothing, for then she would have to explain what she has seen and she cannot, even to herself.
When he has fallen asleep and Marguerite drifts back toward the nursery, she finds the groomsman waiting, his face ringed with worry. “He never fainted before, my lady,” he says.
“He comes to you every day?”
“Every day the priest doesn’t do it. Most days.” His face is as red as his hair. “I never wanted to, my lady, but the queen—”
“When did this begin? How long ago?”
The groomsman scratches his chin. “It was right before the king married you. The queen said he needed to be whipped. His tutor used to do it when he was a boy but then the tutor died so she had me do it at first. Now the king comes to me himself and demands it. Just ten lashes a day, my lady, not so bad, except lately he has been making me use all my force, which causes the blood to run.”
Sickened, Marguerite turns from him. This man will be gone on the morrow, she vows. Let Blanche take him with her when she leaves.
In the nursery, her children cling to her and fret. “Is Papa ill?” Isabelle asks. Rocking her babies in her arms, she thinks of his ugly cotton cap; of the shirt made of goat’s hair he wears under his robes, ignoring—or enjoying—the bloody and weeping rash it raises on his neck and back; of the times he has fallen asleep—at dinner, during meetings, while hearing pleas in the courtroom—after kneeling in the chapel all night to pray for God only knows what. She thinks of daily floggings with a knotted whip, and vinegar-soaked sponges.
“Yes,” she says to Isabelle, “your papa is very ill.”
“Will you become ill, too?”
“Do I appear ill?” She gives a little laugh, tickles her daughter to make her laugh, too. “Do not worry yourself, Isabelle. Your papa will not infect me.”
“Or me? Will I get his sickness?”
“Absolutely not.” Marguerite caresses Isabelle’s fine, dark hair and contemplates Blanche. She has inflicted her son with her madness, but she will not affect these children.
“Do not worry, my darling.” She kisses her daughter’s cheeks, holds her sleeping son a bit more closely. “Nothing will harm you. Mama will see to that.”
A HAND ON her shoulder awakens her. Gisele hovers like a spirit in her white nightgown, a burning candle in one hand and Marguerite’s gown in the other. “You are summoned to the king’s chambers, my lady. Hurry!”
And then she is running from her room, her gown thrown on but not tied, her bare feet slapping on the floor, racing death. But the tall shadow of the priest thrown against the wall, the soft hiccuping sobs of the maids, and the cover laid across her husband’s face tell her that she is too late, that she has lost the contest. She stands over Louis’s bed looking down at his body which can redeem him no more. His soul is on its own.
Thank God I gave him an heir. With a son to rear for the throne, she remains France’s queen, and may even rule as Blanche did until young Louis comes of age. Otherwise, she would be sent home with empty hands. Louis never endowed her with a single castle, and her dowry was never awarded. She has nothing except her children to call her own.
Blanche’s cry cracks like a limb snapping off a tree as she throws herself into the room and, shoving Marguerite aside, onto Louis’s bed. “My love,” she shouts. “My darling, do not leave me. Come back to me, Louis. Every man I love, taken from me! Oh, why is the Lord so cruel?”
As she sobs, prostrate over his body, she inadvertently pulls the cover off his face—and his eyes open. Gisele gasps and grabs Marguerite’s arm. Blanche continues to sob, her face pressed against his stomach. His lips move. “The cross,” he rasps.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Tears stream down Gisele’s face. “It is a miracle.”
“The cross,” he says again, more loudly. Blanche sits up, looks at him, and faints to the floor. “Father, give the cross to me.”
Marguerite stares, enthralled, at the gentle confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu—Louis’s other flogger—as he removes the crude wooden cross from the wall and hands it to Louis. Louis brings it to his lips as, beside the bed, Blanche’s ladies revive her.
“I am going, Father,” Louis says. “To the Holy Land, to fight for Jerusalem. Praise the Lord for calling me back.”
Blanche struggles to her feet. Her face is nearly as white as if she were wearing her makeup. She stares down at Louis with eyes so red from weeping that they seem to glow in the candlelight. “You are going nowhere,” she says. “You are delirious.”
“God has given me a new life this day, Mama.” He sits up in bed. His voice rings with an authority Marguerite has never heard. “And I am going to use it for his glory.”
“You have a kingdom to rule.” Blanche’s tone is pleading. “You don’t know what you are saying. You cannot go!”
“Summon the barons, Mama. Send for Joinville.” Marguerite’s gaze careens about like a startled bird, smashing against the windows. “We must notify the pope of Rome, and begin making preparations.”
The room is abuzz with chatter. Giselle shushes two bickering chambermaids, each blaming the other for covering the king before he was dead. Louis sends out messengers to announce his decision to take the cross. Blanche pleads with him to reconsider. And all the while, the priest chants, in Latin, a prayer of thanksgiving. Standing in the middle of it all, Marguerite has stopped waiting for Louis to acknowledge her and has started waiting for something—someone—else altogether.
Joinville is coming back.
“Summon the tailor Antoine,” she says to Gisele as they walk back to her chambers. “I’m going to the chapel to give thanks for this miracle—and then I wish to celebrate in a new gown.”
Beatrice
The Rules of the Game
Aix-en-Provence, 1245
Fourteen years old
MAMA HAS BEEN reading her letter for a long time. She stands beside one of the Tower windows, squinting at the parchment in her hands, her eyes moving over the words from left to right, top to bottom, then returning to the top to start again. Beatrice, huddled in furs against the Tower’s chill, watches from her chair as the frown on her mother’s face deepens, sees emotions flicker like shadows from a cloud-strewn sky: Confusion. Disbelief. Dismay. Anger. Resignation. She peers out onto the roil and clash of the men at their feet.
“My God,” she says. “I have made an enormous mistake.”
Beatrice braces herself for more bad news, the only kind she has heard in the months since Papa died—three months and two days, according to her marks on the Tower wall since the day the Aragonese began battering their gates and shooting fire into the palace windows. The knights of Provence have fended off the attackers thus far, being skilled at resisting siege after years of battling Toulouse. But the Emperor Frederick, blocked from landing in Provence, leads one thousand men overland, coming for her. In a panic, Mama appealed to the pope of Rome for aid. For three months and two days they have waited for his army. Judging from Mama’s stricken face, Pope Innocent has not responded as they had hoped.
“We must comply, Beatrice.” Mama moves over to sit beside her. Her expression is grave; trouble clouds her eyes. “The pope has declared that you will marry.”
“No!” She jumps to her feet and walks to the window, sees Alfonso of Aragon with his knights trying to light a fire under the fortress wall, as bumbling as jongleurs—but no one is laughing. “Not a man down there is worthy of me,” she says.
Mama’s laugh is dry. “Pope Innocent seems to agree.”
She turns to her mother. “He has chosen someone else?” Her mother avoids her stare. “Not the emperor’s son!”
“Heavens, no. His Grace aims to defeat Frederick, not to enhance him.”
“Who, then? Tell me!” She snatches the letter from Mama’s hand. As brother to the French king, Charles of Anjou will be amply equipped to keep Provence out of Frederick’s control.
Charles of Anjou. The beaked nose; the sardonic wit; the braggadocio of the youth in the garden come rushing back to her. Her heart begins to thump.
“That strutting rooster? He crows more loudly than the rest, but can he fly? That’s the only way he’ll reach me here.” Her blanket falls to the floor as she looks out the window again, to the north. To Paris.
“He is the worst possible choice for you, and for Provence.” Mama pats the seat beside her and Beatrice settles herself into it. Her mother takes her hand. “My poor darling, please forgive me! Charles is his mother’s baby, a spoiled and selfish young man. At your sister’s wedding I heard him boast that he will become the King of France someday.”
“What treason!” Beatrice cannot help her grin. Charles is so far removed from the throne that a half-dozen men and boys would have to die before he could claim it. “What ambition,” she says.
Noting the breathless edge in her voice, her mother slaps her hand. “Arrogance may excite from a distance, but, like the shark, it turns ugly when viewed up close. Charles would exploit you, and our land, to gratify his desires.”
Beatrice pulls away from her mother and moves to the window again. Is that dust rising from the northern hills?
“He knows nothing of Provence,” Mama says. She could teach him, Beatrice thinks. “He cares nothing about family, not his own and certainly not yours.” She could influence him. “He desires only to compete with his brother.” She knows that feeling all too well. “He hungers for power.” She and Charles of Anjou, it seems, have much in common.
A knock startles them, loud and ringing. Mama’s handmaid ushers Romeo, rarely smiling these days, into the room. The emperor’s forces have swept through Marseille, he says. They took all the food in the city and one hundred horses, besides. “They have been given orders to kill every man on the field and every servant in our castle, if necessary, to reach our Beatrice.”
Beatrice rankles. When did she ever belong to Romeo? But her mother is shouting and pulling at her hair. “Where are the pope’s men? My God, why did I turn to him for help? Whose idea was that?”
Romeo glances at Beatrice, who is tempted to stick out her tongue. She doesn’t recall any suggestions from him that day. “It was Romeo’s plan,” she lies.
He smiles, but his eyes glint anger. She must look out the window again, or laugh. The day she marries Charles will be Romeo’s last day in this castle.
“Mama!” Beatrice grips the stone at the base of her tiny window. “Come quickly. Look!”
In the distance, dust clouds rise. Dark shapes crest the hills, then spill over the top like a dark river. “The emperor’s army,” her mother says. “God help us.”
“No,” Beatrice says. “See their flag?” Blue, with the fleur-de-lis: the flag of France.
“Just in time,” her mother breathes. “Thank the Lord.”
“Thank the pope,” Romeo says, eager to claim the idea now that it pleases his mistress. Beatrice laughs, drawing a dark look from him.
She wants to jump about and clap her hands, but it would never do for Charles to hear of it. Instead, she smiles more and more broadly as the army approaches and as, below, the men of Aragon shout and scurry about like ants whose hill has been kicked.
LATER, WHEN HE has smashed his axe against their heavy door and sent it crashing to the floor; when he has flung the shrieking Beatrice over his shoulder, men slashing their swords all around them; when he has ridden off with her on his galloping horse, his whoops of laughter making music with her own; when he has dragged her into his tent despite her feigned resistance and overwhelmed her with his passion; as she lies beside him, swirling her fingertips in the hair on his chest, he tells her how he outfoxed the other suitors as well as the castle guards without drawing a drop of blood.
“I would have killed for you, my darling,” he says, “but the pope forbade it. And he is the man to please these days. He has the ear of God and the testicles of the emperor, and the keys to our future.”
But how did he do it? Beatrice smacks his chest, bringing him back to her. How did he get through all those men?
Charles flares his magnificent nostrils. “I told them that your mother had appealed to the pope, and that he had sent me to organize a series of contests. The winner, I said, would take you home as his prize.” As his men filtered among the competitors, explaining the “rules” of the games, Charles called to the Provençal knights inside the castle walls and invited them to compete for Beatrice, as well. “When they came out, I went in.”
“All those men, competing for my hand! Why didn’t you vie against them? Afraid you might lose, I warrant.”
“I don’t ‘vie’ for anything, my queen.” He rolls on top of her and pins her wrists to the ground, making her gasp. “When I want something, I take it. And the moment you knocked my pal Guillaume to the ground, I knew that I wanted you.”
Sanchia
A Countess to Make Me Proud
Wallingford, 1246
Eighteen years old
HAVING A CHILD is such hard work, and so painful. But feel the soft warmth of her babe in her arms! And see the delight on Richard’s face. He tickles their little son’s chin, but Sanchia is the one who laughs at his crossed eyes and his gurgling baby talk. He is not supposed to be in the birthing chambers during her lying-in period, but neither custom nor the Church can stop him from fulfilling his desires.
“He resembles me more every hour, doesn’t he?” He does, with that high forehead and honey-colored hair. Yet Sanchia sees something of herself, too, in his delicate nose, tilting slightly to the left, and his lips like a bow.
The babe opens his mouth and belches.
“Indeed, the resemblance is very strong,” Sanchia teases, as Richard’s eyes meet hers. She kisses his cheek. He slips his arm around her shoulder, pulling her in more closely. The cat in her lap, a gift from Richard, begins to purr.
“You have made me very happy.” He chuckles. “The curse is lifted.”
“Richard! There was no curse. The Lord does not work that way.” Justine has told her many times how Isabel Marshall died in childbirth. Four babies, and only one of them lived, which must have made for constant sorrow in this house.
Sorrow has been her dinner, her supper, and her pillow to sleep on since coming to Wallingford, the castle he built for Isabel with the great nursery never filled. Yet she had rejoiced to leave Berkhamsted, where his Jew Abraham’s new wife stole Richard’s every glance. Sanchia feared his heart might follow. He had already lost interest in her. She couldn’t convince Eléonore to allow him to keep Gascony, and she couldn’t convince Beatrice to pay him the five thousand marks in dowry that Papa had promised. “My sisters do not listen to me,” she had told him, but he didn’t listen, either. When he realized the truth, he stopped talking to her, too.
Then the Jewess Floria arrived in her tight gowns and her shining black hair, causing Richard to light up like a sparked tinder whenever she appeared. “Flor-r-r-r-ia,” he would say, trilling the “r” in the way of a nightingale, his eyes caressing her as if she were made of gold. In bed with Sanchia, he closed his eyes and murmured the Jewess’s name, making her cry, which he hated.
Tension grew and stretched at Berkhamsted, quivering like a cord pulled too tightly before it snaps. Then some small thing would upset him: Sanchia had forgotten, again, to order his brandy. (“Between getting out of bed in the morning and keeping my brandy stocked, you are obviously overwhelmed with duties.”) Or he found her cat sleeping on his pillow again. (“At least someone in this household desires to share my bed.”) Each insult made a tiny hole in her heart that can never be repaired.
She always tried not to cry, but she always failed, and Richard’s sa
rcasms would turn to mockery and sometimes worse. Then, his temper exhausted, he became contrite. Floria forgotten, he would cater only to Sanchia, giving her jewels and gowns and delicious wines from Toulouse and sitting her in his lap the way he did when they first got married. Soon, however, his eyes would turn to Floria again, and Abraham would glare at Sanchia as if she were the cause of it all.
The baby opens his eyes—destined to be brown, although they are innocent blue now—and roots at her breast. She calls for the wet nurse, but Justine comes in, instead.
“I’ll take him to her, my lady,” she says, as respectful as can be now that Sanchia has had a child. “You must rest for your big day tomorrow.”
The day will be big indeed. At last Sanchia will claim her rightful place by her husband’s side. Her churching ceremony will show all of England that she, not Isabel Marshall, is the Countess of Cornwall now. She imagines herself on Richard’s arm, moving from guest to guest, welcoming England’s barons and best knights to her home. He is proud of her at last. “I had my doubts when first we married,” he will say, “but I was wrong. She was only a girl then. But look at her now! She has become a countess to make me proud.”
A countess to make him proud. Sanchia dresses the part the next morning, with Justine pulling and tucking and tightening and tying, and laying a net of diamonds over Sanchia’s curls. She looks as if she had dipped her head in stars. “You will be the most elegant and refined woman there. Perhaps then the tongues will cease their wagging,” Justine says.
“Tongues are wagging? About me?”
“Aren’t you one of the famous sisters of Savoy? Aren’t you married to the richest man in England? Everyone is talking about you, especially today, for you have given the count a real son.”
Sanchia’s laugh is uncertain. “A real son? Is there any other kind?”
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