Four Sisters, All Queens

by Jones, Sherry

  “Do not excite him overmuch,” she says, holding out her arms for the babe. “He will be awake all night.”

  The baby begins to whimper and clutch at Sanchia’s breast. She tries bouncing him in her arms as Floria did, but it only makes him cry.

  “The poor little thing wants his wet nurse,” Floria says. As if she were an expert on babies, she who has no children after three years of marriage. She reaches out to Edmund again, but Sanchia pulls him close to her chest, saying it is his nap time, too, she must go and find Emma right away.

  “Darling dear,” she says—Joan de Valletort’s endearment. Richard lifts his eyebrows. “Will you come with me? I have matters to discuss with you.”

  “I will come to your chambers in a little while,” he says. “Abraham, I have good news. My brother Henry wants to borrow a huge sum for his adventures across the channel. If he does not repay me in time, he will give me the taxes from all the Jews in England. And I will need someone to collect that tax. It could be very lucrative for you.”

  “I live to serve you, my lord,” Abraham says. He bares his little teeth. Sanchia shudders and hurries up the stairs, her baby’s cries hurting her ears.

  In her chambers, Emma nurses the baby while Sanchia plucks at her harp. She could hear Richard’s breathing as he stood next to Floria. He gave off a fecund aroma, like wet earth and leaves. Could the Jew smell it? Or is she imagining this, too?

  “We are friends,” Richard said of Joan de Valletort. “Anything more is a product of your foolish, fanciful mind.”

  She plucks her harp, and sings a song by Peire Vidal:

  “People and rivers/ I’ve sung their praise/ Five hundred ways/ All of my days, To those who treat me/ Worse than they could, /though you’d agree /They’ll hear nothing but good from me.”

  She wonders if Peire ever heard his wife call him “foolish.” If she ever made him cry. If he ever wanted to lash out, to hurt her back.

  By the time she finishes, her hands are moist with the tears she has wiped away, and Emma and the baby are asleep on the couch. Richard, however, has not come to her yet. How much business does he have to discuss with Abraham?

  Sanchia has not seen Berkhamsted in three years, but Richard has traveled here often. She preferred to visit her sister in London than endure the humiliations these Jews inflict. But Eléonore and King Henry were quarreling, and Richard would not let her stay.

  “For you to involve yourself in their disputes serves no one’s interests, least of all mine,” he said. She felt sorry to leave, for the king shouts at Eléonore with a red face and his new brothers start new rumors about her every week. When they started to whisper that Sanchia and Eléonore were conspiring together as “aliens” to take over the kingdom, Richard forced her to come home.

  At least he did not take her back to Wallingford, where the servants give her looks of pity, especially when Joan de Valletort comes to call. And why wouldn’t they feel sorry for her? They hear the woman’s haughty laugh and her condescending tone, as if Sanchia were a child—and Joan not even a countess! They probably knew that Richard was entertaining her all night whenever she came “to conduct the old man’s business,” as she said. (Her husband is said to be quite old.)

  “Tremberton is neither very large nor very wealthy,” Sanchia finally said to Richard. “I wonder what kind of business keeps bringing her here?”

  “You would not understand,” was Richard’s abrupt reply.

  But Sanchia understands plenty. Seeing the baroness’s son Philip at her churching party made many things clear. While Richard and Joan talked with ease, he stood blushing—Richard’s son, nearly her age!—and staring at the embroidered cloth hanging on the wall depicting the Battle of Hastings. Did the young man realize that Richard is his father? Why did Joan bring him to Sanchia’s ceremony?

  “She is asserting her claim,” Eléonore guessed. Until Sanchia bore Richard a son, he had only one heir: Henry, a sweet youth who writes poems to Sanchia and brings her wildflowers. (Where did he learn such romantic behavior? Certainly not from his father.) “If Richard had no other sons, Philip would be next in line to inherit his wealth.”

  Once she recovered from her surprise at seeing Richard’s features copied onto a younger man’s face, Sanchia could shrug off worries about Joan as if they were snowflakes on her shoulders. Gray streaks her black hair. Her eyes crinkle in little lines when she smiles. Her hands look like maple leaves with all their ropy veins. She is old! Richard might have loved her once, a long time ago, but he had Sanchia now, who had given him a legitimate son, and his eyes were ever upon her when his hands could not be. Soon he would grow to love Sanchia, and Joan de Valletort would have to pursue some other wealthy man.

  But then the baby died coughing and wheezing a few days after the churching, and Richard blamed her for the death.

  “You should have called a physician,” he said. “How could you be so careless?” She did not remind him that she had been sick, too, with a fever so high that Justine had plunged her into a cold bath to bring her temperature down, but that Richard refused to call a healer for her.

  “Healers are pretenders, more hazardous than helpful,” he told her then. “They did nothing to cure my poor wife—and then they wanted their pay.”

  “I am your wife,” Sanchia wanted to say.

  Lying on her bed, waiting, she ponders marriage. The women at Wallingford talked endlessly of their marriages, of the business transactions and the children and the households and the travels. Sanchia, who has only one child and whose husband has excluded her from his affairs, spoke tentatively of love, like a child prodding an anthill with a stick. The younger women in the group stared at her, while the older women only shook their heads and clucked their tongues. What was it that Richard said about marriage? That it was the vinegar, and love the oil?

  But her parents loved each other. Theirs was a great romance—the beauty from Savoy and the count from Aragon—and a true partnership. Not only did Mama bear Papa’s children, and see to their education, but she also administered the household finances, oversaw the servants, handled the correspondence, maintained the castles, and did whatever else he needed. Isabel Marshal had done the same when she was Richard’s wife. But he won’t let Sanchia do anything for him—except watch the baby, who makes a poor companion for an adult woman.

  She at least had Richard’s affections for a time, although sometimes after drinking too much German brandy he could be harsh with her. Now he gives her nothing except a pat on the head, as if she were one of his dogs. Oh, if only she were his dog! Then she would at least have his attention, and be given tasks to perform.

  In France, he did not even let her try to help her sister. Eléonore had asked her to appeal to Queen Blanche de Castille’s piety, “as only you can do,” to coax her to give England’s lands back to King Henry. Henry has taken the cross but he won’t be able to go unless he can get more money—from Normandy, for example.

  Richard, in France to negotiate a treaty for England—and to try to get Normandy back—seemed to like the idea at first. “If anyone could touch the White Queen’s heart, it is our dear, sweet Sanchia,” he said to Eléonore. But she must have said something wrong. When Richard introduced her, she asked if the queen would accompany her to La Sainte-Chapelle, the cathedral that King Louis had built to house the piece of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns, “that I might venerate the relics of the Christ with your guidance.” The queen smiled and said of course, she would be delighted.

  “How encouraging to find such devotion to Our Lord in one so young. Of course, it was common when I was your age, but the universities are teaching Aristotle to our young men now, if you can imagine that,” she said.

  “Our mother taught Aristotle to us,” she said, eager to impress the White Queen. “I liked his ideas.”

  “Really?” The queen lifted one drawn eyebrow. “But his God comprises a divine intelligence, devoid of morality.”

  “Yes, my lady . . .
” She struggled to find an intelligent response, having daydreamed through most of her philosophy lessons and never liking to read, especially in Greek. “But—didn’t he write before Jesus was born? We must consider him in context,” she said, quoting Mama.

  The queen’s blue eyes turned to ice. “Yes,” she said, “you certainly are Marguerite’s sister.”

  Sanchia felt a glow to be compared to Marguerite, the smartest woman she has ever known, and so quick of tongue. “I think she likes me,” she said to Richard when they sat at the meal prepared for them—fresh fish with a tart lemon sauce, baby green beans in butter, a veal roast, a salad of violets, rose petals, and rue. Richard said nothing, and he only grunted whenever, during the next several days, she asked when she might speak with Queen Blanche. When she pressed him, he patted her head and said to be patient, that these were delicate negotiations, that the queen barely had time for him, and that she would need to wait her turn.

  Finally, as he ushered her into her carriage for the journey home—scowling over his failure to regain Henry’s lands, for his purse would have benefited, too—Sanchia asked one more time: What happened to her meeting with the French queen?

  “I promised my sister that I would not disappoint her,” she said.

  “You will disappoint no one as long as you stay away from Blanche,” he said.

  He has always treated her as if she were a child. When they first married, she was very childlike, that is true. She was not the confident woman that he wanted her to be. She could not talk her sisters into giving him what he wanted. But she has changed. She is stronger now, and more mature. She could help Richard, if he would let her. She could make him proud of her again, the way he was the night of her churching.

  She had looked forward to seeing his eyes glow again, at the celebration for Edmund. But six months have passed since he was born, and Richard has not given a feast. Perhaps it is time to do so. She could arrange it; he would not need to do anything except be proud of her, for she would take great care to make him proud. This time, there would be no Joan de Valletort to spoil her day—Tremberton being far from Berkhamsted—nor would Floria be a concern, since Jews, of course, would not be invited and she would not dare to make an entrance as Joan did.

  She sits up in bed, thoughts whirling. The most prominent English barons and their wives will come, and Uncle Peter and Uncle Boniface, and Eléonore and Henry again. And then, when Richard sees how capable she has become, he might allow her to work more closely with him in managing his affairs. She might become as valuable to him as Abraham, or as much a partner as Isabel Marshal had been—who, if she did not have Richard’s fidelity, at least had his respect.

  But—where is Richard? The day’s light is nearly gone. He must have forgotten his promise to come and visit her soon, or maybe he thinks she must be sleeping. In fact, though, she is wide awake, and too excited to sleep.

  She rises and pulls on her slippers, then walks through the castle. He is not in the chancellory, which is empty, lit by a slant of pale light illuminating the dust on the rolls of parchment stacked on high shelves. The Jew is in the treasury, alone, sitting at the large table and jotting notes, squinting by the light of a candelabra. Servants, petitioners, and merchants mill about in the great hall, but Richard is not there. His chambers are empty, too.

  She steps out into the garden, where the sky bleeds a breathtaking shade of red, like the blush on a ripe peach—and she hears his voice, only a faint murmur. Following the sound, she steps around a flowering wisteria and sees him holding the Jewess Floria around her waist, grasping her to him, and gazing into her eyes with a smolder he once reserved for Sanchia. Her heart begins to bang against her chest; pressing her hands to it, she steps back, out of sight.

  “Where is Abraham?” Floria says, a bit breathlessly, she thinks.

  Richard chuckles. “Do not concern yourself with him. He will be occupied for many months collecting the tax, far too busy to disturb us.”

  “It would be no disturbance, my lord. I enjoy my husband’s company.”

  “If you get lonely, my pet, you know where to find me.”

  “But what about your wife? She’s beautiful. Why would you want anyone else?”

  His snort brings tears to Sanchia’s eyes. “She’s a doll. All beauty, no brains. But you, my sweet—you have both. You excite me, Floria. I can tell that I excite you, too.”

  “Abraham would kill us both,” Floria says.

  “He’ll never know. This is our secret, Floria. If anyone finds out, I would be ruined. A Christian and a Jew! Even my brother would not forgive it. And if I fall, Abraham falls, and all the Berkhamsted Jews.”

  “That’s a very good reason to release me now, my lord.”

  “Do not say that!” She can hear him breathing. “Floria, I want you as I’ve never wanted anyone.”

  “I doubt if that is true, my lord.” A long silence follows. Sanchia peeks around the shrubbery and sees them kissing, sees Floria’s throat as her head tilts back. Sanchia wishes she had a knife or a sword; she would hack off the Jewess’s head.

  “Flor-r-r-ia. Come with me to my chambers. Sanchia is asleep and Abraham will be working until the morning. Neither of them need ever know.”

  Sanchia turns and flees into the castle, afraid to be discovered, blinking back tears, stifling her sobs. In her chambers, where her innocent babe sleeps in his wet nurse’s arms, the dark has overcome the day and settled on her bed like a growling dog. She curls up beside it and lies awake, listening for bumps in the night.

  Beatrice

  The Magnificent Queen

  Grand Cairo, 1250

  Nineteen years old

  THE SULTANESS OF Egypt frowns down at them from her high throne, her fleshy face a dark moon in folds of white linen. One of her hands rests on her golden throne; one holds a scepter, also of gold. On her left, a man in a white turban listens to Marguerite’s petition and murmurs in the sultaness’s ear. Not that he needs to whisper for their sake: Neither she nor Marguerite understands a word of Arabic.

  Marguerite, in her men’s robes and long headdress, holds up a jar made of animal hide. “This vessel is filled with livres, hundreds of them. We have more coming; many more, all that you have asked for. I pray you, take this money and set my husband free.”

  “Hundreds?” The sultaness’s laugh tinkles like a fountain of water. “Would we release a king for such a paltry sum?”

  Marguerite makes her case: The king’s health is sensitive. She has heard that he is very ill. He is beloved by his subjects and barons as well as the lords of surrounding lands. If he dies in the Mansoura jail, many kingdoms will send troops to fight against Egypt, seeking revenge.

  “And if we free him, he will return to wage war against our people again,” the sultaness says.

  “We only wish to return home.”

  Shajar al-Durr smiles thinly. “Do you know how your husband spends his time in our prison? Trying to convert his guards to the Christian religion.”

  Beatrice imagines him in his hair shirt and coarse tunic, rashes oozing and bleeding, telling the Saracens in their soft gowns that his is the path to salvation.

  “He loves God, as you do,” Marguerite says.

  Her remark has hit its mark: The sultaness’s eyes soften as they meet Marguerite’s. Her sister stands with a straight back and a bold thrust of her chin, as defiant as a shield. Beatrice marvels at the change: Have her man’s clothes brought it about, or is it her success at saving Damietta? So reserved before, so contained, she now moves with vigor, commanding men as though she were a king, even laughing at the bawdy songs the Genoan sailors sang as they rowed the boats up the broad, flat Nile. Nothing could subdue her, not the bump of crocodiles against the galleys; not the swarms of mosquitoes about their heads and faces; not even the white-hot blast of the midday sun.

  “Love of God is not why you have come,” Shajar al-Durr says. “If it were so, you would heed his commandment not to kill. You are here because
you want what we have.”

  “We want the holy city. It is where our Lord was crucified. Where he was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.”

  “Also our ports of trade. Our fine cloth. Our beautiful rugs. Our spices. Our poetry and philosophy. Our music. Our gold. Especially our gold.”

  Marguerite says, “I know nothing about gold. My husband came to claim Jerusalem for Christians.”

  “Then why isn’t he in Jerusalem?”

  Marguerite says nothing, and Beatrice knows why: They heard Robert of Artois and the other barons urging Louis to swoop down like a hawk on Mansoura and seize the sultan’s palace now that Shajar al-Durr’s husband is dead. “A treasure trove of riches,” Robert said, “ours for the taking!” The barons’ greed knew no end; nor did Robert’s arrogance. They had, indeed, come to Outremer for the gold.

  “No matter why we came, we have lost to you,” Beatrice says. “We are at your mercy, for now. But the people of France will soon hear that King Louis and his brothers are captive. They will eagerly fight for him.”

  The man beside her laughs. Shajar al-Durr lifts her hand and he is silent, but his eyes shimmer with mirth.

  “Have you come to threaten me,” the sultaness says, “or to negotiate your husbands’ release?”

  “We wish to free all our men—today,” Marguerite says.

  “Have you brought five hundred thousand livres? No? Then I cannot let even a single man go with you. If I did, I might lose my neck.” A shadow crosses her face. “I may lose it, anyway.”

  “And I may lose my husband.” Marguerite’s voice rises. “We have four children.”

  “I am sorry.” The sultaness’s eyes fill with tears. “My husband died recently. I loved him as only a woman can love. And now my son Turan Shah is slain. I loved him as only a mother can love.”