Four Sisters, All Queens (34 page)

The Holiest Man in the Kingdom

Paris, 1245

Twenty-four years old

A
FTER THE LONG
carriage ride, Marguerite wants only to walk. By her side, Gisele shivers and remarks on the weather (“It feels like it will snow, don’t you think, my lady?”) but Marguerite hears only her thoughts jumping about as if her mind were a bed of hot coals with nowhere for thoughts to rest.

“You may stop worrying about your dowry now,” Blanche said to her on the ride, as if, having gained the pope of Rome’s permission to take what she wants, she can now dictate Marguerite’s concerns. And perhaps she can, for no scathing riposte came to Marguerite’s lips. Retorts are for clever people and today, having been denied her own petition to the pope, Marguerite feels neither clever nor particularly interested in talking, especially to her mother-in-law.

Even Louis offers no consolation, having testified in Blanche’s favor instead of Marguerite’s. But when has he ever sided with her on anything his mother opposed?

“Aren’t you cold, my lady? Wouldn’t you like to go inside and sit by a nice fire?” Gisele’s face looks raw and her lips are blue, but Marguerite’s answer is no, she does not want to sit. Her blood
races far too fast for her to feel a chill. Imagine: Charles of Anjou, with his preening conceit and nasty temper, is to take her father’s place as Count of Provence. Marguerite cannot fathom it. Not even Beatrice could prefer him, with his nose like a beak and his skin as pale as a dead man’s. Yet Beatrice will not have a choice. Blanche wants Provence for her son and Pope Innocent wants Blanche’s allegiance, and no one seems to care what Marguerite—or Beatrice—wants.

If only another man had been chosen for her—anyone but Charles! Marguerite might have convinced her sister to grant her Tarascon, at least. Then she would have a
château
in Provence, on the banks of the beautiful Rhône, a place where she could find peace and solitude. A private place, of her very own.

A gust of wind brings a flurry of snow, stinging her cheeks, blinding her eyes.

“My lady, should we seek shelter in the stables? I see smoke rising from the chimney.”

Marguerite follows her handmaid with barely a murmur of assent, too lost in her ruminations to care about cold or fires. What could Mama have been thinking, to petition the pope for aid? The Emperor Frederick is a known rogue, but he would not snatch a woman from her home for a forced marriage, no matter what the rumors say. Poor Beatrice, sold like a slave at auction to the highest bidder! Poor Provence, as well, for, with Charles as count, its people may never see another carefree day.

They walk into the livery stables, where the horses that pulled her carriage today nibble from the heaps of grain under their noses and flick their tails, made nervous by the shrieks coming from a back room.

She follows the noise, indignation rising as she prepares to confront the groomsman again for abusing the king’s animals. He has argued that beatings are necessary to make good war-horses, but Marguerite knows about horses. She also knows the excuses people invent to justify cruelty.

“Where are you going, my lady? Wait for me!” Gisele cries, then
nearly runs into her when Marguerite stops, her hands on her face, her mouth agape at the sight of her husband hanging naked and bleeding from a rope tied to the rafters, sobbing and begging to be released, as the groomsman lashes him with his whip.

Gisele’s cry freezes the man’s hand as he lifts the whip again, and now he is the astonished one as Marguerite rushes forward and grabs it from him, then begins beating him with it about the head. “Release the king at once, and prepare yourself for the gallows!” she snarls. The man pulls a long knife from his belt and cuts the rope with one hand while holding Louis with the other, smearing his tunic with the king’s blood. He lays the king, facedown, on a pallet.

“Now for the vinegar,” Louis murmurs before he faints.

“He does not usually take it so hard,” the groomsman says. “You have come on a bad day, my lady.”

Marguerite orders Louis’s nakedness covered, then demands an accounting from the red-faced groomsman. What, she asks, is going on?

He stares at her. “You didn’t know?”

Know what? He averts his eyes, runs a bloody hand through his long hair. “About the king’s floggings.”

The king’s floggings? Marguerite has him repeat the phrase, then again, as if he were speaking in a foreign tongue. To be certain, this is a language she does not understand. Under whose command? she asks, thinking of Blanche.

“Why, the king himself,” the groomsman says. Knowing something that she does not restores his composure. He shakes his head, saying he cannot believe that she did not know, that he thought everyone in the court knew that King Louis has himself flogged every day. “Sometimes his confessor wields the whip, and sometimes I do it—with the queen mother’s approval. She says it keeps His Grace free of sins.”

From under his blanket, Louis calls weakly for the groomsman. “Vinegar,” he says. The man pulls a flagon from the pouch on his belt and a sponge, then soaks the sponge with vinegar from the bottle. He steps toward Louis.

“No!” she shouts.

He offers the sponge to her. “Would my lady care to do it?”

“To soak his wounds in vinegar? My God, what anguish! Have you no compassion?”

“The sponge is not for his stripes, but for his mouth, my lady.” He smiles as if she were an ignorant child. “The king sucks it when he thirsts, as Christ did on the cross.”

Marguerite snatches the sponge and flagon and hurls them to the floor, her vision swimming. Dress him, she commands the groomsman, and bring him to his chambers.

Gisele calls out again, pleading with her to wait as she runs back through the winter-dead garden, frost-frozen grasses crunching underfoot, into the castle and directly to the nursery. There she finds Blanche in a chair with little Louis in her lap, reading to him from a children’s psalter although he is barely old enough to speak.

“Unhand my son,” Marguerite says. She pulls him out of Blanche’s lap and enfolds him in her arms. Lou-Lou smells of honey cakes and milk, and his fat little cheeks are as soft as cushions.

“Mama!” Isabelle cries, such a gay child, and runs up to fling her arms around her mother’s legs. Marguerite sits in a chair and lets her climb into her lap, breathes in her children’s powders and lotions and innocence.

“What has come over you?” Blanche stands. “Are you mad?”

“Not I!” Marguerite’s laugh sounds maniacal even to her own ears. Lou-Lou begins to cry.

Outside the room she hears Louis’s moaning, and the groomsman’s quiet urging: “Just a few steps more, Your Grace. No, we cannot do the vinegar today. Your wife has forbidden it.” Marguerite’s stare accuses Blanche, whose eyes glitter when she realizes what has happened.

“Louis is the holiest man in the kingdom,” Blanche says. “He will be named a saint someday.”

Marguerite calls for the nurse.

“Lou-Lou and I haven’t finished our reading,” Blanche says as
Denise takes the children from her. When they have gone, Marguerite turns to her mother-in-law.

“Queen Mother, the time has come for you to depart.”

Blanche arches a painted eyebrow. “Are you now ordering me about the palace?”

“No, I am ordering you out of it.”

“Indeed!” Her laugh spills contempt. “Aren’t you the high and mighty one?”

“You have done enough harm in my household. More than enough.”

“By teaching my children piety? You could use a dose of it, yourself. I am still waiting for evidence of your ‘pretty faith.’”

“And what is pretty about yours, with its sorrow and deprivation and self-inflicted pain?” Marguerite’s voice rises.

“Surely even a Cathar sympathizer feels compassion for our Lord’s suffering.”

“What of compassion for your own son? But then, you had none for his father.”

Blanche’s hand flies to her throat. Laughter, maniacal and shrill, clangs like an alarm heard only by Marguerite. What has she done? She feels as if she had spent her life saving coins for a special purchase and then lost all in a game of chance. Except that this is not a game of chance. It is a game, yes, but of strategy, like chess, and she has not lost and she will not lose. Blanche will not corrupt her children as she has done her own.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Blanche says when she has found her voice.

“You had your husband killed,” Marguerite says. “You and the King of Navarre, so that you could rule France.”

“Ridiculous,” she says, but the word warbles out on an uncertain note.

“I thought so, too, until I heard it with my own ears.”

“Surely you know better than to believe everything you hear. I laid that rumor to rest years ago.”

“Tell it to the King of Navarre, for he seems still to think he caused King Louis’s death, and all for the love of you.”

“You lie!” Her fantasies foretold the fear on Blanche’s face, but not the delicious hum in her own veins. This is power. “Thibaut would not confide in you.”

“Not in me, but in you—at Alphonse’s celebration in Poitou. I overheard his appeals for your love, and your rejection of him.” As she recounts the conversation word for word, Blanche’s breathing becomes more labored. “He said he had given you the throne, and that you gave only broken promises in return.”

“I never promised him anything,” she says. “I was dismayed by my husband’s failures in England, and by his refusal to return home even after I convinced King Philip Augustus to send ships for him. I complained to my cousin, yes, and said I would give anything to rule, for I knew myself to be more competent. Years later, Thibaut sent an assassin to poison Louis, but without my knowledge or my assent.”

“How unfortunate for you.” Marguerite smiles. “Not so for me.”

“You would not reveal my secret. No one would believe you.”

“I have witnesses,” she lies. “Two servants heard your conversation. The poor souls came to me wringing their hands, wracked by guilt. They feel duty bound to report to Louis, but I have kept them silent—for now.”

“You would not tell my son. It would destroy him.”

“No, it would destroy you, which would please me immensely. Only one thing would delight me more: your immediate departure from this court, never to return.”

Outside the room there is a shout, and a scuffle, then more shouts. “The king! The king! Help!”

Both women start for the door. Marguerite elbows past her mother-in-law. “You have done enough,” she says. In Louis’s chambers: a cloud of stink, a stench like death, the ashen king slumped in his groomsman’s powerful arms, trembling and dripping sweat.

“Come no closer, my lady, or you will step in it,” the man cries, pointing to a dark pool at his feet.

Then servants run about, one with a wash basin, another with cloths, a third sent by Marguerite to fetch the healer, his chamberlains removing Louis’s soiled and bloody clothes and replacing them with fresh ones as she holds her husband’s hot, limp hand and forces herself to murmur comforts. She is the queen now and must behave as such, no matter the burn behind her eyes, no matter the feeling that the ground under her feet has broken apart and carries her ever farther from the world. Who in this court would hold
her
hand? Only Joinville—but he has gone to Champagne to make heirs with his new wife.

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.