Four Sisters, All Queens (43 page)

“Seeing your courage today, I can tell you that you are definitely one of us.”

“You strengthened me.” She began to cry. “I wanted to give up. If not for you, my baby might have died. How can I ever repay you?”

Marguerite looked away.

“I must be delirious. Of course I know what you want most in all the world. And, of course, I will give it to you.”

Marguerite took a breath, willed her excited pulse to slow down. Her sister may, indeed, be delirious. “But you cannot afford to part with ten thousand marks. You said so yesterday.”

“I said that we need every penny to defend our castles. But we do not need all our castles. We do not need Tarascon.”

“I
do
need it, more than you can know. But, no—you cannot give it to me.”

“I can. It is mine, isn’t it?”

“You said Charles would not allow it.”

“He said you have never given
him
anything but an upset stomach.” She grins. “He’ll change his mind when he hears how you cared for me today.”

Now Marguerite was the one with the eyes full of tears. Tarascon will be hers. At last, she will have her dowry. She will have, at last, something to call her own. Should Louis die before her, she will not be bereft. She will not be forced to enter a convent, the usual recourse for widowed queens whose husbands have failed to provide for them. Louis bequeathed her nothing.

It’s only fair a man should find/ His peace with what he’s sought so long
. Guillem de Peiteus’s words ring true: Having finally gained Tarascon, Marguerite feels peace settling, timid and trembling as a rabbit, into her breastbone.

The wind ceases, proving that miracles never do. From within, she hears Beatrice pleading with her infant. “Cry, darling! It may improve your spirits.” Fevers and strange rashes have begun to attack the babe after only a few days of life, leaving her too ill even to whimper.

Now, though, Marguerite does hear a cry, and the shouting of the knights of Burgundy and the foot soldiers of Genoa and Pisa
outside the city walls. She gazes across the rocky beach to see the Oriflamme flicking like a tail in the wind followed by Louis’s knights on horseback and his foot soldiers running, holding up their shields and waving their lances. She lets out a cry. Their approach can mean only one thing: victory for France.

“Vive la France!”
she shouts, and the entire somnolent city rings with life. The barons’ wives pour forth from their dwellings, bare-armed in the sultry April heat, rushing like a snow-fed stream toward the gate. Matilda, on the balcony with Marguerite, cries, “Praise the Lord!” and throws her arms around Marguerite, who throws her arms around Beatrice, whose baby in her arms begins, at long last, to cry.

Their joy is short-lived. “Saracens!” the Duke of Burgundy screams. “Everyone into the palace at once. Hurry to the palace; we are under attack!”

As the men draw nearer, Marguerite can see that, although their armor and shields bear the fleur-de-lis and coats of arms of France and its neighbors, their skin is the color of almonds. Saracens, wearing French armor! Not victory, then, but utter defeat. Her knees wobble. She longs to sit. But she is queen, and must set an example. “Inside, hurry!” she says to Beatrice and Matilda, whose faces droop with disappointment. They make their way inside, to her chambers—where the Lord John of Beaumont awaits, looking at the floor as if searching for something lost there.

He falls to one knee before her. “My lady, I bring tidings most grave.”

Had she hoped, only a moment before, for some news to break the silence? Now she wants only to cover her ears with her hands. “Please rise, Sir John. Have you had repast? Let me send for some bread and wine, and then we may talk.”

“No, my lady.” The growl for which he is known—and feared—returns to his voice. “I must deliver my message. Time is of the essence.”

“The king! Is he injured?”

“He is captured, my lady. Taken prisoner by the Turks, and delivered to the Egyptian queen.”

Marguerite presses her hands to her chest. If Louis dies, they will all die here. “Who else?”

“His brother the Count of Anjou, my lady. His brother the Count of Poitou. The Count of Brittany. The Lord Geoffrey of Sargines. The Lord Walter of Châtillon.”

“The Lord Robert, the king’s brother?” Matilda stands in the doorway, clasping her hands as if in prayer. “What of him?”

Lord John drops his gaze again. “Killed, my lady. I am sorry.”

Matilda shrieks; her head drops back. Marguerite catches her as she slumps in a faint. Her ladies flutter around. They lay her on the bed, and Marguerite kneels beside her, placing herself lower than Lord Beaumont and not caring. The rules are different—she does not know, anymore, what they are.

“Sir Robert died with honor, my lady,” Lord Beaumont says. “He almost took Mansoura. But the Turks came, thousands of them, and there was a most brutal slaughter.”

“Thank you, Lord Beaumont,” she says, cutting him off lest Matilda hear.

Thinking that he has been dismissed, he steps toward the door. Marguerite’s head jerks up.

“Lord Beaumont,” she says, more loudly than she intends. He stops and turns to her.

“What of Sir Jean de Joinville? You did not mention him.”

At the mournful dip of his head, she thanks God that she is already on the floor. Jean, killed too? But no. “He is imprisoned, my lady,” Beaumont says. “With the king.”

W
ITH
L
OUIS CAPTURED
, she takes command. Lord Beaumont offers to advise her but she waves him away. She knows what must be done. She sends knights and foot soldiers to delay the Saracens’ approach, and learns that the Queen of Egypt, anticipating an
easy victory, has sent only a small force. Ha! She will show these Saracens a thing or two about French spirit. She sends galleys to procure more food from the ships offshore. The Genoese and Venetian merchants will brave even a Turkish siege if they stand to profit. She confers with the military leaders on how to defend the city, for if they lose Damietta, they will have nothing with which to ransom the French prisoners. Louis will be lost, and so will they all. She sends Lord Beamont on a ship to Paris, to request money from Blanche for their men’s ransom, and she sends the Countess Matilda with him. She sends a messenger to the Templars requesting funds, as well, plus knights to help with the city’s defense.

And then, as the few men remaining to them build stone throwers and stockpile arrows, the first dull cramp squeezes her womb. An hour later, there is another.

She writes a letter to the Queen of Egypt. She knows the pains of labor, that sometimes they are false. She prays that this is so now. She cannot cease her duties, for who then would rule? Every man of authority is dead or taken captive, leaving only her.
We pray that you will keep our men in safety while we negotiate their release. We remain securely in possession of Damietta, and offer it in trade for our king Louis and all his nobles, knights, and foot soldiers in your captivity.

Shouts ring from outside. Marguerite runs to the balcony. The Turks are building a tower and siege engine, and have already begun firing flaming arrows over the city walls. She sees a man fall, and another. From inside, she hears Gisele calling for her.

“Sir John de Voré wishes to speak with you, my lady Queen,” she says, breathless.

He bows slowly, as if old age had rusted his hinges. His eyes, draped above and below in folds of skin, look directly into hers. These, Marguerite realizes, are all who remain to fight for France: aged knights and peasant boys.

“The Turks have begun their siege, my lady,” he says.

The tide crests, then crashes over her thighs. She cries out in
alarm. A dark pool spreads across the front of her gown. She looks back up at the knight, as if he could save her. He holds out a hand to her.

“May I escort you to your birthing chamber, my lady?” he says. “It appears that your time has come.”

Day blurs into night fades into day. The clatter of the Turkish engine. Acrid burning pitch. Rowdy laughter and a heathen chant. The old knight’s large hand around her own, and the soft scent of Gisele. Beatrice’s commanding tone and her palm on Marguerite’s brow. Then another squeeze of pain, the Latin prayers of the papal legate, the cloy of incense, the stink of shit. A shriek from outside—a man in Saracen robes waving a scimitar and shouting in Arabic, lunging for her. Marguerite screams.

“Sir John, protect me!” she cries.

Women’s arms pulling her up, Beatrice on one side of her and the knight on the other, walking her around the room in circles, in spirals, and then, when she becomes dizzy and nauseated, in a straight line, to and fro.

“Let her rest,” the knight says.

“No,” Beatrice says. “The baby must come now, or perish.”

Men rush into her chamber, armed with crossbows. Marguerite protests: she is in labor, and needs peace. “The Turks are tearing down the walls,” the old knight says. “These men are here to protect us.”

She clutches his arm. “Promise me, sir knight,” she says. “You must not let the Turks take my baby and me alive.” They would rape her, then sell her into slavery—and her child, if it lived, would grow up a heathen, destined for hell. Death would be a far kinder fate.

“The moment the Saracens enter this palace, you must kill us both. Please, sir knight, swear that you will!”

“We are of like minds, madame,” he says. “I had already determined to do so.”

Back in her bed, perspiration and tears soak the coverings.
Hail Mary full of grace blessed are you among women
. A flash
of light—a splintering, as if the heavens were splitting in two; the howl of the wind blowing into the room, knocking over an empty drinking gourd and rolling it across the floor. Rain pours from the sky, pelts the roof like stones, sprays across her, quenching her skin.
Push, sister! Push harder! You can do it.
She gulps the sweet air—the breath of God—fills with strength, and pushes the baby out. Her fourth living child, her sixth altogether, Jean Tristan, she has already named him, for the time of sorrow in which he enters this world.

I
N THE MORNING
, sun. And, miraculously, quiet. The
squonk
of a gull is the only sound. At the window, Gisele admires the blue day. The Turks, she says, have ceased their attack, and sit in their tents, waiting for God knows what. Everyone is taking credit: the legate, citing his prayers; the crossbowmen, bragging about the thick hail of arrows they fired; Marguerite, privately, crediting the letter she penned to Shajar al-Durr, the Sultaness of Egypt.

The sultaness’s messenger waits in the great hall. Marguerite summons him. Before he arrives, though, three soldiers gather at the foot of her bed. “We have come to say good-bye,” one of them tells her in broken French.

Marguerite pushes herself to sit straighter, the night’s travails forgotten. “Where are you going? You can’t leave me now. What will happen to me—to all of us?”

“If we stay, my lady, then we will die,” he says. “You would do the same.”

“I would not. Not when other lives are at stake.”

“Yet you would have us lose our lives to save yours?”

“The life of your queen.” Then she remembers: She is not their queen. These men are from Genoa and Pisa, mercenaries hired from the merchant ships off shore. “The life of the King of France,” she says.