Four Sisters, All Queens (68 page)

“False tears and false tales. I have had more than my share of them from you.”

“They are not false!” She clutches Marguerite’s sleeve, tearing the silk. “Sister.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Sister. Sister, sister, sister! You cannot deny it. You cannot deny me.”

“Please, Beatrice! These histrionics are unbearable.”

“I have spoken for you many times to Charles. You have no idea how many quarrels we have had over your rights to Provence.”

“That is correct. I have no idea, because you have told me many times that you support his wishes over mine.”

“I have never said that! But he is my husband, Margi.”

“You would bend to a man’s will even when it conflicts with your own—and even when it harms your sister?” She slaps Beatrice’s insistent hand from her arm. “You were not reared by our mother, then.”

“No, our mother was occupied with the queens in the family.” Her voice quavers. “It was Papa who raised me.”

“How unfortunate for you.” She intends sarcasm, but Beatrice is nodding.

“I learned from Papa that men control everything. All the power that women have, men have given to us.”

“Except for the White Queen.”

Now Beatrice is the one who laughs. “Do you think that Blanche controlled France? Do you imagine that she was powerful? She had a council of barons to appease. Had she not done so, they would have forced her from her throne and appointed a man to rule until Louis came of age. As the barons did in England for King Henry.”

“But she had her way. She did as she pleased.”

“Do you think she wanted her son to marry the daughter of a poor Southern count?”
You remind me of one of those vulgar flowers that grow in the South
. Marguerite has wondered many times why Blanche approved Louis’s marriage to a “country bumpkin.”

“The Count of Toulouse was her cousin. He wanted Provence.”

“But he never gained it, did he? Blanche could not even help him with that task. The French barons wanted our salt mines and they wanted the port of Marseille. They thought to have them once Papa died—once Provence went to you. But Papa outsmarted them, and left it to me, instead.”

“How do you know this?”

“Papa’s meetings, remember? Meetings with Romeo, with the White Queen, with the French barons. I sat in them all.”

Marguerite sits on her bed, feeling as if someone had punched her in the stomach. The high-and-mighty Blanche was not as powerful as she seemed. If Marguerite had known, she would have defied her more, would have asserted her own authority.

“As Mama said, we women need to help one another,” Beatrice says. “Won’t you help me, Margi?”

Marguerite’s eyes fill with tears. She stands and opens her arms to Beatrice, and the two of them embrace. She notes the thickening of Beatrice’s waist, the result of an inordinate fondness for honey, as Marguerite knows all too well. Mama was right: Beatrice and she are very much alike.

“I cannot help you.” To help Beatrice is to help her enemy. “I would rather cut off all of my fingers than to lift one for Charles’s sake.”

Beatrice stiffens. “Then you spoke correctly before. We may be born of the same parents, but we are most definitely not sisters.”

“Don’t leave on this note.”

“Will there be another note on which to leave? Because I am hearing only the same tune playing over and over again.” She pulls on her gloves. “When next you see me, I shall be a queen.”

“And I shall bow before you, honoring you as you have honored me.”

Beatrice sweeps out of the room blinking back tears, her head high.

“But I shall never bend my knee to Charles,” Marguerite says softly. She sits at her desk to write a letter, in her own hand, to the new pope of Rome, requesting the dowry that is rightfully hers.

Eléonore

A Lost Cause

Paris, 1265

Forty-two years old

S
HE PEERS INTO
the dark, searching, her fingers knotted, her insides gnarled. In the melee of horses and armored men, shouts and grunts, the clashing of swords, Edward sits tall in his saddle.
Constrict yourself,
like her heart,
make yourself small, my son, become a target a man might miss
. He slashes and thrusts, cutting down greed, cutting through lies, cutting away the treason spreading like a tumor across the land. A knight’s horse plunges into the roil, stirring dust, scattering blood, skidding around her son. His lifted shield flashes a roaring lion with a forked tail, the Montfort coat of arms. His lance is aimed for Edward’s back. He charges. Eléonore cries out, but it is too late. Edward has been pierced through, and lies in a boody slump over his horse’s neck.

“My lady, are you well?” Eléonore turns, her heart racing, to see her handmaid Agnes watching her with frightened eyes.

“Yes, I am fine.” She presses a hand to her breast.
Breathe
.

“You gave a shout.”

She glances out the window, sees only moonlight gilding the pear trees, gives a little laugh. “I must have fallen asleep on my feet,” she says. She has not slept since yesterday, when messengers
brought news of a battle brewing at Evesham. The rebels have vowed to kill Henry, but it is Edward they want. Simon aims to place his own son on the throne.

She turns away from the window and sits at her table, peering into her hand mirror as if it could show the future. If only she could conjure the battle, and forgo the agony of waiting.
We will prevail
. For all its bravado, Henry’s last message gives her little confidence.

Simon’s force has thinned, yes. He has lost many of the nobles who backed him at first, most notably Gilbert de Clare, the powerful red-haired Earl of Gloucester.
Montfort speaks of sharing power, then hoards lands and castles for himself and his sons,
he wrote to Eléonore. At last, the barons realize his true ambitions.

The bishops, however, support Simon still, as do the common people, whom he has won by blaming Eléonore and her “alien” relations for poverty and abuse. Greedy lords and corrupt sheriffs are apparently her fault, as well as famine, pestilence, leprosy, adultery, and anything else adding to the people’s misery.

This battle is Simon’s last resort. It is Edward’s, too, who, angered over her injuries and humiliation at London Bridge, has relentlessly—and cleverly—plotted revenge. Gloucester is Edward’s man now, as are Roger Leybourne, Roger de Clifford, and Henry of Almain. Eléonore can resist his friends no longer, not even that dangerous Hamo Lestrange, for they have protected Edward since he escaped from Simon’s clutches.

She conceived the escape plan, she is proud to say. Working in Gascony, where she could command her own men and ships using France’s funds, she welcomed, of all people, William de Valence. How astonished she was to receive him! Despite his banishment from England, his loyalty to Henry has not wavered. He strutted about, as always, bragging about his valor in battle, magnanimously “forgiving” Eléonore for “conspiring” against him—but none of it mattered in light of his outrage over Edward’s imprisonment.

“Our Prince of England held captive by that preening little Frenchman?” he fumed, forgetting his own Poitou origins. He returned home to recruit an army, then sailed to Wales with one hundred twenty knights and her letter to Gilbert de Clare.

Soon the earl had delivered her letter, with its plan for escape, to his brother Thomas de Clare, one of Edward’s guards. Her strategy made full use of Edward’s competitive nature: one day, as he and his guards sat idly about, he boasted that he was the best rider in England. Thomas scoffed, as planned. Others joined in the argument, and soon wagers were involved.

To raise the stakes, Edward proposed to switch horses frequently as proof of his skill. “I can best any man, no matter what horse I ride,” he bragged. Being men, they took his bait. One after another they raced, and Edward won each time. Then, when he was down to his last competitor—Thomas de Clare—he changed horses once more, making sure to choose the fastest and strongest. Off they went on their fresh horses, tearing at top speed into the woods, never to reappear. The captors gave chase on their tired horses and could not catch up.

“He is my son,” Eléonore said when she heard. “Ever eager to test himself against others, ever certain of winning.” He is more like her than anyone alive.

Dinnertime. The morning has passed with excruciating slowness. She heads to the great hall, where she and Margi will dine with Uncle Boniface, Edmund, King Louis, Prince Philip, and, sure to make the meal most interesting, Sir Jean de Joinville, visiting for the first time since Eléonore’s arrival in Paris. Rising to kiss her, Margi positively glows in her new gown of purple with its draping gold silk sleeves, as though she were made for purple, or it for her. Never mind that her figure has grown stout or that the tendrils of hair springing from her headdress are a dull gray: Her eyes are as bright as a bird’s. Her complexion is smooth and, today, blushingly pink, and her wit is as sharp as a rapier.

And as sly.

“Tell me, my lord, how it is that Sir Thomas of Aquino has now declared the flesh of birds to be fit for monks to eat?” she asks Louis as Eléonore takes her seat.

“He has classified poultry as having aqueous origins, like fish,” Louis says in that I-am-trying-to-be-patient voice he uses with Margi.

“I declare that I never saw a chicken in, or near, the water,” she says. “Or a peacock, neither, nor a
becfigue
.” She lifts a morsel from the songbird on her plate, observing it.
Becfigue
was a rare treat when they were girls in Provence, served on special occasions roasted and stuffed with flower petals. “I have never seen a fish flying in the air, either. Nor does poultry taste of the sea.”

“God created fish and fowl at the same time,” Louis says, giving Margi a stern frown. “Read your scriptures.”

“He created man and woman at the same time, too. I wonder if that makes us the same, after all?”

“Many birds eat fish,” Edmund says.

“As do monks. Except for Thomas of Aquino. I have never seen him take a bite of fish at this table.”

“I have noticed the same. It seems that he does not prefer food from the rivers or the sea.” Jean de Joinville is grinning at her. Margi blushes even more profusely. “He does enjoy chicken greatly.”