Four Sisters, All Queens (72 page)

“It would be a pleasure to send you to the jail,” she says. “A single shout from me would do it.”

“I advise against it.” His eyes are red at their rims, as though he has not slept for days. “You do not want anyone to hear what I am about to say.”

Then, in a voice raspy and low, he tells Marguerite her secrets. She was seen that night on the voyage home from Outremer, running onto the ship’s deck unclothed with her burning gown. Joinville, too, was seen, through her cabin’s open door. Marguerite begins to perspire.

“Do not worry. Bartolomeu told no one. When he returned to France, however, he came to me, tormented by guilt and his love for Louis.”

Marguerite feels suddenly weak, as though she might faint. Yet she cannot sit down, for Charles grips her arms, bruising her. “But you never told Louis,” she says.

“No. I intended to, for I have never cared for the noble Joinville and I care even less for you. How I would have enjoyed causing your destruction!” He is so near that she can feel his spittle spraying her face. “But I kept your secret. You may thank Beatrice for that. She begged me not to tell.”

“You agreed out of the goodness of your heart, I suppose.”

He laughs. “You know me better. She had to give me something in return: a promise. Which she kept until she died, even though she sacrificed your love.”

The urge to flee rises up; she pushes hard against him, freeing herself from him. She does not want to hear the rest of his sordid story—and yet, she does.

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why would I lie? Everything I want is mine, thanks in part to your indiscretion.”

“I don’t see what my private life has to do with your ambition.”

“Beatrice paid a price for your privacy. At the time I told her my
informant’s tale, she was preparing to petition the pope, asking him to grant Tarascon to you.”

She reaches out and finds the edge of her bed, then slowly sits. Beatrice had intended to keep her promise, after all. She was never the enemy.

“I forbade her to send the letter, of course. But Beatrice was not a submissive woman. She agreed, in exchange for my silence, and Bartolomeu’s.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” Marguerite begins to cry again.

“That was our agreement—that she never tell anyone, especially you. I would not wish to be known as a man who must utter threats and make bargains to control his wife.”

“And now—what? Do you think you can threaten me? Go! Tell Louis what you think you know. I will deny it, and so will Joinville.” Already, a lie has begun to shape itself. Joinville, on the deck, heard her screams. He rushed inside as she was running out with the burning gown. When she ran back into the cabin, he stood by the bed with his eyes shut, offering her a blanket with which to cover herself.

His smile is ghastly. “Why would I threaten you? You have nothing that I want.”

“Provence is no longer yours. According to my father’s will, it goes to Beatrice’s son. I’m going fight your attempt to rule the county. And I will win.”

His laughter sends her leaping to her feet, her fists balled. “You will not win,” he says. “Your father’s will has been changed. The pope of Rome amended it—at Beatrice’s request.”

Marguerite stifles a cry. How can anyone amend a man’s will after he is dead? But Charles, she sees, has found a way.

“Your sister Eléonore paid a high price for her ambition. She promised the very stars to the pope of Rome in exchange for the Sicilian crown. But revolutions are expensive.”

“That’s why you helped Simon—because you wanted Sicily!”

“My tactic succeeded. After spending every coin in the treasury fighting rebels, Queen Eléonore could not deliver the sum she had
pledged to the pope. He threatened to excommunicate King Henry. Had he done so, his reign—and your sister’s—would have ended. Beatrice pleaded with me to help. So of course I offered to pay their debt—for a price.”

If she must endure his smug smile for even one more moment, Marguerite will be ill. “I am going now,” she says. She turns away—but his words stop her.

“Beatrice would have given anything for your love. To be one of you—one of the sisters of Savoy—was all she ever wanted. Yet she gave up that desire for your sake. Now you can repay her by allowing her body to be buried next to her father’s.”

Marguerite sighs. How did she misjudge her sister so completely? “I shall agree to it,” she says. “It is the very least I can do for her, given all she has done for Eléonore and me.”

He bows. “And you agree to my burial there, as well?”

Marguerite bursts into laughter. She would sooner see him eaten alive by wild boars.

A knock on the door. Gisele enters. “My lady, King Louis summons you and Sir Charles to the great hall.”

“I am a king now,” Charles tells her. “‘Your Grace’ is the appropriate title.”

“If you call him ‘Your Grace,’ I will dismiss you,” Marguerite murmurs to her on the way down to the main floor, where a crowd of hundreds surrounds the dais.

Charles is forgotten at the sight of Louis on his throne in full royal regalia—furs, silks, gold cloth, even his crown—for the first time since their return from Outremer. As she wends her way through the crowd, Jean approaches, his expression bleak.

“The king intends to take the cross again,” he murmurs. “And he will ask us to accompany him.”

Marguerite’s step falters; his hand reaches out and she takes it, steadying herself. “Sir Jean,” she hears, and turns to see Charles standing beside her, eyeing their linked hands.

“Charles,” she says, letting go of Jean, “Louis is going to take the cross.”

Charles’s eyes narrow. Marguerite can almost hear his plot hatching:
how can I benefit?

As she steps up onto the platform, Louis begins to bounce in his seat. Excitement dances in his eyes. As soon as Marguerite has sat beside him, he leaps to his feet. The crowd’s murmurs fade to silence. Louis makes his announcement.

Marguerite, thinking of the heat and dust, the bloodthirsty Saracens, the scorpions, the stinking camels, wonders—why? Why does he want to return? An eternity in hell would be preferable to another year in Outremer.

The Lord has called him, he says, to a “most noble and sacred purpose.” The holy city, he says, is like a damsel in distress, awaiting a chivalric rescue. “We must save her from the heathens,” he cries. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

It is a rousing speech, but the response is mild. Only a few young knights—boys too young to join the previous campaign—step forward to pledge their assistance. And then—a dagger in Marguerite’s throat, stopping her cry of
No
!—Jean Tristan, born in Egypt amid fear and sorrow, now a winsome young man of seventeen, as fragile as his father and too sweet-natured for battle, steps forward and declares that he will join his father. She forces a smile, wills her gaze to admire and shine for her courageous son while on the inside she shrieks at Louis and scratches his face.
Are you insane?
Of course he is.
I won’t let you do this!
Yet—how will she stop him?

Their son Peter, just sixteen, and daughter Isabelle, the Countess of Champagne—said to be the very likeness of Marguerite—step forward. They, too, will go. And then Philip steps up to the dais. He bows his dark head before Louis. Gasps arise. The heir to the crown! Will the king allow it?

“This is my son,” Louis says, “in whom I am well pleased.” In an obviously rehearsed scene, Philip climbs the steps to the dais and kneels before him. Louis pulls his sword from the scabbard on his hip and touches the blade to each of his shoulders and then to
the top of his head, knighting him. Marguerite wipes the tears from her face, still forcing a smile.

And then he turns to her. “My queen,” he says, “your valor and ingenuity saved our life on our last campaign in Outremer. I trust that we can count on you to join us again?”

The eyes of the nobles and knights, their wives, the servants, her sons and daughters turn to her as she stands silent, perspiration drenching her gown, her pulse hammering in her ears.
Beatrice, I am sorry
. Jean’s dark gaze soothes her. His head is moving almost imperceptibly from side to side, telling her the answer she already knows.

“No, my lord,” she says. The room is a held breath. “God has not called me to this journey. He would have me remain in Paris to rule our kingdom.

“And besides”—she finds Charles in the crowd and smiles warmly at him—“I know you will be in the best of hands. Your brother Charles, the King of Sicily, plans to accompany you.” She is already basking in Charles’s cold glare. “He promised me today that he will remain by your side until the end of your campaign.”

Eléonore

Family Comes First

London, 1271

Forty-eight years old

G
RIEF HANGS AS
thick as a shroud over the funeral of Henry of Almain. Remorse bitters Eléonore’s tongue. She’d hoped to bring her nephew into the court as her steward, to reward him for helping to free Edward from captivity. But with Henry weakened by illness and Edward seeking his own glory in Outremer with King Louis, Eléonore has been occupied putting down minor rebellions by hotheads and glory seekers. Six years after Simon’s defeat at Evesham, England still surges and plummets like a storm-tossed ship—with Eléonore its only anchor.

The monks lay the coffin in the grave, next to where Sanchia is buried. Across from Eléonore, Richard begins to sob, clinging to the arm of his new, beautiful, sixteen-year-old wife, Beatrice of Falkenburg, whose distaste for marriage to a sixty-two-year-old man shows on her face like a bad smell. Eléonore watches Richard closely. When he lifts his eyes to hers, she sees hatred. As she knew she would.

She approaches him when the service is finished, as they walk past the lovely old chapel and majestic spires of the abbey he and Sanchia founded. His tears have stopped, but he looks as if he might explode.

“I know what you are thinking, and I beseech you to think again,” she says. “This fighting must stop, for England’s sake.”

“Simon de Montfort’s sons are the ones who need stopping. For England’s sake.”

“We will find them, Richard, and we will hang them high.”

“Using a garotte, I hope.” His mouth twists. “I want to see them suffer.”