The Strangled Queen (22 page)

At the contact of his huge hand, Marguerite felt a glowing, assuaging warmth envelop her body. She placed her emaciated hands upon Robert's fingers as if she feared he would, withdraw them too quickly.

"Goodbye, Cousin," he said. "Goodbye. I wish you quiet repose."

"Robert," she asked in a lo
w voice seeking his eyes, "the
last
time you came and
wished to take
me did you really desire me?

No man is completely bad; the Count of Artois at that moment - said one of the only kind things that had ever issued from his lips, "Yes, my beautiful Cousin, I loved you
very
much."

He felt her relax under his hands, calm, almost happy. To be loved, to be desired, had been the one important thing in the Queen's life, much more so than crowns and dignities.

It was with a kind of gratitude that she saw her cousin fade before her with the light; so huge was he that there seemed to be a quality of unreality about him
,
making one think, as he faded into the shadows of the invincible heroes out of the misty legends of the Round Table.

The white robe of the Dominican and Bersumee's
steel helmet
passed out before Robert, who drove everyone before him. For one moment he stopped upon the threshold, as if he were subject to an instant's hesitation as if he still
had som
ething more to say.

Then the door closed, the room relapse
d into darkness and Marguerite
wondering, heard none of the usual sounds of locks.- She
was
no

longer to be a prisoner, and this omiss
ion, the first in three hundred
and fifty days, was like a
promise of freedom.

Tomorrow she would be allowed to go down and wander about Chateau-Gaillard as she pleased; and then,
soon
a litter would arrive to carry her away among trees, towns and human beings. "Will I be able to get up?" she wondered. "Will I have the strength? Oh,
yes,
my strength will come back!
"

Her arms seemed to be burning, but she would
get well, she knew that
she would get well. She knew, too, that she would not be able to sleep again that night. But she had so much hope to keep her company till dawn broke!

Suddenly she heard a tiny sound, hardly a sound, the sort of faint rustle in the silence that is made by a release of breath by a human being. Someone was in the room.

"Blanche!," she cried. "Is that you?"

Perhaps the door between the two s
toreys had also been unlocked.
But she could remember no
sound of a creaking
hinge. And why should her cousin have taken so much care to come to her silently? Unless . . but no, Blanche had not
gone suddenly as mad
as that. Besides, she had seemed better these last days, since the spring had come.

"Blanche!
" repeated Marguerite in an anguished voice.

But
silence, fell once more, and for a moment Marguerite thought that her fever was conjuring up presences in the darkness. But, a moment later, she again he
ard the same sound of breathing nearer,
and a light scratching on the floor like that produced by a dog's claws. Someone was breathing beside her. Per
haps
it was really a dog, Bersume
e's dog, which had followed him
in and been forgotten; or rats perhaps, rats with their almost human running to and fro, their rustling, their complicated busyness, their curious habit of working at
mysterious tasks
throughout the night. On several occasions there had been r
ats in the tower, and it was in
fact Bersumee's dog that had killed them. But you cannot
hear rats breathe.

Panic-stricken, she sat up quickly on her ' pallet; there was a rattle of iron against the stone of the wall. With wide despairing eyes she sought 'to pierce the darkness around her. It was to the left, it was coming from the left.

"Who's there?" she
cried
-'

There was silence once more.
But she knew that she was no longer alone. She, too, was holding her breath now. She was aware of such panic as she had never felt before. In a few moments she was about to die; she was utterly certain of it, and still worse perhaps than
the fear of death was the agony
of not knowing the guise it would take, what part of her body would be attacked, whose this invisible, presence was, closing in upon her along the wall.

A heavy weight suddenly
hurled itself upon the bed. Mar
guerite uttered a cry that Blanche of Burgundy, on the storey above, heard across the night and was never to forget. The cry was abruptly broken off by the sheet being placed across Marguerite's mouth. T
wo hands had seized the Queen
o
f France
and were twisting the sheet about her throat.

Her head resting against a man's broad chest, her ar
ms flailing the air and all her body twisting in an effort
of release, Marguerite's breath came in stifled gasps. The sheet round her, neck grew tighter like a collar of burning lead. She was suffocating. She felt her eyes burning; she heard huge bronze bells ringing behind her temples. But the killer had a technique all his own; the bell-ropes suddenly broke in a
great cracking of vertebra
and Marguerite was plunged into the shadowy gulf, infinite in space and time.

A few minutes, later, in the courtyard of Chateau-Gaillard, Robert of Artois, who was whiling away the time drinking a goblet of wine and pretending to issue orders, saw his valet
Lormet come up to his horse as if to tighten the girths.

It is done, Monseigneur," murmured Lormet.

"You have left no trace?" asked Robert in a low voice. "None, Monseigneur. I put everything . back in its place." "Not so, easy without a light."

"You know well, Monseigneur, that I can s
ee in the dark." Having hoisted
himself into the saddle, Artois signed to Bersumee to approach.

"I have not found Madame Marguerite at all well he said to him, "I very much fear, from her condition that she will not survive the week, perhaps not, even tomorrow. Should she die, your orders are to come to Paris as fast as a horse can gallop and go direct to Monseigneur of Valois to give him the news. To Monseigneur of Valois, you understand? And this time try to make no mistake in the address. And no loose talk; don't think, you're not paid to. And remember that your Monseigneur de
Marigny is in prison, and, that there might be a vacancy for you on the same gallows."

Dawn was beginning to break over the forest of, Andelys, marking with a faint glow, som
ewhere between grey and pink,
the horizon formed by the trees. Below Chateau-Gaillard the river glistened faintly.

Descending the hill, Robert of Artois felt the regular movement of his horse's shoul
ders beneath him, and its warm
flanks quivering against his boots. He filled his lungs with deep breaths of the morning; air.

"All the same, it's good to be alive,"' he murmured.

"Yes, it's good, Monseigneur," replied Lormet "And what's more it's going to be a fine, sunny day."

5
. A Morning of Death

DESPITE
the narrowness of the
window, Marigny could see
between the thick bars, let
into the stone in the form of a
cross, the sumptuous backcloth
of the sky in which shone the
April stars.

He did not wish to sleep. He hung upon the noises of Paris, as if hearing th
em gave him assurance of still
being alive; but they were few the cry of the watchman, the bell of
a neighbour
ing convent, the rumbling of count
ry wagons bringing their loads to the vegetable market. This
city, whose streets he had widened, whose buildings he had embellished, whose riots he
had
supressed, this living city in which one
felt the pulse of the kingdom
ceaselessly beating: and which, because of it, had been for sixteen years at the centre of his thoughts and cares, and for; the last fort night hated by him as one hates a human being.

This feeling had
begun upon that morning when Charles
of Valois, fearing that Marigny
might find accomplices at the Louvre, of which he had been Captain, had decided to transfer him to the tower of the Temple
. On horseback, surrounded with Sergeants-at-Arms and archers,
Marigny had thus crossed a great part of the capital and had suddenly discovered that the population who, for so many years, had bowed down as he passed by, hated him. The insults hurled at him, the outbursts of joy in the
streets as he passed, the raised fists, the mockery, the laughter, the threats of death, all these had been for the late Rector of the Kingdom a disillusionment more serious perhaps than his arrest itself.

When one has governed men for a long time, when one has
thought that one has acted for
the best, when one
knows the
pains the task has entailed, and then suddenly sees that one has
suddenly

never been either loved d or understood,: but merely submitted to,
then one is overwhelmed with bitterness, and wonders whether one could not have found some better way of spending one's life.

The following days had been no less terrible. Taken back to Vincennes, not this time to sit among the dignitaries of the kingdom, but to appear before a tribunal of barons and prelates, among whom was his own brother the
Archbishop.
Enguerrand de Marigny had had to listen to a lawyer named Jean d
'
Asnieres read, upon the order of Charles of V
alois,
the interm
inable grounds of indictment;
Peculation treason embezzlement, secret
relations with the enemies of the kingdom.

Enguerrand had asked permission to speak; it had been refused. He had demanded the right to single combat; it also had been refused. It was therefore clear that from now on he was considered guilty without even being allowed to defend himself, as if a dead man were brought to judgment.

And when Enguerrand had turned his
eyes upon
his brother
Jean
expecting him at
least to r
aise his voice in his defence,
he
had met nothing but a detached expression, shifty, eyes, and beautiful fingers elegantly toying with the embroidered bands which fell from his mitre upon his shoulders. If even his brother w
ere abandoning
him, if
even his brother had ranged himself with so much cynicism in
the ranks of his
enemies, how could he expect from anyone else even from those who

owed their place
and their wealth to him, any gesture of justice or gratitude?

Philippe of Poitiers, doubtless chagrined to see that Enguerrand had p
aid no attention to the warning
he had sent him by Bouville, was not present at the session.

Marigny had been brought back from Vincennes amid the shouts of the crowd, who now blamed him at the tops of their
voices as responsible for poverty and famine. Then he had been imprisoned in the Temple once, more, but this time in irons, and
in
the same cell that had once been Jacques de
Molay's
prison.

The ring fixed to the wall was the same to which for seven years the Grand Master of the Order of Templars' chain had been riveted. The damp had not yet obliterated the lines drawn upon the stone by the
old knight to mark the passing
of the days.

"Seven Years! We condemned him to pass seven years here, who only to, burn him afterwards. And
I
have been here but seven days,"' Marigny had thought, "I can already understand what he must have suffered.

The statesman, from
the p
innacle where he exercises his power
protected by the whole appar
atus of police force and army,
feeling as he does that his person is physically unattainable, condemns abstractions
when he pronounces sentences of imprisonment or
death. They are not men whom he, tortures or annihilates; they are oppositions which he is reducing, symbols which he is erasing. 'Nevertheless, Marigny remembered the disquiet he had felt while the Templars were being burnt on the Island of Jews, and how at that moment he had understood that it was human beings who were involved, that is to say peopl
e
like himself, and not only principles or errors. On that day, -though he had not dared show it even blaming himself for his weakness, he had felt a certain empathy with the condemned, and had been frightened for himself. "We have indeed all been accursed for what we did that day."

And then, a third time Marig
ny had been taken to Vincennes,
to be present at the most appalling display of baseness. As if all the
accusations brought against him were not sufficient, as if there was still
in the conscience of the kingdom certain, doubts which must at all costs be allayed, they had accused him of extrava
gant crimes, to establish which
false witnesses had been brought forward.

Charles of Valois prided himself upon having discovered in time a monstrous plot of sorcery. Madame de Marigny and her sister, the Dame de Chanteloup, instigated by Enguer
rand of course, had cast spells
and pierced with needles waxen dolls
representing the King, the Count of Valois himself and the Count de Saint-Pol. At least, this was affirmed by people who came from the Rue des Bourdonnais: where the business of magic was carried on with
the tolerance of the police to
whom they served as informers. Accomplices were named: a lame woman, a creature of the devil, and a certain Padiot, who had been caught in some similar affair, were sent to their deaths for it, a fate to which they would in any case have been condemned.

After
which it had been announced to the
great horror of the
Court
that Marguerite of Burgundy was dead and, as a last piece, of
evidence against Marigny, the
letter she had written from her prison and sent to the King was produced.

"She has been murdered! Marigny cried.

But the men who were guarding him had suddenly pulled him down, while Jean d'Asnieres completed his indictment with this new evidence.

In vain
had King
Edward II of England intervened with a message, endeavouring to put pressure upon, his brother-in-law of France to spar
e the late Coadjutor of Philip
the Fair in vain had Louis de Marigny thrown himself at his godfather's, The Hutin's, feet asking for mercy and justice. Louis X, repeating before the Court the words he had uttered to his uncle, had said, indicating Marigny, "He forfeits my protection."

And Enguerrand had heard himself condemned to be hanged, his wife imprisoned and all his goods confiscated. While Jeanne de Marigny and the Dame de Chanteloup; were arr
ested and imprisoned in the Tem
ple,
Marigny was himself-transferred
to a third prison, the Chatelet, for Valois had remembered that his enemy had also been an administrato
r of the Temple. Valois
saw accomplices everywhere, and feared right up to the l
ast that vengeance might escape
him.

It was, therefore, from a cell in the Chatelet that Marigny, during
the night of the 30th April 131
5, watched the sky through a narrow window.

He was not afraid of death, at least he compelled himself to accept the inevitable. But the memory of the curse obsessed his mind; before appearing in the presence of God, he needed to have

resolved for himself the question of whether he were guilty or innocent,

"Why? Why were we all accused, those named and even those not named, merely because we were present? After all, we acted only for the good of the kingdom, for the majesty of the Church
and for the
purity of the Faith.'' So why should heaven have turned so furiously upon each
of us?
"

When he was but a few hours
from his
own execution, his mind returned to the various stages of the Templars' case, as if it were in this rather than `in any of the other public or private actions of his long life that lay hidden, somewhere or other
, the ultimate explanation, the
ultimate justification he wished to find before dying. And treading slowly the stair of memory, he suddenly arrived at a threshold where light broke and all became clear.

The curse did not come from
God.
It emanated from himself and had no other
source but in his own actions;
and this was true of every man and of every punishment.