Four Sisters, All Queens (38 page)

“That boy must be at least sixteen years old,” her sister says.

“Sixteen years ago, Richard was married to Isabel Marshal,” Sanchia says. “The love of his life. Or one of them.”

“‘Love is the delicate oil, and marriage the vinegar,’” Eléonore quips. “I wonder if Richard invented those lines?”

Marguerite

Against the Winds

Egypt, 1249

Twenty-eight years old

T
HIS IS NOT
what she imagined. The triumphal entry, yes—fifteen hundred ships, sails billowing, covering the sea in canvas. But the zeal in Louis’s eyes, his restless pacing across the deck, his constant talk of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem—this Marguerite did not envision, nor the men’s screams as the Saracen gallies burn and crumble, sunk by balls of flame launched at Louis’s command.

She has been told to remain in her cabin, but she is free to do as she wills now, the Queen of France at last, not in Paris as she had hoped, but queen nonetheless. And she does not wish to huddle in that cramped room while her imagination spins scenes of terror from the sounds coming through the door. Yet the view from the deck is grimmer than anything she imagined.

“Lower two dinghies for rescue,” Louis commands. Is he mad? Two dinghies will not hold all the men flailing in the sea and shouting for help. “Save the Saracen captains and nobles, and leave the rest to God,” he tells the crewmen clambering into the boats. She wants to argue, to intervene for the lives of the others, but she holds her tongue. If she would prove herself to Louis here in Outremer, she must not begin by publicly challenging his decisions.

Beatrice joins her at the rail but Marguerite says nothing, having asked her for her dowry and been refused—again. “I will not violate our father’s will,” Beatrice said. “You can ask me as many times as you please, but my answer isn’t going to change.” Marguerite has now decided to ignore her. Why listen to Beatrice when she will not listen to Marguerite?

Nothing can dissuade Beatrice from speaking, however. “Isn’t this an exciting start for our campaign,” she drawls. Marguerite turns away from her sister’s knowing eyes to watch knights pull silk-wearing Saracens into the boats, then smash their oars against the heads and hands of the rest who cling and claw at the dinghies. Blood sprays. Eyes roll. The knights laugh. Marguerite bends over the rail to heave bile from her empty stomach into the death-dark sea.

Beatrice lays a hand on her back; Marguerite flinches away, spitting and wiping her mouth with her handkerchief.

“I hope you are seasick, and not heartsick, O Queen,” Beatrice says. “We came to conquer these people, not to befriend them.”

The Frenchmen climb ladders from the dinghies to the deck, prodding their prisoners before them. Marguerite moves closer for a better view of the heathens and savages, half-expecting horns or forked tongues, but they look only like frightened men in dripping garments. Charles and Robert bind their hands with rope, then shove them below deck. One of the men shouts in the melodic Saracen tongue. A sailor replies in the same language. Marguerite asks him to translate.

“He says his boats came to greet us, and not to fight,” the sailor says.

“They do not appear armed.”

“Trickery, my lady. They conceal scimitars and daggers under their robes,” he says. “Or they may have released them in the sea, to keep from drowning. They only wanted to find out why we’d come, he says. Ha ha! I guess they know now.”

Robert passes, his mouth a rictus of cruelty. Marguerite touches his arm. He turns to her, his eyes out of focus.

“What will you do with them?” she says.

Robert blinks as if she, too, spoke Saracen. “Louis wants to question them, that is all,” he says. “Then we’ll chain them up below. If they talk, they will be left in peace there.”

“And if they don’t?”

“The sting of a barbed whip will make any man talk,” Charles says as he walks by.

“Charles,” Beatrice says, “did you see that the fourth Saracen ship escaped our fire? They’ll return to Damietta.”

“Good! Let them tell their neighbors that the mighty French have arrived.”

As the Saracens pass, some lift hate-filled eyes to leer at her breasts and body. She stumbles backward, her hands on her chest. Beatrice strides forth and slaps a man’s face.

“Show respect for our queen,” she says. The man laughs and spits on her shoe.

“Damned heathens—pardon me, my ladies,” the sailor says. “The Muslims have no love for women except what’s between the legs. Be careful when we get to land. Take a man with you everywhere you go. It’s no sin in the Saracens’ religion to rape a Christian woman.”

Shrieks rise from the hold, following Marguerite to her cabin, where she lies on the bed with her pillow over her head. They are heathens, she reminds herself, but wasn’t the same said of the Cathars whom she knew as kind and gentle folk?
O Lord, why have you sent me here to witness these atrocities?
But it was not God who placed her on this ship. For that, she can thank Blanche.

She had thought herself so clever to send Blanche running from the palace with her threats. How blissful were those years at the court without her mother-in-law’s gargoyle of a face ever turned her way, and without her sneering remarks. The result, however, wasn’t quite what she had hoped. Instead of welcoming her to rule with him, Louis began holding court at Blanche’s castle, excluding Marguerite altogether. But her children, at least, were safe from their grandmother’s sick influence.

How naïve of Marguerite to think she might prevail over her
mother-in-law. Blanche was not gone, but only biding her time. As Louis prepared for his Outremer campaign, Marguerite prepared to rule France in his stead—only to find, mere weeks before his departure, that Blanche had a different idea.

“Why not take your wives along, and encourage your knights to do the same?” she said to Louis and Charles. “Your men may not be so eager, then, to return home before the task is finished.” Now, after eight months away, Marguerite is the one yearning for home.

Sleep is her only escape from the terrible screams of tortured men. And yet it is silence that awakens her and brings her to the deck again. Louis, Robert, Charles and the pope’s legate emerge from the hold, their faces grim—except for Robert, who grins as if he had just enjoyed the finest entertainments.

Beatrice hastens to Charles’s side while Louis speaks to the ship’s captain, who sends a boy scampering up the mainsail to the crow’s nest. At the blast of his trumpet the surrounding ships crowd in, nobles and knights filling their decks. Marguerite stands outside her cabin door, staring at her husband’s blood-spattered tunic.

“Friends and followers,” Louis shouts, “we are unconquerable if we are undivided. The divine will has brought us here. Let us show our thanks by waiting to land after Pentecost, be the enemy’s forces what they may.”

Cheers and whistles mingle with mutterings. “Pentecost?” Beatrice says. “That’s more than a week away. While we linger here, the Saracens will be preparing to fight.”

For the love of God! Can she do nothing but criticize? Marguerite feels compelled to defend Louis. “We cannot hope to inspire others to our faith if we don’t even keep our holy days.”

“I thought we came to kill Muslims, not to convert them,” her sister says. She tells Marguerite the secrets spilled by their prisoners: convinced that the French would land at Alexandria, the sultan of Egypt sent his army there, leaving Damietta virtually unguarded. “Charles says we should take the city now, and press on to Grand Cairo before the Saracens return.”

“It is not I who am the King of France,” Louis cries. “Nor am I the Holy Church. It is you yourselves, united, who are Church and King.” As cheers gather and rise, he finishes. “In us shall Christ triumph, giving glory, honor, and blessing not to us, but to his own holy name.”

P
ENTECOST HAS COME
and gone, the Holy Spirit descending this year as a devastating wind that blew more than one thousand of their ships away from the harborless Damietta coast, scattering them to places unknown. Only a fourth of their army will land. There is talk of retreat, but this is the day for which Louis has dreamt, planned, and awaited for many years. “The Lord will lead us and protect us,” he keeps saying, as if to convince himself.

Marguerite watches the landing from the ship’s deck, her breath a ragged cloth snagged on a branch. Before her spreads an expanse of sea as blue as tears, and beyond that, the rock-jumbled shore of Egypt, where the knights of France have just begun to tumble from their boats and stomp their feet, adjusting to the firmness of solid ground for the first time in weeks. They have not yet seen the flashes of light, the clouds of dust, the horses and men in golden armor pouring forth from the gates of the walled city and racing toward them.

Jean, look up
! Shouting would be pointless. He could not hear her from this distance. Yet she can hear the strange-sounding horns and kettledrums and shrill cries spurring the Saracens to action. The Frenchmen wedge their shields into the sand and thrust their lances into the ground, sharp points facing outward, then stand behind their barricade with their swords lifted high overhead. The Saracens thunder on as if the French weapons were made of dreams, easily trampled.

“Charles!” Beatrice, standing beside her, starts to scream for her husband, whose boat has not yet reached the shore. “Come back, Charles! You will be killed!”