Four Sisters, All Queens (70 page)

A Queen at Last

Sicily, 1266

Thirty-five years old

T
HE WHOLE WORLD
is white, the sky blankly ablaze, a page on which anything might be written, queenship or death, the snow like quicksand sucking at her feet and tugging at the furs swaddling her body, fur wet and heavy with the cold, white breath of God. Strange how she never thought of God as cold. Disturbing that she never knew.

The snow she expected. No one crosses the Alps in November without the sting of blowing ice, the numb of cold. Fingers are lost, the tips of noses. But her own tired desire surprises her, the yearning to float like a feather down to the pillowy white, to succumb, to enfold herself as though the snow were filled with sun instead of the lack of it, as if all that pale light could save her from the teeth of the biting wind as she slogs up the mountainside through the billowing snow. These could be clouds, the world is so far below. The crown that awaits her is a lifetime away.

Her head feels light. Oh, she is tired, so tired. Her eyes close, weighted with ice. She stumbles. “Hold on to my hand, my dear!” Uncle Philip is with her, his horse on the rein behind, stepping surely up the narrow path as though a single slip would not send
him plummeting to his death. These are Savoy lands. He has traveled this route many times. He grips her hand and pulls her close, away from the falling edge. From behind, someone cries out. She lifts her head to look around but sees only white. Hears only the wind’s high moan. Has someone fallen? Dead for her sake. Her eyes so heavy. Uncle Philip’s arm tightens around her waist, lifting her. Almost there. Rome, near? She had not known it was so cold.

“Charles?” she cries. In the blowing snow, a dark shape. He will warm her. “I see him,” she says to Uncle Philip. He leads her onward, revealing a rock. This is not Rome. They are in the Alps. Rome is far away. Charles. If not for Uncle, she would be dead. Philip appeared while she was feasting her army, bringing with him one hundred men including St. Pol, just returned from England and whetted for a fight. Simon de Montfort made an easy conquest in the end. Had Charles known, he would have not bent his knee to him.

“We have reached the summit.” Uncle Philip’s shout whirls in the wind and blows to the back, prompting cheers. Six thousand knights, six hundred crossbowmen, twenty thousand foot soldiers. Beatrice’s conquests. She lured them with gifts, flirtation, cajoling, promises. Her cheeks became stiff from all that smiling.

But she could not convince King Louis. Not a cent from France. “I will be in need of my men and my money,” he said. But France is at peace. Margi’s doing. She holds the keys to the treasury. If not for Beatrice, she would have been revealed as an adulteress. She would hold nothing today except her rosary.

Now for the descent, turn after turn after turn. Philip grips her in an icy dance. She rests against his arm, lets her eyes fall shut, sees Margi with her long hair streaming in the Egyptian sun, bludgeoning a crocodile with an oar. Oh, to be like that. Something presses against her mouth, forcing her lips apart: Bread, stale and hard.
You must eat
. She gags and swallows. Her eyelids turn red. The sun’s white light splinters the clouds, exposing the sky’s blue underbelly. She breathes it in, filling herself with light. A ray touches her cheek. Warmth. Her uncle relaxes his hold. “Queen
Courage,” he calls her. “Like your sisters. Were you men, you four would rule the world.”

This she knows. Charles could not muster an army for this campaign. Beatrice recruited the men of Provence, men who hate Charles but love money, and men from Flanders and Anjou. Her father’s daughter, she lured them with promises. To the Provençal nobles she offered lands in Sicily; to the Marseille merchants, commerce; to the rest, booty by the trunkfuls. “We will all be rich,” she said. If they can conquer Manfred. If they can recapture Rome for the pope. They will be rich and she will be queen, with as much power as a woman can wield.

Next Christmas, she will sit at the head table with Eléonore and Margi. The year after that, who knows? They might bow to her. “I will make you a greater queen than they,” Charles said. He dreams of an empire, stretching across the Mediterranean into Outremer. She will be empress of all, omnipotent. Then Charles may agree, at last, to award Tarascon to Margi. Provence will be as nothing to them, while, to Margi, it is the only home there is. Giving it up would be a small price for the esteem of the sister she loves best.

W
HEN YOU ARE
being queened in a strange land, you peer into your audience as if seeking your reflection in a pool but find only dazed and curious stares, as if they were fish looking back at you. Their shouts of acclaim, rendered in their foreign tongue, swirl like snowflakes to land on your head and shoulders and then disappear. You walk into St. Peter’s Basilica with all the majesty you can muster, uncertain of each next step, as if you were an actor playing a spontaneous part, although you have rehearsed this moment in your mind many times. A chorus of monks pours music over the opulents—the cardinals, now gilded with song; the bishops and archbishops, tunefully illuminated; the velvets of the nobles, alight with melody—singing up majesty, singing up reverence, singing up gold in the shape of a crown ornamented with a lifetime of dreams.

“Smile, my queen,” Charles murmurs to Beatrice as they sit
beside each other in their fur-lined robes, their cloth of gold, their unadorned arms and throats—for Beatrice has sold her jewels to pay their army—their conspicuous, soon-to-be-crowned heads rained upon with Roman love. These people are not even their subjects, no more than ten of them Sicilian if the truth be told, yet they exult as if Charles were the Christ and she were the Virgin Mother, and this were the second coming. They lay flowers at Beatrice’s feet, shout accolades, blow kisses, embrace one another. “Your bewilderment is showing. People seek confidence in their leaders, not confusion.”

“But why are they cheering so? We are not going to be King and Queen of Rome.”

“They enjoy the fête, these Romans. Decadent to the bone. Our celebration will last three days, so of course they love us. Plus, they hate Manfred.”

And no wonder, for the Stupor Mundi’s bastard son has proved shockingly ruthless, first trying to poison his young nephew Conradin, the rightful heir to Frederick’s throne, and then, after failing at that murder, declaring the boy dead anyway and crowning himself King of Germany and Sicily. When the pope excommunicated him, he invaded Rome.

Now Pope Clement hides from Manfred in Viterbo. Five cardinals have come in his stead to lead today’s ceremony. Beatrice cannot help feeling cheated. The pope of Rome is supposed to set the crown on her head. Will the hands of mere cardinals tarnish the gold? Without a papal blessing, will hers and Charles’s authority be challenged?

Last night, Charles laughed at her furrowed brow, her pursed lips. Has she forgotten how they stomped out the fires of mutiny in Marseille, how they rid Provence of heresy, how they defeated the Queen of France’s attempts to annul their father’s will and wrest their lands from them? “Together, we can do anything,” he said, then took her to bed and showed her what he meant.

As she sits with him now, throne to throne, his hand cups hers and she feels a current from his touch, as if rivers of power flowed
from his fingertips to hers and back again. They are unstoppable. When the goose meat stuffing the roasted, silver-dipped swans has been devoured, when the minstrels have piped and drummed and sung themselves dry of notes, when the dancers have churned themselves into a froth and floated away, when the men have told tales until their tongues are knotted with lies and everyone except Beatrice’s twenty-six thousand warriors has gone home, then will the real feast begin. Charles will fling their troops headlong into Sicily, aiming like a well-shot arrow for Manfred’s heart, for he and Beatrice will not be king and queen of anything until the last of Frederick’s heirs is dead. While Charles fights, Beatrice will be his general in Rome, launching ships, mobilizing troops, planning strategies, raising and spending money. Commanding men. A queen at last.

“Looking for your hero St. Pol?” Charles asks, jealous as ever, as she watches the crowd stream into the cathedral. Every seat is filled and yet they continue to arrive, merchants, clergy, nobles, common folk.

“I am thinking of my sisters,” she says. “I wish they were here.”

He shrugs. “You have done well for yourself thus far, without their approval. Or their help.”

It is their love she desires. But Charles would think her weak. “I want only their acknowledgment.”

“You think a crown will make a difference? Will they at last place you among their ranks?”

“Why not? I will be one of them. A queen.”

“Cast them from your mind, my dear. You do not need them now. In fact, they will soon need you. You are going to be an empress. Your sisters will bend their knees to you. And Louis will bow to me.”

So many conflicting thoughts bounce in her head that she cannot speak: She will always need her sisters; she belongs to them, and they to her, even if they do not acknowledge this fact; the only way to gain their acceptance is to give them the lands and money they have claimed; if Charles loves her, he must increase her happiness by doing so.

But love takes as many forms as there are faces in this room,
each of them strange, most of them unseeing. Charles’s love begins with himself. “Why would I give even a fistful of Provençal soil to that harpy Marguerite? Or to my brother, who would not spare a single mark for my battle after I fought so valiantly for him in Egypt?” he says.

He loves Beatrice, but not her affection for her sisters. Sanchia was sweet enough, he used to say, but she lacked confidence except what she found in the bottom of her goblet. “She will never be of use to us, or to anyone.”

Eléonore is too bold, he says. A wife should enhance her husband’s authority, not diminish it. She makes King Henry appear weak, and the people resent her for it. Never mind all the good she has done for England, if she has dispirited her subjects by outshining their king. See how the White Queen reigned with Louis in her lap, puppeting him so that he appeared to rule?

“The people will bend to man’s authority, but not to woman’s,” Charles says. “The woman is head of the household, but man is head of the woman. That is the natural order, established by God.”

Marguerite he calls conniving and weak, relying too much on her mind and too little on might. Had Beatrice’s inheritance been snatched away, she would have fought for it with an army, he points out, while Marguerite flails like a poor swimmer in too-deep waters with her endless petitions to the pope and her little intrigues. What’s more, she now has tried to usurp the power of Louis’s heir, Philip, by coercing from him a promise to give her “supreme authority” over all his kingly decisions.

“She would rule France—and her son—as Mama did, but she is no Blanche of Castille,” Charles said with a sneer. In Beatrice’s mind, this is reason to love her sister more, not less.

The cardinals step forward, their rings flashing in the splintered light. The spectators stand. One cardinal waves incense; another lights candles; another prays. They flit like birds all around her and Charles. She remembers a scene: Marguerite playing at her own coronation, giggling and jesting, making grotesque faces—until Eléonore placed a crown of daisies on her head. Her grin became a
serene smile. Her shoulders squared themselves. Beatrice, just a tiny girl then, never forgot the transformation. And when she later saw Margi as a real queen, in the palace at Paris, the change proved to be real. The mirth had faded from her eyes, replaced by gravitas. “Our Margi has grown up,” Mama said, but Beatrice thought she had merely grown sad. She had not wanted to be queen; she wanted to be Countess of Provence. But, being a woman, she was not allowed to choose.

Beatrice had no choice, either, in spite of Papa’s efforts. “In Provence, a woman may rule,” he said to her the day before he died. “You are more than capable. Hold on to your power at all costs.” But there was no holding on, not in this world. By the time Charles strode into her chambers and scooped her up, her fate had already been decided and her power usurped. Not even Mama could protest.

Protest Mama did, however, as Charles took her castles away. Papa would not have wanted it, but Charles waved away Beatrice’s complaints as though they were gnats. Papa administered the county poorly, he said, pointing to the blooming Cathar communities, the self-governing Marseille, the money spent on troubadours and minstrels “sucking our blood like leeches and flouting their desire for my wife with their shameless verse.”