Four Sisters, All Queens (73 page)

He wants revenge. Eléonore would feel the same, no doubt, if the Montforts had killed Edward in such a cowardly manner. Poor Henry of Almain: he had never the chance to defend himself, for the Montfort brothers stabbed him in the back while he prayed, on his knees in the chapel of Viterbo.

“Richard, their mortal souls will suffer in hell. Isn’t that enough?” The pope of Rome has already excommunicated them for the shocking murder.

“Will it bring back my son?”

A shout arises, and the rumble of running horses, six of them, stampeding through the cemetery, kicking up clods of grass and heath, headed their way as if to trample them down. Edward lifts his sword but Hamo Lestrange, Roger Leybourne, and his Lusignan cousins cut him off, begging him to take refuge in the chapel. Eléonore takes Henry by the arm and runs as fast as she can drag him on his arthritic legs—which is not quite fast enough.

“Death to the monarchy!” the riders shout. “Death to the killers of Simon de Montfort!” An egg hits Eléonore’s gown, streaming yellow yolk on dark blue; Henry cries out as another splats against the side of his head.

“Come on, let’s get them,” she hears Hamo say.

Eléonore turns abruptly. “No!”

Why don’t these men see that fighting begets fighting, that killing only causes more killing? “I forbid you to attack,” she says. Edward sends her a dark look but his men hold their swords by their sides as the horses speed past, the youths laughing and taunting as they disappear into the woods.

“Why did you stop them?” her daughter-in-law Eleanor of
Castille asks. “Don’t you care that we are mocked and ridiculed?”

“By youths such as those? No.” Edward’s wife purses her lips in obvious disagreement—an expression she wears often in Eléonore’s presence. “Idle young men spend most of their time plotting and committing mischief. I’m sure Edward has told you about his own marauding years.”

“That was a long time ago. England has changed. Our subjects need stability.”

Our
subjects? “Stability is what I am trying to give them.”

“By shrugging your shoulders when these incidents occur? You make us appear weak.”

“Refusing to fight requires more strength than attacking every downy-cheeked lad who waves his sword at us.”

“The people want a strong ruler. That’s why they supported Simon de Montfort.”

“Oh, is that why?” Eleanor of Castille wears the look of a hound on the scent of a hare these days. She has begun to hunger for queenship.

At Berkhamsted Castle, men are running across the lawn toward them, waving their hands. Richard leans over his horse, exchanges words with one of them, then spurs his horse to a gallop. Edward follows close behind, with his knights. Eléonore, too, races across the lawn, around the château, dodging shadows, determined to stop the fighting, ignoring Henry’s attempts to call her back to him. She follows the men to a stone house behind the castle and dismounts in a hurry to run after them.

“Mother! By God’s head, leave this place,” Edward says, but it is too late. Eléonore has seen the hanged man swaying from the rafters, his open and bulging eyes, his blue face. Bile rises to her throat, but she cannot look away. Edward’s face is pale as he and his friends hold the body while Hamo, who has climbed up to the ceiling, cuts the rope with his knife.

“Why, O Lord?” Richard sits on the floor, tearing at his hair. “Why take my man from me today, of all days? Haven’t you punished me enough with the death of my son?”

Eléonore bends over, touches his elbow, helps him gently to stand. She leads him to a chair and sits near him, hand on his arm, trying to comfort. Who was he? she asks.

“Abraham,” he says, weeping. His Jew, who murdered his wife all those years ago. “My most loyal servant. My most trusted friend.” His sobs increase. “Dear God, why didn’t you just take me, instead?”

Edward hands him a parchment, sealed with Richard’s wax seal, bearing his name in ink. Richard opens it with trembling hands. As he reads, emotions sweep across his face: Sorrow. Disbelief. Anger.

“Damn him to hell,” he mutters, dropping the letter. Eléonore scoops it up. “Damn his Jewish bastard soul to the hottest hell forevermore.”

“Let me have that, Mother.” Edward holds out his hand but she will not take orders from her son, not until he is a king and perhaps not even then. She unfolds the parchment and reads.

You will never forgive me. Nor can I forgive myself, which is why I must leave this world. I have killed an innocent woman. Not my beautiful wife Floria—beloved by you, also, my lord, yes, I knew. Although I was accused of her death, I was not her killer. Yet I am a murderer, and so I must die.

As she reads, she discovers the circumstances, at last, of the Jewess Floria’s death sixteen years ago. She reads how Abraham’s young servant Samuel came to him as he worked in the treasury, his eyes filled with a horror that sent Abraham racing across the meadow to his house. He found his wife on the floor, blood pooled under her head, a large chess piece—
the queen, my lord, from the set that I gave to you
—matted with blood and hair on the floor beside her.
Samuel told me of a quarrel that he had heard only moments earlier between Floria and the Lady Sanchia.
Abraham sent him to find his father, Joseph, but Sanchia soon appeared and began to call out for Richard.

How cruel of her, I thought, to blame me for her crime, to kill my Floria and then allow me to be locked in the London Tower, where I signed a false confession that slandered my entire race. I might have been hanged if not for you, my lord. You saved my life, which makes my crime against you all the more egregious.

I killed your wife, the Lady Sanchia, by means of a poison mixed into her wine.

“Sanchia!” The words begin to swim. A teardrop falls on the letter, smudging the fresh ink.

I killed her in an act of revenge that any man would take, and I never thought about her again. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But today Samuel came to me. His father is dying, and Samuel blames himself. “There is a blot on my soul,” he told me. “I must atone, or God will kill my father.”

Samuel murdered Floria, he confessed, in a fit of passion. He had professed his love to her (Alas, who did not love Floria?) and she rebuffed him, saying she was a married woman and an honorable one. So he contented himself with spying on her. One day he spied her embracing the Lord Richard, in the gardens; running from the horrid scene, he collided with the Lady Sanchia’s sister, Beatrice, who had also seen them. Floria was a wanton, she told him, who had broken many hearts at Berkhamsted.

Seeing Samuel’s anguish, she tucked her arm into his. Floria had mocked him, she said, telling everyone in the court how he cried for love of her. Having stirred his wrath, she then encouraged him to kill Floria.

The lad protested, saying that he would suffer guilt and shame all his life for committing such a deed. “Perhaps this will ease your pain,” she said, and gave him a pouch filled with silver coins—more money than he had ever seen.

Still he hesitated. He spent many days and nights watching his
beloved from behind the hedge by her front window, agonizing. Then one day, he heard Sanchia and Floria within, shouting. He heard Floria say she carried Richard’s child. His mind went blank with rage. When Sanchia tried to leave, Floria clung to her. Sanchia flung her to the floor and ran out, and Samuel saw his chance for revenge. He threw himself upon Floria and hit her with the object nearest at hand—the chess piece, which lay on the floor beside her.

Abraham forgave the lad, he said, knowing that he was the victim of womanly wiles. He forgave Richard, too, long ago.
Being an old man, and unable to please my wife, I looked away when I saw you together. But women are jealous creatures, and cunning. Would that I had killed the Lady Beatrice instead of your innocent Sanchia! I hope that you will find it in your heart someday to forgive me, as well.

When she has finished, Eléonore throws the parchment into the fire, before anyone else can discover the scandalous truth about Richard (An affair with a Jewess! His name would never recover.) or Beatrice’s awful crime. Edward scowls—his usual expression with her these days—and reaches toward the fireplace.

“Let it burn,” she says.

“I would know its contents,” he says, reaching for the document.

“I am yet queen, and still your mother, and I say, ‘Let it burn.’”

His jaw thrust forward, he touches the edge of the parchment, as if to pull it from the flames. Eléonore would knock his hand away and box his ears—how dare he defy her, and before all these people!—but Richard interrupts.

“Your mother is right, Edward. Let it burn. Abraham’s confession was meant for me alone.”

“But Mother read it.”

“Yes, I did,” she says.

“As heir to the throne—”

“Which currently belongs to me, and to your father. I am yet the queen. And I am telling you now to let it burn.”

His friends, having laid Abraham’s body on a table, gather
around him. Hamo folds his arms across his chest, his expression hooded. Roger Leybourne smirks and the Lusignan cousins eye her warily, as if afraid she might attack her own son.

“It is time we returned to London,” she says. Her voice is firm and clear, her gaze steady into Edward’s sullen eyes.

Abruptly he bows to her. “Yes, my lady,” he says, then turns and strides out the door with his entourage.

“Thank you, Eléonore,” Richard says. “I would not want Edward to know of my indiscretions.”

“I imagine that you are paying the price for them at this very moment.”

“Yes.” Tears slide down his face.

“Richard, I had no idea that Beatrice was so evil.”

“I am the evil one. I, too, thought Sanchia guilty of Floria’s murder. I punished her for it all the rest of her days. Beatrice was only protecting her sister from dishonor—and possibly from divorce.”

“Many men keep mistresses. They do not generally divorce their wives to marry them.”

“No, but my affair with a Jewess would have caused a devastating scandal if it had been discovered. What would your uncles have said?”

Uncle Thomas, in particular, would have insisted that Richard and Sanchia’s marriage be annulled. Sanchia confessed every week her sin of marrying Richard after promising herself to Jesus. How would an annulment—and the disinheritance of her children—have affected her? Shame would have tainted the entire family.

And yet—to plan a murder, and to hire a poor simpleton to commit the act. “I wonder why I was shocked,” she tells Henry that night, lying in his bed. “Beatrice was never like the rest of us. She lived by her own rules.”

“It sounds to me as if she embodied the most important rule of all.”

“Which one is that, dear?” She kisses his cheek, glad that he
was not excommunicated, grateful to be here by his side, loving him, being loved.

“‘Family comes first,’” he says. His smile is gentle. “Had you forgotten? Or is there another, more important, rule now?”

Later, as Henry’s snores jostle one another softly in the dark, Eléonore lies in bed and ponders her sister.
We never knew you, Beatrice
. So much younger than they, and so caught up in her own ambitions—or so they thought—she never seemed like one of them. But while they forgot her, she never forgot them, or the fact that they were sisters. Marguerite has told her how Beatrice saved her from ruin and Eléonore from mutiny. Now, it seems, she saved Sanchia from humiliation, as well. Yet none of them ever helped her at all.

Marguerite