The Sister Queens (31 page)

I have not forgiven Marguerite, and who is hurt by it? Marguerite to be sure. She makes no attempt to hide it. But I am also.
“Stubborn Eleanor. You are too stubborn for your own good.”
I can hear Marguerite saying the words as if she were in the room. And why not? She has sounded some variation on this theme countless times over the years. And now, if her
nef
sinks at sea, if she is killed or captured in the desert, if not a single word of hers ever reaches me
again, what stain will I carry on my soul? Who will mourn her more than I?

Taking her letter with me, I return to my writing table. The garden no longer has the power to draw my eye. Uncle Peter can wait.

M
ARGUERITE
A
UGUST 1248
A
T
S
EA

I
have my letter! It arrived yesterday, on our very last afternoon in France. Standing on the deck of the royal
nef
, near the ship’s castle, I say a prayer of thanksgiving. Marie, at my elbow, thinks I pray for the safety of all the thousands of souls at sea since this morning. And I will do that too, but later.

Moving away from my lady, I open Eleanor’s pages again. I have plenty of room and quiet for my reading and reflections. A majority of the ladies on board have not yet become accustomed to the effects of being at sea, but it agreed with me from the very first moment the anchor was drawn up. The wind feels good, and the sun on the crests of the waves sparkles like diamonds. Having finished Eleanor’s letter for a third time, I gaze out over the water and begin to count ships. I can see thirty in addition to our own. I wonder if the Sieur de Joinville is aboard one of them. Having failed to catch sight of him on land, it will be some weeks now before I have any hope of seeing him. And in truth, I had very little hope of glimpsing him at Aigues-Mortes, though I could not stop myself from closely examining every knight who passed.

With the sound of the seabirds in my ears, I recall the day we arrived at Aigues-Mortes. Louis was ecstatic as the city came into view, for though he planned it, and paid for it, before the moment it rose on the horizon, the king had never seen the result of his labors save in his own imaginings.

“Look at it!” he exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Out of nothing we have built a city with a single purpose—to launch the crusade that will take back the Holy Land.” And I knew I ought to admire Aigues-Mortes—that Louis was waiting for me to comment on its fine wooden wall and imposing towers. Ordinarily I am sure I would have, but all I could see at that moment were the tents. Hundreds upon hundreds of tents of every size and color girdled the city walls. When I asked how many men had gathered, how many stood ready to ride and march into battle behind the oriflamme standard, Louis’s constable, Humbert de Beaujeu, reported that more than two thousand knights were already present, with more arriving. More astonishing still, two times that many archers had been assembled, and twice again as many men-at-arms as
archers. For the first time I grasped the full magnitude of our undertaking. I found myself wondering whether the many ships and crews that my husband commissioned from Genoa and Sicily would be enough to carry so many to the Holy Land.

I am called back to the present by the touch of sea spray on my face. I tuck Eleanor’s pages into the bag at my waist—it is Eleanor’s
aumônière
, the one covered in poppies that she gave me all those years ago. The new letter joins the last she wrote me before Beatrice was married. I’ve been carrying that missive as a talisman to bring me luck—luck in the form of the letter that will now displace it. It is time for me to go to my cabin, not to eat, as Marie has been urging for hours, but to begin a letter to Eleanor. I will tell her of the great city that Louis and I built in the marshes, and how we make first for Cyprus where the stores that we purchased for our army lie waiting.

“TO WASTE SUCH WEATHER IS
a sin. We should never have left Limassol and come to Nicosia.” Louis’s voice is soft, but it brims with dissatisfaction. I slip silently into the room, unwilling to interrupt the discussion.

“And I say again, Your Majesty, we do better to act as we have—to wait for all the ships that have not yet landed and the men who have not yet arrived.” The voice of Humbert of Beaujeu is equally composed and equally urgent.

“Even with the hand of God upon us, it is prudent to have the largest possible force at Your Majesty’s disposal when we go into battle,” adds Philip of Nanteuil. “If those knights and armed men who were separated from us at sea do not find Your Majesty here, in Cyprus, there is some chance that they might come to harm trying to join us in the Holy Land.”

I can see at a glance that Louis has called together his good knights, those half-dozen or so
preudommes
in whom he places the most faith and respect. When we landed at Limassol last month, Louis was as excited as any child to see the massive stores we had paid for heaped in fields and waiting according to plan. Having worked for three years, and spent more than one and a half million livres to be ready to fight, Louis is eager to be in battle. It was with difficulty that his noblemen persuaded him not to set sail immediately for the Holy Land. And the greater part of him needs to be convinced of the wisdom of that decision again regularly.

“I would not abandon any of my men,” Louis concedes. “But it is already October—” Noticing me, my husband stops abruptly. His eyes seem confused and his mouth sets into a straight line. “What do you do here?”

I hesitate for a moment, biting my lower lip, embarrassed by his reception. I thought to be a partner to Louis in this undertaking, as I was when we were recruiting knights, but the closer we get to the Holy Land, the more I am treated as a distraction. “Your Majesty, the Countess of Provence has been delivered of a fine, fair son, and she and the count have named him in Your Majesty’s honor.”

The king starts visibly. In his obsession with Egypt, it seems he forgot that my sister has been laboring for two days. I know that he did not miss me in bed last evening, for since we left French shores he has chosen to keep himself pure, but I am surprised he did not notice my absence from High Mass this morning.

“This
is
good news.” The Count of Artois shows all the warm enthusiasm his brother lacks. After eleven years of marriage, he became a father for the first time before we left France. Matilda, good soul, pines daily for the daughter she waited so long to have and was then forced to leave behind to be with Robert on crusade.

“Indeed,” Louis says, his eyes still on me and still disinterested. I wonder if he notices that my eyes are bloodshot. They are not so only from bearing my sister company. I have been crying with frequency these last days. My foolish heart believed that Louis the crusader and Louis the golden prince whom I met at Sens as a bride would be one and the same. The disappointment of my hopes is hard to bear.

“Shall I convey Your Majesty’s pleasure in the event? Perhaps a small gift?” And then, as Louis’s expression remains vacant, “Some masses?”

“Masses, yes, the very thing.” For a moment his face is enlivened and then, like that, he turns from me. I am dismissed—forgotten entirely. I feel my eyes begin to sting again, and I slide toward the door. Louis speaks to the Lord of Nanteuil. “When we dined yesterday, I overheard Erard of Brienne say that the Count of Sarrebruck and his cousin have arrived.”

I stop in my tracks. The “cousin” of whom Louis speaks must be the Sieur de Joinville.

“Yes, Your Majesty, I believe
les deux
are in the city.”

“Send word to the Sieur de Joinville. He impressed me from the first, and I would have him as my man.”

JEAN DE JOINVILLE IS WITH
the king. I have stationed Marie outside Louis’s rooms. When Joinville comes out, she will bring him to me. If Yolande were alive and here, she would know better than to do so, but Marie is devoted without feeling that she dare try to influence me.

I am in a small courtyard at the castle in which Henry I, king of Cyprus and regent of Jerusalem, so kindly installed us. I found this spot while exploring. It is removed from the main rooms—an
interior courtyard space, narrowly pressed by white stone walls and distinguished by a single twisting tree at its center. I believe I am the only one who knows of it. Its weathered door is off the kitchen garden, and I myself opened it expecting to find nothing more than gardener’s tools.

In my solitude I allow myself to relax. The weather is
calfar
, like the autumns of my long-ago home. As warm as a Parisian summer. I am comfortable in Cyprus. The clear blue sea at Limassol and the outline of the Troodos Massif in the north, seem familiar. This is a land with some of the same languid grace of Provence. Yet it is exotic too, and the very newness of its sights and smells excites my curiosity and my senses.

There is a soft rapping at the door, and it opens to reveal the Sieur de Joinville. He is so
bèl
, more handsome than I remembered him, and not because of the finery he wears in honor of seeing the king. He looks directly at me, in a way that Louis never does anymore—making me feel a person of interest and importance.

“Your Majesty.” He gives a bow as I sweep forward to greet him.

“Sieur de Joinville, I had begun to think you lied to me.”

“Lied?” The bridge of his nose furrows slightly.

“Three years ago, when you told me you were coming on crusade.”

“And here I am.”

“Yet I did not see you in Aigues-Mortes.”

“Did you look?”

I search Joinville’s face for any touch of amusement or incredulity, but instead I see only an earnest desire to know. “Of course.”

“My cousin and I hired a ship in Marseilles.”

Marseilles. My mind’s eye sees its port, the sea glittering in the sunlight. “His Majesty has retained you?”

“Fortunately. I have nine knights dependent upon me and
awoke this morning with less than three-hundred livres in my purse.”

Joinville does not ask why I wanted to see him; nor does he question that we are alone. This is just as well, for I have no satisfactory explanation. I only know that from the moment I learned yesterday that he was in Nicosia, seeing him became a thing so important that I did not sleep last night.

“I gather,” Joinville continues, “that, despite His Majesty’s wish it might be otherwise, we will pass the whole of the winter here in Lefkosia.”

“Lefkosia?”

“A servant, a Greek, told me that is what his people call this city.”

I like that. I like that Joinville is interested in this place as more than a delay in our expedition. I too am on this journey not merely to conquer, but to absorb. To taste, touch, and see that which is different. “I believe, Sieur, that we will stay because,
enfin
, His Majesty’s common sense is stronger even than his desire to be in Egypt.”

“What do the ladies do to pass the time?”

“My sister complains bitterly about everything that is not like home. And the rest are content to behave as if we were at home, embroidering, gossiping, dining.”

“But not you.” He makes the statement with a certainty bespeaking far closer acquaintance than we have.

“If I wanted to be in France, I could easily be there. I am in Cyprus, and I would see something of it.”

It is clear that Joinville is thinking. We stand in silence for more than a moment, but there is nothing at all awkward about it. Then he says, “Would Your Majesty allow me to take you to see the monastery at Politiko? I am eager to see it, as Saint Paul once
preached there.” His eyes shine. Do they do so at the prospect of being with me, or, as my husband’s would in this situation, at the prospect of beholding a holy site?