The Stolen Queen (2 page)

‘Please, where does this come from?'

‘Oh this, my lady? This is not for sale.'

I thought I knew all his merchant's tricks, like when Agnes took me to the fair on Lady Day and the stallholders pretended
they had nothing to spare because they knew we were rich. I thought I would pretend to be patient. ‘But please, tell me where it is from.'

‘This silk is from Persia, my lady. There is nothing like it for sale from Naples to Paris. And it is a gift, a gift for the queen of France herself.'

‘Really? For the queen?'

‘For Queen Agnes, yes. She was a princess of Dalmatia, you know, which is a Venetian territory. Her Majesty will value this greatly, so you see I cannot sell it, even to such a pretty little lady as you.'

‘Is that so?' It was my mother's voice. The silk man folded himself into a bow so tight I thought he would spring back like a spinning top, and the maids' gowns rustled as they bent deep curtseys, but I rushed into her arms.

‘Maman, Maman, here you are! I knew you'd come! Look at this, Maman, he says it's for the queen!'

My mother squeezed me so tightly that I was lifted off the floor and she buried her lips in my neck, kissing me until it tickled while I rubbed my nose into her shoulder.

‘How much?' she asked.

‘But Maman, it really is for the queen, we can't buy it!' I explained.

‘Do you like it, little one? Shall you have it for your birthday gift from me?'

I hesitated. I wanted it, of course I wanted it, but there was something about it that made me afraid. It was a costume for a pink marble palace, like something from a story that I
didn't quite want to come true. When I looked at it, it made me feel lonely.

‘Won't the queen be angry, Maman?' I hesitated.

My mother smiled. ‘I daresay the queen has plenty of Eastern silks to choose from. And this is white, the colour the queens of France wear for mourning, you know. Perhaps she will not like it, just now.'

As my mother spoke I saw Agnes's eyes seek her face. She raised her eyebrows, questioning; my mother replied with a barely perceptible nod.

‘So you would have it, then, my darling?'

‘Of course, thank you Maman, oh, thank you!' I tried to hop with happiness, to show my mother I was delighted but there was a strange cold feeling inside me, and as the silk man moved to lay the cloth on my mother's bed I hated how its lightness stirred in the breeze from the casement, like a living thing. A shroud, I thought, a creeping shroud that would swallow me up and suffocate me. I wanted him gone, I wanted to choose another gown, anything, yellow or blush or green, I didn't care, but I smiled and held my mother's arm as the silk man bowed his way out to the strong room where my father's clerk would mark the silk on the tally sticks. The maids fluttered out, exclaiming over their ribbons and kerchiefs.

And then, when we were alone, my mother told me slowly and sadly that King Richard of England was dead, and that I was to be married. I was nine years old.

CHAPTER ONE

M
Y MOTHER HAD TOLD ME THE TALE OF MELUSINA
many times. ‘There was a king,' she would always begin, ‘who loved his wife very much. When she died, he raved in his grief, and his only consolation was found in the forest, where he hunted for hours every day, exhausting his horses as he tried to ride away his tears. One day, the sorrowful king had outrode his groom and squire and found himself alone in a strange part of the forest. He heard trickling water, which reminded him that he was very thirsty, so he stopped at the spring to refresh himself. As he stooped over the clear water, he heard a woman's voice, singing.'

My mother would change to the langue d'oc here, the language of the musicians, to sing the words the king heard. Sometimes she sang from one of my favourite songs, ‘He alouete, Joliete, petit t'est de mes maus,' putting the words in the mouth of the beautiful fairy, Pressine, who waited by the well for the king.

‘And then, as he saw her, the king's aching heart was healed. In time, Pressine became his wife. When it was time for her to
give birth, Pressine told the king that he must not come near her, and she was delivered of three baby girls, Melusina, Meliore and Palatine.'

‘Did she love them, Maman?'

My mother would kiss me on the nose. ‘Very much but not as much as your maman loves you, little one.'

Then the story told of how the king, hearing of the births, rushed to congratulate his wife, breaking the rule she had given him, and Pressine said sadly that he had not kept his promise to her, and that she must leave his castle at once. And then a great storm blew, with clouds like ink and rain so thick the sun disappeared, and when the storm had gone, so had the queen and her daughters.'

‘Where did they go?'

‘To the Lost Island, where no one but the fairies has ever been. But each day, the queen carried her daughters to the peak of a mountain, where they could look down upon their father's lands, and she would tell them that they might have lived there, and been happy, except that he had broken his word.'

‘Was she sad?'

‘Very sad, my darling. But she had to keep to the fairy law,' Mother would explain.

Melusina was the most beautiful of the three fairy princesses, and the most curious (‘who was she like, little one, I wonder?'). When she was grown up, she asked Pressine what it was that her father had done. When she heard of how he had spied on her mother and defied her, Melusina decided to punish the king. She stole away from the Lost Island into his lands, and there
she used a spell – remember, she had fairy blood – that imprisoned the king and all his barons inside a stony mountain cave. When Pressine discovered this, she was angry, in turn, for she loved her husband still, and longed for him, despite his error, and punished her daughter with another spell – a curse. Every Saturday, Melusina would turn into a serpent, and this would continue until she found a man to marry her who would agree never to see her on that day.

‘But Maman, why did Pressine put such a wicked charm on her daughter, if she loved her so?'

‘Because sometimes mothers have to do very difficult things if they believe they are right. Melusina was different from other girls: she was a fairy. So her mother knew that only by obeying fairy laws could she keep her daughter safe. Shall we see what happened?'

‘Oh yes!'

‘Well then, Melusina set off alone, and she travelled through many forests and many mountains until she came here, to Poitou. The fairies were very happy. They had been expecting her and wanted to make her their queen. They came to dance with her in the woods at Colombiers,' she would continue.

Now she was arriving at the part that I liked best. ‘Tell me about the changeling, Maman. And the murders!'

‘Are you telling this story, or I? Now, in the forest that very day was Raymond, the lord of Lusignan. Raymond was unhappy, because he had accidentally committed a crime. He had been hunting with his uncle, and as they bearded the boar, it had turned aside on Lord Raymond's spear and plunged its
deadly tusk into his uncle's flesh and killed him stone dead. As Raymond wandered sadly through the forest, he saw Melusina, who was so beautiful that he fell in love with her at once. Only by marrying him, he swore, could Melusina be so kind as to assuage the wound in his heart, which was likely to be as fatal as the boar's tusk. Melusina said that she would surely marry him, upon the condition that he never looked upon her on a Saturday. Raymond agreed, and so they were married.

‘Then Melusina had the fairies build a great castle near to the spring where they had met, but she warned Raymond that if he broke his promise she would leave him and they would both be very unhappy. Raymond was so ensorcelled by Melusina's loveliness that he did not even care when their first-born son, Geoffrey Spike-Tooth, was born with a boar's tusk protruding from his upper lip. But Geoffrey was as ugly inside as he was on the outside. He was cruel to everyone in the castle, but most of all he hated his younger brother who was very holy and pious and had gone to live with the monks in the abbey at Malliers. Geoffrey Spike-Tooth was also jealous of his parents' happiness, and he plotted against Melusina. He decided to spy upon her in her privacy on a Saturday.

‘On that day, Melusina would shut herself up in her rooms, taking no food or drink, allowing no one to attend on her from dawn until sunset. She had a great bath in her chamber, and filling it was the last task her maids were permitted before their mistress retired. So Geoffrey Spike-Tooth disguised his ugly features in a plain gown and a hood, and carried a jug into Melusina's rooms as the maids brought the water, then he hid
himself under the bathtub and waited, spying out under the bath cloth.

‘When Melusina got up from her bed and lowered herself into the bath at dawn and the first ray of the sun crept through the window, her legs were transformed into a serpent's tail, all blue and silver scales. All day the wicked son lay under the bath while the fairy splashed in the waters and, at nightfall, when Melusina walked back to her bed and called for her maids, he escaped and rushed straight to Count Raymond. When the count learned the truth, he did not rage and turn his wife away, as Geoffrey Spike-Tooth expected, but grieved, because now that he knew the truth he risked losing his beloved wife forever.

‘Enraged at the failure of his plan, Geoffrey Spike-Tooth travelled to the abbey at Malliers and set it on fire. The good monks and his own holy brother were burned. Melusina heard this dreadful news and rushed to her husband's chamber to comfort him. But now, the story says, my little one, that the poor afflicted father was convinced that the fairy's curse was on his family, and he accused poor Melusina before all the courtiers.'

My mother would draw herself up tall and make her voice very deep and stern.

‘Out of my sight, thou pernicious snake and odious serpent! Thou contaminator of my race!'

‘Oh Maman!' I would burst. ‘And then?'

‘Then, Melusina was so shocked that she fell down in a faint but when she awakened, she solemnly told her husband that she must leave him, just as her own mother Pressine had left her father the king for the breaking of his word. Her fate was to
wander about the world forever, invisible as a spirit. Only when one of her own fairy kind died at Lusignan would she become visible again.'

‘And now the curse!' I would shriek, delighted at the deliciously terrifying climax of the story.

‘And now I must depart from you, faithless husband, that thou, and those who succeed thee for more than a hundred years shall know that whenever I am seen, hovering over the castle of Lusignan, then it will be certain that in that very year the castle shall have a new lord. And though people may not perceive me in the air, they will see me by the fountain, especially on the Friday before the lord of the castle shall die …'

*

And so, like every child in Poitou, I knew the story of the Lusignan ancestress, the serpent-woman Melusina. She haunted this same castle, flapping round the battlements on stormy nights, protecting her descendants with her demonish powers. But if ever she was seen, it meant death to the Lusignan lord.

They are black, the Lusignan men. Their hair is the colour of the river in winter, sucking the light around them, their tip-tilted almond eyes like nuggets of charcoal in sallow, horn-tinted skin. And they are tall. So tall that when Lord Hugh stepped down from the dais in his hall to greet us after our journey my father's head only reached his shoulder. My father had put off his hauberk as he dismounted, to show that he came in peace to his old enemy, and Lord Hugh, also, wore no armour. But where my father's mantle was travel-stained wool, bunching over his
round belly and gathering under his red beard, which fell to his chest, Lord Hugh wore white silk, spotless as an altar cloth, and a short green cloak clasped at one shoulder with a huge gold brooch shaped like a serpent, and his shaven face was all clean, hard planes. A little behind him stood his son, Hal, nearly as tall but narrow and gangling, a sapling next to his father's massive oak, with the same pitchy hair falling fashionably long, the tips curling to touch his soft, sulky mouth.

The Lusignans and the Taillefers had always been enemies, for my father was King Richard's man, defending his lands against the rebellious lords who sought to chip away at the empire of the English king while he was in the Holy Land. But now, my mother had explained as we bumped along in the litter, the leathery smell of the curtains wafting over us, the Lusignans were our allies, ever since King Richard had made Lusignan knights kings in Cyprus for their service on Crusade, and a marriage, my marriage, between our houses, would seal our loyalties and protect our lands together under the leopard flag of the Angevin kings. It had been King Richard's wish that a match be made, before he was struck down by a crossbow wound in his shoulder and died without children, leaving his crown and his dukedoms of Normandy and Aquitaine to his brother John. At least, that was what she told me then.

It seemed unreal to me, all this squabbling about lands, and yet at the same time it had always been as much a part of my life as hearing Mass or doing my lessons. Fighting was what men did – they rode out as soon as the roads were clear in the spring and returned with the fogs of autumn, and I would hear
my parents talking as I dozed in the solar after supper that such a county had changed its fealty again, or that the French armies had taken a castle from the English, or they from the French. It was a game, I supposed, that great people used to pass the time, as shifting and impermanent as the quarrels and alliances of a childhood afternoon in the garden. Men fought and women married, that was what my mother said, and with our marriages we would weave peace between the counties of France. It was men who made war, Maman explained, but it was women's holy duty to make peace, for that was what God commanded.