The Sister Queens (22 page)

We make our way like specters up the spiral staircase to the king’s rooms. His antechamber is full of people—counselors, royal physicians, and priests. There are so many priests. Louis’s Grand
Chambellan, Jean de Beaumont-Gâtinais, ushers us into the bedchamber. We keep this room as warm as we can, though I cannot see the sense in it. The king is on fire, burning with fever. Either Blanche or I am always with him. In this one thing the dragon and I cooperate. We trade places at the king’s bedside without speaking. Each of us grim faced. Each of us frightened of the same thing but for different reasons. If Louis dies, I will be lost, and I will lose my precious son. The king has named a council of regents against such an eventuality, and I am not on it. I can accept having no hand in the governance of France, but at the thought of being able to see my child only when and if his guardians deem it prudent, tears rise to my eyes. Why, oh why did I think that the birth of a prince alone would change everything?

My women take the seats at the foot of Louis’s bed vacated by Blanche’s ladies. The light in the room is too poor for embroidery, but they must do something, or at least appear to, so they pull close their frames, left behind from our last visit to the sick chamber. Elisabeth alone makes no pretense of being occupied but sits staring straight ahead, mumbling.

I move my stool as close to Louis as I can. The smell is overpowering and awful. Yet it is still a smell of life—sweat, urine, and that distinctive odor taken on by the breath of the fevered. The bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it down, leaning closer still. If I do not want the baby within me to be born fatherless, I must try to keep Louis with us. I take one of Louis’s hands and marvel at how thin it has become. The skin looks like parchment. I press it to my cheek.

“Louis? Louis, can you hear me?”

My husband does not stir. As recently as four days ago he had periods of lucidity and was strong enough to lament his own condition with clarity before slipping from consciousness. Then delirium became his constant companion. When awake, he no longer
seemed to recognize any around him but merely cried out to the Lord as a child awakening from a nightmare might cry out for his mother. But for the last two days, there has been nothing; he has not spoken and no longer opens his eyes.

Slowly and softly I begin to talk. I tell Louis anything and everything that I can think of—that his brother Charles was thrown from his horse but suffered nothing more than bruises; how many teeth little Louis has; about the progress that the builders are making on his Sainte-Chapelle. I talk until I cannot think of another word to say. Then I sing. This I do until my throat is dry. Nothing rouses Louis.

Dawn comes—a gray dawn. A tray is brought for me and consommé for Louis. A priest helps to lift Louis’s head and shoulders. I try to give him some, but his lips are flaccid and my efforts without effect. He lacks even the ability to suck wine from a knotted cloth, though he must thirst, for his lips are cracked and dry.

Stiff from sitting for so long, I rise and pace the room. Matilda joins me. “Your Majesty should take some rest. Leave us to watch over the king. This constant worry is not good for you in your condition. You might lose the baby.”

“I am more worried about losing my husband,” I snap. Matilda looks crestfallen, and I know I am being unfair. Matilda is a good sister and is only showing as much by her concern. More than this, her anxiety for my child arises from a recent loss of her own. After seven years of marriage, Robert of Artois finally made her pregnant in the spring. But she took sick with rubeola and lost the babe shortly after she first felt it move. “Listen,” I say, taking both her hands in my own. “I have slept and I have eaten. Do not ask me to leave Louis. You would not leave Robert.”

“No,” she concedes.

Around the time of Terce, Princess Isabelle glides into the room.
She is dressed so simply that she might be mistaken for a
béguine
. Going immediately to a small altar that has been erected along the wall behind me, she kneels in prayer. When she is finished, she rises in silence and sits beside me, taking my hand. For a long time we were not friends, and I am not sure that we are now, but we have come to an understanding. Nearly two years ago, surviving an illness as serious as that which now threatens her brother, she offered herself as an obligation to God. The dragon was entirely against the idea and ordered, cajoled, and ranted accordingly. A match was already being arranged for Isabelle with the emperor’s eldest son—a match forwarded by the Holy Father. But Isabelle would not be bullied, and when I saw her stand up to Blanche in a way that Louis, ten years her senior, never could, she gained my admiration and support. She in turn has not forgotten that I took her part.

Some moments later Isabelle starts. A gasp escapes her lips. She turns to me, her eyes wide. “I do not think he breathes!”

Jumping up, I lean forward over Louis as all my ladies rush to the bed. His face is ashen. I can detect nothing—no rise and fall of his chest, no fevered-hot breath on my cheek as, hovering over him, I turn it to his mouth.

“A priest.” I hear Matilda’s voice as if she stood a league away and not merely by the bedchamber door.

Isabelle, who rose with me, takes my hand again in hers as I straighten up and look down into the vacant face of my husband. I feel a tear run down my cheek and then another. I must be crying. Yolande moves to the side of the bed opposite me and says in a low voice, “What shall we do? How shall we confirm it?”

I sense a commotion at the door. Turning, I see a priest as well as Jean de Soissons and several other noblemen. All appear stricken. None proceed more than a few steps into the room.

“Is he dead?” de Soissons stammers.

“Your Majesty, shall I cover His Majesty’s face?” Yolande’s voice is very calm. She lifts the edge of the sheet covering the king, waiting for my word to draw it up.

I cannot find my voice. I do not have to.

Louis sits up.

At the foot of the bed, Elisabeth collapses in a heap and is left where she lies.

“A cross.” The voice is weak but it is unmistakably Louis’s. “Give me a cross.”

My entire body is shaking, but I move as swiftly as I can to Louis’s altar and take up a cross of Poitevin silver lying there.

“Your Majesty,” I say, holding the cross out to Louis. My hand shakes.

His hand, shaking likewise, rises slightly off the bed’s surface, hovers, and then falls again. He has not the strength to lift it. Taking his right hand in my left, I raise it for him, just high enough that I may place the cross against his palm. His pale fingers curl reflexively around it. I place his hand, still clutching the cross, on his lap.

“He has taken the cross,” exclaims Yolande’s husband, Hugh, Duke of Burgundy.

“God, the Holy Virgin, and all the saints be praised,” cries the priest, falling to his knees, hands uplifted.

Slowly all the men who entered at word of Louis’s demise go down on their knees as well. Turning to the priest, Hugh of Burgundy asks, “Father, have you a cross for me as well?”

Yolande stares at me from the other side of the bed, across the miraculously reanimated figure of my husband. Both of us know without speaking what this means.

Crusade.

“NO, NO, NO, NO!” BLANCHE
is apoplectic. I am stunned by her continued resistance to Louis’s pledge. After all,
she
is the author of Louis’s religious zealotry. And she was raised at the court of Castile during the
reconquista
, a holy war to reconquer territories on the Iberian Peninsula lost to Muslims—a war her father, Alfonso VIII, fiercely led.

It is two weeks since the king miraculously escaped death. Louis is well enough to be out of bed. He sits near the fire, wrapped in all manner of furs, and I sit beside him. Because his eyes tire easily, I was reading out loud to him when Blanche arrived.

“You cannot leave your kingdom ungoverned,” Blanche says, pacing furiously. “You are needed here.”

“It will not be ungoverned. You shall be regent in my absence.”

This promise with all the power it encompasses does nothing to assuage Blanche. She stops in front of us, her cold, gray eyes narrowed to slits and her mouth turned fiercely downward. “You will not survive such foolishness. Look at you—you are too weak to read, let alone ride. Too weak to return to Paris to hold a Christmas court at month’s end.”

“I do not leave at once. There are preparations to be made. Mine will be the best organized and best provisioned expedition. What I do to fulfill my oath I will do wholeheartedly.”

Blanche opens her mouth, but before she can say a thing, a timid knock sounds. “Enter.” Blanche does not wait for Louis but gives the command herself.

The door opens to reveal the squat figure of Mincia, the dragon’s ancient Spanish attendant. “William of Auvergne,” she announces.

I am entirely surprised. Why would the bishop of Paris come
to Pontoise, a distance of more than ten leagues, in frigid winter weather? I can see by the look on Louis’s face that he is puzzled as well. Blanche, however, does not so much as raise an eyebrow. She takes a deep breath, nearly a sigh of relief, then says, “Send him in.”

A pleasant smile raises the corner of the bishop’s thin lips at his first sight of Louis. He is genuinely fond of my husband. Then, as if he recollects something, the smile passes and he takes on a serious mien.

“Your Majesty, I praise God for your recovery. When I left Paris, thousands were offering similar prayers of thanksgiving.”

“I am gratified to hear it, Your Excellency. I am thankful myself that Our Lord has seen fit to give me more time to do his work.”

“Yes…” The bishop hesitates. “I understand that upon regaining your senses, Your Majesty took the cross.”

“Indeed, it is so.”

“And now you intend to fulfill your oath.”

“Yes, sparing no expense, not of money, skill, nor even of blood.”

I see the dragon wince visibly at the mention of blood.

“I must respectfully urge Your Majesty to reconsider.” The bishop speaks softly, soothingly, as if Louis were still very ill.

“Oaths are not subject to reconsideration.”

“With deepest humility, Your Majesty, let me suggest that you are mistaken. An oath taken under great duress, when a man is not himself, may be set aside without any compromise of dignity or any fear of divine disapproval. But if Your Majesty cannot be easy based on my word, I would be happy to write to the Holy Father at Lyon and ask him to offer you a release from your pledge.”

“You think I was not myself?” Louis asks, his voice cold.

“They say, Your Majesty, that you had ceased to breathe. Your
body was in the most extreme of circumstances, and your soul was very near to leaving it.”

“I ask you again—do you think I was not myself?”

“I only suggest the possibility, Your Majesty.”

“And I tell you”—a spot of color marks each of Louis’s cheeks and his voice rises slightly—“that I was never
more
myself than at that moment! But I see that
some
will not be satisfied by my protestations.” The king casts a withering look at Blanche. Then, turning back to William of Auvergne, he continues. “So I ask you now, while I am in full possession of my faculties if not yet returned to my full strength, and with these queens as my witnesses, to give me the cross.”

The dragon blanches noticeably. She glares at William of Auvergne in a most intimidating manner. But what can the poor bishop do? Glancing about, he spots a crucifix on Louis’s makeshift altar. Lifting it, he brings the crucifix forward and offers it to the king. Louis takes it in both hands and holds it fast.

“Your Majesty,” I say, “I too would take the cross and share your work in the Holy Land as I share your life in France.”

Blanche gasps. She has been outmaneuvered and knows it. She cannot possibly travel to the Holy Land with us. Now is my time and this is my battle—to use Louis’s crusade to liberate not only Jerusalem but myself.

I smile sweetly as Louis turns to me with a beatific look and passes me the cross.