The Sister Queens (65 page)

“True.” Eleanor shakes her head in dismay and crinkles her nose. We slide from the room unnoticed. “Heavens,” she says once we have gained fresher air, “I have founded my share of hospitals and abbeys and embroidered my share of vestments for pious clergymen. But I cannot see why good works must lead to unpleasant odors.”

“Oh Eleanor!”

“I am glad to think I can shock you still after all these years.”

“No indeed,” I protest. “In truth I admire you. You have the courage to say what everyone else only thinks.”

My sister stops walking and releases my arm. She squares her shoulders and says, “I shall endeavor to prove your point. It is silly not to look at him on my account.”

“I—”

“Never mind your protests; they will not convince me. For a week you have studiously ignored the Seneschal of Champagne. Nothing could be plainer. I do not doubt but if he fell down dead before you, you would step over him and proceed unhindered. It convinces me of nothing and is, I think, likely to draw more eyes to you, not fewer.”

My heart pounds in my throat. “But if you detected us in only a day—”

“Have your husband and your courtiers not had a thousand times as many days and failed? I know you as no one else does, and I came with fresh eyes, having never seen you in the gentlemen’s company before. Those of your own court are doubtless used to your prior conduct. They think only that you play the lady and the knight. Would you alert them by this change, this studied avoidance, to the very thing you want them least to notice?”

A serving girl, leaving the hall, passes us, bobbing her head in respect since her laden tray prevents her from curtsying. Her appearance stops our conversation. By God, no woman has less privacy than I do! Yet here is a conversation I would not abandon.

Taking Eleanor’s elbow, I steer her out into the gardens. Frost covers everything, and it is doubtless foolish for us to stand out of doors dressed as we are, but here at least we are alone. Not far from where we stand is Louis’s favorite pear tree. Gazing upon it, I feel very sorry for myself. How little could I have imagined, when I sat beneath that tree as a girl watching my husband’s lips form Latin conjugations as if his every word were enchanting, that I would stand as I do, a woman grown and supposedly wiser, shivering in the cold, my life as empty of love as the tree is now of bud or bloom.

“Eleanor,” I say, “I know you bid me never to speak on this subject, but you have begun it. Before it is quit, I swear by my very life, there is no longer anything going on between the Seneschal of Champagne and me that anyone at court might not know of. Jean and I have
never
sinned on French soil nor ever will.”

“Do not tell me lies, Marguerite. I see your eyes when they chance upon him. More than that, I have looked deep into your
eyes these past days as they seek to avoid him. The pain there cannot be missed. You love him still.”

“You call love alone a sin, then?” I demand. “I say
not
to love what is yours is the worse sin, but I will not argue the point with you, you who have been adored since you set foot on English soil. For the simple matter is this: it is not in my power to cease loving Jean. If I bid you tomorrow to stop loving Henry as you do, could you do it? Is your heart so obedient to your command?”

Marguerite’s words hang in the air, though the steam from the breath that accompanied them has fallen away. “My heart is not at issue here,” I reply. “You have some practice in the task of ceasing to love. You stopped loving Louis, did you not?”

“Would you believe me, Eleanor, if I told you it took years?” she asks, reaching out a hand for mine, which I keep from her. “That I clung to some fondness for Louis even in the face of his constant neglect, like a dog will crawl back to its master again and again despite being struck or sent away?” Turning her back upon me, she takes a few steps away. Then rounding, she says, “How long can we love those who do not love us in return?”

I do not know the answer to her inquiry. I’ve struggled with a question of my own since the maimed man spoke to me in my dreams. I know my sister has sinned; yet my heart tells me she is still the best woman I know. How can these facts be reconciled? Marguerite has always been deliberative in nature, and just—more just than I—in her treatment of others. Can her judgment suddenly have abandoned her so entirely? Perhaps I do not see things clearly. Would that it were so! For in this instance I would rather be wrong than have Marguerite wrong. Such an admission might make me smile under other circumstances.

I look down at the ground. Near the tip of my slipper lies a
broken twig with a cocoon lashed upon it. If my Edmund were here, he would pick it up and gently place it where it could not be stepped on.
“It may seem broken,”
he would tell me,
“but something beautiful might still come out.”

I pick up the twig. Marguerite looks at me oddly. She is still waiting for my answer. Her life at present is like this cocoon. Damaged, yes, but something beautiful may still come of it. I wish I could make her life better. I cannot. I pray that time can. But I will not step on her. I will have my son’s heart. I walk to the nearest bush and carefully set the twig among its branches.

“I know only one thing for certain about hearts—that ours must never be separated. That is the essence of what we pledged when you left me to come to France. So many years have passed, but we have allowed neither the events that filled them nor the others of importance in our lives to sever the bond between us—not Louis nor Henry, even when they were at war. The only things to part us for a time were my stubbornness and anger. I will not make that mistake again. That the Seneschal of Champagne loves you makes him a wiser man than his king.” For some ridiculous reason my eyes grow damp. “There is surely no sin in that, nor, I think, in the contents of your heart. As for your acts,” I say, feeling my cheeks grow warm despite the December cold, “did Our Lord not say, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them’? If God forgives you your sins, then they can be nothing to me. You are my most beloved sister as ever you were and ever you shall be.”

Marguerite runs to me and, as her arms close about me and we cry and laugh in turn, I feel such a lightness of heart, such grace. It is as if the forgiveness of Christ were mine as well.

E
LEANOR
J
ANUARY 1255
W
ISSANT,
F
RANCE

M
y days with my sister have drawn to a close. The ships outside my window tell me so.

We celebrated Christmas with such pomp and gaiety that Paris will talk of it for years. There was still sorrow in my sister’s looks in these last days. But there was also happiness without the need for concealment. It was the same happiness, and springing from the same cause, I now realize, as that which filled her letters from Cyprus and the Holy Land. When Marguerite danced with the Sieur de Joinville at our Christmas revels, I watched with joy. To see someone you love laugh is a marvelous thing.

“Are you ready to go on board?” Henry sticks his head through the doorway. “Ready to say good-bye?”

“It is not good-bye. My sister is always with me.”

Doubtless Henry thinks I refer to Marguerite’s letters, several of which are in my
aumônière
even now. Over the years he has occasionally poked fun at their number and frequency. But I do not refer to these tangible objects. Walking with my husband to the courtyard where Marguerite and Louis wait to see us on our horses, I keep one hand ever so gently against my breast, as if guarding my heart.

My sister greets us with open arms, clinging first to Sanchia, who is to sail back with us, then to Henry, and finally to me. Louis
steps forward with more reserve. There is something awkward about the way he embraces Henry but something hopeful as well.

“We are brothers as all men are brothers in Christ,” the King of France declares, releasing my husband, “even more so as we have taken sisters to wife. Our children, along with their cousins, will rule the greatest kingdoms in Europe and influence its history for a hundred years. You are my brother; be also my friend.”

Henry clasps Louis’s arm and pulls the French king back into an embrace. Over my husband’s shoulder I raise my eyebrows and give Marguerite a look. How typical of men to think that by their brotherly embrace they are the authors of history and fortune. Marguerite and I know better. ’Tis sisters who shape the world plain and simple.

H
alf a dozen years ago, while researching another project, I came upon a footnote in a history of Notre Dame de Paris—a footnote about Marguerite of Provence, whose kneeling image is carved over that great church’s Portal Rouge, and about her sisters. I had never heard of these remarkable sisters from Provence and wondered how such extraordinary women could have largely slipped through the fingers of history. I started a folder with their names on it and tucked it away in my file drawer, vowing to come back and tell their story.
The Sister Queens
is the result of that vow.

Perhaps inevitably my finished novel focuses on the two closest sisters, Marguerite and Eleanor, and tells their tale through the lens of their relationship with each other. I am, after all, a “big sister,” and my relationship with my own sister defines me and has done so since childhood. If you have a sister, you know precisely what I mean. We do not escape our sisters. I believe the same was true for Marguerite and Eleanor—they were queens, yes, and wives, and political actors on the stage of thirteenth-century Europe, but first, last, and always they were sisters.

The Christmas of 1254 when my novel ends was the first that Marguerite and Eleanor of Provence spent together after nineteen years of separation, but it was not the last. Five years later, a shared French and English holiday resulted in more than the exchange of rings and pretty presents. In early December 1259, Louis IX and Henry III signed the Treaty of Paris, and, for the rest of Marguerite’s and Eleanor’s lifetimes, France and England would see each other as allies, not enemies. The roots of that treaty stretched back to the Christmas of 1254 when, with the help of the sister queens, important territorial issues were settled in principle. As part of the Treaty of Paris, Henry was paid handsomely, both in money and by the grant of a number of fiefs and domains of the French Crown, to renounce English claims in Normandy and Poitou. In turn, Louis accepted English control of Gascony and Henry did homage for the duchy. The sister queens from Provence had reshaped the political relations between their kingdoms.

But more was changed than politics. On a personal level, the royal families of France and England drew together. After 1254, they increasingly provided support for each other in adversity—just as Marguerite and Eleanor had done since girlhood. In 1260, Henry of England shouldered the coffin of Marguerite’s beloved son Prince Louis, acting as pallbearer on the first stage of the boy’s journey to Royaumont for burial after the fifteen-year-old died suddenly. During the English Civil War, with Henry and her son Edward in rebel hands, Eleanor took refuge in France, raising money and troops for her beleaguered husband. And King Louis, who before the Anglo-French understanding might well have favored his countryman and personal friend Simon de Montfort, declared the English Provisions of Oxford null and his brother-in-law king, plain and simple. He ordered all the lands the English rebels had taken returned to the Crown and its supporters.

The importance of family, championed by two sisters from the houses of Provence and Savoy, made rival kings brothers in spirit, not just in name—quite an achievement and certainly not the end of the sisters’ story. As
The Sister Queens
closes, neither Marguerite nor Eleanor has yet lived even half the years of her long, eventful, life.

A word about my two kings.
The Sister Queens
is very much the tale of Marguerite and Eleanor, but to tell that story is also to tell at least in part the stories of their husbands. These powerful men were multifaceted. I was particularly interested in exploring sides of their characters that have, perhaps, been overlooked somewhat in other portrayals. In the case of Louis IX of France, I sought to illuminate the imperfect man behind the gleaming image of the Roman Catholic saint. And I tried to show the caring husband and good father often overlooked in history’s judgment of Henry III as one of the least of England’s kings.