The Strangled Queen

He lowered his eyes.

‘I shall come to speak with you, Madam,’ he replied, ‘as soon as I have done my rounds and changed the guard.’

Then he ordered Sergeant Lalaine to accompany the Princesses, recommending him in a low voice to behave with particular correctness.

The tower in which Marguerite and Blanche were confined had but three high, identical, circular rooms, placed one above the other, each with hearth and overmantel and, for ceiling, an eight-arched vault; these rooms were connected by a spiral staircase constructed in the thickness of the wall. The ground-floor room was permanently occupied by a detachment of their guard – a guard which caused Captain Bersumée such anxiety that he had it relieved every six hours in continuous fear that it might be suborned, seduced or outwitted. Marguerite lived in the first-floor room and Blanche on the second floor. At night the two Princesses were separated by a heavy door closed halfway up the staircase; by day they were allowed to communicate with each other.

When the sergeant had accompanied them back, they waited till every hinge and lock had creaked into place at the bottom of the stairs.

Then they looked at each other and with a mutual impulse fell into each other’s arms crying. ‘He’s dead, dead.’

They hugged each other, danced, laughed and cried all at once, repeating ceaselessly, ‘He’s dead!’

They tore off their hoods and freed their short hair, the growth of seven months.

Marguerite had little black curls all over her head, Blanche’s hair had grown unequally, in thick locks like handfuls of straw. Blanche ran her hand from her forehead back to her neck and, looking at her cousin, cried, ‘A looking-glass! The first thing I want is a looking-glass! Am I still beautiful, Marguerite?’

She behaved as if she were to be released within the hour and had now no concern but her appearance.

‘If you ask me that, it must be because I look so much older myself,’ said Marguerite.

‘Oh no!’ Blanche cried. ‘You’re as lovely as ever!’

She was sincere; in shared suffering change passes unnoticed. But Marguerite shook her head; she knew very well that it was not true.

And indeed the Princesses had suffered much since the spring: the tragedy of Maubuisson coming upon them in the midst of their happiness; their trial; the appalling death of their lovers, executed in their presence in the Great Square of Pontoise; the obscene shouts of the populace massed on their route; and after that half a year spent in a fortress; the wind howling among the eaves; the stifling heat of summer reflected from the stone; the icy cold suffered since autumn had begun; the black buckwheat gruel that formed their meals; their shirts, rough as though made of hair, and which they were allowed to change but once every two months; the window narrow as a loophole through which, however you placed your head, you could see no more than the helmet of an invisible archer pacing up and down the battlements – these things had so marked Marguerite’s character, and she knew it well, that they must also have left their mark upon her face.

Perhaps Blanche with her eighteen years and curiously volatile character, amounting almost to heedlessness, which permitted her to pass instantaneously from despair to an absurd optimism – Blanche, who could suddenly stop weeping because a bird was singing beyond the wall, and say wonderingly, ‘Marguerite! Do you hear the bird?’ – Blanche, who believed in signs, every kind of sign, and dreamed unceasingly as other women stitch, Blanche, perhaps, if she were freed from prison, might recover the complexion, the manner and the heart of other days; Marguerite, never. There was something broken in her that could never be mended.

Since the beginning of her imprisonment she had never shed so much as a single tear; but neither had she ever had a moment of remorse, of conscience or of regret.

The Chaplain, who confessed her every week, was shocked by her spiritual intransigence.

Not for an instant had Marguerite admitted her own responsibility for her misfortunes; not for an instant had she admitted that, when one is the granddaughter of Saint Louis, the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, Queen of Navarre and destined to succeed to the most Christian throne of France, to take an equerry for lover, receive him in one’s husband’s house, and load him with gaudy presents, constituted a dangerous game which might cost one both honour and liberty. She felt that she was justified by the fact that she had been married to a prince whom she did not love, and whose nocturnal advances filled her with horror.

She did not reproach herself with having acted as she had; she merely hated those who had brought her disaster about; and it was upon others alone that she lavished her despairing anger: against her sister-in-law, the Queen of England, who had denounced her, against the royal family of France who had condemned her, against her own family of Burgundy who had failed to defend her, against the whole kingdom, against fate itself and against God. It was upon others that she wished so thirstily to be avenged when she thought that, on this very day, she should have been side by side with the new king, sharing in power and majesty, instead of being imprisoned, a derisory queen, behind walls twelve feet thick.

Blanche put her arm round her neck.

‘It’s all over now,’ she said. ‘I’m sure, my dear, that our misfortunes are over.’

‘They are only over,’ replied Marguerite, ‘upon the condition that we are clever, and that quickly.’

She had a plan in mind, thought out during Mass, whose outcome she could not yet clearly envisage. Nevertheless she wished to turn the situation to her own advantage.

‘You will let me speak alone with that great lout of a Bersumée, whose head I should prefer to see upon a pike than upon his shoulders,’ she added.

A moment later the locks and hinges creaked at the base of the tower.

The two women put their hoods on again. Blanche went and stood in the embrasure of the narrow window; Marguerite, assuming a royal attitude, seated herself upon the bench which was the only seat in the room. The Captain of the Fortress came in.

‘I have come, Madam, as you asked me to,’ he said.

Marguerite took her time, looking him straight in the eye.

‘Messire Bersumée,’ she asked, ‘do you realize whom you will be guarding from now on?’

Bersumée turned his eyes away, as if he were searching for something in the room.

‘I know it well, Madam, I know it well,’ he replied, ‘and I have been thinking of it ever since this morning, when the courier woke me on his way to Criquebœuf and Rouen.’

‘During the seven months of my imprisonment here I have had insufficient linen, no furniture or sheets; I have eaten the same gruel as your archers and I have but one hour’s firing a day.’

‘I have obeyed Messire de Nogaret’s orders, Madam,’ replied Bersumée.

‘Messire de Nogaret is dead.’

‘He sent me the King’s instructions.’

‘King Philip is dead.’

Seeing where Marguerite was leading, Bersumée replied, ‘But Monseigneur de Marigny is still alive, Madame, and he is in control of the judiciary and the prisons, as he controls all else in the kingdom, and I am responsible to him for everything.’

‘Did this morning’s courier give you no new orders concerning me?’

‘None, Madam.’

‘You will receive them shortly.’

‘I await them, Madam.’

For a moment they looked at each other in silence. Robert Bersumée, Captain of Château-Gaillard, was thirty-five years old, at that epoch a ripe age. He had that precise, dutiful look professional soldiers assume so easily and which, from being continually assumed, eventually becomes natural to them. For ordinary everyday duty in the fortress he wore a wolfskin cap and a rather loose old coat of mail, black with grease, which hung in folds about his belt. His eyebrows made a single bar above his nose.

At the beginning of her imprisonment Marguerite had tried to seduce him, ready to offer herself to him in order to make him her ally. He had failed to respond for fear of the consequences. But he was always embarrassed in Marguerite’s presence and felt a grudge against her for the part she had made him play. Today he was thinking, ‘Well, there it is! I could have been the Queen of France’s lover.’ And he wondered whether his scrupulously soldierly conduct would turn out well or ill for his prospects of promotion.

‘It has been no pleasure to me, Madam, to have had to inflict such treatment upon women, particularly of such high rank as yours,’ he said.

‘I can well believe it, Messire, I can well believe it,’ replied Marguerite, ‘because one can clearly see how knightly you are by nature and that you have felt great repugnance for your orders.’

As his father was a blacksmith and his mother the daughter of a sacristan, the Captain of the Fortress heard the word ‘knightly’ with considerable pleasure.

‘Only, Messire Bersumée,’ went on the prisoner, ‘I am tired of chewing wood to keep my teeth white and of anointing my hands with the grease from my soup to prevent my skin chapping with the cold.’

‘I can well understand it, Madam, I can well understand it.’

‘I should be grateful to you if from now on you would see to it that I am protected from cold, vermin and hunger.’

Bersumée lowered his head.