The Strangled Queen

‘Don’t you dare talk to me,’ shouted Artois. ‘Your breath stinks like a horse!’

He threw him out, and banged the door shut with a kick of his boot.

‘My good Cousins,’ went on Artois, ‘I was expecting the worst indeed; but I see with relief that this sad time has not marked the two most beautiful faces in France.’

It was only now that he took off his hat and bowed low.

‘We still manage to wash,’ said Marguerite. ‘Provided we break the ice on the basins they bring us, we have sufficient water.’

Artois sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at them. ‘Well, my girls,’ he murmured to himself, ‘that’s what comes of trying to carve yourselves the destinies of queens from the inheritance of Robert of Artois!’ He tried to guess whether beneath the rough serge of their dresses, the two young women’s bodies had lost the soft curves of the past. He was like a great cat making ready to play with caged mice.

‘How is your hair, Marguerite?’ he asked. ‘Has it grown properly?’

Marguerite of Burgundy started as if she had been pricked with a needle. Her cheeks grew pale.

‘Get up, Monseigneur of Artois!’ she cried furiously. ‘However reduced you may find me here, I will still not tolerate that a man should be seated in my presence when I am standing!’

He leapt to his feet, and for a moment their eyes confronted each other. She did not flinch.

In the pale light from the window he was better able to see this new face of Marguerite’s, the face of a prisoner. The features had preserved their beauty, but all their sweetness had gone. The nose was sharper, the eyes more sunken. The dimples, which only last spring had shown at the corners of her amber cheeks, had become little wrinkles. ‘So,’ Artois said to himself, ‘she can still defend herself. All the better, it will be the more amusing.’ He liked a battle, having to fight to gain his ends.

‘Cousin,’ he said to Marguerite with feigned good-humour, ‘I had no intention of insulting you; you have misunderstood me. I merely wanted to know if your hair had grown sufficiently to allow of your appearing in public.’

Distrustful as she was, Marguerite could not prevent herself giving a start of joy.

Appear in public? This must mean that she was to go free. Had she been pardoned? Was he bringing her a throne? No, it could not be that, he would have announced it at once.

Her thoughts raced on. She felt herself weakening. She could not prevent tears coming to her eyes.

‘Robert,’ she said, ‘don’t keep me in suspense. I know it’s a characteristic of yours. But don’t be cruel. What have you come to say to me?’

‘Cousin, I have come to deliver you …’

Blanche uttered a cry and Robert thought that she was going to swoon. He had left his sentence suspended; he was playing the two women like a couple of fish at the end of a line.

‘… a message,’ he finished.

It pleased him to see their shoulders sag, to hear their sighs of disappointment.

‘A message from whom?’ asked Marguerite.

‘From Louis, your husband, our King from now on. And from our good cousin Monseigneur of Valois. But I may only speak to you alone. Perhaps Blanche would leave us?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Blanche submissively, ‘I will retire. But before I go, Cousin, tell me: what of Charles, my husband?’

‘He has been much distressed by his father’s death.’

‘And what does he think of me? Does he speak of me?’

‘I think he regrets you, in spite of the suffering you have caused him. Since Pontoise he has never been seen to show his old gaiety.’

Blanche burst into tears.

‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘that he has forgiven me?’

‘That depends a great deal upon your cousin,’ replied Artois mysteriously, indicating Marguerite.

And he led Blanche to the door, closing it behind her.

Then, returning to Marguerite, he said, ‘To start with, my dear, there are a few things I must tell you. During these last days, when King Philip was dying, Louis your husband has seemed utterly confused. To wake up King, when one went to sleep a prince, is a matter for some surprise. He occupied his throne of Navarre only in name, and had no hand in governing. You will remember that he is twenty-five years old, and at that age one is able to reign; but you know as well as I do that, without being unkind, judgement is not his most outstanding quality. Thus, in these first days, Monseigneur of Valois, his uncle, stands behind him in everything, directing affairs with Monseigneur de Marigny. The trouble is that these two powerful minds dislike each other because they are too similar, hardly listening to what they say to each other. It is even thought that very soon they will no longer listen to each other at all, which, if it continued, would be most unfortunate, since a kingdom cannot be governed by two deaf men.’

Artois had completely changed his tone. He was speaking with sense and precision, giving the impression that his turbulent entrances were largely made for effect.

‘As far as I am concerned, as you know very well,’ he went on, ‘I don’t care at all for Messire de Marigny, who has so often stood in my way, and I hope with all my heart that my cousin Valois, whose friend and ally I am, will come out on top.’

Marguerite did her best to understand the intrigues which were everyday matters to Artois, and into which he was so abruptly plunging her once more. She was no longer in touch with affairs, and it seemed to her that she was awakening from a long slumber of the mind.

From the courtyard, blanketed to some extent by the walls, came the shouts of Bersumée, who was busy having his lodging emptied by the soldiers.

‘Louis still hates me, doesn’t he?’ she said.

‘Oh, as for that, I won’t conceal from you that he hates you very well! You must admit that he has reason to,’ replied Artois. ‘To have decorated him with a cuckold’s horns is an embarrassment when they must be worn above the crown of France! Had you done as much to me, Cousin, I should not have made such a clamour throughout the kingdom. I should have given you such a beating that you would never have desired to do the like again, or else …’

He looked so steadily at Marguerite that she was frightened.

‘… or else I should have acted in such a way that I could feign the preservation of my honour. However, the late King, your father-in-law, clearly judged otherwise and things are as they are.’

He certainly possessed a fine assurance in deploring a scandal he had done everything in his power to set alight. He went on, ‘Louis’s first thought, after witnessing his father’s death, indeed the only thought he has in mind at present, since I believe him incapable of entertaining more than one at a time, is to extricate himself from the embarrassment in which you have placed him and to live down the shame you have caused him.’

‘What does Louis want?’ asked Marguerite.

For a moment Artois swung his monumental leg backwards and forwards as if he were about to kick a stone.

‘He intends asking for the annulment of your marriage,’ he answered, ‘and you can see, from the fact that he has sent me to you at once, that he wants to put it through as quickly as possible.’

‘So I shall never be Queen of France,’ thought Marguerite. The foolish dreams of the day before were already proved vain. A single day of dreaming to set against seven months of imprisonment, against the whole of time!

At this moment two men came in carrying wood and kindling. They lit the fire. Marguerite waited till they had gone again.

‘Very well,’ she said wearily, ‘let him ask for an annulment. What can I do?’

She went over to the fireplace and held her hands out to the flames which were beginning to catch.

‘Well, Cousin, there is much you can do, and indeed you can be the recipient of a certain gratitude if you will take a course that will cost you nothing. It happens that adultery is no ground for annulment; it’s absurd, but so it is. You could have had a hundred lovers instead of one, pleasured every man in the kingdom, and you would be no less indissolubly married to the man to whom you were joined before God. Ask the chaplain or anyone else you like; so it is. I have taken the best advice upon it, because I know very little of church matters: a marriage cannot be broken, and if one wishes to break it, it must be proved that there was some impediment to its taking place, or that it has not been consummated, so that it might never have been. You’re listening to me?’

‘Yes, yes, I see what you mean,’ said Marguerite.

It was no longer a question of the affairs of the kingdom, but of her own fate; and she was registering each word in her mind that she might not forget it.