Four Sisters, All Queens Read Free Page B

to go to bed. She wants, she says, to stay up with Papa.
    “I am going to play chess with Sordel. He likes to cheat, and I like to win. That is too much excitement for a little girl.”
    “I don’t care. I want to come.” She nestles her curly head against his shoulder.
    “Do you promise to be good, and sit in my lap and not move?” She nods. “Then you may come with me.” Madeleine plants her hands on her hips as he walks out with her; she has told her lord—how many times?—that baby Beatrice needs her sleep, that she will be tired tomorrow, and ornery. But there is no telling him anything when it comes to Beatrice.
    “Beatrice uses her charms to get what she wants,” Eléonore whispers later, as she and Marguerite lie in bed with the sleeping Sanchia. “ She is like Cleopatra.”
    “I hope you are wrong,” Marguerite says. “Remember what happened to Cleopatra’s sisters.”
    Eléonore bares her teeth. Looking like a gargoyle in the moonlight, she lifts her index finger and draws it slowly across her throat.

 

Marguerite
    The Light of Destiny
    Brignoles, 1234
    Thirteen years old
     
     
    T HE FALCON HOVERS , its eye piercing through the trees and the long grass, abiding on invisible currents, waiting. Then: the sudden stoop, the scurry on the ground, the swoop and upward soar, talons clutching a fat hare. “I won!” Marguerite shouts.
    “You did not.” Eléonore turns to the falconer. “Gaston. Tell her! My hawk had already exhausted that hare.”
    From the château they hear their names. They race down the hill, mouths watering. Yesterday’s dinner consisted of brown bread, cheese, and a few leaves of the spring’s first lettuces; for today, they have been promised raspberries and a fish from the pond. Eléonore reaches the château first, as always. In the glow of victory she doesn’t notice Mama’s glare at her tunic, torn and dirtied in her rolling down the hill this morning. Or, more likely, she pretends not to notice.
    The girls sit at the raised table at the front of the great hall, on their mother’s side. Beside her, Papa talks intently with Uncle Guillaume and Romeo, arrived today after a visit to the French court. Marguerite catches her uncle’s eye, but his wink doesn’t tellher whether he has brought a marriage proposal. On the floor, minstrels play pipes and drums while jongleurs stand on their heads and turn cartwheels in bright short tunics and hose. At the tables behind them, knights jostle for seats closest to the front, while troubadours elbow one another and make sport of them. Papa’s favorite, the red-haired troublemaker Bertran d’Alamanon, scribbles a verse on his hand and shows it to the fat Sordel, who holds his belly as if bracing for the shock of a full meal.
    “The King of France wants Margi,” Uncle Guillaume is saying to Papa, holding up a hand to stop the servant’s watering his wine. “The man they sent here last winter took back a glowing report.”
    “‘A girl of pretty face but prettier faith,’” Romeo quotes, then beams as proudly as if he had invented the phrase.
    Pretty faith? Her religious landscape is strewn with the burned and decapitated bodies of the Cathars, some of them poets. Labeled heretics for criticizing the pope of Rome. Slaughtered by the French. Her faith is a drop of blood on the tip of a sword, unglimpsed by M. de Flagy’s eyes as they admired her chest.
    “But you said his report was glowing,” Papa says. “That tribute sounds lukewarm, no? As if our beautiful Margi were a plain-face destined for the convent.”
    “That is exactly what we want the White Queen to think.” Uncle Guillaume quaffs his wine and gestures for more. “Blanche de Castille does not allow beautiful women in her court.”
    A shout rises from the floor. The servants in their unbleached tunics and linen caps have entered the great hall bearing covered trays, which they place first on the count and countess’s table. Anticipating raspberries,