White Heart (2 page)

One year earlier
Paris, November 1226

At first, I thought he mocked me with that twisting mouth, forming words I couldn’t hear. But I could read his lips.
The king is dead.

My shriek skittered horses, rolling their eyes. I slumped to the ground, crushed by God’s own hand.
Louis.
My only love, taken so soon.
Dear Lord, take me, too.

Brother Guérin tried to help me up. “My lady.” His voice trembled with sorrow and something else: alarm.
It is not seemly for a queen to cry.
Who said that to me? Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln, when he found me sobbing at the Cité Palace, newly arrived in Paris and sick for Castille.
A mother’s tears are her children’s worry and woe.
He had a pinched nose, like the beak of the swan he kept as his pet, and his brown eyes looked tired.
As queen, you are mother to your people. You must hide your woman’s frailty from them and show only strength.

I was strong, but my knees were weak. Guérin pulled me up ever so gently, but I could not walk. I leaned against him, staring at the road spooling out before me, as desolate as my heart’s terrain. A hawk circled overhead. Louis, dead? I pressed my fist into my mouth, stifling my sob.

A hand squeezed mine. I looked down into the solemn gaze of my son, also named Louis, the sweetest boy in all the world and now the King of France. How proudly he had led this procession, a surprise greeting for his father, Louis the Lion, on his way home after seven months in the south and now—dead? I tried to speak the word, but it weighted my tongue like a stone. My stifled tears began to leak from my pores.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I moaned.

“Mama,” Louis said, “I am here.”

I looked into his eyes, bluer than sky—his father’s eyes, never to be seen again—and tried to smile. I tried to be brave for him, my eldest and best boy, although not the firstborn, dear God. Two daughters dropped like unripe fruit from my immature body before Philip came screaming into the world, only to leave it again at nine. Two more boys stillborn left Louis as heir to the throne. One might think me accustomed to death, but no. To this day I hear the scrape of poor Philip’s final breaths, like fingernails clawing for purchase on a sheer cliff.

The king is dead. Louis!
My knees buckled again and I fell, or rather, I flung myself down, letting my son go, letting myself go, folding over myself, burying my face in my lap, my hands over my eyes—crying, yes, the Queen of France, in a sobbing heap in the middle of the world, or at the end of the world.

I longed for darkness, but found it only within. Bereft of my husband and abandoned by my God in a single sweep of death’s scythe? A queen must not cry.
Mama, help me!
Eleanor of England never cried, not even when she heard that Papa had been killed. “We are most aggrieved,” she said. That was all. In a quiet voice she ordered baths for the messengers and a feast for the knights returning from the field, then rode out to view his body. Thanks be to God that it was not Papa who lay under that velvet wrap. Another knight had donned the king’s mantle to fool the Saracen generals, and the trick had worked. A poet wrote of the “moistness” in Mama’s eyes when she found my father alive—wounded in the neck and faint with thirst—but that was all. Another woman might have cried from relief, but not my mother. Her sorrows pooled within her heart until, at last, it burst, killing her. Was that strength?

I pressed my hands to my face, but the flow would not stop. Grief was a river rushing from my eyes and dripping through my fingers. “May I help you to your feet, my lady?” Mincia’s whisper threaded through my sobs. It is unseemly for a queen to cry, even more so for her to grovel in the dirt. I wanted only to sink farther down, to bury myself. How would I live without him?

A hand pressed my shoulder. Guérin stood beside me, his tears falling like rain onto my head. Glancing up at him I spied the handle of his dagger in the sheath on his belt, glinting in the incongruous sunlight. I leapt up and snatched the blade, thinking to plunge it into my breast—but Guérin clasped my wrist and would not allow it. “I beg you to remember your children, my lady,” he wept. In the carriage, my children, Robert, Jean Tristan, Alphonse, and Phillippe, shouted my name. Louis led me by the hand back to them.

“Do not you leave me, too, Mama,” he said, so sweet and earnest. “You must help me to be king.”

Inside the carriage, my boys clambered atop me, shielding me or perhaps seeking shelter.
A mother’s tears are her children’s worry and woe.
My prostrate grief had frightened them. I felt sorry, especially for Louis, who depended on my strength. France had become a mighty force under his grandfather Philip Augustus, its rule too demanding for even the most capable of twelve-year-old kings. As ardently as I yearned for death, I rose, in that moment, to the tasks left for me: to go on ruling France as I had done these past seven months, and to prepare my son to meet his fate.

Indeed, I had reigned since the day my husband and I were crowned, three years earlier on the Feast of the Transfiguration. An auspicious date it was, for I, like the Lord, entered heaven on that day, now joined with Louis more completely than in all our years of marriage. We ruled not as a body with two heads but as one head with two bodies. He consulted me on all matters, included me in every meeting, every counsel, every petition, every hearing—and why shouldn’t he? He loved the battlefield, while the court was my milieu. I could spy a liar from the moment he entered the great hall. My grasp of justice rivaled King Solomon’s. I saw, as in a vision, both the immediate and future effects of every decision. Louis, on the other hand, lived only to fight.

It was the perfect partnership. When Louis headed south to quell revolts against his vassal barons, he left me in command.
I thank God for my most excellent queen, to whom I may entrust my kingdom and my very life,
he said before kissing me good-bye. He rode off to battle on a high-stepping horse, beaming as though he were off to hunt fox instead of heretics and traitors. Now the kingdom he had entrusted to me was mine alone. I looked down the empty road, saw the misery I would cause my people if I abandoned them now, and wiped my tears.

I gathered my children into my lap. Young Louis sat beside me, his hand ever in mine. The carriage wheels rucked and clattered over the hardscrabble earth, bouncing on ruts and rocks, jarring me back to sober life. How could I have thought, even for a moment, of killing myself? If I were to die, my children would die also. That hawk still wheeled overhead—no, not a hawk but a vulture, circling like the English king, coveting our lands, or even the French Crown.

The premonition made me shudder. I wrapped my arm around my son’s slender shoulders, so fragile and delicate. A child on the throne would tempt usurpers. King John’s blood hadn’t even cooled before the English barons tried to topple his young heir. They would have snatched the crown from him and given it to Louis if they could. Only the great lord William Marshal kept the boy-king Henry from losing the kingdom. Who, I wondered, would protect
my
son? I trusted no one except myself.

In the great hall that evening, Guérin relayed the details of my husband’s death. Grief struck at my dry-eyed resolve like a battering ram as I listened, digging my fingernails into the heels of my hands.

The siege of Avignon had lasted months. The city’s twin towers and mountainous stone wall proved impenetrable. Louis vowed to stay until the city surrendered, but he did not reckon on paying so dear a price. Dozens of his men died in the stultifying heat. Louis grew pale and weak, yet refused to give up. At last, starving, the people of Avignon threw open their gates in submission. Louis the Lion had conquered again—but the bells tolled in mourning, not in celebration. So many fine men dead. Then, five days after starting for home, Louis died at Montpensier, surrounded by the men he loved.

“He struggled in vain to reach you, my lady. He wished only to rest his eyes upon your face again.” If only it could have been so! But—it did not please God to save his life.

On his deathbed, my husband required every man present to swear allegiance to our son. But where were Pierre de Dreux, Count of Brittany (and, as Earl of Richmond, vassal to the English king) and Hugh de Lusignan, Count of La Marche (married to Henry’s mother)? Sending messengers to the English court, no doubt, telling King Henry that Louis the Lion was dead, and that a weak and feeble woman now held the throne in France.

“Of course Henry will invade,” I said loudly, feigning a contemptuous snort—for, as I knew, the very walls had ears in my court. “Let him come, I say. He and his friends will soon discover who is weak.”

Our meeting ended, I all but ran to my chambers, racing a cresting tide of tears.
Louis, gone
. How could God be so cruel, when I had served him so faithfully? Hadn’t I always given generously to the poor? Hadn’t I supported the Church? Hadn’t I fended off every lord in the kingdom—including that pock-faced Pierre de Dreux—as well as handsome clerics and rogue poets, all vying to warm my bed during Louis’s long and frequent absences? “Frank in frankness, white in heart as in head,” the minstrels sang of me. I lived up to my name. How did the Lord repay me? By taking my husband’s life and leaving me to rule over an unruly kingdom alone, surrounded by plotters aiming to topple me and my son, too.

The hair on my neck bristled. Let them try! I’d make them wish they’d never even dreamed of fighting Blanche de Castille.
Lord, help me,
I murmured, then cast the prayer aside. God had given me nothing but misery. I would help myself.

I had hoped to find my room dark, like my godless soul, but the servants had laid a cheering fire and the gentle notes of a lute floated from a corner. I snatched the instrument from the man’s hand and hurled it into the flames, sending him ducking from the room. Then, at last, I fell into my bed. Alas, the tears I had resisted these past hours would not come—but the memories did, one after the other, like a procession with no end.

Louis, gone!
How my pulse had quickened at the first sight of him, twenty-six years ago, waiting outside the palace gates to greet me: his smooth skin, his golden hair, his blue eyes brimming with mirth. My grandmother’s training on the long journey, the eloquent speech (
It is my honor and joy to meet the fleur-de-lis of France
), the enticing glance directly into his eyes and then modestly away, the many questions I was to ask (
Men love to talk about themselves
), the secrets—heirloom relics—Eléonore d’Aquitaine had handed to me dissolved from my mind like fog in the afternoon sun as I stood before him, dazzled. He offered his arm and escorted me inside, where he presented me to his father, a great, shaggy red-beard with a voice like thunder. King Philip Augustus should have intimidated me even more than his son, but
Grand-mère
had prepared me for him.
Hold up your head and meet his gaze if you want his respect,
she told me.
Speak your mind, or he will assume that you don’t have one.

When he learned that the famous Eléonore d’Aquitaine had not accompanied me to Paris, his face drooped—and I grinned.

“I forbade her to come,” I said. “She is so beautiful, even at eighty years, that I feared she might steal your son from me.”

The mighty Philip Augustus laughed—at me! In the garden with his twinkly-eyed son, however, I could only mumble and sigh. Then, to my delight, Louis called for a lute and began to play. How did he know of my love for music? I sang with him, my tongue untangled, my fears forgotten. Louis played the songs I knew and loved, the songs of the troubadours who frequented my father’s court, including one composed for my mother by Guiraut de Bornelh:

Lithe and quick her body flows,

With lovely colors it is completed;

Never was such fresh bloom exceeded

By rose or any other bough.

Nor has Bordeaux

Possessed a lord so lively ever

As I would be if, apart or together,

She were mine and I were hers.

Lying on my bed, remembering, I could almost hear the melody—but no. The music was gone, Guiraut departed from this world when I was yet a girl, and Louis inexplicably and suddenly taken, to play for me nevermore. My bedchambers forever silent. I would never sing again.

I closed my eyes and squeezed out a single tear—and felt a hand touch my hair. In an instant I sprang upright with a cry, my elbow hitting against something hard, ready to scream for the guard—but a hand clamped around my mouth. I struggled until I heard Thibaut’s voice in my ear.

“By God’s head, Blanche, it is only me.” He released me to massage his face where I’d hit him. “A little more to the left and you might have broken my nose! You ought to come and train my soldiers in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

“What are you doing here?” I hissed. “In my bedchambers—in my
bed
?”

“I came to comfort you, my dear.” In the glow of the dying fire I could see the love on his face, no different than always—and yet today I took neither pleasure nor comfort from it. I stood and walked toward the fire, away from him. Let him write songs about me from now until the end of time. Of what use were they to me?
A woman’s power lies in her beauty.
Thibaut’s poetry kept alive the legend of my beauty even as I had begun to fade, at thirty-eight nearly an old woman. Yet all the beauty in the world would not save me from an English invasion.

“How do you fare, my lovely? I heard that you collapsed.” From behind, his arms slid around my waist. “I hope you did not injure yourself.”

“My body is intact. My heart has suffered the wound.” My voice cracked; I swallowed, fearing it would break open and spill my sorrow at his feet.

“Very poetic, my dear. May I use that in a song? But you must take care not to grieve overly much. People will suspect you of pretense.”