Maurice Druon - The Strangled Queen

‘Hare’s bones,’ he explained, ‘break into splinters and tear the stomach.’

When they had all eaten enough, he caught Blanche’s eye and indicated the door. She rose without being asked, though her legs were trembling under her; she felt giddy and badly wanted to go to bed. Then Robert had the first humanitarian impulse since his arrival. ‘If she goes out into the cold in this state, she’ll die of it,’ he said to himself.

‘Have they lighted a fire in your room?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you, Cousin,’ replied Blanche. ‘Our life …’

She was interrupted by a hiccough.

‘… our life is really quite altered thanks to you. Oh, how fond I am of you, Cousin, really fond indeed. You’ll tell Charles, won’t you? You will tell him that I love him. Ask him to forgive me because I love him.’

At the moment she loved everyone. She went out, quite drunk, and tripped upon the staircase. ‘If I were here merely for my own amusement,’ thought Artois, ‘I should meet with little resistance from that one. Give a princess enough wine, and you’ll soon see that she turns into a whore. But the other one seems to me pretty tight too.’

He threw a big log on the fire, turned Marguerite’s chair towards the hearth, and filled the goblets.

‘Well, Cousin,’ he asked, ‘have you thought things over?’

‘I have thought, Robert, I have thought. And I think I am going to refuse.’

She said this very softly. Apparently overcome as much by the warmth as by the wine, she was gently shaking her head.

‘Cousin, you’re not being sensible, you know!’ cried Robert.

‘But indeed, indeed, I think I shall refuse,’ she replied in an ironic, sing-song voice.

The giant made a gesture of impatience. ‘Listen to me, Marguerite,’ he went on. ‘It must be to your advantage to accept now. Louis is by nature an impatient man, ready to grant almost anything to get his own way at the moment. You will never again have the chance of doing so well for yourself. Merely agree to make the declaration asked of you. There is no need for the matter to go before the Holy See; we can get a judgement from the episcopal tribunal of Paris, which is under the jurisdiction of Monseigneur Jean de Marigny, Archbishop of Sens, who will be told to make haste. In three months’ time you will have regained complete personal freedom.’

‘And if I won’t?’

She was leaning towards the fire, her hands extended before her. The running string which held together the collar of her long shirt had become unknotted and revealed most of her bosom to her cousin’s wandering eye; but she did not seem to care. ‘The bitch still has beautiful breasts,’ thought Artois.

‘And if I won’t?’ she repeated.

‘If you won’t, your marriage will be annulled anyway, my dear, because reasons can always be found for annulling a king’s marriage,’ replied Artois carelessly, intent upon the objects of his contemplation. ‘As soon as there is a Pope …’

‘Oh, is there still no Pope?’ cried Marguerite.

Artois bit his lips. He had made a mistake. He ought to have remembered that she was ignorant, prisoner as she was, of what all the world knew, that since the death of Clement V the conclave had not succeeded in electing a new Pope. He had revealed a useful weapon to his adversary. And he realized by the quickness of Marguerite’s reaction to the news that she was not as drunk as she pretended to be.

Having committed the blunder, he tried to turn it to his own advantage by playing that game of false frankness of which he was a master.

‘But that is exactly where your good fortune lies!’ he cried. ‘That is precisely what I want you to understand. As soon as those rascally cardinals, who sell their promises as if they were at auction, have made enough out of their votes to consent to agree, Louis will no longer have need of you. You will merely have succeeded in making him hate you all the more, and he’ll keep you shut up here for ever.’

‘Yes, but so long as there is no Pope, nothing can be done without my agreement.’

‘You’re foolish to be so obstinate.’

He went and sat next to her, placed his huge hand as gently as he could about her neck and began to stroke her shoulder.

Marguerite seemed troubled by the contact of his huge muscular hand. It was so long since she had felt a man’s hand upon her skin!

‘Why should you be so interested in my accepting?’ she asked.

He bent low enough over her to brush her hair with his lips.

‘I am very fond of you, Marguerite; I always have been very fond of you, as you know very well. And now our interests are bound up together. You must succeed in regaining your freedom. And I must give Louis cause for satisfaction, so that I may enjoy his favour. You can see very well that we must be allies.’

While speaking he had put his hand deep into the collar of the Queen of France’s shirt and was stroking her bosom. She made no resistance. On the contrary, she leant her head against her cousin’s heavy wrist and seemed to abandon herself to him.

‘Is it not a pity,’ went on Robert, ‘that so beautiful a body, so soft and comely, should be deprived of the pleasures of the flesh? Accept, Marguerite, and I will take you far from this prison this very day; I shall lead you first to some well-endowed convent where I can visit you frequently and watch over you. What can it really matter to you to declare that your daughter is not Louis’s, since you have never loved the child?’

She raised wary eyes to him and said these appalling words: ‘If I don’t love her, is not that certain proof that she is my husband’s daughter?’

For a moment she seemed to be dreaming, her eyes gazing upwards. The logs shifted on the hearth, lighting up the room with a great fountain of sparks. And Marguerite suddenly began to laugh, revealing her little white teeth; her mouth was all pink inside like a cat’s.

‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Robert.

‘Because of the ceiling,’ she replied, ‘I have just noticed that it is like the ceiling of the Tower of Nesle.’

Artois rose in stupefaction. He couldn’t help feeling a certain admiration for so much cynicism joined to so much cunning. ‘My God, what a woman!’ he thought.

She watched him as he stood enormous in front of the fire, planted on his legs solid as trunks of trees. The flames shone on his red boots, glinted on the gold of his spurs and the silver of his belt. If his capacity for desire were in proportion to the rest of him, there would be enough to atone for all the regrets of seven months’ seclusion!

He raised her up and pulled her to him.

‘Ah, Cousin,’ he said, ‘if only you had married me, or had chosen me as your lover instead of that young fool of an equerry, things would not have turned out for you as they have, and we would have been very happy.’

‘Of course,’ she murmured.

He held her by the waist, and he had the impression that the moment was near when she would cease to be able to think.

‘It is not too late, Marguerite,’ he said softly.

‘Perhaps not,’ she replied in a hoarse, consenting voice.

‘Let’s get rid of this letter now, so that we need have no concern but ourselves. Let’s tell the Chaplain, who is waiting below, to come up.’

She started away from him.

‘Waiting below, did you say?’ she cried, her eyes bright with anger. ‘Oh, Cousin, do you think I am such a fool as all that? You have behaved towards me as whores normally do towards men, arousing their sensuality the better to bend them to their will. But you forget that in that line women are better than men, and you are no more than an apprentice.’

Angry, tensely upright, she defied him and re-knotted the collar of her shirt.