Read Online Four Sisters, All Queens by Sherry Jones - Free Book Online Page B

man’s palm, his shout of thanks makes her smile and reach for another coin. Louis, too, smiles as he distributes coins that, in his world, are spent as carelessly as stones tossed into a stream.
    Two men push through the crowd, bearing a woman on a stretcher. She lies gasping and pale. Bulges as large as hen’s eggs protrude from her neck. Lord Peter, the Count of Brittany, draws his sword as if to fend off her sickness, but Louis calms him with a touch of his hand. He steps over to the poor woman. “My wife has scrofula, Your Grace,” one of the stretcher-bearers says. “I beg you to heal her.”
    “Not I, but the Lord.” Louis gestures to the archbishop, who squeezes through the roiling crowds, grasping his prayer book. Louis places his hands on the afflicted woman’s neck. She closes her eyes, sighing, while the archbishop intones a Latin prayer.“You are healed,” Louis says, and gives the husband two pieces of silver.
    Marguerite stares at the scene, dumbstruck. The King of France’s piety is widely known, but—this? “Praise the Lord!” Blanche cries. Marguerite’s muscles tense; she wants to run—but she turns away from the weeping family, from their ecstatic kisses and shouts, and walks, moving slowly against the crush, handing coins along the way. Aimée follows: is she unwell? A headache, she claims, and heads for the palace to rest before the feast, and to ponder the vaunted pride of the man she has married.

     
    “I S THE WOMAN truly healed?” she asks Louis later, sitting with him at a banquet table under the trees. “Have you driven away her sickness with your hands?”
    He looks at her in surprise. “Not I, but the Lord Jesus Christ.”
    “Does Jesus Christ work miracles through your hands, then? Has he given you special healing powers?”
    “Your question disturbs me,” he says with a frown. “Does that diseased peasant, cursed with the lowest birth, have more faith than her exalted queen?” Marguerite’s face burns as if warmed by the very fires of hell.
    On her right, the elderly Isambour of Denmark gives an ungraceful snort. “If our king is such a worker of miracles, why doesn’t he raise his mother from the dead?”
    Marguerite bursts into laughter, then looks around to see who might have heard. Fortunately, Louis is occupied with his sister Isabelle, while the rest of the diners watch and laugh as a minstrel plays the recorder and breaks wind in rhythmic accompaniment.
    Encouraged by Marguerite’s reaction, Isambour winks. “Perhaps Louis’s mind is a bit muddled on the day after his wedding. Did you keep him awake too long last night?”
    “Not I, my lady. Louis spent the night in prayer.”
    She snorts again. “Whose idea was that? Blanche’s, I bet.”
    “The archbishop suggested it. At the wedding?”
    She nods. “That would have occurred during my nap. Celebrations of the mass always put me to sleep. But that delay-the-consummation folly most certainly originated with Blanche.”
    She prods Marguerite with a long fingernail. “Be on your watch where that woman is concerned. She has enjoyed the comforts of Louis the Son ever since Louis the Father died. Ten years! And I doubt that she will give him up.”
    “She invited me to call her ‘Mama.’”
    “Have you ever seen a lion smile? It is not a smile at all, but a baring of teeth before the final pounce.”
    A song springs to Marguerite’s lips.
     
    “Waters that slide calmly by
    Drown more than those that roar and sigh.
    They deceive who seem so fair,
    Oh, be wary of the debonair.”
     
    “I know well the songs of Ventadorn,” Isambour says, nodding. “Hugues de Saint Circq used to sing them for me when he came to our court. He was a lovely man, handsome if you like little dark Italians, which I do. My husband treated me cruelly, but he at least sent the trouvères to amuse me.”
    Marguerite knows her story well, how King Philip petitioned for an annulment the day after he married Isambour. Rumors