The Poisoned Crown

The Comte de Bouville, once chamberlain to Philip the Fair and King Louis X’s envoy, had come to Naples on a first visit during the winter to ask for her hand; he had returned two weeks ago to fetch the Princess and conduct her to Paris now that the marriage could be celebrated.

‘And you too, Signor Baglioni, you are also my friend,’ she added, turning towards the young Tuscan who acted as secretary to Bouville and controlled the expedition’s finances, which had been lent by the Italian banks in Paris. The young man acknowledged the compliment with a bow.

Indeed, everyone was happy that morning. Fat Bouville, sweating a little in the June heat and throwing his black-and-white locks back behind his ears, felt confident and proud at having succeeded so well in his mission and at conducting so splendid a wife to his king.

Guccio Baglioni was dreaming of the fair Marie de Cressay, his secret fiancée, for whom he was taking home a whole chest of silks and embroideries. He was uncertain whether he had been right to ask for the Neauphle-le-Vieux branch of the bank from his uncle. Should he content himself with so small an establishment?

‘But it’s only a start; I shall easily be able to change it for another post, and besides I shall spend most of my time in Paris.’ Assured of the protection of his new sovereign, he set no limits to his ambition; he already saw Marie as lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and himself becoming Grand Pantler or Grand Treasurer within a few months. Enguerrand de Marigny had started with no greater advantages. Of course he had come to a pretty bad end. But then he was no Lombard.

His hand on his dagger, his chin held high, Guccio looked at Naples deployed before him, as if he were about to buy it.

Ten galleys escorted the ship to the open sea; then the Neapolitans watched this white sea-fortress fade into the distance.

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The Storm (#ulink_4ac99bb7-16e6-509c-a00b-768ef36d5448)

A FEW DAYS LATER THE San Giovanni was no more than a half-dismasted, tortured hulk, running before the squalls, tossed in huge seas, while the captain endeavoured to keep her afloat and make what he conceived to be the coast of France, though doubtful whether he would ever succeed in bringing his passengers safely into port.

The ship had been caught on the latitude of Corsica by one of those brief but devastating storms which, on occasion, ravage the Mediterranean. Six anchors had been lost in an endeavour to hold the ship to the wind off the coast of Elba, and she had barely escaped being wrecked upon the island’s rocky shore. They had managed to sail upon their course, but in a tremendous sea. A day, a night, and another day had been spent amid the hell of waters. Several sailors had been injured in taking in what remained of the sails. The crow’s nest had gone overboard with all the weight of stones destined for Barbary pirates. The saloon hatch had had to be forced open with axes in order to free the Neapolitan gentlemen imprisoned by the fall of the mainmast. The Princess’s chests of dresses, jewels, and plate, all her wedding presents, had been washed away. The surgeon-barber’s sick bay in the forecastle was crowded. The chaplain was even unable to celebrate the aride

Mass because ciborium, chalice, books, and ornaments had been swept overboard by a wave. Clutching the rigging, crucifix in hand, he listened to the confessions of those who thought they were soon to die.

The magnetized needle was now utterly useless, since it bobbed wildly upon the residue of water left in the container in which it floated. The captain, an excitable Latin, had torn his robe open to the waist as a sign of despair and was heard to cry, between a couple of orders: ‘Lord, come to my help!’ Nevertheless, he seemed to know his business well enough and to be doing his best to extricate them from their difficulties; he had had the oars shipped. They were so long and heavy that seven men were needed to work each one of them. And he had summoned a dozen sailors to control the helm, six on each side.

Nevertheless, Bouville had been furious with him at the beginning of the storm.

‘Well, Master Mariner, is this the kind of shaking you give a Princess engaged to the King my master?’ the ex-Grand Chamberlain had cried. ‘Your ship must be badly loaded to roll like this. You know nothing of navigation or how to make use of favourable currents. If you do not quickly do better, I shall upon arrival have you haled before the justices of the King of France and you’ll learn seamanship on a galley’s bench.’

But his anger had quickly evaporated, since for the next eight hours he had been sick upon the oriental carpets, in company, moreover, with the majority of the suite. His head rolling upon his shoulders, his face pale, his hair, coat, and hose drenched, the unhappy man prepared to give up the ghost every time a wave lifted the ship, groaning between a couple of hiccups that he would never see his family again and that, during the whole of his life, he had not committed sufficient sins to deserve this intensity of suffering.

Guccio, on the other hand, showed remarkable courage. Clear of head and light of foot, he had taken the precaution of carefully lashing his money-chest and, during moments of relative calm, ran through the spray in search of drinking-water for the Princess, or sprayed scent about her in order to overcome the stench of her seasick companions.

There are certain sorts of men, particularly very young ones, who instinctively behave in the manner expected of them. If they are looked upon with contempt, there is every likelihood of their behaving in a contemptible way. On the other hand, if they feel that people esteem them and have confidence in them, they can surpass themselves and, though as frightened as the next man, can conduct themselves like heroes. Guccio Baglioni was to some extent of this breed. Because Princess Clémence had a way of behaving towards people, whether rich or poor, nobleman or commoner, which maintained their self-respect, because she also used the young man with particular courtesy, since he had been to some extent the harbinger of her good fortune, Guccio, in her company, felt himself to be a knight and behaved with more spirit than any of her gentlemen.

He was a Tuscan and therefore capable of daring all in order to shine in female eyes. And yet, at the same time, he remained body and soul a banker and gambled with fate as one gambles on the exchange.

‘Danger presents the best opportunity of becoming intimate with the great,’ he said to himself. ‘If we’ve got to founder and perish our fate will certainly not be changed by lapsing into lamentation like poor Bouville. But, if we escape I shall have acquired the esteem of the Queen of France.’ To be able to think thus at such a moment was in itself evidence of considerable courage.

But Guccio, that summer, believed himself invincible; he was in love and assured of being loved in return. His head stuffed with heroic tales – for dreams, plans, and ambitions were still chaotically mingled in the boy’s mind – Guccio knew that those engaged in adventure always came out safely in the end if a beautiful damsel is awaiting them in a castle! His was at the Manor of Cressay.

He therefore assured the Princess Clémence, against all the evidence, that the weather was improving, asserted that the ship was sound when it was in fact being strained to the limit, and drew comparisons with the much more terrifying storm, or so he pretended it had been, that he had experienced the previous year when crossing the Channel and from which he had issued safely.

‘I was on my way to Queen Isabella of England with a message from Monseigneur Robert of Artois.’

Princess Clémence was also behaving in exemplary fashion. Lodged in the stern cabin, a state apartment arranged for royal passengers in the stern-castle, she was endeavouring to calm her ladies who, like a flock of frightened sheep, moaned at every wave.

Clémence had uttered no single word of regret when she was told that her chests of dresses and jewels had gone overboard.

‘I would have given twice as much,’ she merely said, ‘if it could have saved the poor sailors from being injured by the mast.’

She was less afraid of the storm than of the augury she saw in it.

This marriage was more than I deserved,’ she thought; ‘I have been too happy in the thought of it and have sinned from pride; God will shipwreck me because I do not deserve to become a queen.’

Upon the third morning, when the ship was in a temporary lull, though the sea gave no sign of abating nor the sun of appearing, fat Bouville, his feet bare, dishevelled, wearing only a shirt, was discovered kneeling on the deck with his arms crossed.

‘What on earth are you doing there, Messire?’ asked Princess Clémence.

‘I’m doing what Monsieur Saint Louis did, Madam, when he was nearly drowned off Cyprus. He promised to give a silver ship weighing five marcs

to Monsieur Saint Nicolas de Warangeville, if God would bring him safely back to France. It was Messire de Joinville who told me the story.’

‘I join you in your vow, Bouville,’ replied Clémence, ‘and since our ship is under the protection of Saint John the Baptist, I promise, if we survive and I am mercifully permitted to give the King of France a son, to call him John.’

She at once knelt down and began praying.

Towards midday the violence of the sea began to decline and everyone became more hopeful. Then the sun burst through the clouds; land was sighted. The captain joyfully recognized the coast of Provence and, as they drew nearer, the calanques of Cassis. He was extremely proud of having kept to his course.

‘You will land us here upon the coast at once, I presume, Master Mariner,’ cried Bouville.

‘I must take you to Marseilles, Messire,’ replied the captain, ‘and we are not far from it. In any case I no longer have sufficient anchors to lie off those cliffs.’

A little before evening the San Giovanni, under oars, was lying off the port of Marseilles. A boat was sent off to warn the city authorities to lower the heavy chain which protected the entrance to the harbour between the Malbert tower and Fort Saint-Nicolas. The Governor, the sheriff, and magistrates (Marseilles was at that time an Angevin city) came off in a strong mistral to welcome the niece of their suzerain lord, the King of Naples.

Upon the quay labourers from the salt-pans, fishermen, makers of oars and rigging, caulkers, money-changers, merchants from the ghetto, clerks from the Genoese and Siennese banks, gaped in astonishment at the huge ship, now a sail-less, dismasted wreck, as the sailors danced and embraced each other on the deck, crying that a miracle had occurred.

The Neapolitan gentlemen and the ladies of the suite endeavoured to put some order in their dress.

Brave Bouville, who had lost a stone during the voyage and whose clothes now hung loose upon him, continually assured those about him that it had been his idea to make a vow and that it was this which had prevented their being shipwrecked, that everyone, in fact, owed their life to him.

‘Messire Hugues,’ Guccio replied with an ironic gleam in his eye, ‘there never has been a storm, from what I hear, in which someone has not made a vow similar to yours. How then do you explain the fact that so many ships manage to go to the bottom all the same?’

‘It must be because they have a miscreant like you on board!’ replied the ex-Chamberlain with a smile.

Guccio was the first to jump ashore. He leaped lightly from the shrouds in order to prove how vigorous he was. There was a rending cry. After several days upon a pitching deck, Guccio had miscalculated the earth’s stability; his foot had slipped and he had fallen into the sea. He barely escaped being crushed between the stone quay and the ship’s hull. The sea around him at once turned red; in his fall he had torn himself on an iron hook. He was pulled out in a half-fainting condition, bleeding, his thigh cut to the bone. He was immediately taken to the Hôtel-Dieu.

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The Hôtel-Dieu (#ulink_51d100dc-e2da-5441-aab2-055103e17421)

THE HUGE WARD FOR men was like a cathedral nave. At the end of it was an altar where four masses, vespers, and evensong were celebrated every day. The privileged patients occupied little cells, called ‘rooms of consideration’, which lined the walls; the rest were lying two in a bed and head to foot. The monks, in long brown habits, were continuously passing up and down the centre aisle, either to sing the office, to attend to the sick or serve the meals. Religious exercises were intimately related to medical treatment; the groans of the sufferers were mingled with verses of the psalms; the odour of incense could not overcome the atrocious smell of fever and gangrene; death was a public spectacle. Inscriptions, painted in high gothic letters upon the walls, prepared the patient for death rather than recovery.

For three weeks Guccio had lain there in a cell, gasping for breath in the appalling heat of summer, which always has a tendency to make illness more exhausting and hospitals more disagreeable. He looked sadly at the rays of the sun which entered by the windows pierced high in the wall and threw large golden patches upon this assembly of human desolation. He could make no movement without groaning; the balms and elixirs of the nursing brothers burnt him like so many flames, and every dressing was a time of torture. No one seemed to be able to tell him whether the bone was affected; but he felt sure that the wound was more than a flesh-wound, since he nearly fainted whenever they touched his thigh or the small of his back. The doctors and surgeons assured him that he was in no mortal danger, that at his age one recovered from anything, and that God had performed many another miracle, as He had for that caulker’s boy who had come in the other day, carrying his intestines in his hands, and who had left after a short time even gayer than before. Guccio despaired none the less. He had been there three weeks already and there seemed no reason to suppose he would not be there for another three, or even three months, or that he would not be lame and crippled for ever.

He saw himself condemned for the rest of his life to crouching huddled behind a money-changer’s counter in Marseilles because he could not make the journey to Paris. If, that was, he died from no other disease. Every morning he saw one or two corpses carried out. They had already turned a horrible black colour, since there were always, as in every Mediterranean port, a few cases of plague about. And all this because he had wished to show off by jumping on to the quay before his companions. And when he had just escaped shipwreck too!

He was furious at fate and his own stupidity. He sent for the letter-writer almost every day and dictated to him long letters for Marie de Cressay which he sent by the couriers of the Lombard banks to the branch at Neauphle, so that the chief clerk might give them secretly to the girl.