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The Poignard

[ladyseraph-756.livejournal.com]

Margot's eyes are bright. Sir Francis looks at her with admiration. She seems to stand straighter, chin up like the queen that she was born to be. The giddy girl with laughing eyes who went out into the city, slept with complete strangers for fun and acted outrageously for sheer attention has disappeared.
"What can you do against your family?" Henri says wearily. "They hold our lives in their hands and so far they feel no compunction about spilling blood, even of relatives. We are living on borrowed time, both of us."
"Are you giving up on me? On us?" she says fiercely. "I am your wife, Henri!”
"Against your will! You made that quite clear. Did you plan to have de Guise after you'd done your duty and married me for peace?"
She flinches at the slur to her character. Sir Francis observes with a burst of understanding that for all her faults, and she has many, that is a step too far.
“-For better or for worse. Whatever happens to you, affects me. I do not promise we'll win. But we'll give it a damned good try. Together. What do I care for de Guise?"
“You do not love him. “
”He has blood on his hands, my Lord.” She says simply, as if that was an end to it.
“The whole country talks of your scandalous love affair with him. How you begged the King and your mother to let you marry him.”
“I don’t deny I slept with him. But it was never him.”
Henri is astounded. Everyone knows about Margot and de Guise. Now she is telling him that she didn’t want him? That there was someone else?
“I don’t understand. You pleaded with your mother to let you marry him. Catherine treated you most brutally until you gave him up-“
“Because he is of noble birth. I would not be shaming my royal blood by a union with him. I know there was no chance of my marrying a commoner, so he was the best option.”
Henri is intrigued. Margot sounds almost wistful. There was someone who was a commoner? Someone she loved and desired but knew from the start it was hopeless. Who could he be? This mysterious rival for her heart? I don’t know this woman he thinks, and she is my wife. What secrets does she keep behind that flawless porcelain mask?
"Why? You are one of them? What do you care about me, when your mother-"
Margot is truly angry. "I'm not my mother, Henri. Haven't you realised that? Things have changed, and we must change with them or get burnt by the flames. I beg you, abjure your religion, if that’s what Charles and Mother want. Turn Catholic, for a time.”
Henri is surprised by her advice. “Abjure my faith? You advise me to do that, Margot? To take on the Papist faith?”
She is deadly serious. “Yes, Henri.”
“You cannot be serious, you don’t understand-“
“If I have ever been serious about anything in my entire life, this is it.”
He’s wary, watching her as if she is going to turn on him. As if he fears Catgherine is setting a terrible trap through her daughter to ensnare him. “ What kind of monarch would I be if I compromised my honour to save my miserable hide? Who would believe my word ever again?”
“One that still lives to fight another day.” She says bluntly.
“You want me to stand in front of my people and lie?”
“Tell them I begged you to do it. I twisted you round my little finger. Seduced you to my will using my body.”
Let them revile me as the Whore of Babylon. They do already. I know what the Huguenots call me, what they whisper in lustful tones as I pass. De Guise’s concubine, the whore of France-”
“Margot, you mustn’t say such things-” Sir Francis can’t help but be appalled by the cynicism in her voice as she talks of their opinion dispassionately. Nate’s words come back to his mind. Does she value herself so little, despite the exalted position she was born to?
“Why not? It’s the truth, isn’t it, Lord Walsingham? Monsieur de Condé thinks so. Armangnac was convinced I was nothing more than a Messalina reincarnated. Perhaps having a bad reputation is good for something?”