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she’d sparred with a young Navarre, not for a moment had she imagined himself married to this country bumpkin, or becoming queen of this realm. Now Henry made a point of ensuring her that she was welcomed back with a fine feast of pigeon pie, sausage, ham, chicken and good Gascon wine .
    Margot had forgotten how very pretty the small town was with its cluster of honey stone houses topped by red tiled roofs. Above the wide river that ran through its heart stood the Palace, small by comparison with the Louvre, but pleasant enough. It was built on four sides of a courtyard, with delightful gardens stretching down to the River Baïse where she could bathe on hot days, should she choose, changing in a bathhouse built for the purpose. Not only that, the weather was a great improvement on Paris, and the rolling landscape with its many forests, perfect for riding.
    Each morning, Navarre and his sister Catherine would go to Prêches , while Margot and her retinue attended Mass in the little chapel in the park.
    After that, she felt free to walk through the narrow streets with her ladies without fear of being molested, although the people looked at her as if she were a being from another universe. She liked to visit the boulangerie and watch the baker make his famous baguettes with their twisted, pointed ends. She might order a delicious pastry made from goose fat, soaked in Armagnac, and filled with prunes as big as plums, or one of apples called a Croustarde de pomme . She’d persuade him to make café, and he would smile and bow and enjoy the kudos of serving a beautiful Princess of France in his shop.
    In the afternoons, Margot would amuse herself with tilting at the ring, plying her crossbow, or taking a stroll through the beautiful gardens, along the avenues of laurel and cypress that grew by the river bank. She gave instructions for further work to be done on these gardens, which stern Jeanne d’Albret, the woman she’d dreaded having for a mother-in-law, had begun. She called it the walk of the three thousand paces. Later, there would be dinner and a ball, poetry readings and lively discussions.
    This was to be no sober Puritan household, but a court as joyous and fashionable as the one she had left behind in France. Margot gathered about her poets and artists, writers and philosophers, with whom she could debate the works of Plato. She possessed a French adaptation of Banquet , which she kept by her bed for night-time reading.
    ‘Should not physical beauty reflect the spiritual beauty of the mind?’ she would ask.
    ‘Such perfection is surely impossible to attain, my lady,’ they would argue.
    ‘Plato thinks it possible, and is not platonic love the most ideal of all love?’
    Coming from a woman who could claim to having enjoyed many lovers, this seemed unanswerable. They might also discuss the value of practising modesty in all things, of not seeking novelty and unusual experiences simply for the sake of it; but no one expected this queen, with her passion for devising new ideas and fashions, who believed in equality between the sexes and refused to accept the mundane, to follow such dictums. Her new friends applauded her intelligence and wit, wrote sonnets to her beauty, even as the Calvinists reviled it.
    Beguiled as they may be by their new queen’s beauty, her glorious gowns, her majesty and joie de vivre , the pastors were nevertheless outraged by her behaviour. The elders disapproved of her style of dress which so exposed her bosom, her fondness for wearing make-up, and they were horrified by the moral laxity of her court.
    In return, Margot saw them as crabbed, peevish, sanctimonious old men, wearied by long years of civil war. She paid them little heed and every day set out to dazzle them, dressed in white satin sparkling with sequins, azure blue, the colour of the southern skies, or else a robe of Spanish carnation velvet. Her plumed caps, the glittering pendants and diamonds she wore in her ears were all