The Lady of the Rivers Read online

I glance over to my husband, but he is talking to the king and not looking at me.

  ‘And would you have smiled on me?’ my brother-in-law asks me. ‘Would you smile on me now? Or are you afraid of stealing my heart from me even now?’

  I don’t smile, I look very grave and wonder that he should speak like this to me, his sister-in-law, with such assurance, as if he believes that I will not be able to resist him. There is something repellent and fascinating about the way that he takes me by the waist, which is part of the movement of the dance, and presses me close to him, his hand warm on my back, his thigh brushing against me, which is not.

  ‘And does my brother please you as a husband?’ he whispers, his breath warm on my bare neck. I lean slightly away but he tightens his grip and holds me close. ‘Does he touch you as a young girl loves to be touched – gently, but quickly?’ He laughs. ‘Am I right, Jacquetta? Is that how you love to be touched? Gently, but quickly?’

  I pull away from him, and there is a swirl of colour and music and Richard Woodville has my hand and has pulled me into the centre of the dancers and has me turning one way and then another. ‘Forgive me!’ he calls over his shoulder to the duke. ‘I am quite mistaken, I have been too long in France; I thought this was the moment that we changed partners.’

  ‘No, you are too soon, but no matter,’ the duke says, taking Woodville’s abruptly abandoned partner by her hand and forming the chain of the dance as Woodville and I take the little steps in the centre of the circle and then form an arch so everyone dances through, all the partners change again, and I move away, in the movement of the dance, away from the Duke Humphrey.

  ‘What did you think of the king?’ my husband asks me, coming to my bedroom that night. The sheets have been turned down for him, the pillows piled high. He gets in with a sigh of exhaustion, and I notice his lined face is grey with fatigue.

  ‘Very young.’

  He laughs shortly. ‘You are yourself such an old married lady.’

  ‘Young evee ps age,’ I say. ‘And somehow, a little frail?’ I don’t tell my husband of the sense I had of a boy as fragile as glass, as cold as thin ice.

  He frowns. ‘I believe he is strong enough, though I agree, he is slight for his age. His father . . . ’ He breaks off. ‘Well, it means nothing now what his father was, or how he was as a boy. But God knows my brother Henry was a strong powerful boy. At any rate, this is no time for regrets, this boy will have to follow him. He will just have to grow into greatness. What did you make of my brother?’

  I bite my tongue on my first response. ‘I don’t think I have ever met anyone like him in my life before,’ I say honestly.

  He laughs shortly. ‘I hope he didn’t speak to you in a way you did not like?’

  ‘No, he was perfectly courteous.’

  ‘He thinks he can have any woman in the world. He nearly ruined us in France when he courted Jacqueline of Hainault. It was the saving of my life when he seduced her lady in waiting, and ran off to England with her.’

  ‘Was that the Duchess Eleanor?’

  ‘It was. Dear God, what a scandal! Everyone said she had seduced him with love potions and witchcraft! And Jacqueline left all alone, declaring they were married, abandoned in Hainault! Typical of Humphrey, but thank God he left her, and came back to England where he can do no damage, or at any rate less damage.’

  ‘And Eleanor?’ I ask. ‘His wife now?’

  ‘She was his wife’s lady in waiting, then his whore, now she is his wife, so who knows what she is in her heart?’ my husband remarks. ‘But she is no friend of mine. I am the oldest brother and so I am heir to the throne. If anything happens to King Henry (which God forbid) then I inherit the crowns of England and France. Humphrey comes after me, second to me. She looks at me sometimes as if she would wish me away. She will be praying that you don’t have a son who would put her another step from the throne. Can you see with the Sight and tell me, does she cast spells? Is she skilled? Would she ill-wish me?’

  I think of the woman with the dazzling sapphires and the dazzling smile and the hard eyes. ‘I can see nothing for sure but pride and vanity and ambition.’

  ‘That’s bad enough,’ my lord says cheerfully. ‘She can always hire someone to do the actual spells. Should I have her watched, d’you think?’

  I consider the brilliant woman and her handsome whispering husband. ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking that this is a court very far from my girlhood in the sunny castles of France. ‘Yes, I think if I were you, I would have her watched. I would have them both watched.’

  PENSHURST, AUTUMN 1433

  All the summer my lord speaks with one great man and then another, then when the seasonal fear of the plague recedes and the parliament returns to London, he meets with the men of the shires and the counties and begs them for funds to wage the war in France. He invokes the support of his uncle cardinal, he prevails upon his brother to advise the young king. Slowly they realise the service he has done for his country and they tell him that they are so grateful that he can leave his office, retire from his work, abandon his regency in France and return to England, where we can live in his new beautiful house.

  ‘He won’t come,’ Woodville predicts to me. We are riding in the green lanes around the fields of Penshurst, in Kent. We have been waiting for my lord to leave London and come to his new home for days. ‘He won’t come now, and he won’t stay in England, even though they say he has earned his rest.’

  ‘Is he so very tired? I have not seen him for weeks.’

  He shakes his head in despair. ‘I would say he was working himself to death. But he won’t stop.’

  ‘Why not? If they say that he can?’

  ‘Because he would not leave men like your uncle Louis without his leadership in Paris. He would not leave France without its regent. He would not allow the Armagnacs to come to the peace meetings and make their demands without him there to answer them. A peace has to come; Burgundy is ready for it and probably talking with the Armagnacs behind our backs. The Armagnacs are exhausted and out of men and funds, and you see how my lord struggles to raise an army in England. We are all of us ready for peace, and my lord will see the peace talks through. He will get peace in France before he leaves his post.’

  ‘So we will have to go back to Paris?’ I am reluctant to go. I have been using this time in England like a clerk at his lessons. I have been studying English, I have been reading the books in my lord’s library, I have employed a scholar to read the alchemy texts with me and explain them. I have been looking for a herbalist to teach me the skills. I don’t want to leave all this and go back to the grand palace in the starving city.

  ‘We will. But if you were free to choose, would you rather stay?’

  I take a moment to answer; there is something in his voice that warns me that this is an important question. I look from the hedgerows where the red pebbles of the hips gleam among the fading leaves, to the distant hills of the downs, where the beech trees are turning bronze. ‘It is a beautiful country,’ I say. ‘And, actually, I prefer London to Paris.’

  He beams with pride. ‘I knew you would,’ he says triumphantly. ‘I knew you would. You are an English duchess, you were born to be an Englishwoman. You should live in England.’

  ‘It does feel very like home,’ I concede. ‘Even more than France, even more than Luxembourg. The countryside is so pretty and the hills so green. And Paris is so poor and the people so angry, I can’t help but like it better here.’

  ‘I said to my father that you were an Englishwoman in your heart.’

  I smile. ‘And what did your father say?’

  ‘He said that so pretty a duchess should be kept in England where she can flourish.’

  ‘Where does your father live?’

  ‘He has a small manor at Grafton; our family has been there for many years. He served the duke your husband, and the king before him. I think he willgo to war again, and muster his own troop to support us when we go back to France.’

&nb
sp; ‘Is Grafton like here?’

  ‘Just as beautiful,’ he says proudly. ‘You know, I wish I could take you to Grafton. I so want to take you there. I wish you could see my home.’

  Slowly, I glance sideways at him. ‘I wish it too,’ I say, and then we are both silent.

  My lord stays in London and summons Richard to attend him; but every week or so the wagon comes with tapestries, furniture or books that he has bought for the new house. Waiting in the stable yard as they unpack one of these treasure wagons, I am surprised by a dainty woman, wearing the gown of a townswoman and a modest white cap, who is handed down from the back of the wagon and makes her curtsey to me.

  ‘I am Mrs Jourdemayne,’ she says. ‘His Grace sent me to you with these as a gift.’

  She nods her head and a lad jumps out of the wagon behind her with a wooden tray of tiny clay pots, each one holding a nodding head of a green plant. He sets the tray down at my feet and jumps back into the wagon to fetch another and another until I am surrounded by a little lawn of green and Mrs Jourdemayne laughs at my delighted face. ‘He said you would be glad,’ she observes. ‘I am a gardener and a herbalist. He said that I should bring you these and he has paid me for a week’s work. I am to stay with you and help you plant a garden of herbs, if you wish it.’

  ‘I do wish it!’ I say. ‘There is a herb garden here by the kitchen but it is very overgrown, and I don’t know what half the things are.’

  ‘Tell the lad where to take the seedling trays and we will start whenever you want,’ she says briskly.

  I call my pageboy and he leads the way for the two of them while I go inside to fetch a broad hat to shield my face, and gloves for my first lesson as a gardener.

  She is an odd gardener. She orders the Penshurst senior man to make twelve beds in the old kitchen garden, and while he is digging over the soil she lifts the little herbs, shows me their leaves and their flowers and tells me of their properties. Each new bed is to be named for a house of the planets.

  ‘This was the comfrey bed,’ Ralph says stubbornly. ‘Where are we going to put the comfrey now?’

  ‘In the Aquarius bed,’ she says smoothly. ‘Comfrey is a plant that flourishes under the water sign. And this bed here is going to be the place we grow the plants under the sign of Taurus.’

  He puzzles over this all night, and in the morning he has a joke ready. ‘What will you plant there? In the Taurus bed? Bull rushes? Bull rushes?’ he asks, and doubles up at his own humour. That jest keeps him laughing all day, but Mrs Jourdemayne is not disturbed. She picks out seedlings from her tray of plants and puts them before me. ‘Taurus is an earth sign,’ she says. ‘When the moon is in Taurus, it favours the growth of crops that live below the soil. Root crops like white and purple carrots, onions, and turnips. It favours the herbs of Taurus, like mint and primrose, tansy, wormwood and yarrow. We’ll plant these in our Taurus bed.’

  I am enchanted. ‘You have all these?’

  She smiles. ‘We can plant some of them now, some of them will have to wait until the moon is in a different phase. But I have brought them all, in the green or in seed. Your lord commanded that you should have all the herbs of England in your garden. He said that you have a gift. Do you?’

  I dip my head. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I know things, sometimes I know nothing. I am studying his books and I shall be glad to learn how to grow herbs and how to use them. But I have no certainty; all that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.’

  She smiles. ‘That is the very path of learning,’ she says.

  All afternoon we spend in the garden on our knees like peasant women, planting the herbs in the beds that she has prepared for them, and as the evening grows cool and the sun starts to set I get to my feet and look around the garden that we have made. Twelve regular beds fan out from the circular seat at the heart of the garden. All of them are dug over and weeded, some of them are already planted. Mrs Jourdemayne has labelled the seedlings with their name and their properties. ‘Tomorrow I shall show you how to make tinctures and dry herbs,’ she says. ‘I will give you my recipes.’

  I am so tired from our work that I sleep well; but in the night, as if the rising moon is calling to me as well as to the rising sap of the plants, I wake and see the cool light lying along my bedroom floor. My maid is heavily asleep in the bed beside me. I turn back the covers and go to the window. I can hear something, like the chiming of a bell, and I put a gown around my shoulders and push open my bedroom door, and then go out into the gallery.

  In the shadows I can just see the outline of a woman: Mrs Jourdemayne. For a moment I step back, fearful of what she is doing in the darkness. She is standing beside one of the windows and she has thrown it open, the singing is louder as if the clear sweet noise is pouring into the gallery with the moonlight. As she hears my footstep she glances around, her face alert, as if she expects anyone, anything; but she fears nothing.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says, though she should curtsey. ‘Can you hear it?’

  I nod. ‘I hear it.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such a thing before, I thought it was the music of the spheres.’

  ‘I know it,’ I say sadly. I reach forwards and I close the window, at once the music is muffled, and then I draw the heavy curtain to shut out both music and moonlight.

  She puts out her hand to stop me. ‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘Why do you shut it out? What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘It is for me. Let me close it out.’

  ‘Why, what is it?’

  ‘I have heard it twice in my life before,’ I say, thinking of my little sister who died almost as she drew her first breath, and then the sighing choir that whispered goodbye to my great-aunt. ‘I am afraid it is the death of one of my family,’ I say quietly. ‘It is the singing of Melusina,’ and I turn from her and go down the darkened gallery to my bedroom.

  In the morning she shows me how to dry herbs, how to make a tisane, how to make a tincture, and how to draw the essence from flowers using a bed of wax. We are alone in the still room, the pleasant smell of crushed leaves around us, the coolness of the stone floor beneath our feet, the marble sink filled with cold water.

  ‘And does the singing tell you of a death?’ she asks simply.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I pray that my mother and father are well. This seems to be the only gift I have: foreknowledge of loss.’

  ‘Hard,’ she says shortly, and passes me a pestle and mortar with some seeds for crushing.

  We work together in silence for a while, then she speaks. ‘There are herbs especially for a young woman, newly married,’ she observes as if to the leaves that she is washing in the sink. ‘Herbs that can prevent a baby, herbs that can cause one. They are in my recipe book.’

  ‘You can prevent a baby?’ I ask.

  ‘I can even stop one coming when a woman is already with child,’ she says with a nasty little smile. ‘Pennyroyal, mugwort, and parsley will do it. I have planted the herbs in your garden for you to use when you need. If you ever need.’ She glances at the flatness of my belly. ‘And if you want to make a baby you have those herbs too, to your hand. Raspberry leaves from your orchard, and weeds, easy enough to find: nettle leaves, and clover flowers from the field.’

  I dust off my hands and pick up my slate and chalk. ‘Tell me how to prepare them,’ I say.

  Margery stays for more than the week that she has promised and when she leaves, my herb garden is planted with everything but those plants which need to wait for the descending moon, and the still room already has a few jars of herbs in wine, and a few bunches of herbs hung up to dry. She will go back to London in one of my lord’s wagons, her servant-boy with her, and I go to the stable yard to say goodbye. As I watch her clamber nimbly into the cart, a guard of half a dozen, with a messenger in my lord’s livery of red and white, clatter into the yard and Richard Woodville swings down from his horse.

  ‘My lady, I bring a message from my lor
d,’ he says. ‘He has marked it for you, only.’

  I put out my hand, though I can feel my face is trembling and my eyes are filling with tears. I take the letter and break the seal but I cannot see what he has written for my sight is blurred. ‘You read it,’ I say, handing it to him. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I am sure there is no cause for you to be distressed . . . ’ he starts, then he reads the few lines and looks at me aghast. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace. I am so sorry. My lord writes to tell you that your father has died. There is plague in Luxembourg, but your mother is well. She sent the news to my lord.’ He hesitates; he looks at me. ‘You knew already?’

  I nod. ‘Well, I thought it was so. Though I closed the curtain on the moonlight and I tried not to hear the music.’

  Mrs Jourdemayne, seated beside the wagoner, looks down at me with shrewd sympathy in her face. ‘Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see,’ she says. ‘May the Lord who gave you the gift give you the courage to bear it.’

  PARIS, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1434–

  JANUARY 14

  35

  Woodville does not get his wish that I should see Grafton, though we stay in England for a year, and my lord never gets his wish for an adequate army to serve in France, nor – though he takes power and rules England – can he bring the king’s council or parliament into proper order. We cannot stay in England for the city of Paris sends for my lord duke and says that the people there are besieged by robbers, mutinous soldiers and beggars, and starving for lack of supplies.

  ‘He won’t refuse them,’ Woodville warns me. ‘We will have to go back to Paris.’

  The seas are rough for the crossing and when we arrive in Calais the garrison is so dispirited that my lord commands Woodville to stay there, raise their spirits, and prepare the soldiers for an attack on the French as soon as the weather allows. Then my lord and I prepare to press on down the muddy roads for Paris.