The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  I say nothing for it is true, I am not much of a rider. Then I try again to make a conversation with him. ‘And why is it hard riding today, my lord?’

  For a moment he is silent as if considering whether he can be troubled to answer me.

  ‘We’re not going to Paris. We’re going north to Calais.’

  ‘Excuse me, but I thought we were going to Paris. Why are we going to Calais, my lord?’

  He sighs as if two questions are too much for a man to bear.

  ‘There was a mutiny at Calais among the garrison, my soldiers, recruited and commanded by me. Bloody fools. I called in on my way to you. Hanged the ringleaders. Now I’m going back to make sure the rest have learned their lesson.’

  ‘You hanged men on your way to our wedding?’

  He turns his dark gaze on me. ‘Why not?’

  I can’t really say why not, it just seems to me rather disagreeable. I make a little face and turn away. He laughs shortly. ‘Better for you that the garrison should be strong,’ he says. ‘Calais is the rock. All of England’s lands in northern France are built on our holding Calais.’

  We ride on in silence. He says almost nothing when we stop to eat at midday except to ask if I am very tired, and when I say no, he sees that I am fed and then lifts me back to the pillion saddle for the rest of the ride. The squire comes back and sweeps his hat off to me in a low bow and then mutters to my lord in a rapid conference, after which we all fall in and ride on.

  It is twilight as we see the great walls of the castle of Calais looming out of the misty sea plain ahead of us. The land all around is intersected with ditches and canals, divided with little gates, eh of them swirling with mist. My lord’s squire comes riding back when the flag over the top tower of the castle dips in acknowledgement, and the great gates ahead of us swing open. ‘Soon be home,’ he says cheerfully to me as he wheels his horse round.

  ‘Not my home,’ I observe shortly.

  ‘Oh, it will be,’ he says. ‘This is one of your greatest castles.’

  ‘In the middle of a mutiny?’

  He shakes his head. ‘That’s over now. The garrison hadn’t been paid for months and so the soldiers took the wool from the Calais merchants, stole it from their stores. Then the merchants paid to get their goods back, now my lord the duke will repay them.’ He grins at my puzzled face. ‘It’s nothing. If the soldiers had been paid on time it would never have happened.’

  ‘Then why did my lord execute someone?’

  His smile dims. ‘So that they remember that next time their wages are late, they have to wait on his pleasure.’

  I glance at my silently listening husband on my other side.

  ‘And what happens now?’

  We are approaching the walls, the soldiers are mustering into a guard of honour, running down the steep hill from the castle which sits at the centre of the town, guarding the port to the north and the marshy land to the south.

  ‘Now I dismiss the men who stole the goods, dismiss their commander, and appoint a new Captain of Calais,’ my husband says shortly. He looks across me at the squire. ‘You.’

  ‘I, my lord?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m honoured, but . . . ’

  ‘Are you arguing with me?’

  ‘No, my lord, of course not.’

  My husband smiles at the silenced young man. ‘That’s good.’ To me he says, ‘This young man, my squire, my friend, Richard Woodville, has fought in almost every campaign here in France and was knighted on the battlefield by the late king, my brother. His father served us too. He’s not yet thirty years old but I know of no-one more loyal or trustworthy. He can command this garrison and while he is here I can be sure that there will be no mutinies, and no complaints, and no petty thieving. And there will be no arguing about my orders. Is that right, Woodville?’

  ‘Quite right, sir,’ he says.

  And then the three of us go through the dark echoing doorway and up the cobbled streets, past the hanged mutineers swinging silently on the gallows, through the bowing citizens to the castle of Calais.

  ‘Am I to stay here now?’ Woodville asks, as if it is a mere matter of a bed for the night.

  ‘Not yet,’ my husband says. ‘I have need of you by me.’

  We stay only three nights, long enough for my husband to dismiss half of the soldiers of the garrison and send to England for their replacements, long enough to warn their commander that he will be replaced by the squire Sir Richard Woodville, and ten we rattle down the cobbled street and out of the gateway and go south down the road to Paris, the squire Woodville at the head of the troop once more, me on the lumbering horse of the man at arms, and my husband in grim silence.

  It is a two-day ride before we see the Grange Batelière standing over the desolate countryside outside the city. Beyond it are worked fields and little dairy farms which gradually give way to small market gardens that surround the city walls. We enter through the north-west gate, close to the Louvre, and see at once my Paris home, the Hôtel de Bourbon, one of the greatest houses in the city, as befits the ruler of France. It stands beside the king’s palace of the Louvre, looking south over the river, like a building in marchpane, all turrets and roofs and towers and balconies. I should have known that it would be a great house, having seen my lord’s castle at Rouen; but when we ride up to the great gates I feel like a princess in a story being taken into a giant’s fortress. A fortified wall runs all around, and there is a guard house at every gate, which reminds me, if I were in any danger of forgetting, that my husband may be the ruler but not everyone recognises him as the representative of the God-given king. The one that many prefer to call the King of France is not far away, at Chinon, eyeing our lands and stirring up trouble. The one that we call the King of France and England is safe in London, too poor to send my husband the money and troops he needs to keep these faithless lands in subjection, too weak to command his lords to come to fight under our standard.

  My lord gives me several days of freedom to find my way around my new home, to discover the former duchess’s jewel box, and her dressing room of furs and fine gowns, and then he comes to my room after Matins and says, ‘Come, Jacquetta, I have work for you today.’

  I follow him, trotting like a puppy at his heels, as he leads me through the gallery where tapestries of gods look down on us, to a double door at the end, two men at arms on either side, and his squire, Woodville, lounging on the windowsill. He jumps up when he sees us and gives me a low bow.

  The men at arms swing open the doors and we go inside. I don’t know what I am expecting; certainly not this. First there is a room as big as a great hall but looking like a library in a monastery. There are shelves of dark wood and on them are scrolls and books, locked away behind brass grilles. There are tall tables and high stools so that you can sit up at a desk and unfurl a scroll and read it at your leisure. There are tables made ready for study with pots of ink and sharpened quills and pages of paper ready for taking notes. I have never seen anything like it outside of an abbey, and I look up at my husband with new respect. He has spent a fortune here: each one of these books will have cost as much as the duchess’s jewels.

  ‘I have the finest collection of books and manuscripts outside the Church in Europe,’ he says. ‘And my own copyists.’ He gestures to two young men, either side of a stand, one of whom is intoning strange words, reading from a scroll, while the other, painstakingly, writes. ‘Translating from the Arabic,’ my husband says. ‘Arabic to Latin and from there to French or English. The Moors are the source of great knowledge, of all mathematics, all science. I buy the scrolls and I have them translated myself. This is how I have put us ahead in the search for knowledge. Because I have tapped the source.’ He smiles, suddenly pleased with me. ‘Just as I have with you. I have gone to the very source of the mysteries.’

  In the centre of the roomis a great table, painted and sculpted. I exclaim in delight, and step closer to examine it. It is enchanting, like a little
country, if one could view it from above, flying high over it like an eagle. It is the country of France; I can see the outer wall of the city of Paris, and the Seine flowing through, painted bright blue. I can see the Ile de Paris, a little maze of buildings shaped like a boat itself, set in the river. Then I can see how the land is divided: the top half of France is painted white and red in the colours of England and the bottom half is left blank, and Armagnac flag shows Charles, the pretend king, in his lands at Chinon. A series of scratches shows where the little flags were stabbed, furiously, rapidly, in the plan marking the triumphant march of Joan of Arc, halfway across France, victorious all the way, and then up to the very walls of Paris, only two years ago.

  ‘The whole of France is ours by right,’ my husband says, looking jealously at the green lands that lead down to the Mediterranean sea. ‘And we will have it. We will have it. I shall win it for God and King Harry.’

  He leans forwards. ‘Look, we are advancing,’ he says, showing me the little flags of St George for England spreading over the east of France. ‘And if the Duke of Burgundy will remain true, and a good ally, we can win back our lands in Maine. If the Dauphin is fool enough to attack the duke – and I think that he is – and if I can persuade the duke that we both fight at once . . . ’ He breaks off as he sees I am looking upwards. ‘Oh, those are my planets,’ he says, as if he owns the night skies quite as much as he does France.

  Suspended from criss-crossing wooden beams is a series of beautiful silver spheres, some of them ringed with silver haloes, some with other tiny balls floating nearby. It is such a pretty sight that I forget all about the map and the flags of campaigns and clasp my hands together. ‘Oh, how pretty! What is this?’

  Woodville the squire gives a little choke of laughter.

  ‘It is not for amusement,’ my husband says dourly. Then he nods at one of the clerks. ‘Oh well – show the duchess the skies at her birth.’

  The young man steps forwards. ‘Excuse me, Your Grace, when were you born?’

  I flush. Like almost all girls I don’t know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her belly-ache brought on my birth. ‘Spring 1416,’ I say. ‘Perhaps May?’

  He pulls out a scroll from the library and spreads it across the tall desk. He looks at it carefully, then reaches out and pulls one of the levers, then another, then another. To my absolute delight the balls, with their haloes, and the little balls spinning, descend from the rafters, and move gently around until they are positioned, swaying slightly, in the places in heaven that they held at the moment of my birth. There is a sweet tinkling noise, and I see that the spheres have tiny silver bells attached to the strings that move them, so they play as they take their places.

  ‘I can predict where the planets will be before I start a battle,’ my husband says. ‘I only launch a campaign when they tell me the stars are propitious. But it takes hours to calculate on paper, and it is easy to make a mistake. Here we have built a mechanism as beautiful and as regular as God made when He put the stars in the sky and set them in motion. I have made a machine like the workings of God Himself.’

  ‘Can you foretell with them? Can you know what will happen?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not as I hope that you will do for us. I can tell when the time is ripe, but not the nature of the fruit. I can tell that our star is in the ascendant, but not the outcome of a particular battle. And we had no warning at all of the witch of Arc.’

  The clerk tilts his head sadly. ‘Satan hid her from us,’ he says simply. ‘There was no darkness, there was no comet, there was nothing to show her rising, and nothing marked her death, praise to God.’

  My husband nods and puts his hand under my arm and leads me away from the table and past the clerk. ‘My brother was a man of Mars,’ he says. ‘Heat and fire, heat and dryness: a man born to fight and win battles. His son is wet and cold, a man young in years but like a child in his heart, damp like a wet baby drinking milk and pissing in his clout. I have to wait for the stars to put some fire into his cause, I have to study for weapons to put into his hand. He is my nephew, I must guide him. I am his uncle, and he is my king; I have to make him victorious. It is my duty; it is my destiny. You will help me in this, too.’

  Woodville waits for a moment, then, as my lord seems to have fallen into deep thought, he opens the door to the next room, pushes it wide, and stands back so we can go through. I step into the stone-floored room and my nose prickles at the strange scents. There is a tang like the smell of a forge – hot metal, but also something acidic and sharp. The air is acrid with a smoke that stings my eyes. In the centre of the room are four men, dressed in leather aprons, charcoal fires glowing before them in little braziers set into stone benches, vessels of bronze bubbling like sauce pots. Beyond them, through the open door that leads to an inner yard, I can see a lad stripped to the waist working the bellows of a furnace, heating a great chamber like a bread oven. I look across at Woodville. He gives me a reassuring nod as if to say, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But the smell of the room is sulphurous, and the furnace outside glows like the entrance to hell. I shrink back and my husband laughs at my pale face.

  ‘Nothing to fear, I told you there would be nothing to fear. This is where they work on the recipes, this is where they try one elixir and then another. Out there we forge the metals and bring them in to be tested. This is where we are going to make silver, gold, to make life itself.’

  ‘It’s so hot,’ I say weakly.

  ‘These are the fires that make water turn to wine,’ he explains. ‘That make iron turn to gold, that make earth turn to life. Everything in this world is growing to a state of purity, of perfection. This is where we speed it up, this is where we make the changes to metals and to waters that the world itself does in its deep bowels, over centuries, with heat like hatching an egg into a chicken. We make it hotter, we make it faster. This is where we can test what we know, and see what we learn. This is the heart of my life’s work.’

  Outside in the yard someone pulls a red-hot bar of metal from the coals of the furnace, and starts to hammer it flat.

  ‘Just think if I could make gold,’ he says longingly. ‘If I could take iron and purify it so that the com traces were burned from it, washed away, so that we had gold coin. I could hire soldiers, I could reinforce defences, I could feed Paris. If I had my own mint and my own gold mine I could take all of France for my nephew and keep it forever.’

  ‘Is it possible?’

  ‘We know it can be done,’ he says. ‘Indeed, it has been done, many, many times though always in secret. All metal is of the same nature, everything is made of the same thing: “first matter”, they call it in the books, “dark matter”. This is the stuff that the world is made of. We have to remake it, make it again. So we take dark matter, and we refine it, and refine it again. We make it transform into its purest and best nature.’ He pauses, looking at my puzzled face. ‘You know that they make wine with the juice that comes from grapes?’

  I nod.

  ‘Any French peasant can do that. First he takes the grapes, then he crushes them for their juice. He takes a fruit – a solid thing, growing on a vine – and makes it into a liquid. That’s alchemy itself, making that change. Then he stores it and lets the life within it change that juice into wine. Another liquid but one with quite different properties from the juice. Now I can go further. I have done another change, right here. I can make an essence from wine that is a hundred times stronger than wine, which burns at the sight of a flame, which cures a man of melancholy and watery humours. It is a liquid but it is hot and dry. We call it aqua vitae – the water of life. All this I can do already, I can change juice to aqua vitae – the gold is just the next step, gold from iron.’

  ‘And what am I to do?’ I ask nervously.

  �
�Nothing today,’ he says. ‘But perhaps tomorrow, or the next day, they will need you to come and pour some liquid from a flask, or stir a bowl, or sieve some dust. Nothing more than that, you could have done as much in your mother’s dairy.’

  I look at him blankly.

  ‘It is your touch I want,’ he says. ‘The pure touch.’

  One of the men, who has been watching a flask bubble and then overflow through a tube into a cooled dish set in a bath of ice, puts it to one side and comes towards us, wiping his hands on his apron and bowing to my husband.

  ‘The Maid,’ my husband says, gesturing to me as if I am as much an object as the fluid in the flask or the iron in the furnace. I flinch at being given Joan’s name. ‘As I promised. I have her. Melusina’s daughter and a virgin untouched by any man.’

  I put out my hand in greeting but the man recoils from me. He laughs at himself and says, smiling to my husband, ‘I hardly dare to touch her. Indeed, I can not!’

  Instead, he puts his hand behind his back and bows very low and says directly to me, ‘You are welcome, Lady Bedford. Your presence here has been needed for a long time. We have waited for you. We have hoped that you would come. You will bring a harmony with you, you will bring the power of the moon and water with you, and your touch will make all things pure.’

  I step awkwardly from one foot to the other, and glance at my husband. He is looking at me with a sort of hot approbation. ‘I found her, and I recognised at once what she could be,’ he says. ‘W could do. I knew that she could be Luna for us. She has water in her veins and her heart is pure. Who knows what she might not be able to do?’

  ‘Can she scry?’ the man asks eagerly.

  ‘She says she has never tried, but she has already foreseen the future,’ my husband replies. ‘Shall we try her?’

  ‘In the library.’ The man leads the way back through the door. My husband snaps his fingers and the two scholars take themselves off into a side room, as the alchemist and Woodville the squire pull a cloth off the biggest looking glass I have ever seen, framed in a case, completely round, shining silver, like a full moon.