The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ‘Close the shutters,’ my husband says. ‘And light the candles.’ He is breathless, I can hear the excitement in his voice, and it makes me fearful. They ring me with candles so that I am encircled in fire and they put me before the big mirror. It is so bright I can hardly see for the winking bobbing flames around me.

  ‘You ask her,’ my husband says to the alchemist. ‘Before God, I am so excited, I can’t speak. But don’t tax her overmuch, let’s just see if she has a gift.’

  ‘Look in the mirror,’ the man commands me quietly. ‘Let yourself look in the mirror and let yourself dream. Now, Maid, what can you see?’

  I look at the mirror. Surely it is obvious what I can see? Myself, in a velvet gown cut in the very latest fashion with a horned headdress on my head, my golden hair captured in a thick net on each side of my face, and the most wonderful shoes of blue leather. I have never before seen a mirror that could show me myself, all of me, full size. I lift my gown a little so I can admire my shoes, and the alchemist makes a little dry cough as if to remind me to beware vanity. ‘What can you see when you look deeply, Duchess?’

  Behind me and to the side of me is a dazzle of candles so bright that they drain the colour from the gown, even from the blue shoes, even from the shelves and the books behind me that, as I look, grow darker and more misty.

  ‘Look deep into the mirror and say what you can see,’ the man urges again, his voice low. ‘Tell us what you can see, Lady Bedford. What can you see?’

  The light is overwhelming, it is too bright to see anything, I cannot even see my own face, dazzled by the hundreds of candles. And then I see her, as clearly as the day when we lazed by the moat, as brightly as when she was alive and laughing, before the moment when she drew the card of le Pendu in his suit as blue as my shoes.

  ‘Joan,’ I say quietly with deep sorrrow. ‘Oh, Joan. The Maid.’

  I struggle to come back to wakefulness through the noise of the alchemist flapping at the candles to put them out. Some must have fallen over when I went down in a faint. Woodville the squire has me in his arms, holding up my head, and my husband is sprinkling cold water in my face.

  ‘What did you see?’ my lord demands as soon as my eyelids flutter open.

  ‘I don’t know.’ For some reason, a sudden pang of fear warns me. I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to say Joan’s name to the man who had her burned alive.

  ‘What did he say?’ He glares at the squire and at the alchemist. ‘As she went down? She said something. I heard something. What did she say?’

  ‘Did she say “the Maid”?’ the alchemist asks. ‘I think she did.’

  They both look at Woodville.

  ‘She said “it’s made”,’ he lies easily.

  ‘What could she mean?’ The duke looks at me. ‘What did you mean? What d’you mean, Jacquetta?’

  ‘Would it be Your Grace’s university at Caen?’ Woodville asks. ‘I think she said “Caen”, and then she said “it’s made”.’

  ‘I saw Your Grace’s planned university at Caen,’ I say, taking up the prompt. ‘Completed. Beautiful. That’s what I said: “it’s made”.’

  He smiles, he is pleased. ‘Well, that’s a good vision,’ he says, encouraged. ‘That’s a good glimpse of a safe and happy future. That’s good news. And best of all, we see she can do it.’

  He puts out his arm and helps me to my feet. ‘So,’ he says with a triumphant smile to the alchemist, ‘I will bring her back tomorrow, after Mass, after she has broken her fast. Get a chair for her to sit on next time, and make the room ready for her. We will see what she can tell us. But she can do it, can’t she?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ agrees the alchemist. ‘And I will have everything ready.’

  He bows and goes back into the inner room, and Woodville picks up the rest of the candles and blows them out, and my lord straightens the mirror. I lean for a moment against an archway between one set of shelves and another, and my husband glances up and sees me.

  ‘Stand there.’ He gestures me to the centre of the arch, and watches as I obey him. I stand still, framed in the arch, wondering what he wants now. He is staring at me as if I were a picture or a tapestry myself, as if he sees me as an object, a new thing to be framed or translated or shelved. He narrows his eyes as if considering me as a vista, or a statue that he might have bought. ‘I am so glad that I married you,’ he says, and there is no affection in his voice at all but the satisfied tone of a man who has added something to his beautiful collection – and that at a good price. ‘Whatever it costs me, with Burgundy, with whoever, I am so glad that I married you. You are my treasure.’

  I glance nervously at Richard Woodville who has heard this speech of acquisition; but he is busy throwing the cloth over the looking glass, and quite deaf.

  Every morning my lord escorts me to the library and they seat me before the mirror and light the candles all around me, and ask me to look into the brightness and tell them what I see. I find I go into a sort of daze, not quite asleep but almost dreaming, and sometimes I see extraordinary visions on the swimming silver surface of the mirror. I see a baby in a cradle, I see a ring shaped like a golden crown dangling from a dripping thread, and one morning I turn from the mirror crying out, for I see a battle, and behind it another battle, a long lane of battles and men dying, dying in mist, dying in snow, dying in a churchyard.

  ‘Did you see the standards?’ my husband demands as they press a glass of small ale into my hand. ‘Drink. Did you see the standards? You said nothing clearly. Did you see where the battles were taking place? Could you tell the armies one from another?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Could you see what town? Was it anywhere you recognise? Come and see if you can point out the town on the map. Do you think it is happening right now, or is it a vision from the future that will come?’

  He drags me to the table where the little world of France is laid before me and I look, dazed, at the patchwork of ownership and roll of the hills. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘There was a mist and an army forcing their way uphill. There was snow and it was red with blood. There was a queen with her horse at a forge and they were putting the horseshoes on backwards.’

  He looks at me as if he would like to shake some sense out of me. ‘This is no good to me, girl,’ he says, his voice very low. ‘I can get cursed in any Saturday market. I need to know what is going to happen this year. I need to know what is going to happen in France. I need names of towns and the numbers of rebels. I need to know in detail.’

  Dumbly, I look back at him. His face is suffused with darkness in his frustration with me. ‘I am saving a kingdom here,’ he says. ‘I need more than mist and snow. I did not marry you for you to tell me about queens with their horseshoes on back to front. What next? Mermaids in the bath?’

  I shake my head. Truly, I know nothing.

  ‘Jacquetta, I swear, you will be sorry if you defy me,’ he says with quiet menace. ‘This is too important for you to play the fool.’

  ‘Perhaps we should not overtax her?’ Woodville suggests, addressing the bookshelves. ‘Perhaps every day is too much for her. She is only young and new to the work. Perhaps we should train her up to it, like a little eyas, a young falcon. Perhaps we should release her to ride and walk in the mornings, and only have her scry perhaps once a week?’

  ‘Not if she has a warning!’ the duke breaks out. ‘Not if it is now! She cannot rest if we are in danger. If this battle in mist and this battle in snow is going to be fought this winter in France, we need to know now.’

  ‘You know that the Dauphin has not the arms or the allies for it to be now.’ Woodville turns to him. ‘It cannot be a warning of now, it will be a fearful dream of the future. Her head is filled with fears of war, and we ourselves have frightened her. We have put the visions in her mind. But we need to clear her head, we need to give her some peace so that she can be a clean stream for us. You bought her’ – he stumbles and corrects himself – ‘You found her uns
poiled. We must take care not to muddy the waters.’

  ‘Once a month!’ the alchemist suddenly remarks. ‘As I said at the start, my lord, she should be speaking when her element is on the rise. On the eve of the new moon. She is a being of the moon and of water, she will see most clearly and speak most clearly when the moon is in the ascendant. She should work on those days, under a rising moon.’

  ‘She could come in the evening, by moonlight.’ My husband thinks aloud. ‘That m="0lp.’ He looks critically at me, as I lean back in the chair, my hand on my throbbing forehead. ‘You’re right,’ he says to Woodville. ‘We have asked too much of her, too soon. Take her out riding, take her down by the river. And we set off for England next week, we can go by easy stages. She’s pale, she needs to rest. Take her out this morning.’ He smiles at me. ‘I am not a hard task-master, Jacquetta, though there is much to be done and I am in a hurry to do it. You can have some time at your leisure. Go to the stables, you will see I have left a surprise for you there.’

  I am so relieved to be out of the room that I don’t remember to say ‘thank you’, and only when the door is closed behind us do I start to be curious.

  ‘What does my lord have for me in the stables?’ I ask Wood ville as he follows, half a step behind me, down the circular stair from the gallery to the inner courtyard, and as we walk across the cobbles, past the armoury to the stable yard. Menservants carrying vegetables to the kitchens and butchers with great haunches of beef slung over their shoulders fall back before me and bow. The milkmaids coming in from the fields with buckets swinging from their yokes drop down in a curtsey so low that their pails clatter on the cobbles. I don’t acknowledge them; now I hardly see them. I have been a duchess for only a few weeks and already I am accustomed to the exaggerated bows that precede me wherever I go, and the reverent murmur of my name as I walk past.

  ‘What would be your greatest wish?’ Woodville asks me. He at any rate does not serve me in awestruck silence. He has the confidence born of being at my husband’s right hand since he was a boy. His father served the English King Henry V, and then my husband the duke, and now Woodville, raised in the duke’s service, is the most trusted and most beloved of all the squires, commander of Calais, trusted with the keys to France.

  ‘A new litter?’ I ask. ‘One with golden curtains and furs?’

  ‘Perhaps. Would you really want that more than anything else?’

  I pause. ‘Does he have a horse for me? A new horse of my very own?’

  He looks thoughtful. ‘What colour horse would you like best?’

  ‘A grey!’ I say longingly. ‘A beautiful dappled grey horse with a mane like white silk, and dark interesting eyes.’

  ‘Interesting?’ He chokes on his laughter. ‘Interesting eyes?’

  ‘You know what I mean, eyes that look as if the horse can understand you, as if she is thinking.’

  He nods. ‘I do know what you mean, actually.’

  He gives me his arm to guide me round a cart laden with pikes; we are passing the armoury, and the weapons master is counting in a new delivery with a tally stick. Hundreds, thousands of pikes are being unloaded, the campaign season is starting again. No wonder my husband sits me before the scrying mirror every day to ask me where is the best place to mount our attack. We are at war, constantly at war, and none of us has ever lived in a country at peace.

  We go through the archway to the stables and Woodville steps back to see my face as I scan the yard. Each of the horses of household has a stall facing south so the mellow stone is warmed through the day. I see my husband’s four great war horses, their heads nodding over the door. I see Woodville’s strong horse for jousting and his other horses for hunting and riding messages, and then I see, smaller than any of them, with bright ears that flick one way and another, the perfectly shaped head of a grey horse, so bright in colour that she is almost like silver in the sunshine of the yard.

  ‘Is that mine?’ I whisper to Woodville. ‘Is that for me?’

  ‘That is yours,’ he says almost reverently. ‘As beautiful and as high-bred as her mistress.’

  ‘A mare?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I go towards her, and her ears point to listen to my footsteps and my cooing voice as I come close. Woodville puts a crust of bread into my hand and I step up to her and take in the dark liquid eyes, the beautifully straight face, the silvery mane of the horse that I described, here before me, as if I had performed magic and wished her into being. I stretch out my hand and she sniffs, her nostrils wide, and then she lips the treat from my hand. I can smell her warm coat, her oaty breath, the comfortable scent of the barn behind her.

  Woodville opens the stable door for me and without hesitation I step inside. She shifts a little to make room for me, and turns her head and sniffs at me, the pockets of my gown, my belt, my trailing sleeves, and then my shoulders, my neck and my face. And as she sniffs me, I turn to her, as if we are two animals coming together. Then slowly, gently, I reach out my hand and she droops her head for my caress.

  Her neck is warm, her coat silky, the skin behind her ears is tender and soft, she allows me gently to pull the mane on her poll, to stroke her face, and then she raises her head and I touch her flared nostrils, the soft delicate skin of her muzzle, her warm muscled lips, and hold, in my cupped hand, the fat curve of her chin.

  ‘Is it love?’ Woodville asks quietly from the doorway. ‘For it looks like love from here.’

  ‘It is love,’ I breathe.

  ‘Your first love,’ he confirms.

  ‘My only love,’ I whisper to her.

  He laughs like an indulgent brother. ‘Then you must compose a poem and come and sing to her like a woman troubadour, a trobairitz. But what is your fair lady’s name?’

  I look thoughtfully at her, as she moves quietly away from me and takes a mouthful of hay. The scent of the meadow comes from the crushed grasses. ‘Mercury,’ I say. ‘I think I’ll call her Mercury.’

  He looks a little oddly at me. ‘That’s not such a good name. The alchemists are always talking of Mercury,’ he says. ‘A shape-shifter, a messenger from the gods, one of the three great ingredients of their work. Sometimes Mercury is helpful, sometimes not, a partner to Melusina, the water goddess who also changes her form. A messenger that you have to employ in the absence of any other; but not always reliable.’

  I shrug my shoulders. ‘I don’t want more alchemy,’ I insist. ‘Not in the stable yard as well as everywhere else. I shall call her Merry but she and I will know her true name.Is it l

  ‘I will know too,’ he says; but I have already turned my back on him to pull out wisps of hay to give to her.

  ‘You don’t matter,’ I observe.

  I ride my horse every morning, with an armed escort of ten men ahead of me and ten behind, and Woodville at my side. We go through the streets of Paris, looking away from the beggars starving in the gutters, and we ignore the people who stretch out imploring hands. There is terrible poverty in the city and the countryside is all but waste, the farmers cannot get their produce to market, and the crops are constantly trampled by one or other of the armies. The men run away from their villages and hide in the forests for fear of being recruited or hanged as traitors, so there is no-one but women to work the fields. The price of bread in the city is more than a man can earn, and besides, there is no work but soldiering and the English are late with their wages again. Woodville gives orders that we must ride at a hand-gallop through the streets, not just for fear of beggars but also for fear of disease. My predecessor, the Duchess Anne, died of a fever after visiting the hospital. Now my lord swears that I shall not so much as speak to a poor person, and Woodville rushes me through the streets and I don’t draw breath until we are out of the city gates and going through what once were busy gardens, the fertile tilled land that lies between the city walls and the river. Only then does Woodville order the armed men to halt and dismount, and wait for us, while the two of us ride down to the river and take
the tow path and listen to the water as if we were a couple riding in a countryside at peace.

  We go companionably, side by side, and talk of nothing of any importance. He helps me with my riding, I have never ridden so fine a horse as Merry, and he shows me how to straighten up in the saddle, and gather her up so she curves her neck and stretches out her stride. He shows me how he rides a cavalry charge, bent low over the horse’s neck, going ahead of me down the track and thundering back towards us, pulling up at the last moment so Merry sidles and dances on the spot. He teaches me how to jump, getting off his horse to drag little branches of wood across the deserted track, building them higher and higher as my confidence increases. He teaches me the exercises his father taught him in the lanes of England, riding exercises to improve balance and courage: sitting sideways like a girl riding pillion, lying backwards across the horse, with the saddle in the small of my back, while the horse jogs along, sitting up tall and stretching one arm then another up to the sky, crouching down low to touch my stirrups, anything which accustoms the horse to the idea that it must go on steadily and safely, whatever the rider does, whatever happens around it.

  ‘More than once my horse has taken me to safety when I was hurt and didn’t have a clue where we were going,’ Richard says. ‘And my father held the standard before Henry V of England, and so he rode at a gallop all the time, with only one hand on the reins. You will never ride in battle, but we might run into trouble here or in England, and it is good to know that Merry will carry you through anything.’

  He dismounts and takes my stirrups and crosses them out of the way, in front of me. ‘We’ll do a mile at trot, without stirrups. To improve your balance.’

  ‘How should we ride into trouble?’ I ask as he gets back on his own horse.