The Lady of the Rivers (25 page)

The hed the witch come before the court charged together with both witchcraft and treason. The duchess claims that she only visited Mrs Jourdemayne for herbs for fertility, and the herbalist gave her a drink, and said that it would make her conceive a child. I sit at the back of the room behind the avid spectators and know that I did exactly the same.

Margery has been charged with witchcraft before, and so they ask her why she continued to practise her arts: the herbs, the incantations, the foreseeing. She looks at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, as if he might understand her. ‘If you have eyes, you can’t help but see,’ she says. ‘The herbs grow for me, the veil sometimes parts for me. It is a gift, I thought it was given by God.’

He gestures at the wax doll that sits before him on the desk. ‘This is a most unholy curse, an attempted murder of an anointed king. How could it come from God?’

‘It was a poppet to make a child,’ she says wearily. ‘It was a poppet in the shape of a great lord. See his ermine and his sword. It was a little doll to make a beautiful and talented child who would be an ornament to his country and a treasure to his family.’

Without thinking, my hand steals to my belly where a new baby is being made who I hope will be an ornament and a treasure.

Mrs Jourdemayne looks at the archbishop. ‘You are frightening yourselves with a poppet,’ she says rudely. ‘Do you great men have nothing better to do?’

The archbishop shakes his head. ‘Silence,’ he orders.

They have all decided already that this was an image of the king, made for melting. They have all decided that she is a witch, a brand for the burning. Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.

They kill her for it. They take her to Smithfield, the meat market where the innocent cattle of the counties around London walk in to be butchered, and like an obedient lamb, trustingly herded into the bloodstained pen, she goes speechless to the stake and they light the fire beneath her bare feet and she dies in agony. Roger Bolingbroke, who confessed and recanted, finds no mercy either. They hang him on the public gallows, and as he is kicking in the air, whooping for breath, the executioner catches his feet and cuts the rope, restoring him to croaking life, lays him on a hurdle to revive him; but then slices open his belly, pulls out his entrails so that he can see his pulsing heart, his quivering stomach spilling out with his blood, and then they hack him into quarters, his legs from his spine, his arms from his chest, and they send his head with its horrified glare to be set on a spike on London Bridge for the ravens to peck out his weeping eyes. Thomas Southwell, my one-time confessor, the canon of St Stephen’s Church, dies of sorrow in the Tower of London. Richard says that his friends smuggled poison to him, to spare him the agony that Bolingbroke endured. The duchess’s clerk, John Home, is sent to prison, awaiting pardon. And the proud duchess is forced to do public penance.

The woman who paraded into London in cloth of gold with the nobility of the kingdom in her train is stripped to her linen shift and sent out shoeless with a lighted taper to walk around Wstminster as the people jeer and point at her as someone who was the first lady of the kingdom and is now humbled to dirt. I watch from the steps of the great gate of Westminster Palace as she walks by, her gaze fixed on the cold stones beneath her flinching bare feet. She does not look up to see me, or the women who once scrambled to serve her, but are now laughing and pointing; she does not raise her head, and her beautiful dark hair tumbles over her face like a veil to hide her shame. The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down, and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they took the risk to dishonour their own. They are so anxious to save themselves that they thought they should throw her aside. Her husband, who is now generally known as the ‘good’ Duke Humphrey, declares that he was seduced into marriage by her witchcraft; the marriage is instantly declared void. She, a royal duchess, the wife of the heir to the throne, is now a convicted witch in her petticoat; no man will give her his name, and they will keep her in prison for the rest of her life.

I think of the illusion that I saw as we came off the barge at Greenwich, that she was followed by a black dog, a fighting dog, a black mastiff, and the smell that lingered around her despite the perfume and the perfectly washed linen, and I think that the black dog will follow her and will run up and down the stairs of Peel Castle on the Isle of Man, as she waits, long, long years, for her release into death.

GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,
WINTER 1441–1444

As soon as we can be excused from court, Richard and I go back home, to Grafton. The terror of the court is only stoked by the death of the witch, the disgrace of the duchess and the mood of witch-taking. Apprehension of the unknown and fear of the hours of darkness infect all of London. Everyone who has been studying the stars for years, reading books, or testing metal finds a reason to leave for the country and Richard thinks it is safer for us if I – with my perilous ancestry – am far away from court.

At Grafton there is much work to do. The death of Richard’s father means that Richard inherits the land and the responsibilities of being the lord of the small village and the keeper of the peace. I too have work to do. The cradle is polished again and the swaddling bands laundered and aired. ‘I think this will be another son,’ I say to my husband.

‘I don’t mind,’ he says. ‘As long as the baby is well and strong and you rise up from childbed as joyfully as you lie down in it.’

‘I shall rise up with a son,’ I say certainly. ‘And he will be an ornament to his country and a treasure to his family.’

He smiles and taps me on the nose. ‘You are a funny little thing. What d’you mean?’

‘And we shall call him Anthony,’ I continue.

‘For the saint?’ my husband asks. ‘Why him?’

‘Oh, because he went to the river to preach,’ I say. ‘I like the thought of honouring a saint who preached to the fishes and they put their little heads out of the water to hear him, and the mermaids said “Amen”.’

The next year after Anthony comes another girl, whom we name Mary, and after her, another girl. ‘Jacquetta,’ my husband declares. ‘She’s to be named Jacquetta, the most beautiful name for the most beautiful woman.’ We are hanging over the little wooden cradle while the baby sleeps, her face turned to one side, her perfect eyelashes closed on her rosy cheek. Her eyelids flicker, she is dreaming. I wonder what a baby dreams? Do they know that they are to come to the parents that we are? Are they prepared for the world we are making? Richard slides his arm around my waist. ‘And though we love her, we have to leave her for just a little while.’

‘Hmm?’ I am absorbed in the clenching of her tiny fist.

‘We have to leave her, for only a little while.’

Now he has my attention, I turn towards him in his grip. ‘How so?’

‘We are to go to France with a great party to fetch home the king’s bride.’

‘It has been decided?’ The marriage of Henry has been a long time coming. My own first husband, Lord John, was picking out French princesses for him, when I was a new bride. ‘At last?’

‘You have missed all the gossip while you were in confinement, but yes, it is decided at last. And she is a kinswoman to you.’

‘Margaret!’ I guess at once. ‘Margaret of Anjou.’

He kisses me as a reward. ‘Very clever, and since your sister is married to her uncle, you and I are to go and fetch her from France.’

At once I look towards my sleeping baby.

‘I know you don’t want to leave her,’ he says tenderly. ‘But we will do our duty for Henry, fetch the bride, bring her home and then we will come back here. I am summoned by the king to serve him. I have to go.’

‘You are asking me to leave a nursery with six babies,’ I say. ‘How can I go?’

‘I know,’ he says gently. ‘But you have to do your duty too. You are an English duchess and my wife, and the head of our house is asking you to fetch his bride. When they marry it will bring peace to England and France – the one thing my lord wanted when he died. We have to go, my love. You know that. It is a service to the king and to him, your first husband and my good lord, it is a service to him too.’

NANCY, FRANCE, SPRING 1445

I am not the only unenthusiastic member of the marriage party. Our leader, William de la Pole the Earl of Suffolk, is said to be so mistrustful of the French and so unimpressed with the fortune that Margaret of Anjou brings that, before he left England to start the negotiations last year, he had the king swear that nobody should ever blame him for bringing the French princess to England. Cardinal Beaufort, who now rules everything, may see this as the way to lasting peace; but Duke Humphrey of Gloucester swears that the Valois king will just buy time with this marriage and come against our lands in France. I know my late husband would have feared above everything else that this is a n ruse by the French to make us hand over Anjou and Maine to René of Anjou: the new queen’s father. Almost everyone left behind in England, while we spend a fortune on a progress to France, regards the deal that we are making as utterly uncertain to bring peace, costly to make, and most likely to be to our disadvantage.

The bride is brought by her mother from Anjou, and they say that she too is far from enthusiastic for a marriage which will put her in the bed of the king who has been an enemy of France ever since she was a baby.

‘You’re to go and see her first, before everyone,’ my husband tells me. I am standing by the window of the castle, looking down into the stable yard. The horses of the Anjou party, a sorry herd of hacks, are being brushed down and watered, and led into their stables.

‘Me? Why me?’

‘Her mother knows your mother, they think that you can be her friend. You made much the same journey that she faces, from a Luxembourg castle to the royalty of England. They want you to meet her ahead of the rest of us so that you can introduce her to her new court.’