The Lady of the Rivers (26 page)

‘I don’t know that I’ll be any help,’ I say, turning to follow him.

‘You’ll speak the same language and that will be something,’ he says. ‘She’s even younger than you were when the duke married you. She’s only fifteen. She’ll need a friend at court.’

He takes me to the double doors of the best apartment and steps to one side. The guards swing open the doors and bellow, ‘The Dowager Duchess of Bedford!’ as I go in.

The first thing that strikes me is that she is tiny, like a pretty doll. Her hair is a real bronze, a red-gold, and her eyes are grey-blue. She wears a gown of slate blue and a headdress perched far back on her head to show her exquisitely pretty face and her perfectly pale complexion. Her gown is scattered with embroidered marguerites – the daisies that are her emblem. The pout of her mouth suggests a spoiled child, but as she hears my name she turns quickly, and the brightness of her smile is endearing.

‘Ah! Madame la duchesse!’ she exclaims in French and runs forwards and kisses me as if we are old friends. ‘I am so glad you have come to see me.’

I curtsey. ‘I am glad to meet you, Your Grace.’

‘And this is my mama. I was so happy when they told me you would come with the Earl of Suffolk to fetch me, for I thought you would tell me how I am to behave and everything. For you were married to the duke when you were only a little older than I am now? And fifteen is very young to marry, is it not?’

I smile at this nervous ripple of talk.

‘Hush,’ her mother says. ‘The duchess will think you are a chatterbox.’

‘It is just that there are so many English people come to see me, and I find it so hard to remember names. And their names are so hard to say!’

I laugh. ‘I could not even say the name of my house at first,’ I said. ‘It is a hard language to learn. But I am sure you will learn it. And everyone speaks French, and everyone is eager to meet you and to be your friend. We all want you to be happy.’

Her lower lip quivers, but she speaks bravely enough. ‘Oh, I have started already, and I can say the Earl of Suffolk, and Cardinal Bouffé.’

‘Bouffé?’ I query.

‘Is that not right?’

‘Beaufort!’ I identify. ‘They say it Bow-futt.’

She laughs and spreads out her hands. ‘You see! You will teach me how to say these words, and you will teach me how the English ladies dress. Will I have to wear great boots all the time?’

‘Boots, Your Grace?’

‘For the mud?’

I laugh. ‘Ah, they have been teasing you. England does get very muddy, especially in the winter, but the weather is no worse than – say – Paris. I prefer London to Paris and I am very happy in England now.’

She slips her hand in mine. ‘And you will stand by me and tell me everyone’s name, won’t you? And how to say everything?’

‘I will,’ I promise her, and I feel the grip of her little hand tighten as she turns to her mother and says, ‘You had better tell them they can come in. I had better meet them all now.’

She is a delightful little princess, perfect in every detail except that her father, though called a king, cannot conquer his many kingdoms, and never will. She has no dowry, and though she says she brings us the islands of Minorca and Majorca, we all know she will inherit nothing. Everything she requires for the wedding and the journey has been paid for by the treasury of England – and there is nothing left in the treasury of England. She is exquisitely beautiful; but so are many girls of fifteen. She is dearly loved by the French court, the declared favourite of her uncle, the Valois king Charles VII; yet she is not a princess of the House of Valois but only of Anjou. He is not offering one of his own daughters in marriage to the English, but only a niece. In short, most of the English who are sent to fetch her think that we have been cheated: in the peace treaty, in the dower, and in the little princess herself. This is not a good start to a marriage.

She is to be married in the chapel of St George in the palace at Tours, where the Earl of Suffolk will represent the king and stand beside her before the altar, and take her little hand from her father and the French king. Her sister Yolande is to be married at the same time. I know she is nervous but I am surprised to be summoned to her rooms two hours before the wedding and find myself shown alone into her bedroom; no other attendants are present. She is dressed in her wedding gown of white satin embroidered with marguerite daisies of silver and gold thread, but her hair is still plaited, and she is barefoot.

‘My mother says you have a gift,’ she says, speaking rapidly in French without any preamble. ‘She says all the ladies of your house have the gift of foresight.’

I curtsey, but I am apprehensive. ‘They say so, Your Grace, but I take all my hopes and fears to my priest and to God. I don’t believe it is given to mortal men to know the future and certainly not to women.’

I do not respond to the invitation. ‘Surely your mother did not suggest this?’

‘No, she knows nothing of it, it is quite my own idea. Come, sit beside me.’

‘I cannot,’ I say, not moving. ‘The court of England does not like prophesying or casting horoscopes. They certainly won’t like the cards.’

‘The court of England will never know,’ she says. ‘It will be just you and me.’

I shake my head. ‘I dare not.’

She looks stubborn. ‘If I command it, you will have to. You are my lady in waiting, you have to do what I say.’

I hesitate. If William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, hears that I have upset the princess, there will be serious trouble. ‘Of course, my only wish is to obey you, Your Grace. But what if you ask me to do something that your husband, our king, would not like? You must see that puts me in a difficult position. What am I to do then?’

‘Oh, then you must do as I ask,’ she says simply. ‘Because the king will never know, nobody will ever know. But I will have my way in this. I can insist. I do insist.’

I kneel and bow my head, privately cursing her for a spoiled child. ‘Your Grace, excuse me, I cannot.’

She pauses. ‘All right, then I won’t get married,’ she declares. ‘You can go out and tell them that you have refused to prepare me for my wedding, and so I will not marry. The wedding is off.’

I look up smiling, but she is perfectly serious.

‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘You show me the cards, or I won’t marry the king. I insist on seeing my future, I have to know that this is the right thing to do. I won’t go ahead without seeing what the future holds for me.’

‘I don’t have any cards,’ I say.

With a smile she lifts her pillow and puts a pack of beautifully coloured cards in my hand. ‘Do it,’ she says simply. ‘It is my order.’

I shuffle the pictures gently. I wonder what will happen if she draws a bad card. Is she such a stubborn fool as to call off the wedding? I run through the arcana in my mind and wonder if I can hide those that show bad prospects. ‘What if the cards are not good?’ I ask. ‘What happens then?’

She puts her hand on mine. ‘The wedding will go ahead, and I will never tell anyone that you drew the cards for me,’ she promises. ‘But I will know in advance that I am going into danger, and what sort of danger it is. I will know to be on my guard. I want to know what is ahead of me. If I am going to die in childbirth within the year, I want to know. If my father and my husband are going to go to war against each other, I want to know. If the English lords who seem to agree on nothing are going to tear each other apart: I want to know.’

‘All right,’ I say. I can see no way of getting out of it. ‘But I am not dngea full spread.’ This at least cuts down the possibility of a series of pessimistic prophecies. ‘I will do just one card. You take the cards, and shuffle them.’

Her little hands stretch around the thick cards; she interleaves them, and then puts them down.

‘And cut.’

She cuts them and then puts the deck together. I spread them out before her in a fan, their faces down, their beautifully painted backs gleaming on the woollen covers of the bed. ‘Choose one,’ I say. ‘One will tell you enough.’

Margaret’s red-gold hair falls forwards and she leans across, her pretty face grave, trailing her finger along the pack, and then takes a card and holds it, without looking at it, to her heart.

‘Now what?’

I sweep the untouched cards into a pile and then say to Margaret, ‘Show it.’

She puts it face up.

It could have been an awful lot worse.

It is the card Joan the Maid saw in my hands, all those years ago: the Wheel of Fortune.

“
La Roue de Fortune
,” she reads. ‘Is that good? Is that very good?’

The card shows a wheel with two beasts balanced on either side of it, one climbing up, the other tumbling down as the wheel turns. The handle for the wheel is extended beyond the card, so one cannot see who is turning it; perhaps it is spinning at random. Seated at the very top of the card is a funny little blue animal, crowned and holding a sword. My great-aunt told me this little animal shows that it is possible to watch the wheel turn, and feel neither pride nor regret. One can stand above it, and see one’s own life both rise and fall with the real indifference that comes from true greatness of spirit. One can look at one’s own ambition as if it were all a masque of vanities, a dance for fools. It could not be a more unlikely card for Margaret: she is not at all a girl of indifference.

‘It’s good and bad,’ I say. ‘It’s a kind of warning that you can rise very high and fall very low. It says that fortune’s wheel can take you, by no merit of your own, by no grace of yours, very high indeed. And then it can throw you down very low.’

‘So how do I rise again?’ she asks me, as if I am some old hedgerow witch who tells fortunes for a groat.

‘The whole point is that you can’t,’ I say impatiently. ‘The whole point is that you can’t make it happen. The whole point is that you cannot make your own fate. You are on fortune’s wheel just like this poor monkey animal in the smart livery who is going to fall down; he can’t help himself. You can’t help yourself.’

She makes a sulky little face. ‘That’s not much of a foretelling,’ she says. ‘And anyway, doesn’t the other animal rise up? This little cat thing? Maybe I am the cat thing and I am going to rise and rise.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But then you go over the top of the wheel and are falling down again. You are supposed to learn to bear it, whichever happens, as if they were both the same.’

She looks blank. ‘But they are not the same. Victory and eat are not the same. I only want victory.’

I think of Joan and the sign she made with her forefinger, the circle in the air that meant that everything was dust. I make the sign to Margaret. ‘The Wheel of Fortune,’ I say. ‘It is your card: you drew it. You insisted on a reading, and this is the card that you got. It tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.’ I look at her pretty, downcast face and see she has little interest in wisdom. ‘But perhaps you will be lucky.’

TITCHFIELD ABBEY, HAMPSHIRE,
SUMMER 1445