The Lady of the Rivers (39 page)

And as for the king – he rests on the duke, as if Edmund is his only comfort and his peace of mind. Ever since the rise of Jack Cade when the king fled from London, he cannot feel safe in his own capital city, nor in any of the counties of the south. He may go through them every summer dispensing his spiteful justice with the gallows; but he knows he is not beloved. He only feels safe in the middle lands of England, at Leicester, Kenilworth and Coventry. He relies on Edmund Beaufort to assure him that – despite all appearances – everything is well. Edmund reports that he is beloved, the people faithful, the court and the men of the household honest, Calais secure and Bordeaux certain to be restored. It is a comforting list and Beaufort is persuasive. His warm honeyed tongue seduces the king and the queen together. The king praises Edmund to the skies as his only reliable advisor, he lauds him as the man whose military skill and courage will save us from rebels great and small. He thinks that Edmund can manage the parliament, that Edmund understands the commons, and all the time the queen smiles and says that Edmund is a very great friend to them both, and she will go riding with him the next morning, while the king prays in his chapel.

She has learned to be cautious – she knows well enough that she is watched all the time and that people judge her harshly. But her pleasure in his company and his hidden desire for her is apparent to me; and this is enough to make me glad to leave a court with this dangerous secret at the very heart of it.

Richard is to come home to me at last, and sends to tell me he is on his way. We are to celebrate the marriage of Elizabeth. She is fifteen, she is ready for marriage, and the boy that I had picked out in my mind and whose name I whispered to the new moon has found the courage to speak to his mother about her.

Lady Grey herself wrote to me with the proposal that her son John might marry our daughter. I knew that if Elizabeth stayed in their house for any length of time John Grey would fall in love with her, and his parents would see the benefit of the match. And she picked the apple blossom and gave him the fruit to eat. She is more than pretty, she has real beauty; and Lady Grey cannot bear to refuse her beloved son anything. Besides, as I foresaw, Lady Grey is a woman of her own mind, a commander of her own acres, a queen in her county, and once she had the training of my daughter she soon believed that no better-mannered girl could exist. She taught her how to keep the still room, she taught her how the linen room should be. She preached to her the value of well-trained maids, she took her into the dairy to watch as they churned the famous Groby butter and skimmed the fat cream. She taught her how to keep the account books and to write a civil letter to the Grey kinsmen all around the country. Together they climbed the little hill that they call Tower Hill, and looked over the Ferrers acres, and Lady Grey remarked that all this had come to her on the death of her father, she had brought it to Sir Edward on their marriage, and now her beloved son John will inherit it all.

Elizabeth, who knew well enough how to run a household, who knew how to prepare herbs for the still room, indeed knows how they should be grown and when harvested, who knows the properties of a hundred plants and how to call the venom out of them – she is my daughter, after all – had the good sense and the good manners never to correct the lady of the house; but simply learned how it was done at Groby. Of course, she already knew how linen should be folded, or cream skimmed, she knew how a county lady should command her maids, actually she knows far more than Lady Grey will ever dream: for she has learned from me how a royal court is run and how things were done in the courts of France and of Luxembourg. But she accepted the orders of the woman who would be her mother-in-law as a polite young woman should, and gave every appearance of a girl eager to learn the right way that things should be done: the Groby way. In short, as she picked and dried the herbs for the Groby still room, prepared the oils, polished the silver and watched the cutting of the strewing rushes, my daughter enchanted the hard-hearted lady of Groby, just as she enchanted the son of the house.

It is a good match for her. I had it in mind for years. She has my name and her father’s position in our county; but next to no dowry. Service to this king has not brought us a fortune. It seems to be profitable only for those lords who take their fees and do nothing. Those courtiers who do nothing but sympathise with the king and conspire with his wife can take a great profit, as we see from the rich lands that were given to William de la Pole and the extraordinary wealth that Edmund Beaufort now enjoys. But my husband took sixty lancers and nearly six hundred archers with him to Calais, all trained under his command, all wearing our livery, and all paid by us. The treasury has promised to reimburse us, but they might as well date the tally sticks the day of judgement; for the dead will rise from their graves before we can take the sticks into the treasury and get a full repayment. We have a new name and a beautiful house, we have influence and a reputation, we are trusted by both the king and the queen; but money – no, we never have any money.

With this marriage my Elizabeth will become Lady Grey of Groby, mistress of a good part of Leicestershire, owner of Groby Hall and the other great properties in the Grey family, kinswoman to all the Greys. It is a good family, with good prospects for her, and they are solidly for the king and fiercely opposed to Richard, Duke of York, so we will never find her on the wrong side if the dispute between the Duke of York and his rival, the Duke of Somerset, grows worse.

Elizabeth is to go to her wedding from our house with her father and me, and all the children except the two babies. But Richard is not yet home.

‘Where is Father?’ she asks me the day before we are due to leave. ‘You said he would be here yesterday.’

‘He will come,’ I say steadily.

‘What if he has been delayed? What if he could not get a ship? What if the seas were too rough to sail? I cannot be married without him to give me away. What if he does not get here?’

I put my hand on my wedding ring, as if to touch his fingers that placed it there. ‘He will be here,’ I say. ‘Elizabeth, in all the years that I have loved him, he has never failed me. He will be here.’

She frets all the day and I send her to bed that night with a tisane of valerian, and when I peep into her room she is fast asleep in her bed, her hair plaited under her nightcap, seeming as young as her sister Anne, who shares the bed with her. Then I hear the noise of horses in the stable yard and look from her window, and there is the Rivers staence and a, and there is my husband, heaving himself wearily from his horse, and in a moment I am down the stairs and out through the stable door and in his arms.

He holds me so tightly that I can hardly breathe, and then he turns my face up to his and kisses me.

‘I daresay I stink,’ is the first thing he says when he gets his breath. ‘You must forgive me. The tide was against us and so I have ridden hard to get here tonight. You knew I would not fail you, didn’t you?’

I smile up at his handsome well-worn well-loved face: the man I have adored for so many years. ‘I knew you would not fail me.’

The Greys have a small chapel at their house, opposite the great hall, where the young couple exchange the vows which are solemnly witnessed by both sets of parents and the brothers and sisters. Our family fills up the chapel. I can see Lady Grey look at the ranks of my children and think that her son is marrying fertile stock. After the wedding we walk through the cloister to the hall, and there is a feast and singing and dancing, and then we prepare them for bed.

Elizabeth and I are alone in the bedroom that is going to be hers. It is a beautiful room, looking north over the pleasure grounds, towards the meadows and the river. I am feeling tenderhearted, this is my girl, the first child of mine to marry and leave her home. ‘What do you foresee for me, Lady Mother?’ she asks.

This is a question I have been dreading. ‘You know I don’t foresee any more,’ I say. ‘That was something in my girlhood. They don’t like such things in England and I have put it aside. If it comes to me or to you it is without our bidding. Your father does not like it.’

She gives a little giggle. ‘Oh, Lady Mother!’ she says reproachfully. ‘That you should stoop so low, and on my wedding day.’

I cannot help but smile. ‘Stoop so low as to what?’

‘As to lie,’ she whispers. ‘And to me! On my wedding day! I understand now that you foresaw that John would love me, and I him. I picked the apple blossom and I gave him the apple, just as you said. But long before that, the moment I first saw him, I knew exactly what you intended when you sent me here. I was standing before his mother when she was at her table in the rents room, and he came in the door behind her – I had not even known he was at home – and the moment I saw him, I knew why you had sent me to Groby and what you thought would happen.’

‘And were you glad? Was I right to send you?’

Her joy shines out of her bright grey eyes. ‘Very glad. I thought, if he were to like me, I should be the happiest girl in England.’

‘That was not foreseeing, that was nothing more than knowing that you are beautiful and lovable. I could have sent you to any handsome young man’s household and he would have fallen in love with you. There was no magic in that but a girl and a boy in springtime.’

She is glowing. ‘I am glad. I wasn’t sure. I am so glad that he is in love but not enchanted. But surely you have looked to see my future? Did you put the charms in the river? What did you draw from the waters? Did you look for us in the cards? What will my future be?’

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‘I didn’t read the cards.’ I lie to her, my little daughter, I lie barefaced like a hard-hearted old witch, denying the truth on her wedding night, and I lie to her with my face completely serene. I am going to tell her a lie that is utterly convincing. I will not have my foresight overshadowing her present happiness. I will deny my gift, deny what it has shown me. ‘You are mistaken, my dear, I didn’t read the cards and I didn’t look in a mirror. I didn’t put any charms in the river because I didn’t have to. I can predict your happiness without any craft. Just as I knew he would love you. I can tell you that I know you will be happy, and I think there will be children, and the first one quite soon.’

‘Girl or boy?’

‘You will be able to tell that yourself,’ I smile. ‘Now you have your own wedding ring.’

‘And I will be Lady Grey of Groby,’ she says with quiet satisfaction.

I feel a shiver, like a cold hand on the nape of my neck. I know that she will never inherit here. ‘Yes,’ I say, defying my better knowledge. ‘You will be Lady Grey of Groby and the mother of many fine children.’ This is what she must hear as she goes into her wedding bed on her wedding night. ‘God bless you, my darling, and give you joy.’

The girls tap on the door and come into the room in a flurry, with rose petals for the bed and the jug of wedding ale and a bowl of scented water for her to wash with and her linen gown, and I help her get ready, and when the men come in, boisterous and drunk, she is lying in her bed like a chaste little angel. My husband and Lord Grey help John in beside her and he blushes furiously, like a boy, though he is twenty-one; and I smile as if I am wholly happy; and I wonder what it is that stops my heart in fear for the two of them.

In two days we go back to our own house at Grafton, and I never tell Elizabeth, or anyone, that I did indeed read the cards for her, the very day that Lady Grey wrote to me to ask what dowry Elizabeth might bring to the marriage. I sat at the table looking out over the water meadow and the dairy, certain of her happiness, and took the cards in my hand. I turned over three, chosen at random, and all three were blank.

The card-maker had put three spare cards in the pack when he first painted the pictures, three cards just like the others with brightly coloured backs but nothing on the front, spares for use in another game. And it was the three cards with nothing to say which came to my hand when I went to foresee Elizabeth’s future with John Grey. I had hoped to see prosperity and children, grandchildren and a rise in the world, but the cards were empty of anything. There was no future that I could see, for Elizabeth and John Grey: no future for them at all.

PALACE OF PLACENTIA, GREENWICH,
LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1452