The Lady of the Rivers

by Gregory, Philippa

  ‘It was a wax image of the king. It is supposed to have a little crown on its head and that golden thread is the sceptre and the little bead is the orb.’

  The face is distorted, the feet are formless. I can see the outline of the cape and the dots to show the markings of ermine, but the head is almost melted away. ‘What have they done to it?’

  ‘They heated it before a fire so that it would melt and run away. It would make the king’s strength flow from him too. They meant to destroy him as the image melted away.’

  I shudder. ‘Can’t we go now?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘We have to be here to show our revulsion at these crimes.’

  ‘I am revolted. I am so revolted I want to go.’

  ‘Keep your head up. Keep walking. You, of all people, have to be seen to be an enemy of this sort of work.’

  ‘Me of all people?’ I fire up. ‘This is so disgusting it makes me sick.’

  ‘They are saying that the Duchess Eleanor got her husband the duke to marry her with a love potion, so that he could not resist her. They are saying you did the same when you were a girl and my lord duke was a man broken-hearted at the loss of his wife Anne.’

  I shudder, averting my eyes from the melted wax poppet. ‘Richard . . . ’

  ‘I shall keep you safe,’ he swears. ‘You are my lady and my love. I shall keep you safe, Jacquetta. You will never look for me, and find me gone.’

  We come back from the shaming of Bolingbroke to find the duchess’s rooms are empty, the door thrown open to her privy chamber, her clothes chests overturned, her cupboards ransacked, her jewellery boxes missing, and the woman vanished.

  ‘Where is the duchess?’ my husband demands of her maid in waiting.

  She shakes her head, she is crying unstoppably. ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Gone,’ is all she can say.

  ‘God save us, the child is an idiot,’ Richard snaps. ‘You ask her.’

  I take her by the shoulders. ‘Ellie, tell me, did they arr. Her Grace?’

  She dips a curtsey. ‘She ran, Your Grace. She’s run into sanctuary. She says they will kill her to punish her husband, she says they will destroy him through her. She says it is a wicked plot against him that is going to be the ruin of her. She says Cardinal Beaufort will tear them both down.’

  I turn to my husband. ‘Sanctuary?’

  His face is grim. ‘Yes, but she is mistaken. That won’t save her.’

  ‘They can’t say she is a witch, if she is hiding on holy ground and claiming the safety of the Church.’

  ‘Then they’ll accuse her of being a heretic,’ he says. ‘A heretic can’t be protected by the Church. So if she’s claimed sanctuary they’ll charge her with heresy; it’s the only way to get her out. Before this they might have charged her with forecasting. Now they’ll accuse her of heresy. And heresy is a worse crime than forecasting. She’s put herself in a worse place.’

  ‘The law of men always puts women in a bad place!’ I flare up in anger.

  Richard says nothing.

  ‘Should we go away?’ I ask him very quietly. ‘Can we go home to Grafton?’ I look around the wreckage of the room. ‘I don’t feel safe here. Can we go?’

  He grimaces. ‘We can’t go now. It looks like guilt if we go, just as she looks as if she admits guilt by hiding in sanctuary. I think we are better off staying here. At least we can get a ship to Flanders from here, if we need to.’

  ‘I can’t leave the children!’

  He pays no attention. ‘I wish to God your father was still alive, you could have gone on a visit to him.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘You stay here. I shall go and see William de la Pole the Earl of Suffolk. He’ll tell me what’s going on in the council.’

  ‘And what shall I do?’

  ‘Wait here,’ he says grimly. ‘Open these rooms and treat them like your own. Behave as if nothing were wrong. You are the first lady of the kingdom now, the only royal duchess left. Order the ladies to tidy the place up and then have them sew with you, and get someone to read from the Bible. Go to chapel this evening. Parade your innocence.’

  ‘But I am innocent,’ I say.

  His face is dark. ‘I don’t doubt that she will say the same.’

  She does not say the same. They bring Roger Bolingbroke before her with the horoscope that she commanded he cast for her, with the magical instruments that were the tools of his trade as an explorer of the unknown realms, with the misshapen wax that they say is a melted image of the king, and she confesses to witchcraft and offences against the church. She admits that she has ‘long used witchcraft with the Witch of Eye’ and then they tell her that the Witch of Eye has been under arrest since the night of the witch’s wind.

  ‘Who is the Witch of Eye?’ I ask Richard in a hushed whisper, late at night with the curtains of the bed drawn around us/di height="0">

  ‘Margery Jourdemayne,’ he says, his brow knitted with worry. ‘Some practising witch, who was taken up for her crimes once before now. Comes from the village of Eye. She is known to the Church as a witch, known to everyone as a witch.’

  I gasp in horror.

  He looks at me. ‘For the love of God, tell me that you don’t know her.’

  ‘Not as a witch.’

  He closes his eyes briefly in horror. ‘What do you know of her?’

  ‘I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, as my lord commanded, I swear to you, and I would swear to the court. I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, and she did nothing at Penshurst but plan the herb garden with me, and tell me when the herbs should be cut and when they should be sown. I didn’t know she was a witch.’

  ‘Did my lord command you to see her?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Do you have that under his seal? Did he write the order?’

  I shake my head. ‘He just sent her to me. And you saw her. That time in the stable yard when you came with the message from Luxembourg, and she was leaving with the wagon.’

  Richard clenches his hands into fists. ‘I can swear that my lord commanded that she serve you . . . but this isn’t good, it’s not good. But perhaps we can glide over this. Perhaps nobody will bring it up, if it was just making a herb bed. At least you never consulted her. You have never ordered her to attend you . . . .’

  I glance away.

  He groans. ‘No. Oh no. Tell me, Jacquetta.’

  ‘I took a tincture to prevent a child. You knew about that.’

  ‘The herbs? That was her recipe?’

  I nod.

  ‘You told nobody?’

  ‘No-one but you.’

  ‘Then nobody will know. Anything else she made for you?’

  ‘Later . . . a drink to get a child.’

  He checks as he realises that this was the conception of our daughter, Elizabeth, the baby that forced him into marriage. ‘Good God, Jacquetta . . . ’ He throws back the covers and gets out of bed, pulls back the curtain and strides to the fireside. It is the first time he has ever been angry with me. He thumps the bedpost with his fist as if he wishes he could fight the world. I sit up, gather the covers to my shoulders and feel my heart hammer with dread at his rage.

  ‘I wanted a child and I wanted you,’ I say unsteadily. ‘I loved you, and I wanted us to be married. But I would not have cast a spell for it. I used herbs; not witchcraft.’

  He rubs his head, making his hair stand on end, as if these distinctions are beyond him. ‘You made our child with a witch’s potion? Our daughter Elizabeth?’

  ‘Herbs,’ I say steadily. ‘Herbs from a herbalist. Why not?’

  He casts a furious look at me. ‘Because I don’t want a child brought to life by a handful of herbs from some old witch!’

  ‘She is not some old witch, she is a good woman, and we have a beautiful child. You are as bad as this witch-hunt with your fears. I took herbs to help me to be fertile. We made a beautiful child. Don’t you ill-wish us now!’

  �
�For God’s sake.’ He raises his voice. ‘I am afraid of nothing but you being mixed up with the most notorious witch in England, who has been trying to kill our king!’

  ‘She is not! She would not!’ I shout back at him. ‘She would not!’

  ‘She is accused.’

  ‘Not by me!’

  ‘By the Lord Chief Justice! And if they look for her associates they will find you, another royal duchess, another woman who dabbles in the unknown, another woman who can call up a storm or capture a unicorn.’

  ‘I am not! I am not!’ I burst into tears. ‘You know I am not. You know I do nothing. Don’t say such things, Richard. Don’t you accuse me. You of all people!’

  He loses his anger at my tears, and comes quickly across the room, sits beside me and gathers me against his shoulder. ‘I don’t accuse you, my love. I know. I know you would never do anything to harm anyone. Hush, I am sorry. And you are not to blame.’

  ‘I can’t help it that I foresee.’

  ‘I know you can’t help it.’

  ‘And you of all people know that my lord put me before the scrying mirror day after day and all I could see was a battle in snow and a queen . . . a queen . . . with horseshoes reversed. He said it was useless. He said I could not foresee for him. I failed him. I failed him.’

  ‘I know. I know you don’t conjure. Be still, my love.’

  ‘I did take herbs to get Elizabeth, but that was all. I would never conjure a child. Never.’

  ‘I know, my love. Be still.’

  I am silent and as I dry my eyes on the sheet he asks me, ‘Jacquetta, does anyone know of this recipe that she gave you but you and her? Did anyone see her with you at Penshurst? Any of the court know that she was there?’

  ‘No. Just servants, and her boy.’

  ‘Then we will have to pray that she keeps her mouth shut about you, even if they take her to the stake.’

  ‘The stake?’ I say stupidly.

  He nods in silence and then gets back into bed beside me. Together we watch the fire burning down in the grate. ‘They will burn her for a witch,’ he says flatly. ‘And the duchess too.’

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,

  OCTOBER 1441

  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.’