The Lady of the Rivers

by Gregory, Philippa

  She nods. ‘I want to know that,’ she whispers longingly. ‘Do you think he loves me, Jacquetta? You have seen him with me. Do you think he loves me?’

  ‘Spread the cards,’ I say.

  She makes a fan of the cards, their bright faces downwards.

  ‘Now choose.’

  Slowly, one finger moving across the painted backs, she muses on her choice, and then she points. ‘This one.’

  I turn it over. It is the Falling Tower. The tower of a castle, struck perhaps by lightning, a jagged streak of light flaming into the roof of the tower, the walls going one way, the roof the other. Two little figures fall from the tower to the grass below.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she whispers. ‘Will he take the tower? Does it mean he will take the kingdom?’

  For a moment I cannot understand her meaning. ‘Take the kingdom?’ I repeat in horror. ‘Take the kingdom!’

  She shakes her head, denying the very thought, hand over her mouth. ‘Nothing, nothing. But what does it mean? This card – what does it mean?’

  ‘It means an overturning of all things,’ I say. ‘Disruption of the times. Perhaps a fall of a castle . . . ’ Of course, I think of Richard, who is sworn to hold the castle of Calais for this very commander. ‘A fall from on high, look, here are two people falling down from the tower, a rising of those who are low, and in the end, everything different. A new heir takes the throne, the old order is changed, everything is new.’

  Her eyes are shining. ‘Everything is new,’ she whispers. ‘Who do you think is the king’s true heir?’

  I k at her in something close to horror. ‘Richard, Duke of York,’ I say flatly. ‘Like him or not. Richard, Duke of York, is the king’s heir.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Edmund Beaufort is the king’s cousin,’ she whispers. ‘He could be the true heir. Perhaps this is what the card means.’

  ‘It never comes out quite how I think it will be,’ I warn her. ‘This is not a prediction, it is always more like a warning. D’you remember the Wheel of Fortune card? The card you drew on your wedding day that promises what rises will fall, that nothing is certain?’

  Nothing I can say can dull her joy, her face is shining. She thinks I have foreseen the change of everything and she is longing for something to change. She thinks that the tower shown in the card is her prison; she wants it broken down. She thinks the people who are clearly falling are breaking free. She thinks the lightning shaft that destroys and burns will break down the old and make new. There is nothing I can say that she will hear as a warning.

  She makes the gesture that I showed her on her wedding day, the circling forefinger that shows the rise and the fall of life. ‘Everything new,’ she whispers again.

  In bed, that night, I confide my worries to Richard, skirting over the queen’s infatuation for the duke, but telling him only that she is lonely and that the duke is her closest friend. Richard is sitting up, beside the warmth of the fire, his gown thrown over his naked shoulders. ‘No harm in friendship,’ he says stoutly. ‘And she is a pretty girl and deserves some companionship.’

  ‘People will talk.’

  ‘People always talk.’

  ‘I am afraid that she may become too fond of the duke.’

  He narrows his eyes as if he would scrutinise my thoughts. ‘Are you saying she might fall in love with him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. She is young, he is handsome, she has nobody else in the world who shows any sign of caring for her. The king is kind to her and considerate, but he has no passion in him.’

  ‘Can the king give her a child?’ Richard asks bluntly, going to the very core of the matter.

  ‘I think he can,’ I say. ‘But he does not come often to her room.’

  ‘The man’s a fool,’ my husband says. ‘A woman like Margaret cannot be neglected. D’you think the duke has eyes for her?’

  I nod.

  Richard scowls. ‘I think you could trust him to do nothing which would endanger her or the throne. It would be a selfish villain who would seduce her. She has everything to lose, and it would cost the throne of England as well. He’s no fool. They are close, they are bound to be close, they are both in attendance on the king for most of every day. But Edmund Beaufort is running this kingdom through the king, he would not jeopardise his own future – never mind hers. The most important thing is for her to get an heir.’

  ‘She can hardly do it alone,’ I say crossly.

  He laughs at me. ‘No need to defend her to me. But while there is no child then Richard, Duke of York, is the rightful heir, but the king keeps favouring others of his family: Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, who takes precedence, and Edmund Beaufort. Now I hear he is bringing his half-brothers, the Tudor boys, to court as well. It makes everyone uneasy. Who does he think is his heir? Would he dare to put Richard, Duke of York, aside for one of these favourites?’

  ‘He’s young,’ I say. ‘She’s young. They could get a child.’

  ‘Well, he’s not likely to die on campaign like his father,’ my husband the soldier says cruelly. ‘He keeps himself safe enough.’

  At the end of the twelve days of Christmas Richard has to go back to his post at Calais. I go down to the river to see him set sail. He is wearing his thick travelling cloak against the cold wintry mist and he wraps it around us both as we stand on the quayside. Inside the warmth, my head against his shoulder, my arms tight around his broad back, I hold him as if I cannot bear to let him go. ‘I’ll come to Calais,’ I promise.

  ‘Sweetheart, there is nothing for you there at all. I will come home again at Easter, or earlier.’

  ‘I can’t wait till Easter.’

  ‘Then I will come sooner. Whenever you bid me. You know that. When you want me I will come.’

  ‘Can’t you just go and inspect the garrison and come back?’

  ‘Perhaps; if there is no expedition into Normandy this spring. The duke hopes to mount one. Does the queen say anything?’

  ‘She says whatever the duke says.’

  ‘If we don’t have an expedition by spring there won’t be one this year, and I can come home to you,’ he promises.

  ‘You had better come home in the summer,’ I warn him. ‘Whatever happens. I will have something I will want you to see.’

  In the warm shelter of the cloak his hand goes to my belly.

  ‘You are a ruby, my Jacquetta. A wife of noble character worth more than rubies. Are you with child again?’

  ‘Yes, again,’ I say.

  ‘A summer baby,’ he says with pleasure. ‘Another for the House of Rivers. We are making a nation, my love. The Rivers are becoming an estuary, a lake, an inland sea.’

  I giggle.

  ‘Will you stay at court with the queen for now?’

  ‘Yes, I will. I’ll go down to Grafton for a few days to see the children and then I’ll come back to court. At the very least, I can guard her from slander.’

  Concealed by his cloak he squeezes me. ‘I like the thought of you as a model of respectability, my love.’

  ‘I am a very respectable mother of nine,’ I remind him. ‘Soon ten, God willing.’

  ‘Good God, that I shou feel like this for a mother of ten,’ he remarks, taking my hand and holding it against his breeches.

  ‘God forgive me that I should feel like this for a married man and a father of ten,’ I say, pressing against him.

  There is a shout from the deck of the ship above us. ‘I have to go,’ he says reluctantly. ‘We have to catch the tide. I love you, Jacquetta, and I will come home soon.’

  He kisses me hard and quickly, and then he steps back and runs up the gangplank to the ship. Without his cloak, without his warmth, without his smile, I feel very cold and alone. I let him go.

  THE TOWER OF LONDON, SPRING 1453

  I come back to court after

  a week at Grafton in time for the great celebration in the Tower of London where the king’s half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor are made ear
ls. I stand beside the queen as the two young men kneel before the king for their investiture. They are the sons of Queen Catherine of Valois, the king’s mother, who made a second marriage as imprudent as my own. After her husband Henry V died leaving her a widow with a baby, she did not, as everyone hoped, retire to a nunnery and spend the rest of her life in respectable grief. She stooped even lower than I did and fell in love with the keeper of her wardrobe, Owen Tudor, and married him in secret. She left an awkward situation when she died, with Tudor as her surviving widower or abductor – depending on your judgement – and his two sons as half-brothers to the King of England or two bastards to a madly incontinent queen mother – depending on your charity.

  King Henry has decided to acknowledge his half-brothers, deny his mother’s shame, and count them as royal kinsmen. What this will do to the expectations of the several men who are in line to inherit the throne is beyond understanding. These Tudors will just add to the confusion around the throne. The king honours the Duke of Buckingham, who counts himself as the greatest duke of England, but favours Edmund Beaufort the Duke of Somerset above anyone else. And all the while his true heir is the only man not here and never welcomed at court: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York.

  I glance at the queen, who must be shamed by her failure to solve all this by producing a son and heir, but she is looking down at her folded hands, her eyelashes veiling her expression. I see Edmund Beaufort look quickly away from her.

  ‘His Grace is generous to the Tudor boys,’ I remark.

  She gives a little start at my words. ‘Oh, yes. Well, you know what he is like. He can forgive anyone anything. And now he is so afraid of the common people and of the York affinity that he wants to gather his family around him. He is giving the boys a fortune in lands and recognising them as his half-brothers.’

  ‘It is good for a man to have his family around him,’ I say cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, he can make brothers,’ she says, and the unspoken words ‘but not a son’ remain unsaid.

  As the winter nights become lighter and the mornings become golden rather than grey we receive great nws from Bordeaux where John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, four times the age of his pageboy, sweeps through the rich cities of Gascony, wins back Bordeaux and looks set to reclaim all the English lands. This sends the court into an ecstasy of confidence. They declare that first we will win back all of Gascony and then we will win back all of Normandy and Calais will be secure and Richard will be able to come home. Margaret and I are on the river walk in the gardens at Westminster, wrapped in our winter furs but feeling the spring sunshine on our faces, and looking at the first daffodils of the season.

  ‘Jacquetta, you are like a lovesick girl,’ she says suddenly.

  I jump. I had been looking at the river and thinking of Richard, over the sea in Calais; furious – I am sure – that he is not leading the campaign in Bordeaux. ‘I am sorry,’ I say with a little laugh. ‘I do miss him. And the children.’

  ‘He will be home soon,’ she assures me. ‘Once Talbot has won back our lands in Gascony, we can make peace again.’

  She takes my arm and walks beside me. ‘It is hard to be parted from people that you love,’ she says. ‘I missed my mother so much when I first came to England, I feared that I would never see her again, and now she writes to me that she is ill and I wish I could go to her. I wonder if she would have sent me away if she had known what my life would be like, if she had known that she would never see me again, not even for a visit.’

  ‘She knows at least that the king is kind to you, and a gentle husband,’ I say. ‘When the Greys asked me for Elizabeth my first thought was would he be kind to her. I think every mother would want that for her daughter.’

  ‘I so want to be able to tell her I am with child,’ she says. ‘That would make her happy, that is the one thing she wants – that everyone wants. But maybe this year. Perhaps one will come for me this year.’ Her eyelids sweep down and she smiles, almost to herself.

  ‘Oh, dear Margaret, I hope so.’

  ‘I am more contented,’ she says quietly. ‘I am even hopeful. You need not fear for me, Jacquetta. It is true that I was very unhappy this summer, and even at Christmas time; but I am more contented now. You were a good friend to warn me to take care. I listened to you, I thought about what you said. I know I must not be indiscreet, I have put the duke at a distance and I think everything is going to be all right.’

  There is something going on here – I don’t need the Sight to see it. There is a secret here, and a hidden joy. But I cannot complain of her behaviour. She may smile on the duke; but she is always at the side of the king. She does not linger with the duke in the gallery nor let him whisper in her ear any more. He comes to her rooms, as he always has done; but they talk of matters of state and there are always companions with him, and ladies with her. It is when she is alone or quiet among the crowd that I look at her and wonder what she is thinking, when she folds her hands so demurely in her lap and gazes down, her eyes veiled, smiling to herself.

  ‘And how is your little girl?’ she asks a touch wistfully. ‘Is she well and fat and pretty like all your babies always seem to be?’

  ‘Thank God she is strong and growing well,’ I say. ‘I called her Eleanor, you know. I sent them all s fairings and we had a couple of days of such fine weather when I was down with them. I took the older ones hunting and the younger ones sledging. I will go back to see them at Easter.’

  That night the queen dresses in her new gown of darkest red, a colour no-one has seen before, especially bought for her from the London merchants, and we go into the king’s presence chamber with the ladies behind us. She takes her seat beside the king and the little Beaufort heiress, Margaret, comes into the room, dressed far too ornately, paraded by her shameless mother. The child is wearing a gown of angelic white trimmed with red silk roses, as if to remind everyone that she is the daughter of John Beaufort, first Duke of Somerset, a great name but, God forgive him, not a great man. He was Edmund Beaufort’s older brother but he made a fool of himself in France and came home and died, so promptly and conveniently – just ahead of a charge of treason – that Richard says it was by his own hand and it was the only good thing he ever did for his family. This scrap of a girl with the great name and greater fortune is his daughter, and the niece of Edmund Beaufort.

  I see her staring at me and I smile at her. At once she flushes scarlet and beams. She whispers to her mother, obviously asking who I am, and her mother very rightly gives her a pinch to make her stand straight and silent, as a girl at court should do.

  ‘I am giving your daughter in wardship to my dearly loved half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor,’ the king says to the girl’s mother, the dowager duchess. ‘She can live with you, until it is time for her to marry.’

  Amusingly, the child looks up as if she has an opinion about this. When no-one so much as glances at her she whispers to her mother again. She is a dear little thing and so anxious to be consulted. It seems hard to me that she will be married off to Edmund Tudor and sent away to Wales.

  The queen turns to me and I lean forwards. ‘What do you think?’ Margaret asks.

  Margaret Beaufort is of the House of Lancaster, Edmund Tudor is the son of a queen of England. Any child they conceive will have an impressive lineage, English royal blood on one side, French royal blood on the other, both of them kin to the King of England.

  ‘Is the king making his brother over-mighty?’ the queen whispers.

  ‘Oh, look at her,’ I say gently. ‘She is a tiny little thing, and a long way from marriageable age. Her mother will keep her home for another ten years, surely. You will have half a dozen babies in the cradle before Edmund Tudor can wed or bed her.’

  We both look down the room at the girl whose little head is still bobbing up and down as if she wishes someone would speak to her. The queen laughs. ‘Well, I hope so, surely a little shrimp like that will never make a royal heir.’

  The next night I wait
for a quiet moment in the hour before dinner when the queen is dressed and the duke and king have not yet come to our rooms. We are seated before the fire, listening to the musicians. I glance at her for her nod of permission, and then draw my stool a little closer.

  ‘If you are waiting for a chance to tell me that you are with child again, you need not choose your time,’ she says mischievously. ‘I can see it.’

  I blush. ‘I’m certain it will be a boy, I am eating enough to make a man, God knows. I have had to let my belt out.’

  ‘Have you told Richard?’

  ‘He guessed, before he left.’

  ‘I shall ask the duke to let him come home. You will want him at home with you, won’t you?’

  I glance at her. Sometimes the almost annual evidence of my reliable fertility makes her wistful; but this time she is smiling, her joy for me is without shadow. ‘Yes. I would want him home, if the duke can spare him.’

  ‘I shall command it,’ she smiles. ‘The duke tells me he will do anything for me. It is a little request for a man who has promised me the moon.’

  ‘I will stay at court until May,’ I say. ‘And then after my confinement I will join you on the summer progress.’

  ‘Perhaps we won’t go very far this year,’ she says.

  ‘No?’ I am slow to grasp her meaning.

  ‘Perhaps I too will want an easy summer.’

  At last I understand her. ‘Oh Margaret, is it possible?’

  ‘I thought you had the Sight!’ she crows. ‘And here I am, sitting before you, and I think . . . I am almost certain . . . ’

  I clasp her hands. ‘I think so too, I see it now. I really do.’ There is something about her luminous skin and the curves of her body. ‘How long?’

  ‘I have missed two courses, I think,’ she says. ‘So I haven’t told anyone yet. What d’you think?’