The Witch of Eye

by Mari Griffith

  ‘Married? Who has she married? When? She can’t possibly have married without your knowing ... without the King’s permission. She can’t possibly be married.’

  ‘Well, she is. It seems she has been married for a number of years. It must be the best-kept secret in the history of England.’

  ‘But Edmund Beaufort has married Eleanor Beauchamp, so who ...’ she left the sentence unfinished.

  ‘Oh, Edmund Beaufort has nothing to do with this. She must have let people assume she was interested in Beaufort as some sort of distraction.’

  ‘So, who ...’ Again her question hung in the air.

  ‘Does the name Owen Tudor mean anything to you?’

  Eleanor stopped and thought. There was no one by that name at court. No one she knew of anyway. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is he some foreign dignitary?’

  ‘Oh, he’s foreign, all right. He’s Welsh. One of those filthy, uncouth, war-mongering bastards from beyond the border. But he is certainly no dignitary. He’s her servant. Her Clerk of the Wardrobe, no less.’ Humphrey started laughing now. ‘I ask you – a clerk on her household staff! And she has married him! Has she gone mad? She must have gone mad! She must have been screaming for a man – any man – to pleasure her. To satisfy her carnal appetites. I knew it. Like mother, like daughter – and her mother was an absolute slut. Queen Isabeau was the greatest whore in Europe!’ His voice was rising, a note of hysteria in it.

  ‘Humphrey!’

  ‘Well, she was. Isabeau had her poor mad husband locked up and then hopped into bed with his brother, Louis. And Louis wasn’t the only one. It’s a fact. Everyone knows it. And, dear God, how many children did Isabeau have? Thirteen at the last count. She must have been screwing every night of the week!’

  Eleanor turned her face away from her husband. He had struck a raw nerve. ‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though she needed to wear mistletoe in her garter,’ she said in a small voice.

  Humphrey was suddenly contrite and he reached out to put his hand on her arm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my sweet Nell,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. That’s man’s talk, soldier’s talk. It has no place in a lady’s boudoir. I’m so sorry.’

  Eleanor managed a tight little smile as she gave her husband’s hand a forgiving pat. There was a question she had to ask him but not just yet because she dreaded hearing the answer.

  ‘It’s all right, Humphrey,’ she said. ‘Try not to upset yourself any further. I’m sure there’s something that can be done. There’s a law against dowager queens re-marrying, isn’t there?’

  ‘There is,’ said Humphrey. ‘I got it through Parliament myself when I thought she was behaving like a dockyard cat on heat with young Edmund Beaufort. Yes, there most certainly is a law and it deals very harshly with any man who presumes to marry a dowager queen without the express permission of His Highness the King.’

  ‘And the King knows nothing about this?’

  ‘No. Yes. Oh ... I don’t know. I expect he does. Everyone seems to know about it. Except me, of course. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. I’ll get Suffolk to deal with this Tudor fellow. He can send some of the big brutes in the royal guard to seize him and teach him a lesson he won’t forget. The Welsh bastard can kick his heels in Newgate for a couple of months. That will cure him of his ardour!’

  ‘Well, perhaps there’s no great harm done as long as ... as long as ...’ She hesitated. ‘Humphrey, this ... Tudor, and the Queen Catherine ... his wife ... do they have a child?’

  There, the question was out.

  ‘Oh, yes. A few. Well, I’m not sure how many, but there are certainly two boys. Five or six years old ... I don’t know – but that’s how long it’s been going on! They’ll have to be put away, of course, while we decide what to do with them.’

  ‘Put away?’

  ‘Oh, you know, a convent or something like that. Not the Tower anyway.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Poor, soft-hearted Nell. The little ones will come to no harm, if that’s what you’re worrying about.’

  It was decidedly not what she was worrying about. Far from it. She couldn’t give a tinker’s damn what happened to the children. All she knew was that Queen Catherine had succeeded in giving birth to two sons, something she herself would have sold her soul to do. But more than that, the boys were the King’s half-brothers and if anything should happen to him, it would not be difficult to establish that they were of the blood royal: they could even prove a threat to Humphrey’s own claim to the throne. So, the further the children were sent away, the better. The King might forget about them; he could be quite absent-minded.

  Humphrey would have to deal with the problem of the Queen’s children. For Eleanor, it had now become imperative for her to find a way of giving her husband a son as a matter of extreme urgency. If anything should happen to the King, his heir must have a legitimate heir of his own, for the sake of the dynasty.

  As soon as Humphrey had left the room and she was sure he was out of earshot, she picked up a little bell and rang it several times with increasing impatience. She paced the room, her hands clenched at her sides, her breath coming in short gasps until Sarah came hurrying into the room. Her face a mask of fury, Eleanor rounded on the girl, gripping her arm.

  ‘Sarah,’ she said, ‘go to the Eye estate at once and get me Mistress Jourdemayne. Now. This instant. Bring her back with you. It is very, very urgent that she attends me immediately.’

  As soon as her mistress’s back was turned, Sarah rolled her eyes to the ceiling at the prospect of yet another trip to Eybury farmhouse.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  February 1437

  Cardinal Henry Beaufort cherished his memories of the woman whose mortal remains were being laid to rest on a bitterly cold, grey morning. Harsh winter winds, blowing in off the leaden waters of the Thames, found their way under the great door of Westminster Abbey and cut like knives through even the warmest clothes: he felt grateful for his thick woollen hose and the sturdy leather boots on his feet, but his fingernails were blue with cold and his hands were almost too numb to hold his rosary.

  The fact that he had never married did not mean he was not an admirer of women, far from it, and the Dowager Queen Catherine whose coffin now lay on a catafalque below the high altar was one woman for whom he had always had a great affection.

  He first met her as a young bride when his nephew, King Henry V, brought her home to England after their wedding in France. He’d been instantly captivated by her beauty, her vitality and her quintessentially French charm. When custom dictated that her husband the King did not attend his wife’s coronation, it had been Bishop Beaufort who had been her guide and mentor for the occasion. Only sixteen short years ago, on a February day nearly as cold as this one, the Princess Catherine de Valois had been crowned Queen of England by Archbishop Henry Chichele in a solemn, dignified ceremony here in the Abbey, enthroned no more than a yard or two away from where her coffin now lay. The irony of that brought a lump to his throat. But he also remembered the sheer pleasure of sitting on her right at the sumptuous banquet which followed the coronation, enchanted by her attempts to express herself in English and captivated by her delight at seeing the edible sweet subtleties which decorated the high table in her honour. It had been on that day that she had begun to call him ‘My Lord Uncle’ and though he had been awarded a Cardinalate since then, her name for him had always been one of his most cherished titles.

  He doted on her and rejoiced when she gave birth to her husband’s son and heir. When she was widowed so pitifully soon afterwards, he mourned with her and did his best to offer her comfort and solace. He even allowed himself the small hope that she might find consolation in the arms of his nephew, Edmund, though that wasn’t to be. Nevertheless, they remained friends, even when she confided in him the potentially ruinous secret of her clandestine love for Owen Tudor. Seeing her from time to time in the years that followed, he rejoiced with her when she found happiness with the young Welshman and he patted their children’s he
ads with avuncular pride. He kept Catherine’s confidences for many years without ever once betraying her. She was delightful. He was beside himself with sorrow when she became another of the legion of women who had made the ultimate sacrifice in childbed. Life could be intolerably hard on women.

  Seated near Cardinal Beaufort among the official mourners at the funeral were the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Eleanor knew it would be bone-chillingly cold in the Abbey, so she had given some considerable thought to the mourning weeds she would wear for the occasion. For warmth, she had ordered a cloak of fine black worsted to be lined with coney but edged with miniver, aware that soft white fur near the face was very becoming. Though she would do her best to give the impression that she was enduring great sorrow, she made sure the hennin on her head, richly embroidered with beads of Whitby jet, had a veil which could be drawn across to hide her face, should her mask of sadness begin to slip.

  The royal mourners were seated close to the catafalque, which bore Queen Catherine’s coffin. Though she tried hard not to look at it, Eleanor’s eyes were inexorably drawn to the Queen’s funeral effigy, which lay on top of the coffin, a figure of hollowed-out wood, dressed simply in a square-necked red gown and with its hands joined in prayer. Wooden feet in gold-coloured slippers peeped out from under the hem of the gown and rested on a small carved lap dog. Under a jaunty coronet of base metal, a lifelike wig was nailed to the effigy’s head, but its painted blue eyes were dull, devoid of any expression. It looked very unlike the real Catherine, whose shrouded body lay hidden inside the coffin, embalmed with sweet-smelling herbs and unguents to disguise the odour of decaying flesh.

  Eleanor was disturbed by the death of an attractive, vibrant woman of her own age, lovely enough to have ensnared a king and charming enough to have enslaved a lover to warm the cold bed of her widowhood, a man with whom she then found a love deep and precious enough to run the risk of a secret marriage. Catherine’s beauty had brought her great joy and excitement in her lifetime.

  But no more. Death was the end of beauty, the end of opportunity, the end of love. Death was ugly and Eleanor would rather not be reminded of it.

  The Queen’s short life had not been without purpose: within two years of her first marriage, she had achieved all that was expected of her by producing a male heir to the English throne. Now, fifteen years later, a great scandal had emerged as it became known that the Queen had given birth to five other children, fathered by her lover Owen Tudor and born in secret. The first two children had been a girl then a disabled boy, neither of whom would have been any real threat to Eleanor’s ambitions. But then there had been two more boys, Edmund and Jasper, now six and five years old respectively, both sturdily healthy and growing fast. The last child was the sickly girl who had died with her mother in childbed, that blood-soaked sphere of pain and anxiety which Eleanor both craved and dreaded in equal measure.

  Duke Humphrey had ordered that the two healthy boys be dispatched like foundlings to the convent at Barking in Essex and put in the care of the Abbess. At least this meant they weren’t being given the opportunity to charm anyone at court. Eleanor prayed that their half-brother the King would forget their very existence. It was possible: he was often away in a daydream.

  King Henry was here in the Abbey, of course, Queen Catherine was his mother after all. He had seen very little of her since graduating from the nursery to the schoolroom, but he was doing his best to control his obvious distress. Otherwise, this funeral ceremony was a sham, thought Eleanor. Apart from the immediate royal family, most members of the congregation were here in the Abbey because they thought they should be. Hardly anyone present had known Queen Catherine in her last years. Not even the Queen’s husband, Owen Tudor, was there to mourn his wife: he had been incarcerated in Newgate jail since last October, at Humphrey’s command.

  It was just as well the whole dreary saga had come to its gloomy conclusion today. With luck, nothing more would be heard of the late Queen, her husband or her sons. Requiescant in pace.

  Dry-eyed, but with respectfully bowed heads, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester stood together as Abbot Harweden intoned the final prayer in the requiem mass. Standing behind them, Cardinal Beaufort felt a warm tear run down the crease alongside his cold nose and he wiped it away as Queen Catherine’s soul was committed to its eternal salvation and her earthly remains to their final resting place in the vault of the Lady Chapel.

  The Edward Bell in the tower began to ring out a single, desolate note.

  ***

  Borne on the easterly wind, the sombre tolling of the bell could be heard faintly a mile away at Eybury farmhouse. Working at her table, Margery Jourdemayne well knew who was being buried today – indeed there could not have been many people who didn’t know, since the royal court and the entire village of Westminster were still buzzing with gossip about the Dowager Queen’s secret love affair with her Clerk of the Wardrobe, their covert marriage and the children whose existence few people had known about until very recently.

  Standing opposite her mistress, Jenna crossed herself and prayed silently not only for the Queen but for Alice. She still remembered Alice in her prayers.

  Before the intrusion of the Edward Bell, Jenna had been crossing off the items on a list then packing them carefully into a coffer on the table. ‘The funeral bell sounds so sad,’ she said. ‘Poor woman. Do you know how old the Queen was, mistress?’

  ‘She must have been about thirty-five or thirty-six. Around the same age as the Duchess Eleanor, I believe.’

  ‘And did you ever see Her Highness?’

  ‘I did on one occasion, last summer at Greenwich, during a reception at La Pleasaunce which the Duke was giving to celebrate the Duchess’s birthday and his own victory at the siege of Calais.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know you attended the Duchess at Greenwich.’

  ‘I don’t, normally, but she asked me to help with waiting on the guests. So, yes, I did see Queen Catherine on that one occasion. She was a very fine-looking woman.’

  ‘But not one of your customers?’

  ‘No, never that. She didn’t need me to beautify her.’

  Jenna looked down at the coffer she was packing: it was nearly full of Margery’s expensive perfumes and beauty aids, among them toothpowder, brazilwood chips, tincture of myrrh, the marigold face cream, Carmelite water and a salve for the lips.

  ‘Not like the Duchess of Gloucester, then,’ she said.

  Margery allowed herself a wicked grin.

  ‘The Duchess of Gloucester is convinced she needs what I sell her and that suits me very well. As long as she wants the Duke in her bed and takes an interest in her appearance in order to keep him there, I will never be out of pocket. Though, to be truthful, she is a perfectly attractive-looking woman in her own right.’

  Jenna made no comment. Her respect for her mistress had been dealt a serious blow when she realised that Margery Jourdemayne was a liar and she was still uncertain about the morality of what her mistress was doing and the excessive profit she made. It cost Margery very, very little to make lotions, tinctures, and creams on her farmhouse table. Her ingredients came from her own physic garden or from the wild hedgerows around the farm. St John’s Wort, celandine, dandelions, thyme, elderflower, lavender, rosemary and many other plants all had their uses and Margery did a roaring trade with her face cream, made to a special recipe of her own which combined rose petals and beeswax. The alternative version she made for the exclusive use of the Duchess of Gloucester blended marigold flowers with the rose petals in combination with several other secret ingredients, including the root of the marsh mallow. It produced an even richer cream and now Her Grace would use nothing else.

  What set Margery’s preparations apart was the care she took in presenting her products for sale. Her creams were potted up into the prettiest little ceramic pots sealed with wax, while her lotions and tinctures were funnelled into elegant glass bottles with stoppers and finished off with bows of coloured ribbon
. They were a joy to use and graced the dressing table in many an elegant lady’s bedchamber. Margery bought her supply of combs, scissors, ear scoops, toothpicks and tweezers very cheaply from itinerant tinkers, then wrapped them carefully in leftover scraps of satin and lace from the royal sewing rooms and packaged them in individual small wicker baskets or boxes decorated with painted roses. These she sold on to the gentry, men and women, for ten times what she had paid the tinkers. She had no scruples about doing this: as she said, as long as people were vain, had faith in the efficacy of her products and enough money to pay the extortionate prices she charged, then they had only themselves to blame. Besides, she wanted the kind of life for William and herself that William’s brother Robert and his wife enjoyed in nearby Acton – and if she waited for William to make money, then she would have to wait until hell froze.

  ‘Her Grace has placed a large order this time,’ Jenna observed, wrapping a tablet of fine Bristol soap. ‘When does she want this delivered?’

  ‘Last week! You know what she’s like. Sarah is supposed to be collecting it this morning. She’s late, though; she should have been here by now. How far are you from finishing it?’

  ‘Nearly there, mistress. I just need to pot up one more jar of the special face cream.’

  ‘Good,’ Margery said. ‘Sarah isn’t normally late. She daren’t be, she says, because Her Grace worries. She’s constantly anxious and takes it out on her maid.’

  ‘She’s anxious? Why?’

  Margery paused in the act of pounding spices in a mortar and considered her answer. ‘She’s starting to panic, poor soul. At her age, she’s living on borrowed time. She’s beginning to lose her looks, not to mention her chances of childbearing.’