Eleanor was glad of the warmth from a small pile of logs burning in the hearth because although the incessant rain of recent weeks had finally stopped, the air was unseasonably cool. She gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Are you quite comfortable, Your Grace?’ Abbot Kyrton inquired. ‘Are you warm enough? I can always call for more logs for the fire.’
‘No. No, thank you,’ Eleanor replied. ‘I’m not really cold, just upset by the events of this afternoon.’
‘I imagine it was a very distressing experience for you, Your Grace, to have been accused of crimes of this nature.’
‘It was, very distressing. But what troubles me, perhaps more than anything at the moment, is ... is the fear that I have unintentionally implicated someone else.’
‘Really? And might I enquire who that is? Only if you wish to tell me, of course,’ he added hurriedly. Then he smiled at her. ‘I assure you, Your Grace, I will respect your confidences equally as much in my dining room as I would in the confessional!’
Eleanor waited until her porringer had been filled with a helping of civet of hare from a large tureen. The tantalising aroma of onions in the stew made her realise how very hungry she was. While the Abbot was being served, she took a slice of bread and buttered it generously.
He looked enquiringly at her. ‘Would you like to tell me who it is?’
Eleanor waited until she was sure that the young novice who was serving at table was safely out of earshot. ‘She is the wife of one of your tenants on the manor farm, a man by the name of William Jourdemayne.’
‘Ah, yes. I know him, of course. A most conscientious tenant. He seems to run the place very well. I know of his wife by reputation, but I haven’t met her since I inherited responsibility for the manor farm from Abbot Harweden. She has not been much in evidence on those occasions when I have visited La Neyte.’
‘Her name is Margery. She is a clever woman, skilled at making cures for all manner of ills. Her tinctures and decoctions are most effective and the ladies of the court very often buy her creams and lotions, too. And not only the ladies: she often sells small items to the gentlemen.’
‘So she’s by way of being what you would call a business woman, then, rather than discharging her duties as a good wife to her husband?’
‘Well, yes, in a way. Yes, I suppose she is.’
‘And how is she involved in this case?’ he asked.
With a sigh, Eleanor answered. ‘I have made the mistake of buying some of her wares in the past and now the King’s Council is trying to prove she’s some sort of wise woman and that I am in league with her.’
Abbot Kyrton looked enquiringly at her over the rim of his spoon. ‘And is she?’
‘Is she what? A wise woman? Well, perhaps.’
‘And are you, Your Grace? In league with her, that is?’
Eleanor thought very hard before replying. ‘As I said, I have purchased some of her lotions and so on in the past. Oh, and a little tooth tincture. It’s not such a dreadful thing to have done. And I have admitted it.’
Thoughtfully, the Abbot chewed on a mouthful of bread. He needed to choose his words with care. The Duchess was upset enough already. He had no desire to make things worse.
‘The problem as I see it, Your Grace, is that wise women are very often accused of being witches. And if the Council can lay that accusation at Mistress Jourdemayne’s door, then not much can be done to help her.’
‘But they’d have to prove it!’
‘If they want to prove it, they will. It won’t be difficult. As I say, I know of Mistress Jourdemayne’s reputation and the accusation of sorcery that was once made against her. But if she is still known in the village as a wise woman, it’s only a short step to a second accusation of witchcraft. And she won’t be shown much leniency a second time.’
‘But I still don’t see how they can prove ...’
‘Believe me, Your Grace, I have read the scriptures in great detail during the course of a lifetime of study and I can think of at least two Biblical references which could be quoted in support of that accusation. You must resign yourself to that, Your Grace. I’m sorry.’
Eleanor put her spoon down on the table beside her porringer. She had lost her appetite.
***
Jenna didn’t expect to find William immediately. The whole demesne extended for well over a thousand acres, from the boundary of Knightsbridge village in the north to the Westbourne stream in the west, and south to the banks of the Thames. He could be anywhere, but since the working day was all but over, the chances were that he’d be in the farmhouse kitchen. He was, but he was not alone. Robin Fairweather was with him.
William was on his feet the moment he saw her.
‘Jenna! Thank God! My dearest girl, I’ve been so worried.’
Surprised at seeing Robin, Jenna instinctively shied away from William’s embrace. He glanced back over his shoulder at Robin.
‘It’s all right. Robin knows how it is. He’s known for a long time. I had to tell someone, Jenna. I’d have gone mad if I hadn’t.’
‘And I think it’s high time you two had some time to yourselves,’ said Robin, smiling as he got up from the table. ‘You have a lot of catching up to do. Jenna, how are you? It’s good to see you.’
‘Hello, Robin, it’s good to see you, too. But you’re late with this drove, aren’t you? You’re usually earlier than this.’
Robin shrugged. ‘Weather’s been bad,’ he said.
‘I’ve had to let the wheat crop stand for the same reason,’ William added. ‘It’s been too wet to cut.’
‘But now,’ Robin said, hooking his finger in the collar of his jerkin and swinging it over his shoulder, ‘I have to go and make sure the girls are properly milked and bedded down for the night. So I’ll leave you to it. C’mon, Mallow. Work to do!’ The old cattle dog, dozing under the table, struggled a little in getting to her feet yet still wagged her tail in anticipation.
‘You’ve never worried that much about them before!’ William laughed, his arm tightly around Jenna’s waist.
‘Who? The girls? I always worry about them! Jenna knows that. Besides, if I don’t go and join the other men in the barn, they’ll have finished the ale before I get there.’
‘Could be there’s a bit of a barn dance going on,’ said William.
‘Oh, yes, there will be. And you can sometimes meet a nice class of girl at a barn dance,’ he added, with a broad wink at Jenna.
As the door closed behind Robin, she let herself relax within the circle of William’s arms, her head against his shoulder. After a long moment, he raised her chin and looked into her face.
When he bent his head and kissed her, it was the most overwhelming, melting moment of her entire life. He had kissed her before, of course, fleetingly on Twelfth Night with a kiss as light as thistledown. Under the oak tree beside Willow Walk, when he confessed his love for her, he had kissed her with desperation, urgency, every muscle of his lean body tensed in the moment. Then, the last time they were together in this very kitchen and realised the gravity of their situation, their kiss of pure despair had changed, somehow, into a mute declaration of solidarity, each with the other.
Now the kiss was one of recognition, of new beginnings, of assent and avowal, the first real kiss of the rest of their lives together. They both knew that and, equally, they both knew what must happen next. It was as inevitable as dawn after darkness.
‘Come,’ said William, ‘it can’t be here.’
Taking her hand, he led the way towards the stable at the far end of the farm yard and up the stone steps to the hay loft. A few late bees still droned among the cornflowers in the wheat field and from the big barn came the muted sounds of music and laughter, all but drowning out the distant, plaintive call of a curlew from the river.
‘Will anyone find us up here?’ Jenna’s eagerness was tinged with anxiety.
‘No, they’re far too busy enjoying themselves in the barn,’ he said, pulling her down o
nto the warm hay, still fragrant after the heat of the day. ‘Come, my sweeting’ he said. ‘We can’t wait any longer.’
She responded to him joyously, loosening her kirtle and her shift, pulling the coif off her head and letting her dark hair cascade freely over her bare breasts. Lying on her back in the hay, she smiled up at him as he leaned on his elbow, gently brushing her hair away from her face. Suddenly he frowned.
‘Dear God, Jenna, what happened to your ear?’
Instantly, her hand flew up to cover her puffball ear. She rarely thought about it these days unless she occasionally misheard something someone said. She felt her skin reddening.
‘Oh, it’s nothing ... it’s just...’
‘Did someone hit you?’
‘Yes, but ... but it was a long time ago. Really, I hardly remember...’
‘Poor Jenna, my poor, poor girl. But don’t worry, my sweet. No one will ever hurt you again.’ William held her close, making soothing, crooning sounds, conscious of her bare breasts against his chest.
So, Robin had been right when he said there’d been a cruel husband in her background and here was the proof of it. But if Jenna chose not to tell him that, then he couldn‘t tell her she was a widow. And in any case, he himself still had a wife. Sometime, some day in the future when they had come through this nightmare together, there would be time for explanations, for forgiveness and for forgetting. But that time was not now. Now he stood on the threshold of something he had long dreamed of, something wondrous and beautiful. He wanted to make love to this woman as he had never wanted anything else in his life but, savouring the moment, he kissed her just once more before he did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
August 1441
‘You two are getting to be my most regular customers!’ Annie the alewife called out as she spotted John Virley and William Woodham coming through the door of the tavern. Annie, wearing her usual greasy apron, was standing behind a table with two other women, dispensing ale from a tall jug.
‘You’re not complaining, are you, you old quean?’ William Woodham roared over the heads of a few dozen noisy drinkers.
‘No, of course I’m not!’ she replied with a raucous laugh as they pushed through the crowd towards her. ‘Your money’s the same colour as everyone else’s. What’ll it be, boys?’
‘The usual,’ said Woodham. ‘But make sure it’s your best ale this time, Annie, not the cat’s piss you gave us last time.’
‘Cat’s piss!’ cried Annie indignantly. ‘Well, you drank enough of it as I recall, so it can’t have been that bad!’
‘Sorry, my sweet,’ Woodham teased her, blowing kisses in her direction. ‘I meant nectar of the gods, not cat’s piss. Come on then, hurry it up.’
Once they’d been served, the two men took their ale over to a bench near the small window overlooking Fleet Street and sat down.
‘So, where does having Canon Hume locked up in the Tower leave you?’ Virley asked when his fingers were contentedly curled around the handle of his tankard. ‘Are you having any time to yourself?’
‘Not on your life’s breath! I never seem to stop going back and forth, fetching and carrying everything he needs,’ said Woodham. ‘He’s a bad-tempered fellow at the best of times and he’s bringing a new meaning to the word “demanding”. He’s always demanding something, his books, a change of clothes, a new quill pen ... anything you can think of. Seems to spend most of his time writing letters.’
‘So he’s allowed visitors?’ asked Virley, genuinely interested.
‘Only one. And that’s me. Someone has to take things in for him, food mainly. The food in the Tower is disgusting: slops and frumenty. You wouldn’t feed it to the pigs. Actually, I have to look after all the poor bastards,’ he added. ‘Bolingbroke has no one to visit him and neither does Canon Southwell.’
‘He’s just plain Master Southwell again now, isn’t he? At least, that’s what they’re saying in Westminster.’
‘Oh, yes, he’s lost his job all right. Seems to have broken him completely. He’ll never be a bishop now.’
‘Aye, he was always ambitious,’ said Virley. He was silent for a moment, recalling the familiar sight of Thomas Southwell strutting around the monastery at Westminster with his rotund stomach preceding him, treating the likes of Virley with barely concealed distain and yet fawning sycophantically over anyone more senior in the church hierarchy. There was a pitiful transparency about him.
Virley had never liked Southwell and yet he felt sorry for the man. Though he himself had never cherished any serious ambitions within the church, he could well understand someone who aspired to wear a mitre. A bishop was someone with great authority, someone important, to be looked up to and respected, and if that’s what had motivated Thomas Southwell, then was it such a bad thing?
‘Perhaps I’ll come with you the next time you visit Southwell,’ he said to Woodham. ‘I do know him and I know how it feels to be a failed cleric. We‘re two of a kind in that. So I feel a bit sorry for him.’
‘Please yourself,’ Woodham said. ‘I‘ll be going there tonight. You‘re welcome to come with me if you want to. By the way, you never told me what was the cause of your fall from grace. Women, was it?’
‘Aye, mostly. One in particular. She’s involved in this case, too. That’s why I’m interested.’
‘Not Margery Jourdemayne?’
‘Yes, the Witch of Eye. And she really is a witch. I hate the woman. Did you never hear about our extended stay at Windsor Castle?’
‘You and Margery Jourdemayne?’
‘Yes. In the dungeons. Imprisoned. The Jourdemayne woman, me and a Grey Friar called John Ashwell. A nice old man. Ashwell thought we could all learn from each other about aspects of healing and we did, to start with. She turned out to be a right bitch, though, if a damned attractive one. Could have given a man a good time.’
‘And you wanted her to?’
‘Yes. Oh yes, at one time. She was a good-looking woman. Clever, too. There’s not much she doesn’t know about plants and that sort of knowledge is always useful. She’d have made a good apothecary.’
‘But she’s a woman.’
‘Exactly. She was good at image magic, too, and thief magic. And she’d find anything you’d lost. It was uncanny. Ashwell was fascinated by her.’
‘So were you, by the sound of it.’
‘Only to the extent of getting her into bed.’
‘But you never managed...’
‘No. Never. And now I wouldn’t touch the bitch with a barge pole. But she’ll pay for getting me into trouble, you can bet on it.’
Startled by the venom in Virley’s voice, William paused for a moment, then said: ‘Tell me about her image magic. Did she make wax models?’
‘She was very skilful at it. She could fashion anything out of wax – flowers, manikins, poppets, you name it, the Witch of Eye could make it. And she often did.’
Woodham was thoughtful for a moment. That would explain the lump of wax in the willow basket he had found on Bolingbroke’s shelf. He wondered whether it was time to share the information.
***
The King was pleased to see that sunlight dappled the waters of the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster, in stark contrast to the howling wind and rain that had greeted his last visit to London.
He recalled with horror his meeting on that occasion with his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort and he still felt overwhelmingly grateful for his advice. It had been a great shock for the King to realise that not all his subjects viewed him with the loyalty and cordial love he had been led to expect of them. More than anything, it upset him to think that one of his least loyal subjects was his uncle’s wife, the woman he had been happy to call his aunt, though he’d always felt slightly unnerved by her coquettish mannerisms and her studied allure.
During the past three weeks at Sheen, he’d had a chance to consider the situation and, though he could now only think of the Duchess of Gloucester with something akin to dread,
he knew he would be expected to judge the situation impartially. He must mingle firmness with consideration; that was what a wise king would do. He was grateful for the support he was being given by the members of the Council, but what he really wanted was their approval.
He looked at them now, solemnly convened in the big meeting room in the Palace of Westminster and was comforted by the presence of Cardinal Beaufort, who always seemed to him to be the voice of wisdom and authority. Seated next to him was Cardinal Kemp and here too were the earls of Huntingdon, Northumberland and Stafford, who had been part of the earlier investigation into the case. Lords Hungerford and Fanhope were sitting together while the Mayor of London, Robert Clopton, sat with a group of aldermen. All eyes were watching the King intently, waiting for him to address them.
‘My Lords,’ he said, ‘we live in trying times. So let me begin this meeting by giving you some good news. As you already know, it appears that my uncle’s wife, Her Grace the Duchess of Gloucester, commissioned her advisers to read my horoscope because, she claimed, she was concerned for my failing health. Naturally, I was more than a little alarmed by this, particularly since they predicted that a terminal decline, during the months of May and June this year, would culminate in my death from melancholia.’
The King looked up and scanned the impassive faces around the table. Not one of the noble lords looked likely to react until he had said something positive. He swallowed nervously before he began to speak again.
‘Today, my Lords, is the ninth day of August – and I am still alive!’
There was a gale of relieved laughter and some spontaneous applause. Smiling now, the King held up his hand.
‘Moreover, I am in the best of health and I would like to thank you all for your support.’ The atmosphere had lightened considerably.
The King went on: ‘I am also grateful to my own learned advisers, Sir John Somerset and Master John Langdon of Cambridge from whom I commissioned an alternative horoscope, on the advice of my esteemed great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort. These two learned gentlemen have put their extensive knowledge to work on my behalf. Their expertise is clearly greater than the poor skills of the Duchess’s advisers and I am told that, with God’s blessing, I will be among you for some considerable time to come.’ He bent his head and crossed himself with due piety. All the other men present did the same and a quiet rumble of approval rippled around the table.
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