The Lady of the Rivers (12 page)

He smiles, he is pleased. ‘Well, that’s a good vision,’ he says, encouraged. ‘That’s a good glimpse of a safe and happy future. That’s good news. And best of all, we see she can do it.’

He puts out his arm and helps me to my feet. ‘So,’ he says with a triumphant smile to the alchemist, ‘I will bring her back tomorrow, after Mass, after she has broken her fast. Get a chair for her to sit on next time, and make the room ready for her. We will see what she can tell us. But she can do it, can’t she?’

‘Without a doubt,’ agrees the alchemist. ‘And I will have everything ready.’

He bows and goes back into the inner room, and Woodville picks up the rest of the candles and blows them out, and my lord straightens the mirror. I lean for a moment against an archway between one set of shelves and another, and my husband glances up and sees me.

‘Stand there.’ He gestures me to the centre of the arch, and watches as I obey him. I stand still, framed in the arch, wondering what he wants now. He is staring at me as if I were a picture or a tapestry myself, as if he sees me as an object, a new thing to be framed or translated or shelved. He narrows his eyes as if considering me as a vista, or a statue that he might have bought. ‘I am so glad that I married you,’ he says, and there is no affection in his voice at all but the satisfied tone of a man who has added something to his beautiful collection – and that at a good price. ‘Whatever it costs me, with Burgundy, with whoever, I am so glad that I married you. You are my treasure.’

I glance nervously at Richard Woodville who has heard this speech of acquisition; but he is busy throwing the cloth over the looking glass, and quite deaf.

Every morning my lord escorts me to the library and they seat me before the mirror and light the candles all around me, and ask me to look into the brightness and tell them what I see. I find I go into a sort of daze, not quite asleep but almost dreaming, and sometimes I see extraordinary visions on the swimming silver surface of the mirror. I see a baby in a cradle, I see a ring shaped like a golden crown dangling from a dripping thread, and one morning I turn from the mirror crying out, for I see a battle, and behind it another battle, a long lane of battles and men dying, dying in mist, dying in snow, dying in a churchyard.

‘Did you see the standards?’ my husband demands as they press a glass of small ale into my hand. ‘Drink. Did you see the standards? You said nothing clearly. Did you see where the battles were taking place? Could you tell the armies one from another?’

I shake my head.

‘Could you see what town? Was it anywhere you recognise? Come and see if you can point out the town on the map. Do you think it is happening right now, or is it a vision from the future that will come?’

He drags me to the table where the little world of France is laid before me and I look, dazed, at the patchwork of ownership and roll of the hills. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘There was a mist and an army forcing their way uphill. There was snow and it was red with blood. There was a queen with her horse at a forge and they were putting the horseshoes on backwards.’

He looks at me as if he would like to shake some sense out of me. ‘This is no good to me, girl,’ he says, his voice very low. ‘I can get cursed in any Saturday market. I need to know what is going to happen this year. I need to know what is going to happen in France. I need names of towns and the numbers of rebels. I need to know in detail.’

Dumbly, I look back at him. His face is suffused with darkness in his frustration with me. ‘I am saving a kingdom here,’ he says. ‘I need more than mist and snow. I did not marry you for you to tell me about queens with their horseshoes on back to front. What next? Mermaids in the bath?’

I shake my head. Truly, I know nothing.

‘Jacquetta, I swear, you will be sorry if you defy me,’ he says with quiet menace. ‘This is too important for you to play the fool.’

‘Perhaps we should not overtax her?’ Woodville suggests, addressing the bookshelves. ‘Perhaps every day is too much for her. She is only young and new to the work. Perhaps we should train her up to it, like a little eyas, a young falcon. Perhaps we should release her to ride and walk in the mornings, and only have her scry perhaps once a week?’

‘Not if she has a warning!’ the duke breaks out. ‘Not if it is now! She cannot rest if we are in danger. If this battle in mist and this battle in snow is going to be fought this winter in France, we need to know now.’

‘You know that the Dauphin has not the arms or the allies for it to be now.’ Woodville turns to him. ‘It cannot be a warning of now, it will be a fearful dream of the future. Her head is filled with fears of war, and we ourselves have frightened her. We have put the visions in her mind. But we need to clear her head, we need to give her some peace so that she can be a clean stream for us. You bought her’ – he stumbles and corrects himself – ‘You found her unspoiled. We must take care not to muddy the waters.’

‘Once a month!’ the alchemist suddenly remarks. ‘As I said at the start, my lord, she should be speaking when her element is on the rise. On the eve of the new moon. She is a being of the moon and of water, she will see most clearly and speak most clearly when the moon is in the ascendant. She should work on those days, under a rising moon.’

‘She could come in the evening, by moonlight.’ My husband thinks aloud. ‘That m="0lp.’ He looks critically at me, as I lean back in the chair, my hand on my throbbing forehead. ‘You’re right,’ he says to Woodville. ‘We have asked too much of her, too soon. Take her out riding, take her down by the river. And we set off for England next week, we can go by easy stages. She’s pale, she needs to rest. Take her out this morning.’ He smiles at me. ‘I am not a hard task-master, Jacquetta, though there is much to be done and I am in a hurry to do it. You can have some time at your leisure. Go to the stables, you will see I have left a surprise for you there.’

I am so relieved to be out of the room that I don’t remember to say ‘thank you’, and only when the door is closed behind us do I start to be curious.

‘What does my lord have for me in the stables?’ I ask Wood ville as he follows, half a step behind me, down the circular stair from the gallery to the inner courtyard, and as we walk across the cobbles, past the armoury to the stable yard. Menservants carrying vegetables to the kitchens and butchers with great haunches of beef slung over their shoulders fall back before me and bow. The milkmaids coming in from the fields with buckets swinging from their yokes drop down in a curtsey so low that their pails clatter on the cobbles. I don’t acknowledge them; now I hardly see them. I have been a duchess for only a few weeks and already I am accustomed to the exaggerated bows that precede me wherever I go, and the reverent murmur of my name as I walk past.

‘What would be your greatest wish?’ Woodville asks me. He at any rate does not serve me in awestruck silence. He has the confidence born of being at my husband’s right hand since he was a boy. His father served the English King Henry V, and then my husband the duke, and now Woodville, raised in the duke’s service, is the most trusted and most beloved of all the squires, commander of Calais, trusted with the keys to France.

‘A new litter?’ I ask. ‘One with golden curtains and furs?’

‘Perhaps. Would you really want that more than anything else?’

I pause. ‘Does he have a horse for me? A new horse of my very own?’

He looks thoughtful. ‘What colour horse would you like best?’

‘A grey!’ I say longingly. ‘A beautiful dappled grey horse with a mane like white silk, and dark interesting eyes.’

‘Interesting?’ He chokes on his laughter. ‘Interesting eyes?’

‘You know what I mean, eyes that look as if the horse can understand you, as if she is thinking.’

He nods. ‘I do know what you mean, actually.’

He gives me his arm to guide me round a cart laden with pikes; we are passing the armoury, and the weapons master is counting in a new delivery with a tally stick. Hundreds, thousands of pikes are being unloaded, the campaign season is starting again. No wonder my husband sits me before the scrying mirror every day to ask me where is the best place to mount our attack. We are at war, constantly at war, and none of us has ever lived in a country at peace.

We go through the archway to the stables and Woodville steps back to see my face as I scan the yard. Each of the horses of household has a stall facing south so the mellow stone is warmed through the day. I see my husband’s four great war horses, their heads nodding over the door. I see Woodville’s strong horse for jousting and his other horses for hunting and riding messages, and then I see, smaller than any of them, with bright ears that flick one way and another, the perfectly shaped head of a grey horse, so bright in colour that she is almost like silver in the sunshine of the yard.

‘Is that mine?’ I whisper to Woodville. ‘Is that for me?’

‘That is yours,’ he says almost reverently. ‘As beautiful and as high-bred as her mistress.’

‘A mare?’

‘Of course.’

I go towards her, and her ears point to listen to my footsteps and my cooing voice as I come close. Woodville puts a crust of bread into my hand and I step up to her and take in the dark liquid eyes, the beautifully straight face, the silvery mane of the horse that I described, here before me, as if I had performed magic and wished her into being. I stretch out my hand and she sniffs, her nostrils wide, and then she lips the treat from my hand. I can smell her warm coat, her oaty breath, the comfortable scent of the barn behind her.

Woodville opens the stable door for me and without hesitation I step inside. She shifts a little to make room for me, and turns her head and sniffs at me, the pockets of my gown, my belt, my trailing sleeves, and then my shoulders, my neck and my face. And as she sniffs me, I turn to her, as if we are two animals coming together. Then slowly, gently, I reach out my hand and she droops her head for my caress.

Her neck is warm, her coat silky, the skin behind her ears is tender and soft, she allows me gently to pull the mane on her poll, to stroke her face, and then she raises her head and I touch her flared nostrils, the soft delicate skin of her muzzle, her warm muscled lips, and hold, in my cupped hand, the fat curve of her chin.

‘Is it love?’ Woodville asks quietly from the doorway. ‘For it looks like love from here.’

‘It is love,’ I breathe.

‘Your first love,’ he confirms.

‘My only love,’ I whisper to her.

He laughs like an indulgent brother. ‘Then you must compose a poem and come and sing to her like a woman troubadour, a trobairitz. But what is your fair lady’s name?’

I look thoughtfully at her, as she moves quietly away from me and takes a mouthful of hay. The scent of the meadow comes from the crushed grasses. ‘Mercury,’ I say. ‘I think I’ll call her Mercury.’

He looks a little oddly at me. ‘That’s not such a good name. The alchemists are always talking of Mercury,’ he says. ‘A shape-shifter, a messenger from the gods, one of the three great ingredients of their work. Sometimes Mercury is helpful, sometimes not, a partner to Melusina, the water goddess who also changes her form. A messenger that you have to employ in the absence of any other; but not always reliable.’

I shrug my shoulders. ‘I don’t want more alchemy,’ I insist. ‘Not in the stable yard as well as everywhere else. I shall call her Merry but she and I will know her true name.Is it l

‘I will know too,’ he says; but I have already turned my back on him to pull out wisps of hay to give to her.

‘You don’t matter,’ I observe.