The Lady of the Rivers (22 page)

‘You have the dower of a royal duchess, but you have chosen to be the woman of a squire. I think you will find they will want your dower. You may find you have to live as the wife of a squire. I only hope that in a few years’ time you still think you have made a good bargain.’

‘I hope you will help me,’ I say. ‘I am counting on you.’

He just sighs.

He is right. One thousand pounds in gold they demand from us, and they order Richard to return to his post at Calais.

Richard is aghast. ‘My God! A fortune! We will never raise it! It is the price of a house and an estate, it is greater than my father’s entire fortune. Greater than any inheritance I could hope for. Greater than anything I could win. They mean to ruin us. They are forcing us to part.’

I nod. ‘They are punishing us.’

‘They are destroying us!’

‘We can find the money,’ I say. ‘And we are banished from court, but we don’t care, dowe? We can go together to Calais?’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not taking you there. I’m not taking you into danger. The Earl of Suffolk has offered me a property where you can live. He has taken most of your wealth as a fine, and he is prepared to take the rest as a rent. He has said he will lease his manor at Grafton to us. It’s not much of a favour since we cannot afford to pay him. But he knows I want it. It is near my home, I have had my eye on it since I was a boy.’

‘I will sell my jewels,’ I say. ‘And books if we have to. I have lands that we can borrow on, some things that we can sell to raise the rent. This is the price of our life together.’

‘I have reduced you to the position of a squire’s wife with a nobleman’s debt,’ he says furiously. ‘You should hate me. I have betrayed you.’

‘How much do you love me?’ I counter. I take his hands in mine and I hold them to my heart. I can feel him catch his breath at my touch. He pauses and looks at me.

‘More than life itself, you know that.’

‘If you had to put a price on it?’

‘A king’s ransom. A fortune.’

‘Then consider, husband mine, that we have a bargain, for our marriage has cost us only a thousand pounds.’

His face lightens. ‘Jacquetta, you are my joy. You are worth tens of thousands.’

‘Then pack your things for we can leave court this afternoon,’ I say.

‘This afternoon? Do you want us to flee from disgrace?’

‘I want us to be at your home tonight.’

He hesitates for a moment and then his smile breaks out, as he realises what I am saying. ‘We will spend our first night together as a married couple? We will go to our bedroom as husband and wife? And tomorrow we will go to breakfast together openly? Ah, Jacquetta, this is the start of everything.’ He bows his head and kisses my hands. ‘I love you,’ he says again. ‘And please God, you will always think that you have a good bargain for our thousand pounds.’

GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,
AUTUMN 1436–1439

I do think it a good bargain. We raise the money for the fine by borrowing against my dower lands, and then we borrow more to buy the manor house at Grafton from the Earl of Suffolk. For all his sly smiles he does not refuse to sell to the disgraced duchess and her squire. He wants our friendship so that we can be his allies in the country as he gains power at court. Richard goes to Calais and prepares the garrison for a siege as my kinsman, the faithless Duke of Burgundy, marches against his former allies. The great lords of England, the Earl of Mortmain and the Duke of York, turn out for their country and Richard holds Calais for them. Finally Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, sets sail for Calais and earns much credit for the saving of the town, though, as my husband points out, the siege was already defeated before the king’s uncle came in with his standard flying.">

I don’t care. Richard’s courage has been demonstrated to all of England and nobody can doubt his honour. He has come through a siege and several raids without a scratch and returns to England a hero. My first child, the daughter that I had foretold, is born without difficulty when the hedge is bobbing white with May and the blackbirds are singing in the dusk, that first spring in the country. The next year comes our son and heir.

We call him Lewis, and I find I am entranced to have a boy of my making. He has very fair hair, almost silvery, but his eyes are as dark as the sky at night. The midwife who helps me for this, my second time, tells me that all babies’ eyes are blue and that both his hair colour and his eyes may change; but he seems to me a boy who is half-fairy with this angelic colouring. His little sister is still sleeping in the Woodville cherrywood crib and so at night I put them in together, side by side on their swaddling boards like pretty little dolls.

Richard says with satisfaction that I am a woman who has forgotten all about being a wife and a lover and that he is a miserably neglected man. He is joking though, and he revels in the beauty of our little daughter and in the growth and strength of our son. The next year I give birth to his sister, my Anne, and while I am confined with her, my father-in-law takes a fever and dies. It was a comfort to him that he lived long enough to learn that we had been forgiven by the king, and summoned back to court. Only with a daughter of just two, a boy of one year old and a new baby in the carved cradle, I am not very eager to go.

‘We will never earn enough to pay our debts, living in the country,’ my husband advises me. ‘I have the fattest cows in Northamptonshire, and the best sheep, but I do swear, Jacquetta, we will live and die in debt. You have married a poor man and should be glad that I don’t make you beg in your petticoat.’

I brandish the letter at him with the royal seal. ‘No, for see, we are commanded to court for the Easter feast, and I have another letter here from the king’s groom of the household asking if we have enough rooms for the king to stay with us on his summer progress.’

Richard all but blenches. ‘Good God, no, we cannot house the court. And we certainly cannot feed the court. Is the groom of the household run mad? What sort of house do they think we have?’

‘I will write and tell them we have nothing but a modest house, and when we go to court at Easter we must make sure they know it.’

‘But won’t you be glad to go to London?’ he asks me. ‘You can buy new clothes and shoes and all sorts of pretty things. Have you not missed the court and all of that world?’

I come around the table to stand behind his chair, lean over and put my cheek to his. ‘I shall be glad to be at court again, for the king is the source of all wealth and all patronage and I have two pretty daughters who will one day need to marry well. You are too good a knight to spend your time raising cattle, the king could have no more loyal advisor and I know they will want you to go to Calais again. But no, I have been happy here with you, and we will only go for a little while and come home again, won’t we? We won’t be courtiers, spending all our time there?’

‘We are the squire and his lady of Grafton,’ my husband declares. ‘Ruined by lust, up to our eyes in debt, and living in the country. This is where we belongong rutting animals with no money. They are our peers. This is where we should be.’

LONDON, SUMMER 1441

I told the truth when I said that I was happy at Grafton but my heart leaps with the most frivolous joy when the king sends the royal barge to take us down the river, and I see the high towers of Greenwich Castle and the new Bella Court that the Duke of Gloucester has built. It is so pretty and so rich, I cannot help but delight in coming to it as a favourite of the court and one of the greatest ladies in the land once more. The barge sweeps along as the drummers keep the oarsmen in time and then they shoulder their oars and the liveried boatmen on the pier catch the ropes and draw the barge alongside.

I am stepping down the drawbridge when I look up and see that the royal party has been walking beside the river and is now strolling to greet us. In front of them all is the king, a boy-king no longer; he is a young man of nearly twenty, and he comes confidently forwards and kisses me, as a kinsman, on both cheeks, and gives his hand to my husband. I see the company behind him surprised at the warmth of his welcome, and then they have to come forwards too. First the Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, my former brother-in-law, whom my first husband said would bear watching, and behind him comes the Duchess Eleanor. She walks slowly towards the pier, a woman exulting in her own beauty, and at first I see only the dazzle of vanity, but then I look again. At her heels is a big black dog, a huge creature, a mastiff or some sort of fighting dog. The moment I see it I could almost hiss, like a cat will hiss, setting its fur on end, and darkening its eyes. I am so distracted by the ugly dog that I let the duke take my hand and kiss my cheek and whisper in my ear, without hearing a word he says. As his lady, the Duchess Eleanor, comes close I find I am staring at her, and when she steps forwards to kiss me, I flinch from her touch as if she smells of the spittle of an old fighting dog. I have to force myself to step into her cold embrace, and smile as she smiles, without affection. Only when she releases me and I step back do I see that there is no black dog at her heels, and never was. I have had a flicker of a vision from the other world, and I know, with a hidden shudder, that one day there will be a black dog that runs up stone stairs in a cold castle and howls at her door.

As the months go on, I see that I am right to fear the duchess. She is everywhere at court, she is the first lady of the land, the queen in all but name. When the court is at Westminster Palace she lives in the queen’s apartments and wears the royal jewels. In procession she is hard on the heels of the king. She treats him with a treacly intimacy, forever laying her hand on his arm and whispering in his ear. Only his radiant innocence saves them from the appearance of conspiracy, or worse. Inevitably, as a dowager duchess of England, I am constantly in her company, and I know she does not like it when people compare us. When we go into dinner I walk behind her, during the day I sit with her ladies, and she treats me with effortless disdain, for she believes I am a woman who wasted the currency of her youth and beauty by throwing it away for love.