The Lady of the Rivers (24 page)

Within half an hour the palace is barring its doors and windows and calling it a witch’s wind that blows death down with rain. Within a day the young king has announced that his aunt the duchess may not come into his presence. The Oxford scholar, the friend of my first husband who came to visit us at Penshurst, is questioned by the council and confesses to heresy and magic. They put him on show, like a bear to be baited. Poor Roger Bolingbroke, a scholar for all his life, a man of learning with a great love for the mysteries of the world and the stars, is put on a stage, like a scaffold, at St Paul’s Cross in London, while a sermon is preached against him and against all witches and warlocks, necromancers and heretics who threaten the king’s life and his peace, who crowd into his festering city, who seek to enter his ports, who hide themselves in the country villages and do acts of malice, small and great. It is declared that there are thousands of evil men and women, conjuring with black arts to harm the king: herbalists, wise women, liars, heretics, murderers. The king knows they are out there, plotting against him in their malevolent thousands. Now he believes he has found a plot at the heart of his court, at the heart of his dangerously ambitious family.

We all parade around Bolingbroke, circling him and staring at his shame as if he were an animal brought back from the coast of Africa, some new sort of beast. He keeps his eyes down so that he cannot see the avid faces, and need not recognise his former friends. The man who has spent his life in study, thinking about the harmonious natuainhe world, sits on a painted chair wearing a paper crown, surrounded by his equipment and his books as if he were a Fool. They have his geomancy board laid on the ground before his feet, and a set of candles specially carved. They have some charts showing the positions of the planets, and the horoscope that they say he drew up for the duchess, at her request. They have a little model of the earth and the planets moving around it. They have brass moulds for casting figures, they have a still for making liquids, and the wax trays used for drawing the perfume of flowers. Worst of all, at his feet is a horrible little creature of wax, like a miscarried rabbit.

I shrink back when I see it, and Richard puts a strong arm around my waist. ‘Don’t look at it,’ he advises me.

I look away. ‘What was it?’

‘It was a wax image of the king. It is supposed to have a little crown on its head and that golden thread is the sceptre and the little bead is the orb.’

The face is distorted, the feet are formless. I can see the outline of the cape and the dots to show the markings of ermine, but the head is almost melted away. ‘What have they done to it?’

‘They heated it before a fire so that it would melt and run away. It would make the king’s strength flow from him too. They meant to destroy him as the image melted away.’

I shudder. ‘Can’t we go now?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘We have to be here to show our revulsion at these crimes.’

‘I am revolted. I am so revolted I want to go.’

‘Keep your head up. Keep walking. You, of all people, have to be seen to be an enemy of this sort of work.’

‘Me of all people?’ I fire up. ‘This is so disgusting it makes me sick.’

‘They are saying that the Duchess Eleanor got her husband the duke to marry her with a love potion, so that he could not resist her. They are saying you did the same when you were a girl and my lord duke was a man broken-hearted at the loss of his wife Anne.’

I shudder, averting my eyes from the melted wax poppet. ‘Richard . . . ’

‘I shall keep you safe,’ he swears. ‘You are my lady and my love. I shall keep you safe, Jacquetta. You will never look for me, and find me gone.’

We come back from the shaming of Bolingbroke to find the duchess’s rooms are empty, the door thrown open to her privy chamber, her clothes chests overturned, her cupboards ransacked, her jewellery boxes missing, and the woman vanished.

‘Where is the duchess?’ my husband demands of her maid in waiting.

She shakes her head, she is crying unstoppably. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ is all she can say.

‘God save us, the child is an idiot,’ Richard snaps. ‘You ask her.’

I take her by the shoulders. ‘Ellie, tell me, did they arr. Her Grace?’

She dips a curtsey. ‘She ran, Your Grace. She’s run into sanctuary. She says they will kill her to punish her husband, she says they will destroy him through her. She says it is a wicked plot against him that is going to be the ruin of her. She says Cardinal Beaufort will tear them both down.’

I turn to my husband. ‘Sanctuary?’

His face is grim. ‘Yes, but she is mistaken. That won’t save her.’

‘They can’t say she is a witch, if she is hiding on holy ground and claiming the safety of the Church.’

‘Then they’ll accuse her of being a heretic,’ he says. ‘A heretic can’t be protected by the Church. So if she’s claimed sanctuary they’ll charge her with heresy; it’s the only way to get her out. Before this they might have charged her with forecasting. Now they’ll accuse her of heresy. And heresy is a worse crime than forecasting. She’s put herself in a worse place.’

‘The law of men always puts women in a bad place!’ I flare up in anger.

Richard says nothing.

‘Should we go away?’ I ask him very quietly. ‘Can we go home to Grafton?’ I look around the wreckage of the room. ‘I don’t feel safe here. Can we go?’

He grimaces. ‘We can’t go now. It looks like guilt if we go, just as she looks as if she admits guilt by hiding in sanctuary. I think we are better off staying here. At least we can get a ship to Flanders from here, if we need to.’

‘I can’t leave the children!’

He pays no attention. ‘I wish to God your father was still alive, you could have gone on a visit to him.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘You stay here. I shall go and see William de la Pole the Earl of Suffolk. He’ll tell me what’s going on in the council.’

‘And what shall I do?’

‘Wait here,’ he says grimly. ‘Open these rooms and treat them like your own. Behave as if nothing were wrong. You are the first lady of the kingdom now, the only royal duchess left. Order the ladies to tidy the place up and then have them sew with you, and get someone to read from the Bible. Go to chapel this evening. Parade your innocence.’

‘But I am innocent,’ I say.

His face is dark. ‘I don’t doubt that she will say the same.’

She does not say the same. They bring Roger Bolingbroke before her with the horoscope that she commanded he cast for her, with the magical instruments that were the tools of his trade as an explorer of the unknown realms, with the misshapen wax that they say is a melted image of the king, and she confesses to witchcraft and offences against the church. She admits that she has ‘long used witchcraft with the Witch of Eye’ and then they tell her that the Witch of Eye has been under arrest since the night of the witch’s wind.

‘Who is the Witch of Eye?’ I ask Richard in a hushed whisper, late at night with the curtains of the bed drawn around us/di height="0">

‘Margery Jourdemayne,’ he says, his brow knitted with worry. ‘Some practising witch, who was taken up for her crimes once before now. Comes from the village of Eye. She is known to the Church as a witch, known to everyone as a witch.’

I gasp in horror.

He looks at me. ‘For the love of God, tell me that you don’t know her.’

‘Not as a witch.’

He closes his eyes briefly in horror. ‘What do you know of her?’

‘I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, as my lord commanded, I swear to you, and I would swear to the court. I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, and she did nothing at Penshurst but plan the herb garden with me, and tell me when the herbs should be cut and when they should be sown. I didn’t know she was a witch.’

‘Did my lord command you to see her?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Do you have that under his seal? Did he write the order?’

I shake my head. ‘He just sent her to me. And you saw her. That time in the stable yard when you came with the message from Luxembourg, and she was leaving with the wagon.’

Richard clenches his hands into fists. ‘I can swear that my lord commanded that she serve you . . . but this isn’t good, it’s not good. But perhaps we can glide over this. Perhaps nobody will bring it up, if it was just making a herb bed. At least you never consulted her. You have never ordered her to attend you . . . .’

I glance away.

He groans. ‘No. Oh no. Tell me, Jacquetta.’

‘I took a tincture to prevent a child. You knew about that.’

‘The herbs? That was her recipe?’

I nod.

‘You told nobody?’

‘No-one but you.’

‘Then nobody will know. Anything else she made for you?’

‘Later . . . a drink to get a child.’

He checks as he realises that this was the conception of our daughter, Elizabeth, the baby that forced him into marriage. ‘Good God, Jacquetta . . . ’ He throws back the covers and gets out of bed, pulls back the curtain and strides to the fireside. It is the first time he has ever been angry with me. He thumps the bedpost with his fist as if he wishes he could fight the world. I sit up, gather the covers to my shoulders and feel my heart hammer with dread at his rage.

‘I wanted a child and I wanted you,’ I say unsteadily. ‘I loved you, and I wanted us to be married. But I would not have cast a spell for it. I used herbs; not witchcraft.’

He rubs his head, making his hair stand on end, as if these distinctions are beyond him. ‘You made our child with a witch’s potion? Our daughter Elizabeth?’

‘Herbs,’ I say steadily. ‘Herbs from a herbalist. Why not?’

He casts a furious look at me. ‘Because I don’t want a child brought to life by a handful of herbs from some old witch!’

‘She is not some old witch, she is a good woman, and we have a beautiful child. You are as bad as this witch-hunt with your fears. I took herbs to help me to be fertile. We made a beautiful child. Don’t you ill-wish us now!’

‘For God’s sake.’ He raises his voice. ‘I am afraid of nothing but you being mixed up with the most notorious witch in England, who has been trying to kill our king!’

‘She is not! She would not!’ I shout back at him. ‘She would not!’

‘She is accused.’

‘Not by me!’

‘By the Lord Chief Justice! And if they look for her associates they will find you, another royal duchess, another woman who dabbles in the unknown, another woman who can call up a storm or capture a unicorn.’

‘I am not! I am not!’ I burst into tears. ‘You know I am not. You know I do nothing. Don’t say such things, Richard. Don’t you accuse me. You of all people!’

He loses his anger at my tears, and comes quickly across the room, sits beside me and gathers me against his shoulder. ‘I don’t accuse you, my love. I know. I know you would never do anything to harm anyone. Hush, I am sorry. And you are not to blame.’

‘I can’t help it that I foresee.’

‘I know you can’t help it.’

‘And you of all people know that my lord put me before the scrying mirror day after day and all I could see was a battle in snow and a queen . . . a queen . . . with horseshoes reversed. He said it was useless. He said I could not foresee for him. I failed him. I failed him.’

‘I know. I know you don’t conjure. Be still, my love.’

‘I did take herbs to get Elizabeth, but that was all. I would never conjure a child. Never.’

‘I know, my love. Be still.’

I am silent and as I dry my eyes on the sheet he asks me, ‘Jacquetta, does anyone know of this recipe that she gave you but you and her? Did anyone see her with you at Penshurst? Any of the court know that she was there?’

‘No. Just servants, and her boy.’

‘Then we will have to pray that she keeps her mouth shut about you, even if they take her to the stake.’

‘The stake?’ I say stupidly.

He nods in silence and then gets back into bed beside me. Together we watch the fire burning down in the grate. ‘They will burn her for a witch,’ he says flatly. ‘And the duchess too.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
OCTOBER 1441