The Lady of the Rivers (48 page)

‘Your Grace,’ she says quietly. ‘This is your son.’ She steps forwards, but the king does not lift his arms to receive the child. He is completely still. Awkwardly, the duchess holds the baby against his chest, but the king does not move. She looks to the Duke of Somerset who takes the baby from her, and lays it in the king’s lap. He does not stir.

‘Your Grace,’ the duke says loudly. ‘This is your son. Raise your hand to acknowledge him.’

Nothing.

‘Your Grace!’ the duke says again, a little louder. ‘Just nod your head to acknowledge your son.’

Nothing.

‘Just blink, sire. Just blink to say that you know this is your son.’

Now it is as if we are all enchanted. The physicians are still, looking at their patient, hoping for a miracle, the duchess waiting, the duke with one hand holding the baby on the king’s unmoving knees, the other on the king’s shoulder, squeezing him, hard and then harder, so his strong fingers are digging into the king’s bony shoulder, pinching him cruelly. I am silent, standing still. For a moment I feel as if the king has a plague of stillness and we are all going to freeze and sleep with him, an enchanted court around a sleeping king. Then the baby lets out a little cry and I step forwards and catch him up as if I fear that he might be infected with sleep.

‘This is hopeless,’ the Duke of York says abruptly. ‘He sees and hears nothing. My God, Somerset: how long has he been like this? He can do nothing. You should have told us.’

‘He is still king,’ the duke says sharply.

‘Nobody is denying that,’ Richard, k, snaps. ‘But he has not recognised his son, and he cannot transact the business of the kingdom. He is a king like a babe himself. We should have been told.’

Edmund Beaufort looks round for support, but even the lords who are sworn to his house and hate and fear the Duke of York cannot deny that the king has not recognised his son, does nothing, sees nothing, hears nothing, is far, far from us – who knows where?

‘We will return to Westminster,’ Edmund Beaufort announces. ‘And we will wait for His Grace to recover from this illness.’ He throws a furious look at the doctors. ‘The good physicians will waken him, I know.’

That night as I start to doze in my bedchamber at Westminster Palace I wonder at a sleep that is unbroken, a sleep like death; except that in this sleep one would dream and stir and then sleep again. What would it be like to stir a little and glimpse the physicians and that terrible room with the chair and the knives and the leeches, and then slide back into sleep, unable to protest? What would it be like to open one’s mouth in the silent scream of a dream and fall asleep mute? When I fall asleep I dream again of the Fisher King, of a king who can do nothing as his kingdom falls into chaos and darkness, and leaves a young woman without her husband, alone. The Fisher King is wounded in his groin, he can neither father a child nor hold his lands. The cradle is empty, the fields are bare. I wake in the night and thank God that I have done so, that the enchantment that is lying like a blanket of darkness on the king has not smothered me, and I wonder, I shake my head on my pillow and wonder if it is my fault, if I commanded the king to be blind, if it was my incautious words that blinded him?

When I wake in the dawn light, I am clear-headed and alert at once, as if someone is calling my name, and I get up and go to the jewellery box that my great-aunt Jehanne gave me. There, untouched, is the purse of charms, and this time I choose a crown, to symbolise the king’s return. I tie four different thin ribbons to this one charm. I choose a white ribbon to symbolise winter, if he will come back to us in the winter, a green ribbon if he will not come back till spring, a yellow ribbon if he will come back for haymaking, and a red ribbon if he will come back a year from now, when the berries are in the hedges. Then I tie each of these ribbons to four black strings, and take them to the riverside walk where the Thames is flowing high and fast as the tide is coming in.

There is nobody about as I walk down to the little wooden pier where the wherry-boatmen pick up their passengers, and so I tie the four dark threads to one of the stanchions of the pier and I throw the little crown with the coloured ribbons as far out as it will go, out into the river, and then I go back to the queen’s confinement room where she waits for her time of cleansing to be over and her release into the light.

I leave the crown in the water for a week, while the queen comes out of her confinement and is churched in a magnificent service where all the duchesses of the kingdom walk behind her, to honour her, as if their husbands are not locked in a struggle to decide how the prince shall be recognised and how the kingdom shall be commanded while the king sees nothing and commands nothing
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Now that the queen is returned to the world the duke can come to her rooms and he tells her that the Earl of Salisbury, brother-in-law to the Duke of York, is saying publicly that the baby was not got by the king, and that there are many, dangerously many, who believe him. The queen lets it be known that anyone who listens to such slander need never come again to court, she tells her friends that no-one should even speak to the Earl of Salisbury or to his spiteful son, the Earl of Warwick. She tells me that Richard, Duke of York, their kinsman, and even his duchess Cecily, are her enemies, her enemies to death, and that I must never speak to any of them ever again. What she does not do is comment on what they are saying, what many people are saying: that the king is not man enough to make a son, and that the baby is not a prince.

The queen and Edmund Beaufort decide that they must redouble the efforts to waken the king, and they hire new physicians and experts. They change the laws against alchemy, and men of learning are allowed to study once again and asked to consider the causes and cures of unknown illnesses of the mind. Everyone reopens their forges, refires their ovens, starts to send for foreign herbs and spices; herbalism, even magic, is permitted if it can cure the king. They command the doctors to treat him more powerfully, but since nobody knows what is wrong with him, nobody knows what should be done. He has always been known to be melancholic so they try to change his humour. They feed him burning-hot drinks and spicy soups to make him hotter, they make him sleep under thick furs heaped up on the bed, with a hot brick at his feet and a warming pan on either side of him until he sweats and weeps in his sleep; but still never wakens. They lance his arms and bleed him to try to drain the watery humours, they poultice his back with paste of mustard seed till it is red and raw, they force boluses down his throat and purge him with enemas so that he vomits and voids in his sleep, burning waste that leaves his skin red and sore.

They try to make him angry by beating his feet, by shouting at him, by threatening him. They think it is their duty to taunt him with cowardice, with being a lesser man than his father. They abuse him terribly, God forgive them, they shout things in his face that would have broken his heart if he had heard them. But he hears nothing. They hurt him when they slap him – they can see his cheeks redden under the blows. But he does not rise up and leave them, he lies inert as they do what they want to him. I fear this is not treatment but torture.

In Westminster I wait for my week and then I know that the morning has come when I wake again at dawn, wake as if I am alert in every part of my body and my mind is clear as the cold water washing round the pier. The four threads are there, safely tied to the leg of the pier, and I hope with all my heart that when I choose a black thread it will pull out the white ribbon on the crown so that I can see that the king will return to us this winter.

The sun is coming up as I put my hand on the threads and I look east towards it, as it rises over the heart of England. There is a dazzle on the water from the rising sun, a wintry sun, a white and gold and silver wintry sun, in a cold blue sky, and as it rises and the mist swirls off the river I see the most extraordinary sight: not one sun but three. I see three suns: one in the sky and two just above the water, reflections of mist and water, but clearly three suns. I blink and then rub my eyes but the three suns blaze at me as I pull on the thread and I find it comes lightly, too lightly, into my hand. I don’t have the thread with the white ribbon that would mean the king would come back to us in winter, nor even the green which would mean the king would come back to us in spring. I pull on one thread after another and find all four ribbons empty with no crown; there is no crown at all. The king will never come back to us: instead there will be the rise of a new dawn, and the suns in splendour.

I walk slowly back to the palace, a bunch of wet ribbons in my hand, and I wonder what three suns over England can mean. As I near the queen’s rooms I can hear noise, soldiers grounding their weapons, and shouting. I pick up my long gown and hurry forwards. Outside her presence chamber there are men in the livery of Richard, Duke of York, his white rose on their collar. The doors are flung open to reveal the queen’s personal guards standing irresolute as the queen shouts at them in French. Her women are screaming and running inwards to the privy chamber, and two or three of the lords of the council are trying to command quiet, as York’s guard get hold of Edmund Beaufort, the Duke of Somerset, and march him out of the chamber and past me. He casts one furious look at me, but they take him past too fast for me to say anything, not even to ask where he is going. The queen comes flying out after him and I catch her, and hold her, as she bursts into a flood of tears.

‘Traitors! Treason!’

‘What? What is happening?’

‘The Duke of Somerset has been accused of treason,’ one of the lords tells me, as he rapidly withdraws from the queen’s chamber. ‘They are taking him to the Tower. He will have a fair trial, the queen need not be distressed.’

‘Treason!’ she screams. ‘You are the traitor, you, to stand by as that devil of York takes him!’

I help her back through the presence chamber, through the privy chamber and into her bedroom. She flings herself on her bed and bursts into tears. ‘It’s Richard, Duke of York,’ she says. ‘He has turned the council against Edmund. He wants to destroy him, he has always been his enemy. Then he will turn on me. Then he will rule the kingdom. I know it. I know it.’

She raises herself up, her hair spilling from the plaits on either side of her face, her eyes red with tears and temper. ‘You hear this, Jacquetta. He is my enemy, he is my enemy and I will destroy him. I will get Edmund out of the Tower and I will put my son on the throne of England. And neither Richard, Duke of York, nor anyone else will stop me.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
SPRING 1454

Christmas comes and goes. Richard takes a ship from Calais and spends only the twelve days of the festival with me at the quiet court, and then says he has to return. The garrison is on the verge of mutiny and could come under attack at any time. The men do not know who is in command, and they are afraid of the French. Richard has to hold the garrison for Edmund Beaufort, and for England, against enemies within and without. Once again we are on the quayside, once again I am clinging to him. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I say desperately. ‘We said I should come with you. I should come now.’