The Lady of the Rivers (49 page)

‘Beloved, you know I would never take you into a siege, and God alone knows what is going to happen.’

‘When will you come home again?’

He gives a resigned little shrug. ‘I have to hold my command until someone relieves me of it, and neither the king nor the duke is going to do that. If Richard, Duke of York, seizespower then I will have to hold Calais against him, as well as against the French. I will have to hold it for Edmund Beaufort. He gave me the command, I can only return it to him. I have to go back, beloved. But you know I will return to you.’

‘I wish we were just squires at Grafton,’ I say miserably.

‘I wish it too,’ he says. ‘Kiss the children for me and tell them to be good. Tell them to do their duty and that I am doing mine.’

‘I wish you were not so dutiful,’ I say disagreeably.

He kisses me into silence. ‘I wish I could have another night,’ he says in my ear, and then he breaks away from me and runs up the gangplank to his ship.

I wait on the quayside until I see him at the rail, and I kiss my cold hand to him. ‘Come back soon,’ I call. ‘Be safe. Come back soon.’

‘I always come back to you,’ he calls back. ‘You know that. I will come back soon.’

The dark nights grow shorter, but the king does not recover. Some alchemists predict that the sunshine will bring him to life as if he were a seed in the darkness of the earth, and they wheel him to an eastern window every morning and make him face the grey disc of the wintry sun. But nothing wakes him.

Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, is not released from his rooms in the Tower of London; but neither is he accused. Richard, Duke of York, has enough power over the council of lords to make them arrest the duke, but not enough to persuade them to try him for treason.

‘I am going to see him,’ the queen announces.

‘Your Grace, people will talk,’ I warn her. ‘They are already saying things about you that don’t bear repeating.’

She raises an eyebrow.

‘So I won’t repeat them,’ I say.

‘I know what they are saying,’ she declares boldly. ‘They are saying that he is my lover and that the prince is his son, and this is why my husband the king has not acknowledged him.’

‘Reason enough not to visit him,’ I caution.

‘I have to see him.’

‘Your Grace . . . ’

‘Jacquetta, I have to.’

I go with her, and take two of her other ladies. They wait outside while the queen and I go into his rooms. He has a privy chamber with a bedroom beside it. The rooms, stone-walled with arrowslit windows, are pleasant enough, close to the royal apartments in the White Tower; he is not by any means in a dungeon. He has a table and a chair and some books, but he is pale from being kept indoors and he is looking thinner. His face lights up when he sees her and he drops to his knee. She hurries towards him and he passionately kisses her hands. The Constable of the Tower stands at the door, his back turned tactfully to the room. I wait at the window looking out over the grey tide of the cold river. Behind me, I can hear the duke rise to his feet and I can sense him mastering himself so that he does not reach for her.

‘Will you sit, Your Grace?’ he asks quietly and puts the chair near the little fire for her.

‘You can sit beside me,’ she says. I turn and see him pull up a small stool, so they are close enough to whisper.

They are hand-clasped, his mouth to her ear, her turning to murmur to him, for half an hour, but when I hear the clock strike three, I go forwards and curtsey before her. ‘Your Grace, we have to go,’ I say.

For a moment I am afraid that she is going to cling to him, but she tucks her hands inside her sweeping sleeves, strokes the border of ermine as if for comfort, and rises to her feet. ‘I will come again,’ she says to him. ‘And I will do as you suggest. We have no choice.’

He nods. ‘You know the names of the men who will serve you. It has to be done.’

She nods and looks at him once, longingly, as if she wants his touch more than anything in the world, as if she cannot bear to leave, then she ducks her head and goes quickly out of the room.

‘What has to be done?’ I ask as soon as we are outside, walking down the stone stairs towards the watergate. We came in a barge without flags and standards; I was anxious that as few people as possible knew that she was meeting the man accused of treason and named as her lover.

She is alight with excitement. ‘I am going to tell the parliament to appoint me as regent,’ she says. ‘Edmund says the lords will support me.’

‘Regent? Can a woman be a regent in England? Your Grace, this is not Anjou. I don’t think a woman can be a regent here. I don’t think a woman can reign in England.’

She hurries ahead of me, down the steps and onto the barge. ‘There’s no law against it,’ she replies. ‘Edmund says. It is nothing but tradition. If the lords will support me we will call a parliament and tell the parliament that I will serve as regent until the king is well again or – if he never wakes – until my son is old enough to be king.’

‘Never wakes?’ I repeat in horror. ‘The duke is planning for the king to sleep forever?’

‘How can we know?’ she asks. ‘We can’t do nothing! You can be sure that Richard, Duke of York, is not doing nothing.’

‘Never wakes?’

She sits herself at the rear of the barge, her hand impatiently on the curtain. ‘Come on, Jacquetta. I want to get back and write to the lords and tell them my terms.’

I hurry to take a seat beside her and the oarsmen cast off and take the barge out into the river. All the way back to the palace I find I am squinting at the sun and trying to see three suns, and wondering what three suns might mean.

The queen’s demand to be regent of England and rule the country with all the rights and wealth of the king during the illness of her husband does not resolve the whole problem as she and Edmund Beaufort confidently predicted. Instead there is uproar. The people now know that the king is sick, mysteriously sick and utterly disabled. The rumours of what ails him range from the black arts of his enemies, to poison given to him by his wfe and her lover. Every great lord arms his men and when he comes to London marches them into his house, for his own protection, so the City is filled with private armies and the Lord Mayor himself imposes a curfew and tries to insist that weapons are left at the City gates. Every guild, almost every household, starts to plan their own defence in case fighting breaks out. There is an air of constant tension and anger; but no battle cries. As yet, nobody could name the sides, nobody knows the causes; but everybody knows that the Queen of England says that she will be king, that the Duke of York will save the people from this virago, that the Duke of Somerset has been locked up in the Tower of London to save the City from ruin, and that the King of England is sleeping, sleeping like Arthur under the lake, and perhaps he will only waken when ruin walks the land.

People ask me where my husband is, and what is his view. I say grimly that he is overseas, serving his king in Calais. I do not proffer his view which I don’t know; nor my own – which is that the world has run mad and there will be three suns in the sky before all this is over. I write to him, and send messages by the trading ships that go between here and Calais, but I think the messages do not always get through. In early March I write shortly, ‘
I am with child again
,’ but he does not reply, and then I know for sure that either they are not delivering my messages, or he is unable to write.

He was appointed as commander in Calais under the captaincy of the Duke of Somerset. Now the Duke of Somerset is in the Tower, charged with treason. What should a loyal commander do? What will the garrison do?

The lords and parliament go again to Windsor to see the king.

‘Why do they keep going?’ the queen demands, seeing the barges come back to the steps at the palace, and the great men in their furred robes helped ashore by their liveried servants. They trudge up the steps like men whose hopes have failed. ‘They must know he won’t wake. I went myself and shouted at him and he didn’t wake. Why would he wake for them? Why don’t they see that they have to make me regent and then I can hold down the Duke of York and his allies and restore peace to England?’

‘They keep hoping,’ I say. I stand beside her at the window and we watch the doleful procession of the lords wind their way to the great hall. ‘Now they will have to nominate a regent. They can’t go on without any king at all.’

‘They will have to nominate me,’ she says. She sets her jaw and stands a little taller. She is queenly, she believes she is called by God to rise into a yet greater role. ‘I am ready to serve,’ she says. ‘I will keep this country safe, and hand it to my son when he is a man. I will do my duty as Queen of England. If they make me regent I will bring peace to England.’

They make the Duke of York regent and they call him ‘Protector of the Realm’.

‘What?’ Margaret is beside herself, striding up and down the privy chamber. She kicks a footstool and sends it flying, a maid in waiting lets out a sob and cowers in the window, the rest of the ladies are frozen with terror. ‘They called him what?’

The hapless knight who brought the message from the council of the lords trembles before her. ‘They named him as Protector of the Realm.’

‘And what am I to do?’ she demands of him. She means the question to be rhetorical. ‘What do they suggest that I do, while this duke, this mere kinsman, this paltry cousin of mine, thinks to rule my kingdom? What do they think that I, a princess of France, a queen of England, am going to do, when a jumped-up duke from nowhere thinks to pass laws in my land?’

‘You are to go to Windsor Castle and care for your husband,’ he says. The poor fool thinks he is answering her question. He realises swiftly that he would have done better to keep his mouth shut.

She goes from fire to ice. She freezes and turns to him, her eyes blazing with rage. ‘I did not hear you exactly. What did you say? What did you dare to say to me?’

He gulps. ‘Your Grace, I was trying to tell you that the lord protector . . . ’

‘The what?’

‘The lord protector commands . . . ’

‘What?’

‘Commands . . . ’

She crosses the floor in two swift paces and stands before him, her tall headdress overtopping him, her eyes boring into his face. ‘Commands me?’ she asks.

He shakes his head, he drops to his knees. ‘Commands that your household go to Windsor Castle,’ he says to the rushes beneath his knees. ‘And that you stay there, with your husband and your baby, and play no part in the ruling of the country which will be done by him as lord protector, and the lords and the parliament.’

WINDSOR CASTLE, SUMMER 1454