The Lady of the Rivers (59 page)

The queen summons me in the twilight of a winter afternoon. ‘I want you to come out with me,’ she says. ‘There is a man I want you to meet.’

Together we don our capes, pull up our hoods to shield our faces. ‘Who is it?’

‘I want you to come with me to an alchemist.’

I freeze, like a deer scenting danger. ‘Your Grace, Eleanor Cobham consulted alchemists, and Eleanor Cobham was imprisoned for eleven years and died in Peel Castle.’

She looks at me blankly. ‘And so?’

‘One of the fixed plans of my life is not to end as Eleanor Cobham.’

I wait. For a moment her heart lifts, her face smiles, she dissolves into laughter. ‘Ah Jacquetta, are you telling me you are not some mad ugly bad old witch?’

‘Your Grace, every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch, somewhere in her heart. The task of my life is to conceal this. The task of every woman is to deny this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The world does not allow women like Eleanor, women like me, to thrive. The world cannot tolerate women who think and feel. Women like me. When we weaken, or when we get old, the world falls on us with the weight of a waterfall. We cannot bring our gifts to the world. The world we live in will not tolerate things that cannot be understood, things that cannot be easily explained. In this world, a wise woman hides her gifts. Eleanor Cobham was an enquiring woman. She met with others who sought the truth. She educated herself and she sought masters with whom to study. She paid a terrible price for this. She was an ambitious woman. She paid the price for this too.’ I wait to see if she has understood; but her round pretty face is puzzled. ‘Your Grace, you will put me in danger if you ask me to use my gifts.’

She faces me, she knows what she is doing. ‘Jacquetta, I have to ask you to do this, even if it is dangerous for you.’

‘It is a great demand, Your Grace.’

‘Your husband, the Duke of Bedford, asked for nothing less. He married you so that you would serve England in this way.’

‘I had to obey him: he was my husband. And he could protect me.’

‘He was right to ask you to use your gifts to save England. And now I ask it too, and I will protect you.’

I shake my head. I have a very real sense that there will come a time when she will not be there and I will face a court like Joan of Arc, like Eleanor Cobham, a court of men, and there will be documents written against me and evidence produced against me and witnesses who will swear against me, and no-one will protect me.

‘Why now?’

‘Because I think the king is under a spell, and has been for years. The Duke of York, or Duchess Cecily, or the French king or somebody – how should I know who? – but someone has put him under a spell that makes him like a sleeping baby, or makes him like a trusting child. I have to make sure he never slips away from us again. Only alchemy or magic can protect him.’

‘He is awake now.’

‘He’s like a wakeful child now. He has a dream of harmony and peace and then he will fall asleep again, smiling at his lovely dream.’

I pause. I know she is right. The king has slipped through to another world and we need him in this one. ‘I will come with you. But if I think your alchemist is a charlatan, I will have no truck with him.’

‘That’s the very reason I want you to come,’ she says. ‘To see what you think of him. But come now.’

We go on foot, through the darkened streets of Westminster, hand in hand. We have no ladies in waiting, not even a guard. For one moment only, I close my eyes in horror at what Richard my husband would say if he knew that I was taking such a risk and with the queen herself. But she knows where she is going. Sure-footed on the muck of the streets, imperious to the crossing-sweepers, with a little lad going ahead of us with a flaming torch, she guides us down the narrow lanes, and turns into an alley. At the end of it is a great door set in the wall.

I take the iron ring set beside it, and pull. A great carillon answers us, and the sound of dogs barking somewhere at the back. The porter opens the grille. ‘Who calls?’ he asks.

Margaret steps up. ‘Tell your master that she of Anjou has come,’ she says.

At once the door swings open. She beckons to me, and we go inside. We step into a forest, not a garden. It is like a plantation of fir trees inside the tall walls, in the very heart of London, a secret woodland like a London garden under an enchantment to grow wild. I glance at Margaret and she smiles at me as if she knows how this place will strike me: as a hidden world within the real one; perhaps it is even the doorway to another world inside this.

We walk down a twisting path which takes us through the green shadow of towering trees and then to a small house, overburdened with dark trees around it, sweet-scented boughs leaning on every roof, chimneys poking through foliage and singeing the needles of the pine trees. I sniff the air, there is the smell of a forge, thin smoke from hot coals, and the familiar, never-forgotten scent of sulphur. ‘He lives here,’ I say.

She nods. ‘You will see him. You can judge for yourself.’

We wait, beside a stone bench before the house, and then a little door swings open and the alchemist comes out, a dark cloak around him, wiping his hands on his sleeves. He bows to the queen and directs a piercing look at me.

‘You are of the House of Melusina?’ he asks me.

‘I am Lady Rivers now,’ I say.

‘I have long wanted to meet you. I knew Master Forte, who worked for your husband the duke. He told me that you had the gift of scrying.’

‘I never saw anything that made much sense to me,’ I say.

p height="0" width="1em">He nods. ‘Will you scry for me?’

I hesitate. ‘What if I see something which is against the law?’

He looks at the queen.

‘I say it is allowed,’ she rules. ‘Anything.’

His smile is gentle. ‘Only you and I will see the looking glass, and I will keep it secret. It shall be as a confessional. I am an ordained priest; I am Father Jefferies. No-one will know what you see, but you and I. I will tell Her Grace only the interpretation.’

‘Is it to find the spell which will heal the king? It is to do good for him?’

‘That is my intention. I am already preparing some waters for him, I think that your presence at the moment of distilling will make the difference. He is well now, he can stay awake now, but I think he has some deep wound inside. He has never grown away from his mother, he has never truly become a man. He needs to transform. He needs that change from a child to a man, it is an alchemy of the person.’ He looks at me. ‘You have lived at his court, you have known him for many years. Do you think this?’

I nod. ‘He is of the moon,’ I tell him unwillingly. ‘And cold, and damp. My lord Bedford used to say he needed fire.’ I nod towards Margaret. ‘He thought Her Grace would bring fire and power to him.’

The queen’s face works as if she is about to cry. ‘No,’ she says sadly. ‘He has all but put me out. He is too much for me. I am chilled, I have all but lost my spirit. I have no-one who can make me warm any more.’

‘If the king is cold and wet the kingdom will sink beneath floods of tears,’ the alchemist says.

‘Please do it, Jacquetta,’ the queen whispers. ‘We will all three swear never to tell anyone about this.’

I sigh. ‘I will.’

Father Jefferies bows to the queen. ‘Will you wait here, Your Grace?’

She glances to the half-open door of his house. I know she is longing to see inside. But she submits to his rules. ‘Very well.’ She wraps her cloak around herself and sits on the stone bench.

He gestures to me to go inside and I step over the threshold. In the room on the right there is a great fireplace in the centre with a fire of charcoal warming a big-bellied cauldron. In the cauldron, in warm water, is a great vessel with a silver tube which passes through a cold bath; at the end of the tube is the steady drip of an elixir made from the steam. The heat in the room is stifling, and he guides me to the room on the left where there is a table and a great book and beyond it: the scrying mirror. It is all so familiar, from the sweet smell of the elixir to the scent of the forge outside, that I pause for a moment and am back in the Hôtel de Bourbon at Paris, a maid and yet a bride, the new wife of the Duke of Bedford.

‘Do you see something?’ he asks eagerly.

‘Only the past.’

He puts a chair before me and takes the curtain from the mirror. I see myself reflected back, so much older than the girl who was commanded to look in the mirror at Paris.

‘I have some salts for you to sniff,’ he says. ‘I think it will help you to see.’

He takes a little purse from the drawer in the table and opens the drawstring. ‘Here,’ he says.

I take the purse in my hand; inside is some white powder. I hold it to my face and cautiously breathe in. There is a moment when my head seems to swim and then I look up, and there is the scrying mirror, but I cannot see my own reflection. My image has disappeared, and in my place there is a swirl of snow, and white flakes falling like the petals of white roses. It is the battle I saw once before, the men fighting uphill, a swaying bridge which falls, throwing them into the water, the snow on the ground turning red with blood, and always the swirling petals of the white snow. I see the iron grey of wide, wide skies; it is the north of England, bitterly cold, and out of the snow comes a young man like a lion.

‘Look again.’ I can hear his voice, but I cannot see him. ‘What is going to become of the king? What would heal his wound?’

I see a small room, a dark room, a hidden room. It is hot and stuffy, and there is a sense of terrible menace in the warm silent darkness. There is only one arrowslit of a window in the thick stone walls. The only light comes from the window, the only brightness in the darkness of the room is that single thread of light. I look towards it, drawn by the only sign of life in the black. Then it is blocked as if by a man standing before it, and there is nothing but darkness.

I hear the alchemist sigh behind me as if I have whispered my vision to him, and he has seen it all. ‘God bless,’ he says quietly. ‘God bless him and keep him.’ Then he speaks a little more clearly. ‘Anything else?’

I see the charm that I threw into the deep water of the Thames tied to the ribbons, a different ribbon for each season, the charm shaped like a crown that washed away and told me that the king would never come back to us. I see it deep in the water, dangling on a thread, then I see it being pulled to the surface, up and up, and then it breaks from the water like a little fish popping on the surface of a summer stream, and it is my daughter Elizabeth who smilingly pulls it from the water, and laughs with joy, and puts it on her finger like a ring.

‘Elizabeth?’ I say wonderingly. ‘My girl?’

He steps forwards and gives me a glass of small ale. ‘Who is Elizabeth?’ he asks.

‘My daughter. I don’t know why I was thinking of her.’

‘She has a ring shaped like a crown?’

‘In my vision she had the ring that signified the king. She put it on her own finger.’

He smiles gently. ‘These are mysteries.’

‘There is no mystery about the vision: she had the ring that was the crown of England, and she smiled and put it on her finger.’

He drops the curtain across the mirror. ‘Do you know what this means?’ he asks.

‘My daughter is to be close to the crown,’ I say. I am puzzling through the scrying. ‘How could such a thing be? She is married to Sir John Grey, they have a son, and another baby on the way. How can she put the crown of England on her finger?’

‘It is not clear to me,’ he says. ‘I will think on it, and perhaps I will ask you to come again.’

‘How could Elizabeth have a ring like a crown on her finger?’

‘Sometimes our visions come darkly. We don’t know what we see. This one is very unclear. It is a mystery. I will pray on it.’

I nod. When a man wants a mystery it is generally better to leave him mystified. Nobody loves a clever woman.

‘Will you come here and pour this liquid into a mould?’ he asks me.

I follow him into the first room and he takes a flask from the wall, shakes it gently and then hands it to me. ‘Hold it.’ I cup the bowl in my hands and at once I feel it grow warm under the heat of my fingers.

‘Now pour it,’ he says, and gestures to the moulds that are on his table.

Carefully, I fill each one with the silvery liquid and then pass the flask back to him.

‘Some processes call for the touch of a woman,’ he says quietly. ‘Some of the greatest alchemy has been done by a husband and wife, working together.’ He gestures to the bowl of warm water that is over the charcoal stove. ‘This method was invented by a woman and named for her.’

‘I have no skills,’ I say, denying my own abilities. ‘And when I have visions they are sent by God and are unclear to me.’

He takes my hand and tucks it under his arm as he leads the way to the door. ‘I understand. I will send for you only if I cannot manage to work for the queen without you. And you are right to hide your light. This is a world that does not understand a skilled woman, it is a world that fears the craft. We all have to do our work in secret, even now, when the kingdom needs our guidance so much.’

‘The king will not get better,’ I say suddenly, as if the truth is forced out of me.

‘No,’ he agrees sadly. ‘We must do what we can.’

‘And the vision I had of him in the Tower . . . ’

‘Yes?’

‘I saw him, and then someone stood before the window and it was all dark . . . ’

‘You think he will meet his death in the Tower?’

‘Not just him.’ I am filled with a sudden urgency. ‘I feel, I don’t know why, it is as if one of my own children were in there. A boy of mine, perhaps two of my boys. I see it, but I’m not there, I can’t prevent it. I can’t save the king, and I can’t save them either. They will go into the Tower and not come out.’

Gently, he takes my hand. ‘We can make our own destiny,’ he says. ‘You can protect your children, we can perhaps help the king. Take your visions to church and pray, and I will hope for understanding too. Will you tell the queen what you have seen?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘She has enough sorrows for a young woman already. And besides, I know nothing for certain.’