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He sighs as if two questions are too much for a man to bear.
not everyone recognizes him as the representative of the God-given king. The one whom many prefer to call the King of France is not far away, at Chinon, eyeing our lands and stirring up trouble. The one whom we call the King of France and England is safe in London, too poor to send my husband the money and troops he needs to keep these faithless lands in subjection, too weak to command his lords to come to fight under our standard.
I have never seen anything like it outside of an abbey, and I look up at my husband with new respect.
“Oh, those are my planets,” he says, as if he owns the night skies quite as much as he does France. Suspended from crisscrossing wooden beams is a series of beautiful silver spheres, some of them ringed with silver haloes, some with other tiny balls floating nearby. It is such a pretty sight that I forget all about the map and the flags of campaigns and clasp my hands together. “Oh, how pretty! What is this?”
Like almost all girls I don’t know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season,
“Satan hid her from us,” he says simply. “There was no darkness, there was no comet, there was nothing to show her rising, and nothing marked her death, praise to God.”
Joan of Arc
This is where we are going to make silver, gold, to make life itself.”
Everything in this world is growing to a state of purity, of perfection. This is where we speed it up; this is where we make the changes to metals and to waters that the world itself does in its deep bowels, over centuries, with heat like hatching an egg into a chicken. We make it hotter; we make it faster. This is where we can test what we know, and see what we learn. This is the heart of my life’s work.”
“Any French peasant can do that. First he takes the grapes, then he crushes them for their juice. He takes a fruit—a solid thing, growing on a vine—and makes it into a liquid. That’s alchemy itself, making that change. Then he stores it and lets the life within it change that juice into wine. Another liquid but one with quite different properties from the juice. Now I can go further. I have done another change, right here. I can make an essence from wine that is a hundred times stronger than wine, which burns at the sight of a flame, which cures a man of melancholy and watery humors. It is a
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“It is your touch I want,” he says. “The pure touch.”
“The Maid,” my husband says, gesturing to me as if I am as much an object as the fluid in the flask or the iron in the furnace. I flinch at being given Joan’s name.
For some reason, a sudden pang of fear warns me. I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to say Joan’s name to the man who had her burned alive.
there is no affection in his voice at all but the satisfied tone of a man who has added something to his beautiful collection—and that at a good price.
crying out, for I see a battle, and behind it another battle, a long lane of battles and men dying, dying in mist, dying in snow, dying in a churchyard.
“Perhaps every day is too much for her. She is only young and new to the work. Perhaps we should train her up to it, like a little eyas, a young falcon. Perhaps we should release her to ride and walk in the mornings, and only have her scry perhaps once a week?”
You bought her”—he stumbles and corrects himself—“You found her unspoiled. We must take care not to muddy the waters.”
Woodville, raised in the duke’s service, is the most trusted and most beloved of all the squires, Commander of Calais, trusted with the keys to France.
He looks a little oddly at me. “That’s not such a good name. The alchemists are always talking of Mercury,” he says. “A shape-shifter, a messenger from the gods, one of the three great ingredients of their work. Sometimes Mercury is helpful, sometimes not, a partner to Melusina, the water goddess who also changes her form.
I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t want more alchemy,” I insist. “Not in the stable yard as well as everywhere else. I shall call her Merry, but she and I will know her true name.”
anything that accustoms the horse to the idea that it must go on steadily and safely, whatever the rider does, whatever happens around it.
They say that he does the bidding of the person who spoke to him last. “But anyway, even if he were older, or firmer, there would be no money to pay for defenses from the sea, and the English lords don’t make the rule of law run through their lands as they should.
“Why do I have to learn this?” I ask breathlessly as he dismounts again to restore my stirrups. “In case you lose your stirrups, or one breaks, or if we have to ride away some time, when we can get hold of horses but no saddles. It’s good to be prepared for anything.
“In England, they each make their own little lordship,” he says. “They use the troubled times as a screen to serve themselves, to gain their own land, to make war on their neighbors. When the young king does decide to take his power, he will find he has to challenge the very people who should be his friends
“The stone?” “They call it the philosopher’s stone, that turns metal to gold, water to the elixir vitae, that gives the owner eternal life.” “Is there such a thing?” I ask.
Clearly, my husband is not being adequately supported by his nephew the king, nor financed as he should be by the English Parliament that has to raise taxes for the war in France. The purpose of the trip is to make them see that English coins buy French support, and they must pay.
Then we go out into the stable yard, where I blink at the cavalcade preparing to depart. It is like a small town on the move.
I am more and more afraid that we are wandering lost, perhaps even going round in circles like enchanted knights in a fairy-tale forest. Thinking this, I am hardly surprised when I hear the sound of water and turn towards it, and we come to a little stream and a pool. It is almost a fountain, so round and banked with green moss. I have a moment when I think perhaps Melusina will rise from the magical pool to help me, her daughter; but nothing happens,
At this thought, so awful to him since he had sworn privately that he would serve and protect her to death, he stopped still and put his hand to a tree trunk to support himself, and bowed his head in shame. She was his lady, he was her knight, and at this, the very first test, he had failed; now she was somewhere lost in the darkness, and he could not find her.
what he saw made him rub his eyes, to see without a doubt, without a shadow of a doubt, the glimmering white light of an enchantment, a chimera, and at the heart of it, gleaming, a little white horse, alone in the forest. But as it turned its head and he could see its profile, he saw the silvery horn of a unicorn.
He had a sense that he should not try to catch the unicorn; he remembered that all the legends warned that it would turn on him and attack him if he came too close.
He bit his tongue on an exclamation as he saw her, asleep like a nymph, as if she were growing in the wood herself,
he turns to lift me up. For a moment he hesitates, with his hands on my waist. It is as if our bodies have come together, almost without our volition: my head to his shoulder, his hands on my waist. It is as if we are drawn, one to another, like the planets on their wires in my lord’s library. Slowly, I realize that I am filled with an emotion I have never felt before; slowly I realize that this is a longing. I turn my face up towards him, and his darkened eyes look down at me, his hands warm, his face almost puzzled as he feels the desire that is slowly pulsing in me. We stand like that
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I bite my lip on a retort. Personally, I don’t think that having a water goddess for an ancestress is a guarantee of freedom against seasickness, nor, come to that, shipwreck.
The two of them, the Duke of Gloucester and the cardinal, try to turn the young king each to their own way of thinking, and he is torn between them.”
“I should think he will adore you. He will never have seen anyone quite like you. You will be the most beautiful woman in England, as well as the greatest.”
The young king is a disappointment to me. I have no experience of kings since my own county of Luxembourg is not a royal one,
He is slight and short—that is my first impression—and he is pale, pale like a scholar, though I know that they make him take exercise, ride daily, and even joust with a safety cushion on the top of his opponent’s lance. I wonder if he is ill, for there is something about the transparency of his skin and the slow pace of his walk towards us that gives me a feeling of his weariness, and suddenly, I see to my horror that in this light, for a moment, he looks to me like a being made of glass, so thin and translucent that he looks as if he might break if he were to topple on a stone floor.
“He’s so frail,” I whisper, then I find the true word: “He is fragile, like a prince of ice, of glass.” “Not now!” Woodville commands, and pinches my hand hard. I am so surprised at his tone and the sudden sharp pain that I flinch and look at him, and am returned to myself to see that the men and women of the court are all around us,
In short, a man driven by his desires and not by duty. A man so unlike my husband that I can hardly believe they are both sons of King Henry IV of England. “If I had seen you, I would
as if he believes that I will not be able to resist him. There is something repellent and fascinating about the way that he takes me by the waist,
” I don’t tell my husband of the sense I had of a boy as fragile as glass, as cold as thin ice.
“She was his wife’s lady-in-waiting, then his whore; now she is his wife, so who knows what she is in her heart?” my husband remarks. “But she is no friend of mine. I am the oldest brother and so I am heir to the throne. If anything happens to King Henry (which God forbid), then I inherit the crowns of England and France. Humphrey comes after me, second
Slowly, they realize the service he has done for his country, and they tell him that they are so grateful that he can leave his office, retire from his work, abandon his regency in France and return to England, where we can live in his new beautiful house. “He won’t come,” Woodville predicts to me.
I don’t want to leave all this and go back to the grand palace in the starving city.
I take a moment to answer; there is something in his voice that warns me that this is an important question.
“It is a beautiful country,” I say. “And, actually, I prefer London to Paris.” He beams with pride. “I knew you would,” he says triumphantly. “I knew you would. You are an English duchess; you were born to be an Englishwoman. You should live in England.”
Paris is so poor and the people so angry, I can’t help but like it better here.”
“I have heard it twice in my life before,” I say, thinking of my little sister, who died almost as she drew her first breath, and then the sighing choir that whispered good-bye to my great-aunt. “I am afraid it is the death of one of my family,” I say quietly. “It is the singing of Melusina,” and I turn from her and go down the darkened gallery to my bedroom.
Mrs. Jourdemayne, seated beside the wagoner, looks down at me with shrewd sympathy in her face. “Sometimes you cannot help what you hear; you cannot help what you see,” she says. “May the Lord who gave you the gift give you the courage to bear it.”
Woodville does not get his wish that I should see Grafton, though we stay in England for a year,
