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“We’re going back to Westminster,” he says. “We don’t want to be seen with the duchess anymore.”
“She’s a reader of alchemy books; her husband employs physicians; she’s said to have seduced him with love potions; she mixes with men of learning, scholarship, and magic, and she’s a royal duchess. Does this sound like anyone you know?” “Me?” I shiver as the oars dip quietly in the cold waters and the boatman pulls towards the stairs.
They are accused of drawing up a horoscope chart for Eleanor. The chart has been found, and they say that it foretells the death of the young king and her inheritance of the throne.
“And where are all the charts?” my husband asks tightly. “Where are they now?” “I gave them to the Duke of Gloucester.” Quietly, the horror of this dawns on me. “Oh, Richard! All the charts and the maps I gave to Duke Humphrey. He said he had an interest. I only kept the books, the ones we have at home. My lord left the books to me, the equipment and the machines I gave to the duke.”
She glances out of the window. “He should have come earlier,” she says. “Now he’ll be caught in the rain. There’s going to be such a storm!”
“Oh, don’t be so ridiculous. I was looking at the sky. Anyone could see there was going to be a storm.” Elizabeth gets up from her stool, dips a curtsey, and says, “Excuse me, my lady …”
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.
The man who had spent his life in study, thinking about the harmonious nature of the world, sits on a painted chair wearing a paper crown, surrounded by his equipment and his books as if he were a Fool.
Worst of all, at his feet is a horrible little creature of wax, like a miscarried rabbit.
“Ellie, tell me, did they arrest 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.
“The law of men always puts women in a bad place!” I flare up in anger.
“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. “Margery Jourdemayne,” he says, his
“They will burn her for a witch,” he says flatly. “And the duchess too.”
Mrs. Jourdemayne looks at the archbishop. “You are frightening yourselves with a poppet,” she says rudely. “Do you great men have nothing better to do?”
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision, and they cannot tolerate any other.
The woman who paraded into London in cloth of gold with the nobility of the kingdom in her train is stripped to her linen shift and sent out shoeless with a lighted taper to walk around Westminster as the people jeer and point at her as someone who was the first lady of the kingdom and is now humbled to dirt.
I think of the illusion that I saw as we came off the barge at Greenwich, that she was followed by a black dog, a fighting dog, a black mastiff, and the smell that lingered around her despite the perfume and the perfectly washed linen, and I think that the black dog will follow her and will run up and down the stairs of Peel Castle on the Isle of Man, as she waits, long, long years, for her release into death.
The first thing that strikes me is that she is tiny, like a pretty doll. Her hair is a real bronze, a red-gold, and her eyes are gray-blue.
I don’t need to be told twice. Something is wrong. My first husband, the duke, used to say that if you ride into a town and feel that something is wrong, it is usually because something is wrong.
“We’ll go in,” I say to Cutler. “Draw your sword and have two men behind us.” They follow me as I walk across the cobbles to the house, my London home, that I was so proud to receive and so pleased to furnish. One of the front doors is thrown off the hinges, there is the smell of smoke. As I push the other door open and go inside, I can see that a mob of people has run through the rooms and taken whatever they thought was of value. There are pale squares on the walls where my tapestries, the Duke of Bedford’s tapestries, once hung. A huge wooden sideboard, too heavy to carry off, has been
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They have taken the brass grilles off the shelves, they have taken the brass chains that fettered the books to the reading desks. They have even taken the quills and the pots of ink. But the books are safe, the books are untouched. They have stolen everything made of metal but damaged nothing of paper. I snatch up a slim volume and hold it to my cheek.
In the painted beams above, there is smoke blackening the ceiling. Someone tried to burn us to the ground. I shudder at the smell of the scorched plaster.
“It looks as if they came through on a whim and took anything that was of great value. It was not an assault. You need not fear them. It was not directed at you. They are people driven to despair by poverty and fear of the lords. They are not bad people. It’s just they cannot bear it anymore.”
I don’t look back. But I remember, as I ride down the road, the dark smear of the smoke stain in the hall of my house, and my realization that the people had come into my house and taken what they wanted, and done just what they wished.
London no longer feels safe for me. I have become like the queen—a woman uneasy in the heart of her own home.
When I think of Richard dead in a ditch in Kent, I want to lie down in the gutter and die myself. I put my hand on my belly and think of the child who will never know her father. How can it be that I shall not show Richard his new baby?
“I got swept up in the crowd. I saw him enter London.” “Jack Cade?” “The captain? He is John Mortimer.” “Jack Cade is his name, but he’s calling himself Mortimer, and John Amend-All, and all sorts of names. The name Mortimer brings out the supporters of Richard of York for him; it’s York’s family name. Cade is borrowing it, or worse, the duke is lending it. Either way it means more trouble. Where did you see him?” “Crossing the bridge, and getting the keys of the city.” “Getting the keys?” my husband demands, dumbfounded. “They greeted him as a hero, all the common people and the mayor and the
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“They greeted him like he was freeing them from a tyrant. The lord mayor and all the aldermen welcomed him to the city like a hero.”
We live under siege in the Tower, at war in our own country, besieged in our own capital city. Every day my husband sends out men and even the kitchen girls to get news in the marketplace and at the city gates. They come back saying that Cade’s army is camped south of the river, with more joining them every day.
There is a silence as my husband absorbs the fact that they are going to send one of the peers of England out to face a mob that wants him dead. “You are the commander,” he says stiffly. “I am here under your command. But my advice is that we defy them.”
Richard draws me back into the shadow of the wall. “My God,” I say quietly. “This is the end, isn’t it? This is the end of the England we have known. This is the end of everything.”
A vision of the dancing head of Lord Say comes to my mind, and I blink to try to rid myself of it. “Richard, God send you back safely to me,” I whisper.
I see all this, but I am trying to see more. I am trying to see if there is a shadow over them, if they are marching out to their death.
I glimpse him only briefly before they slip between the crowded buildings, but I have no sense of premonition. Richard seems, as he always has been, so passionately alive, so vital, that there could never be a shadow over him.
That night he sits in a deep hot bath in our rooms, and I soap the nape of his neck and his strong muscled back as if we were a peasant and his doxy taking their annual bath on Shrove Tuesday. “Good,” he says. “Pray God the worst of this is over.”
Jack Cade himself lines up for his piece of paper and is publicly forgiven for leading an army against the king, killing a noble lord, and invading London. Some men see this as the king’s weakness, but the greatest number of them think themselves lucky to get off scot-free, and they go back to their poor homes, where they cannot pay their taxes, where they cannot get justice, where the great lords ride roughshod over them—and hope for better times. They are just as they were before, but more bitter—and still the good times have not come.
“What’s the matter?” I ask. “Why are we going now? Isn’t the king coming? Should we not stay in London?” “I can’t stand to see him, nor her,” he says flatly. “I want to go home for a while. We’ll come back, of course we will, we will come back the moment they send for us; but before God, Jacquetta, I cannot stomach the court a moment longer.” “Why? What has happened?” He is tying his traveling cape on the back of his saddle, and his back is to me. I go behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. Slowly he turns to face me. “I see you’re angry,” I say. “But speak to me: tell me what has
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“The pardons,” he says, through his clenched teeth. “Those damned pardons. Those hundreds of pardons.” “Yes?” “Jack Cade took his pardon in the name of John Mortimer. The name he used in battle.” “So?” “So they chased after him, despite his pardon, and they have captured him, despite his pardon. He showed them his pardon, signed by the king, blessed by the bishop, written fair in the name of John Mortimer. But they are going to hang him in the name of Jack Cade.”
“No. But here we show everyone that his very cause was just. He said that there was no rule of law, but that the lords and the king do as they please. Here we prove it is so. We make a peace on the battlefield while he is in arms, while he is strong and we are weak; when he is near to victory and we are trapped in the Tower. We give him a pardon—that is our word of honor—but we break it as soon as he is a fugitive. The king’s name is on the pardon, the king gave his word. Turns out that means nothing.
“I know, and that is why I say that we will come back to court and serve him again. He is our king; we are his people. He gave us our name and our fortune. We will come back to court in the autumn. But I swear to you, Jacquetta, I just can’t stomach it this summer.”
He lights me a candle, and the two of us go out together into the dark gallery above the hall. And then I hear it. The strong sweet singing of Melusina, so high and so pure that you would think it was the sound of the stars moving in their spheres.
As I see him, and hear the insistent ringing music, I know that it is Lewis, my darling twelve-year-old son, who is dying.
I am fumbling in my haste, and all the time the music is ringing in my head, as if to tell me that there is no time, that this is the song of mourning, that all this brewing of tea that smells of summer harvests is too late for Lewis, all I need for him is rosemary.
I think that I will dream of Lewis, but I sleep deeply every night and dream of nothing at all. Until one night, a month after his death, I dream of a river, a deep cool river studded with yellow water lilies, flowing over a bed of gold and bronze stones, and golden kingcups growing on the green reedy banks; I see my boy Lewis on the far side of the river, pulling on his linen shirt and his breeches, and he is smiling at me and waving to show that he is going to run on ahead, just a little way ahead. And in my dream, though I want to hold him back, I wave at him and call to him that I will see
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I look up from the letter. It is grief which makes me feel that nothing matters. I know this is a great honor, to rule Gascony is a great command. The Rivers are rising, even if one of us is missing. And there is no point in letting my heart ache for the one who is missing.
“Amen,” I respond, thinking that perhaps we should pray that the king is saved from himself.
Always we wait, and the money never comes when it should.
Richard trying to hold his army together, trying to hold his fleet together, sending message after message to London, pleading with the court to send him the order to sail. Nothing comes.
They whisper that Jack Cade called for Richard, Duke of York, to be admitted to the king’s councils, and that Jack Cade was right and died for his belief.
In July we hear that Bordeaux has fallen to the French. In September the first refugees from Bayonne start to arrive in tattered craft and say that the whole of the duchy of Gascony has been captured by the French while the expedition to save them, commanded by my unhappy husband, waited in the dock at Plymouth, eating the stores and waiting for orders.
