The Lady of the Rivers (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #1)

by Philippa Gregory

“It’s over,” he says bluntly to me as I quietly stand beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder; there is nothing I can say to comfort him in this, his moment of shame and failure. “It is all over, and I did nothing. I am seneschal of nothing. You have been the wife firstly of John, Duke of Bedford, a mighty lord, the regent of all of France, and secondly to the seneschal of nothing.”

When she laughs, she is a child; but sometimes she looks at me, and I think, dear God, what a girl this is: she has the Sight from Melusina; she is a woman of my line, and she has a future before her that I can neither imagine nor foresee.

“You think it will be another girl?” he asks. “The girls will be the making of this family,” I predict. “You wait and see.” “Queens militant?” “One of these girls is going to make a marriage that will make our fortunes,” I say. “Why else would God make them so beautiful?”

“Are you missing Father already?” she asks gently. “Yes,” I say. “I know I am a soldier’s wife and I should be ready to let him go, but each time it is hard, and I think that it gets harder, not easier.” “Can you foretell his future?” she asks quietly. “Can’t you see that he will come home safely? I am certain this time he will be safe. I just know it.” I turn and look at her. “Elizabeth, can you foresee things at will?” She gives a little shrug of the shoulders. “I’m not sure,” she says. “I don’t know.”

For a moment I am back in that hot summer, in the chamber of my great-aunt Jehanne as she showed me the cards and gave me the bracelet of charms, and told me the story of the women of our family.

I smile, thinking back to the night when I brought out the charms but realized that I needed nothing but my own determination. “A spell and a prayer and knowing your desire are all the same thing,”

The prayer is just the same as a spell, which is just the same as knowing your desire that calls the thing back to your mind, and so back to your hand. Isn’t it?”

To let yourself know that you want something, that you yearn for it. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do. Because you have to have courage to know what you desire. You have to have courage to acknowledge that you are unhappy without it. And sometimes you have to find courage to know that it was your folly or your wrongdoing which lost it; before you make a spell to bring it back, you have to change yourself. That’s one of the deepest transformations that can be.”

“Say one day, when you are married, you want a baby, a child?” She nods. “First you have to know the emptiness of your womb, of your arms, of your heart. That can hurt. You have to have the courage to look at yourself and know the loss that you feel. Then you have to change your life to make a space for the child who will not come. You have to open your heart; you have to make a safe place for the baby. And then you have to sit with your longing and your desire, and that can be the most painful. You have to sit with your longing and know that you may not get what you want; you have to encounter the danger of longing for something without the expectation of getting your desire.” “But this never happened to you,” she suggests.

“I didn’t try to change him, but I had to know the sorrow of what was missing in my life. I had to find the courage to know that I had made the mistake of marrying a man who would not love me for myself, and who would not give me a child; and once I knew that, truly knew that I was an unloved maid—though a married woman—then I could wish that someone loved me.”

“In a way. Magic is the act of making a wish come about. Like praying, like plotting, like herbs, like exerting your will on the world, making something happen.”

And more importantly than anything else, I start to teach her how to clear her mind, how to know her desires, how to judge herself, putting aside favor and indulgence. “The alchemists always say you have to be pure. You are the first ingredient,” I tell her. “You have to be clean.”

“When a beautiful young woman wants to enchant a man, she doesn’t need much of a spell,” I assure her. “A girl like you needs to do nothing much more than stand under an oak tree and wait for him to ride by. But do you remember about wishing?”

say, and take her hand before she climbs on the mounting block. She turns to listen. “Don’t curse,” I say to her. “No ill-wishing.”

“Ill-wishing is a curse on the woman who does it, as well as the one who receives it. When you put such words out in the world, they can overshoot—like an arrow—that’s what my great-aunt Jehanne told me. A curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly. I would hope that you never curse at all.” Even as I speak I feel the shadow of the future on her. “I pray that you never have cause to curse,” I say.

“Jacquetta, he accuses me of being William de la Pole’s lover; do you think he would blink at calling you a witch?”

“You must know,” she says bitterly. “You are lying. You know, all my ladies know. You come to wake us in the morning, and we are lying side by side, as if we were dead and made of stone on our tombs. Have you ever caught us wrapped in each other’s arms? Have you ever heard us call through the door, ‘Not

now! Come back later’? You have only to look at him and you would know. You cannot imagine that he is a lusty, passionate man who is going to father a strong son on me? We don’t even rumple the sheets.” “Oh, Margaret, I am so sorry,” I say tenderly. “Of course I didn’t think he was lusty. But I did think that he came to your bed and did his duty.”

She turns her face away and rubs her eyes. “It is not the same for me. It will never be the same for me. I will never be loved like you are loved. And I think I am dying inside, Jacquetta.”

we have influence and a reputation; we are trusted by both the king and the queen, but money—no, we never have any money.

The card maker had put three spare cards in the pack when he first painted the pictures, three cards just like the others with brightly colored backs but nothing on the front, spares for use in another game. And it was the three cards with nothing to say that came to my hand when I went to foresee Elizabeth’s future with John Grey. I had hoped to see prosperity and children, grandchildren and a rise in the world, but the cards were empty of anything. There was no future that I could see, for Elizabeth and John Grey: no future for them at all.

I turn it over. It is the Falling Tower. The tower of a castle, struck perhaps by lightning, a jagged streak of light flaming into the roof of the tower—the walls going one way, the roof the other. Two little figures fall from the tower to the grass below. “What

Nothing I can say can dull her joy, her face is shining. She thinks I have foreseen the change of everything, and she is longing for something to change. She thinks that the tower shown in the card is her prison; she wants it broken down. She thinks the people who are clearly falling are breaking free. She thinks the lightning shaft that destroys and burns will break down the old and make new. There is nothing I can say that she will hear as a warning.

I glance round the room and see that all her ladies-in-waiting are looking, like me, bewildered. This is a couple who have conceived their first child—after nearly eight years of waiting. This child makes their marriage complete and their throne secure. Why do they behave as if they are barely acquainted?

“He’s the son of Marguerite the Daisy,” I say. “He can be the flower that we rejoice to see in springtime, whose coming means spring.” “Yes,” she says. “A wildflower that comes from who knows where.”

I had seen him before as a charmer, a seducer, a rogue; but now I see something better in him, a man of great tenderness.

He serves the king as a most loyal friend, and he serves her as a knight of chivalry. More than this, I don’t want to see; I won’t let myself see.

I slam the bedroom door and put my back to it, before anyone can see that he has his hands either side of her face, that she is holding his wrists, that they are scanning each other’s eyes.

The tears spill over from her eyes and pour down her cheeks, and Edmund Beaufort drops his head and kisses them away, kisses her like a lover trying to comfort his mistress. “No!” I cry again, utterly horrified. I come to the bed and put my hand on his arm, pulling him away from her; but they are blind and deaf to me, clinging together, her arms around his neck. He is half lying on her, as he covers her face with kisses and whispers promises that he cannot keep, and at that moment, at that terrible, terrible moment, the door behind us opens and Henry, King of England, comes into the room and sees the two of them, wrapped in each other’s arms: his pregnant wife and his dearest friend.

There is nothing he can say. The king looks from his wife, raised on one elbow, white as a ghost on her bed, to the duke standing beside her, and then he looks at me. He looks puzzled, like a hurt child. I reach out to him, as if he were one of my own children, cruelly struck. “Don’t look,” I say foolishly. “Don’t see.” He puts his head on one side, like a whipped dog, as if he is trying to hear me. “Don’t look,” I repeat. “Don’t see.”

Strangely, he steps towards me and lowers his pale face to me. Without knowing what I am doing, I lift my hands to him, and he takes one and then the other and cups my palms over his eyes, as if to blindfold himself.

For a moment we are all quite frozen: my hands over his eyes, the duke waiting to speak, Margaret leaning back on her pillows, her hand over her curving belly. Then the king presses my hands hard against his clos...

The king goes to bed very early, the gentlemen of his chamber tell me, when I go to inquire. They say he seemed very tired. He did not speak to them. He did not say one word.

I go back and tell the queen that he has slept through the morning and is still asleep.

All day he sleeps. Every hour I go to the door of the king’s rooms and ask if he has woken. Every hour the groom of the chamber comes out, his face more and more worried, and shakes his head: “Still sleeping.”

“They can’t wake him,” she says tightly. “The grooms tried to wake him for dinner but he would not stir. The duke has sent for the physicians to see if he is sick.”

“The king seems to be in good health, but he is sleeping,” one of the doctors, John Arundel, says. “Can you wake him up?” “We judged it best to let him sleep,” Dr. Faceby replies, bowing. “It might be best to let him sleep and wake when he is ready. Grief and a shock will sometimes be healed with a sleep, a long sleep.”

The next day they go to wake the king, but he does not wake.

One of the grooms of the bedchamber comes to the door and tells me that they had to lift the king to the close stool, clean him, and change his nightgown, which he had soiled.

He cannot stand, he cannot hear them; he does not respond to a touch. He shows no hunger, and he would lie in his filth. “This isn’t sleep,” the groom says bluntly. “The doctors are fooling themselves. Nobody sleeps like this.”

My great-aunt Jehanne cautioned me to always be careful what I wished for, to consider very carefully the words of blessings or of curses. And now I have told the King of England: “Don’t look! Don’t see!” and he has closed his eyes and neither looks nor sees.

She breaks off. Neither of us has mentioned the duke taking her into his arms as an accustomed lover, kissing her face, promising to keep her safe.

“I don’t know anything, and if I know nothing, then I cannot be questioned, and I cannot confess,” I say, cutting him off. “All I want to do is to see Her Grace at peace and strong enough to carry her child to full term and bring him into the world. All I pray is that His Grace, the king, wakes up with a calm mind and we can tell him the sad news from Gascony. And I hope, of course, all the time, ceaselessly, that my husband is safe in Calais. Other than these thoughts, I don’t venture, Your Grace.” He nods his head, and we walk in silence.

They look like conspirators, their heads close together, whispering. I glance around at the queen’s rooms; no one else seems to see anything out of the ordinary. I realize that I am the only one who suddenly sees a sickening intimacy.

Not even an ordained priest can come into these rooms for six weeks before the birth and for six weeks after. In practice, in most households, a loving husband will break the rules and come in to see his wife during her confinement, as soon as the baby is born, washed, swaddled, and laid in the cradle. Many husbands will not touch her until she has been churched, believing that she is unclean after the travail of childbed, and might contaminate him

No man will come near the poor little queen, of course. No man is allowed in the royal confinement chamber,

Some nights I get up from the little bed that I have in the queen’s room and pull up the corner of the tapestry over the window so that I can see the moon, a big warm harvest moon, so near to earth that I can see every wrinkle and pockmark on her face, and I ask her: “Did I bewitch the king? Did I ill-wish him? In that moment of fright when I bade him see nothing, did I, in truth, make him blind? Could such a thing be? Could I be so powerful? And if it was me—how can I take the words back and restore him?”

I go down to the river and sit on the pier as the sun is setting and look over the swiftly moving water that flows towards the sea, and I whisper to Melusina that if I ever said a word that wished the king blinded, I take back that word now. If I ever had a thought that he should see nothing, then I deny that thought now, and I wish with all my heart that the baby born to the queen will be well and healthy and live long and happy.

It does take a while—all night—but next day, on the day of St. Edward, she gives birth to a boy, a precious Lancaster boy, and the safety and the inheritance of England is assured.

At the closed door of her rooms is a young boy and a couple of guards wearing the white rose of the House of York on their livery. I know at once that this will mean trouble, as I open the door and go inside.