WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
SUMMER 1433

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, my father is a count, our overlords are the Dukes of Burgundy (though they are richer and more powerful than anyone in France) and the last French king, who was said to be most tragically mad, died when I was only a little girl, before I could see him. So I am counting on much from the English boy-king. I hope to see a youth who is the small mirror of his heroic father. After all, my husband’s life is devoted to making this king safe in his lands in France. We are both sworn to his service. I am expecting a great being: something halfway between a boy and a god.

Not so. I first see him on our entry into London when we go through the City gates to the sound of singing choirs, and the cheering of the citizens. My husband is an old friend to the people of London, and I am a novelty they delight to see. The men bellow approval of my youth and looks and the women blow me kisses. The London merchants depend upon trade with the English lands in France and my husband is well known for holding the lands in the keeping of England. The merchants and their wives and their households turn out to greet us and show our standards from their overhanging windows. The Mayor of London has prepared poems and pageants to greet us; in one tableau there is a beautiful mermaid who promises good health, fertility, and ever-flowing waters of happiness. My lord duke holds my hand and bows to the crowd and looks proud of me as they call my name and shout blessings on me.

‘The Londoners love a pretty girl,’ he says to me. ‘I will have their favour forever while you keep your looks.’

The king’s servants greet us at the gate of the palace at Westminster and lead us through a maze of courts and gardens, rooms with inner rooms, galleries and courtyards, until finally we come to the king’s private rooms. One pair of double doors is flung open, another pair beyond them, then there is a room filled with people in the most beautiful clothes, and finally, like a tiny jack popping from a series of boxes, there is the young king, rising from his throne and coming forwards to greet his uncle.

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.

I give a little gasp and my husband glances down at me, distracted for a moment, and turns to the king his nephew and bows and embraces him in one movement. ‘Oh! Take care!’ I whisper as if he might crush him, and then Woodville steps smartly across and takes my right hand on his arm, as if he is bringing me forwards to be presented.

‘What is it?’ he demands urgently in a low whisper. ‘Are you ill, my lady?’

My husband has both hands on the boy’s shoulders, he is looking into the pale face, into the light-grey eyes. I can almost feel the weight of his grip, I feel that it is too much. ‘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, staring at me and my lord and the king, and that Woodville is marching me forwards to make my curtsey, with such determined briskness that I know I must not say another word.

I sink down into a deep curtsey and the king raises me up with a light touch on my arms. He is respectful since I am his aunt, for all that I am only seventeen years old to his twelve: we are both young innocents in this court of hard-faced adults. He bids me welcome to England in a thin little voice that has not yet broken into a man’s tone. He kisses my cheeks right and left; the touch of his lips is cold, like the brittle ice that I imagined when I first saw him, and his hands holding mine are thin, I can almost feel the bones of his fingers, like little icicles.

He bids us come in to dinner and turns and leads me in, at the head of all the court. A beautifully dressed woman steps back with a heavy tread, as if to make way for me, begrudgingly. I glance at the young king.

‘My other aunt, Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester,’ he flutes in his little-boy treble. ‘Wife of my much beloved uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.’

I curtsey to her and she to me, and behind her I see the handsome face of my husband’s brother the Duke of Gloucester. He and my husband embrace, arms on each other’s shoulders, a great hug, but when my husband turns to his sister-in-law Eleanor I see that he looks sternly at her.

‘I hope we shall all live merrily together,’ the king says in his tentative piping voice. ‘I think a family should be as one. A royal family should always be as one, don’t you think? We should all love one another and live in harmony.’

‘Of course,’ I say, though if ever I saw rivalry and envy in a woman, I am seeing it now on the beautiful spoiled face of the Duchess of Gloucester. She is wearing a towering headdress that makes her seem like a giantess, the tallest woman in the court. She is wearing a gown of deep blue trimmed with ermine: the most prestigious fur in the world. Around her neck are blue sapphires and her eyes are bluer than they are. She smiles at me and her white teeth are bared but there is no warmth in her face.

The king seats me on his right-hand side and my lord duke to his left. Next to me comes the Duke of Gloucester, my husband’s brother, and his wife goes the other side of my husband. We face the great dining room as if we were their tapestry, their entertainment: bright with the colours of our gowns and capes, sparkling with jewels. They gaze up at us as if we were a masque for their education. We look down at them as the gods might look down on mortals, and as the dishes go round the room we send out the best plates to our favourites as if to remind them that they eat at our behest.

After dinner there is dancing and the Duke of Gloucester is quick to lead me out into a dance. We take our part and then stand as the other couples dance their steps. ‘You are so charming,’ the duke says to me. ‘They tol me that John had married a heart-stealer, but I didn’t believe it. How is it that I have served my country in France over and over and yet never saw you?’

I smile and say nothing. The true answer would be that while my husband was engaged in endless warfare to keep the English lands safe in France, this worthless brother of his ran away with the Countess of Hainault, Jacqueline, and took on a war all of his own to try to win her lands for himself. He wasted his fortune and might have lost his life there, if his vagrant fancy had not wandered to her lady in waiting, this Eleanor, and then he ran away with her. 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 never have come home to England,’ he whispers as a turn in the dance puts us together.

I don’t know what to reply to this, and I don’t like how he looks at me.

‘If I had seen you, I would never have left your side,’ he says.

I glance over to my husband, but he is talking to the king and not looking at me.

‘And would you have smiled on me?’ my brother-in-law asks me. ‘Would you smile on me now? Or are you afraid of stealing my heart from me even now?’

I don’t smile, I look very grave and wonder that he should speak like this to me, his sister-in-law, with such assurance, 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, which is part of the movement of the dance, and presses me close to him, his hand warm on my back, his thigh brushing against me, which is not.

‘And does my brother please you as a husband?’ he whispers, his breath warm on my bare neck. I lean slightly away but he tightens his grip and holds me close. ‘Does he touch you as a young girl loves to be touched – gently, but quickly?’ He laughs. ‘Am I right, Jacquetta? Is that how you love to be touched? Gently, but quickly?’

I pull away from him, and there is a swirl of colour and music and Richard Woodville has my hand and has pulled me into the centre of the dancers and has me turning one way and then another. ‘Forgive me!’ he calls over his shoulder to the duke. ‘I am quite mistaken, I have been too long in France; I thought this was the moment that we changed partners.’

‘No, you are too soon, but no matter,’ the duke says, taking Woodville’s abruptly abandoned partner by her hand and forming the chain of the dance as Woodville and I take the little steps in the centre of the circle and then form an arch so everyone dances through, all the partners change again, and I move away, in the movement of the dance, away from the Duke Humphrey.

‘What did you think of the king?’ my husband asks me, coming to my bedroom that night. The sheets have been turned down for him, the pillows piled high. He gets in with a sigh of exhaustion, and I notice his lined face is grey with fatigue.

‘Very young.’

He laughs shortly. ‘You are yourself such an old married lady.’

‘Young evee ps age,’ I say. ‘And somehow, a little frail?’ I don’t tell my husband of the sense I had of a boy as fragile as glass, as cold as thin ice.

He frowns. ‘I believe he is strong enough, though I agree, he is slight for his age. His father . . . ’ He breaks off. ‘Well, it means nothing now what his father was, or how he was as a boy. But God knows my brother Henry was a strong powerful boy. At any rate, this is no time for regrets, this boy will have to follow him. He will just have to grow into greatness. What did you make of my brother?’

I bite my tongue on my first response. ‘I don’t think I have ever met anyone like him in my life before,’ I say honestly.

He laughs shortly. ‘I hope he didn’t speak to you in a way you did not like?’

‘No, he was perfectly courteous.’

‘He thinks he can have any woman in the world. He nearly ruined us in France when he courted Jacqueline of Hainault. It was the saving of my life when he seduced her lady in waiting, and ran off to England with her.’

‘Was that the Duchess Eleanor?’

‘It was. Dear God, what a scandal! Everyone said she had seduced him with love potions and witchcraft! And Jacqueline left all alone, declaring they were married, abandoned in Hainault! Typical of Humphrey, but thank God he left her, and came back to England where he can do no damage, or at any rate less damage.’

‘And Eleanor?’ I ask. ‘His wife now?’

‘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 to me. She looks at me sometimes as if she would wish me away. She will be praying that you don’t have a son who would put her another step from the throne. Can you see with the Sight and tell me, does she cast spells? Is she skilled? Would she ill-wish me?’

I think of the woman with the dazzling sapphires and the dazzling smile and the hard eyes. ‘I can see nothing for sure but pride and vanity and ambition.’

‘That’s bad enough,’ my lord says cheerfully. ‘She can always hire someone to do the actual spells. Should I have her watched, d’you think?’

I consider the brilliant woman and her handsome whispering husband. ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking that this is a court very far from my girlhood in the sunny castles of France. ‘Yes, I think if I were you, I would have her watched. I would have them both watched.’