LONDON, SUMMER 1441

I told the truth when I said that I was happy at Grafton but my heart leaps with the most frivolous joy when the king sends the royal barge to take us down the river, and I see the high towers of Greenwich Castle and the new Bella Court that the Duke of Gloucester has built. It is so pretty and so rich, I cannot help but delight in coming to it as a favourite of the court and one of the greatest ladies in the land once more. The barge sweeps along as the drummers keep the oarsmen in time and then they shoulder their oars and the liveried boatmen on the pier catch the ropes and draw the barge alongside.

I am stepping down the drawbridge when I look up and see that the royal party has been walking beside the river and is now strolling to greet us. In front of them all is the king, a boy-king no longer; he is a young man of nearly twenty, and he comes confidently forwards and kisses me, as a kinsman, on both cheeks, and gives his hand to my husband. I see the company behind him surprised at the warmth of his welcome, and then they have to come forwards too. First the Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, my former brother-in-law, whom my first husband said would bear watching, and behind him comes the Duchess Eleanor. She walks slowly towards the pier, a woman exulting in her own beauty, and at first I see only the dazzle of vanity, but then I look again. At her heels is a big black dog, a huge creature, a mastiff or some sort of fighting dog. The moment I see it I could almost hiss, like a cat will hiss, setting its fur on end, and darkening its eyes. I am so distracted by the ugly dog that I let the duke take my hand and kiss my cheek and whisper in my ear, without hearing a word he says. As his lady, the Duchess Eleanor, comes close I find I am staring at her, and when she steps forwards to kiss me, I flinch from her touch as if she smells of the spittle of an old fighting dog. I have to force myself to step into her cold embrace, and smile as she smiles, without affection. Only when she releases me and I step back do I see that there is no black dog at her heels, and never was. I have had a flicker of a vision from the other world, and I know, with a hidden shudder, that one day there will be a black dog that runs up stone stairs in a cold castle and howls at her door.

As the months go on, I see that I am right to fear the duchess. She is everywhere at court, she is the first lady of the land, the queen in all but name. When the court is at Westminster Palace she lives in the queen’s apartments and wears the royal jewels. In procession she is hard on the heels of the king. She treats him with a treacly intimacy, forever laying her hand on his arm and whispering in his ear. Only his radiant innocence saves them from the appearance of conspiracy, or worse. Inevitably, as a dowager duchess of England, I am constantly in her company, and I know she does not like it when people compare us. When we go into dinner I walk behind her, during the day I sit with her ladies, and she treats me with effortless disdain, for she believes I am a woman who wasted the currency of her youth and beauty by throwing it away for love.

‘Can you imagine being a royal duchess and lowering yourself to marry a squire of your household?’ I catch the hiss of her whisper to one of her ladies as I sew in her rooms. ‘What woman would do such ang?’

I look up. ‘A woman who saw the finest of men, Your Grace,’ I reply. ‘And I have no regrets, and I have no doubts about my husband who returns love with love and loyalty with faithfulness.’

This is a hit at her, for as a mistress turned wife she is always fearfully on the lookout for another mistress who might try to repeat the trick she played on the countess who was her friend.

‘It’s not a choice I would make,’ she says more mildly. ‘Not a choice that a noblewoman, thinking of the good of her family, would ever make.’

I bow my head. ‘I know it,’ I remark. ‘But I was not thinking of my family at the time. I was thinking of myself.’

On Midsummer Eve she makes an entry into London, accompanied by the lords and nobles of her special favour, as grand as if she were a visiting princess. As a lady of the court I follow in her train and so hear, as the procession winds through the streets, the less flattering remarks from the citizens of London. I have loved the Londoners since my own state entry into the City and I know them to be people easily charmed by a smile, and easily offended by any sign of vanity. The duchess’s great train makes them laugh at her, though they doff their caps as she goes by and then hide their smiling faces with them. But once she has gone by, they raise a cheer for me. They like the fact that I married an Englishman for love, the women at the windows blow kisses at my husband who is famous for his good looks, and the men at the crossroads call out bawdy remarks to me, the pretty duchess, and say that if I like an Englishman so much I might try a Londoner if I fancy a change.

The citizens of London are not the only people to dislike Duchess Eleanor. Cardinal Beaufort is no great friend; and he is a dangerous man to have as an enemy. She does not care that she offends him; she is married to the heir to the throne and he can do nothing to change that. Indeed, I think she is courting trouble with him, wanting to force a challenge to decide once and for all who rules the king. The kingdom is dividing into those who favour the duke and those who favour the cardinal; matters are going to come to a head. In this triumphal progress into London the duchess is staking her claim.

The cardinal’s reply comes swiftly. That very next night, when Richard and I are dining at her table in the King’s Head in Cheap, her chamberlain comes in and whispers in her ear. I see her go pale, she looks at me as if she would say something, and then she waves away her dinner, rises to her feet without a word to anyone, and goes out. The rest of us look from one to another, her lady in waiting stands up to follow her and then hesitates. Richard, seated among the gentlemen, nods at me to stay seated, and quietly leaves the room. He is gone only a few moments and the shocked silence has turned into a buzz of speculation by the time he comes back in, smiles at each of my neighbours as if to excuse us, takes my hand and leads me from the room.

Outside he throws his cloak over my shoulders. ‘We’re going back to Westminster,’ he says. ‘We don’t want to be seen with the duchess any more.’

‘What’s happened?’ I ask, clutching at the laces of the cloak as he hurries me down the streets. We jump over the foul ditch in the centre of the lane and he helps me down the slippery stairs to the river. A waiting wherry boat comes to his whistle, and he helps me into the prow. ‘Cast off,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘estminster Stairs.’

‘What is happening?’ I whisper.

He leans towards me so that not even the boatman, pulling on his oars, can hear. ‘The duchess’s clerk and her chaplain have been arrested.’

‘What for?’

‘Conjuring, or astronomy, divining or something. I could only get a rumour, enough to tell me that I want you right out of this.’

‘Me?’

‘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.

‘You,’ Richard says quietly. ‘Have you ever met Roger Bolingbroke, a scholar of Oxford? Serves in her household.’

I think for a moment. ‘My lord knew him, didn’t he? Didn’t he come to Penshurst one time? Didn’t he bring a shield chart and show my lord the art of geomancy?’

The boat nudges against the Westminster Palace stairs and my husband takes my hand and helps me up the wooden steps to the pier. A servant comes forwards with a torch and lights our way through the gardens to the river entrance.

‘He’s been arrested,’ Richard says.

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll leave you in our rooms, and then I’ll go and see what I can find out.’

I pause under the archway of the entrance and I take his cold hands in mine. ‘What do you fear?’

‘Nothing yet,’ he says unconvincingly, then he takes my arm and guides me into the palace.

Richard comes in at night and tells me that nobody seems to know what is happening. Three of the duchess’s household have been arrested: men that I know, men that I greet daily. The scholar Roger Bolingbroke, who came to visit us at Penshurst, and the duchess’s chaplain who has served the Mass before me a dozen times, and one of the canons at St Stephen’s chapel in this very palace. 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.

‘Ever seen a chart for the king?’ my husband asks me tersely. ‘He has left the palace for Sheen with nobody but the closest men of his council. We are ordered to stay here. We are all under suspicion, he hates this sort of thing, it terrifies him. His council will come here and there will be questions. They might call on us. My lord Bedford never showed you a chart for the king, did he?’

‘You know he drew up charts for everyone,’ I say quietly. ‘You remember the machine that hung above the plan of France which showed the positions of stars? He used it to show the stars at someone’s birth. He drew up a chart for me. He drew up his own. Probably one for you. Cerainly, he will have drawn up a chart for the king.’

‘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.’ I can taste blood in my mouth and I realise that I have peeled the skin from my lip. I put my finger to where the raw skin is stinging. ‘Are you thinking that the duchess might have taken the king’s chart? Might she have used it? Will they link me to the charges since I gave her husband the king’s chart?’

‘Perhaps,’ is all he says.

We wait. The summer sun burns down on the city and there are reports of plague in the poor areas, near the stinking river. It is unbearably hot. I want to go home to Grafton and my children, but the king has commanded that everyone must stay at court. No-one can leave London, it is like bringing a stewpot to the boil. As the hot air presses on the city like a lid on a cauldron, the king waits, trembling with distress, for his council to unravel the plot against him. He is a young man who cannot tolerate opposition, it strikes at his very sense of himself. He has been brought up by courtiers and flatterers, he cannot bear the thought that someone does not love him. To think that someone might use the dark arts against him fills him with a terror that he cannot admit. The people around him are afraid for him, and for themselves. Nobody knows what a scholar like Roger Bolingbroke could do if he was minded to cause harm. And if the duchess has put him in league with other skilled men, they may have forged a conspiracy against the king to do him deadly harm. What if even now some secret horror is working its way through his veins? What if he shatters like a glass or melts like wax?

The duchess appears at the high table in the Palace of Westminster, seated alone, her face bright and smiling, her air of confidence unshaken. In the airless hall, where the smell of the meat from the kitchens wafts in like a hot breath, she is cool and untroubled. Her husband is at the king’s side in Sheen, trying to reassure the young man, trying to counter anything that his uncle the cardinal says, swearing that the young king is beloved, beloved of everyone, vowing on his life that he has never seen a horoscope for the king, his interest in alchemy is merely in the king’s service, the herb bed at Penshurst was already planted under the signs of the stars when they got there. He does not know who planted it, perhaps the former owner? I sit with the ladies in the duchess’s rooms, and sew shirts for the poor, and say nothing, not even when the duchess suddenly laughs at random and declares that she does not know why the king delays so long at Sheen Palace, surely he should come to London, and then we could all go on progress to the country, and get out of this heat.

‘I believe he is coming tonight,’ I volunteer.

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!’

A scud of sudden rain makes the women cry out, the sky is black as a crow over London and there is a rumble of thunder. The window rattles in the rising wind and then it is flung open b a gust of icy wind. Someone screams as the frame bangs, and I rise up and go to the window, catch the flying latch and draw it shut. I flinch back from the crack of lightning over the city. A storm is rumbling in, over the king’s route, and within moments there is the rattle of hail against the window, like someone flinging pebbles, and a woman turns her pale face to the duchess and cries, ‘A storm over the king! You said that there would be a storm over the king.’

The duchess is hardly listening, she is watching me fighting with the wind at the window, and then the words – the accusation – sinks into her awareness and she looks at the woman – Elizabeth Flyte – and says, ‘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 . . . ’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Excuse me, my lady . . . ’

‘You can’t leave without permission,’ the duchess says harshly. But the woman has tipped over her stool in her hurry to get to the door. Two other women rise too, uncertain whether to run or stay.

‘Sit down! Sit down!’ the duchess shrieks. ‘I order it!’

Elizabeth tears open the door and flings herself out of the room, while the other women sink to their stools, and one quickly crosses herself. A flash of lightning suddenly makes the scene look bleak and cold. Eleanor the duchess turns to me, her face haggard and white. ‘For God’s sake, I just looked at the sky and saw that there was going to be a storm. There is no need for all this. I just saw the rain coming, that’s all.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know that’s all.’

Within half an hour the palace is barring its doors and windows and calling it a witch’s wind that blows death down with rain. Within a day the young king has announced that his aunt the duchess may not come into his presence. The Oxford scholar, the friend of my first husband who came to visit us at Penshurst, is questioned by the council and confesses to heresy and magic. They put him on show, like a bear to be baited. Poor Roger Bolingbroke, a scholar for all his life, a man of learning with a great love for the mysteries of the world and the stars, is put on a stage, like a scaffold, at St Paul’s Cross in London, while a sermon is preached against him and against all witches and warlocks, necromancers and heretics who threaten the king’s life and his peace, who crowd into his festering city, who seek to enter his ports, who hide themselves in the country villages and do acts of malice, small and great. 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.

We all parade around Bolingbroke, circling him and staring at his shame as if he were an animal brought back from the coast of Africa, some new sort of beast. He keeps his eyes down so that he cannot see the avid faces, and need not recognise his former friends. The man who has spent his life in study, thinking about the harmonious natuainhe world, sits on a painted chair wearing a paper crown, surrounded by his equipment and his books as if he were a Fool. They have his geomancy board laid on the ground before his feet, and a set of candles specially carved. They have some charts showing the positions of the planets, and the horoscope that they say he drew up for the duchess, at her request. They have a little model of the earth and the planets moving around it. They have brass moulds for casting figures, they have a still for making liquids, and the wax trays used for drawing the perfume of flowers. Worst of all, at his feet is a horrible little creature of wax, like a miscarried rabbit.

I shrink back when I see it, and Richard puts a strong arm around my waist. ‘Don’t look at it,’ he advises me.

I look away. ‘What was it?’

‘It was a wax image of the king. It is supposed to have a little crown on its head and that golden thread is the sceptre and the little bead is the orb.’

The face is distorted, the feet are formless. I can see the outline of the cape and the dots to show the markings of ermine, but the head is almost melted away. ‘What have they done to it?’

‘They heated it before a fire so that it would melt and run away. It would make the king’s strength flow from him too. They meant to destroy him as the image melted away.’

I shudder. ‘Can’t we go now?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘We have to be here to show our revulsion at these crimes.’

‘I am revolted. I am so revolted I want to go.’

‘Keep your head up. Keep walking. You, of all people, have to be seen to be an enemy of this sort of work.’

‘Me of all people?’ I fire up. ‘This is so disgusting it makes me sick.’

‘They are saying that the Duchess Eleanor got her husband the duke to marry her with a love potion, so that he could not resist her. They are saying you did the same when you were a girl and my lord duke was a man broken-hearted at the loss of his wife Anne.’

I shudder, averting my eyes from the melted wax poppet. ‘Richard . . . ’

‘I shall keep you safe,’ he swears. ‘You are my lady and my love. I shall keep you safe, Jacquetta. You will never look for me, and find me gone.’

We come back from the shaming of Bolingbroke to find the duchess’s rooms are empty, the door thrown open to her privy chamber, her clothes chests overturned, her cupboards ransacked, her jewellery boxes missing, and the woman vanished.

‘Where is the duchess?’ my husband demands of her maid in waiting.

She shakes her head, she is crying unstoppably. ‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Gone,’ is all she can say.

‘God save us, the child is an idiot,’ Richard snaps. ‘You ask her.’

I take her by the shoulders. ‘Ellie, tell me, did they arr. 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. She says it is a wicked plot against him that is going to be the ruin of her. She says Cardinal Beaufort will tear them both down.’

I turn to my husband. ‘Sanctuary?’

His face is grim. ‘Yes, but she is mistaken. That won’t save her.’

‘They can’t say she is a witch, if she is hiding on holy ground and claiming the safety of the Church.’

‘Then they’ll accuse her of being a heretic,’ he says. ‘A heretic can’t be protected by the Church. So if she’s claimed sanctuary they’ll charge her with heresy; it’s the only way to get her out. Before this they might have charged her with forecasting. Now they’ll accuse her of heresy. And heresy is a worse crime than forecasting. She’s put herself in a worse place.’

‘The law of men always puts women in a bad place!’ I flare up in anger.

Richard says nothing.

‘Should we go away?’ I ask him very quietly. ‘Can we go home to Grafton?’ I look around the wreckage of the room. ‘I don’t feel safe here. Can we go?’

He grimaces. ‘We can’t go now. It looks like guilt if we go, just as she looks as if she admits guilt by hiding in sanctuary. I think we are better off staying here. At least we can get a ship to Flanders from here, if we need to.’

‘I can’t leave the children!’

He pays no attention. ‘I wish to God your father was still alive, you could have gone on a visit to him.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘You stay here. I shall go and see William de la Pole the Earl of Suffolk. He’ll tell me what’s going on in the council.’

‘And what shall I do?’

‘Wait here,’ he says grimly. ‘Open these rooms and treat them like your own. Behave as if nothing were wrong. You are the first lady of the kingdom now, the only royal duchess left. Order the ladies to tidy the place up and then have them sew with you, and get someone to read from the Bible. Go to chapel this evening. Parade your innocence.’

‘But I am innocent,’ I say.

His face is dark. ‘I don’t doubt that she will say the same.’

She does not say the same. They bring Roger Bolingbroke before her with the horoscope that she commanded he cast for her, with the magical instruments that were the tools of his trade as an explorer of the unknown realms, with the misshapen wax that they say is a melted image of the king, and she confesses to witchcraft and offences against the church. She admits that she has ‘long used witchcraft with the Witch of Eye’ and then they tell her that the Witch of Eye has been under arrest since the night of the witch’s wind.

‘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/di height="0">

‘Margery Jourdemayne,’ he says, his brow knitted with worry. ‘Some practising witch, who was taken up for her crimes once before now. Comes from the village of Eye. She is known to the Church as a witch, known to everyone as a witch.’

I gasp in horror.

He looks at me. ‘For the love of God, tell me that you don’t know her.’

‘Not as a witch.’

He closes his eyes briefly in horror. ‘What do you know of her?’

‘I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, as my lord commanded, I swear to you, and I would swear to the court. I never did anything with her but study the use of herbs, and she did nothing at Penshurst but plan the herb garden with me, and tell me when the herbs should be cut and when they should be sown. I didn’t know she was a witch.’

‘Did my lord command you to see her?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Do you have that under his seal? Did he write the order?’

I shake my head. ‘He just sent her to me. And you saw her. That time in the stable yard when you came with the message from Luxembourg, and she was leaving with the wagon.’

Richard clenches his hands into fists. ‘I can swear that my lord commanded that she serve you . . . but this isn’t good, it’s not good. But perhaps we can glide over this. Perhaps nobody will bring it up, if it was just making a herb bed. At least you never consulted her. You have never ordered her to attend you . . . .’

I glance away.

He groans. ‘No. Oh no. Tell me, Jacquetta.’

‘I took a tincture to prevent a child. You knew about that.’

‘The herbs? That was her recipe?’

I nod.

‘You told nobody?’

‘No-one but you.’

‘Then nobody will know. Anything else she made for you?’

‘Later . . . a drink to get a child.’

He checks as he realises that this was the conception of our daughter, Elizabeth, the baby that forced him into marriage. ‘Good God, Jacquetta . . . ’ He throws back the covers and gets out of bed, pulls back the curtain and strides to the fireside. It is the first time he has ever been angry with me. He thumps the bedpost with his fist as if he wishes he could fight the world. I sit up, gather the covers to my shoulders and feel my heart hammer with dread at his rage.

‘I wanted a child and I wanted you,’ I say unsteadily. ‘I loved you, and I wanted us to be married. But I would not have cast a spell for it. I used herbs; not witchcraft.’

He rubs his head, making his hair stand on end, as if these distinctions are beyond him. ‘You made our child with a witch’s potion? Our daughter Elizabeth?’

‘Herbs,’ I say steadily. ‘Herbs from a herbalist. Why not?’

He casts a furious look at me. ‘Because I don’t want a child brought to life by a handful of herbs from some old witch!’

‘She is not some old witch, she is a good woman, and we have a beautiful child. You are as bad as this witch-hunt with your fears. I took herbs to help me to be fertile. We made a beautiful child. Don’t you ill-wish us now!’

‘For God’s sake.’ He raises his voice. ‘I am afraid of nothing but you being mixed up with the most notorious witch in England, who has been trying to kill our king!’

‘She is not! She would not!’ I shout back at him. ‘She would not!’

‘She is accused.’

‘Not by me!’

‘By the Lord Chief Justice! And if they look for her associates they will find you, another royal duchess, another woman who dabbles in the unknown, another woman who can call up a storm or capture a unicorn.’

‘I am not! I am not!’ I burst into tears. ‘You know I am not. You know I do nothing. Don’t say such things, Richard. Don’t you accuse me. You of all people!’

He loses his anger at my tears, and comes quickly across the room, sits beside me and gathers me against his shoulder. ‘I don’t accuse you, my love. I know. I know you would never do anything to harm anyone. Hush, I am sorry. And you are not to blame.’

‘I can’t help it that I foresee.’

‘I know you can’t help it.’

‘And you of all people know that my lord put me before the scrying mirror day after day and all I could see was a battle in snow and a queen . . . a queen . . . with horseshoes reversed. He said it was useless. He said I could not foresee for him. I failed him. I failed him.’

‘I know. I know you don’t conjure. Be still, my love.’

‘I did take herbs to get Elizabeth, but that was all. I would never conjure a child. Never.’

‘I know, my love. Be still.’

I am silent and as I dry my eyes on the sheet he asks me, ‘Jacquetta, does anyone know of this recipe that she gave you but you and her? Did anyone see her with you at Penshurst? Any of the court know that she was there?’

‘No. Just servants, and her boy.’

‘Then we will have to pray that she keeps her mouth shut about you, even if they take her to the stake.’

‘The stake?’ I say stupidly.

He nods in silence and then gets back into bed beside me. Together we watch the fire burning down in the grate. ‘They will burn her for a witch,’ he says flatly. ‘And the duchess too.’