WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
OCTOBER 1441

The hed the witch come before the court charged together with both witchcraft and treason. The duchess claims that she only visited Mrs Jourdemayne for herbs for fertility, and the herbalist gave her a drink, and said that it would make her conceive a child. I sit at the back of the room behind the avid spectators and know that I did exactly the same.

Margery has been charged with witchcraft before, and so they ask her why she continued to practise her arts: the herbs, the incantations, the foreseeing. She looks at the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, as if he might understand her. ‘If you have eyes, you can’t help but see,’ she says. ‘The herbs grow for me, the veil sometimes parts for me. It is a gift, I thought it was given by God.’

He gestures at the wax doll that sits before him on the desk. ‘This is a most unholy curse, an attempted murder of an anointed king. How could it come from God?’

‘It was a poppet to make a child,’ she says wearily. ‘It was a poppet in the shape of a great lord. See his ermine and his sword. It was a little doll to make a beautiful and talented child who would be an ornament to his country and a treasure to his family.’

Without thinking, my hand steals to my belly where a new baby is being made who I hope will be an ornament and a treasure.

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?’

The archbishop shakes his head. ‘Silence,’ he orders.

They have all decided already that this was an image of the king, made for melting. They have all decided that she is a witch, a brand for the burning. 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.

They kill her for it. They take her to Smithfield, the meat market where the innocent cattle of the counties around London walk in to be butchered, and like an obedient lamb, trustingly herded into the bloodstained pen, she goes speechless to the stake and they light the fire beneath her bare feet and she dies in agony. Roger Bolingbroke, who confessed and recanted, finds no mercy either. They hang him on the public gallows, and as he is kicking in the air, whooping for breath, the executioner catches his feet and cuts the rope, restoring him to croaking life, lays him on a hurdle to revive him; but then slices open his belly, pulls out his entrails so that he can see his pulsing heart, his quivering stomach spilling out with his blood, and then they hack him into quarters, his legs from his spine, his arms from his chest, and they send his head with its horrified glare to be set on a spike on London Bridge for the ravens to peck out his weeping eyes. Thomas Southwell, my one-time confessor, the canon of St Stephen’s Church, dies of sorrow in the Tower of London. Richard says that his friends smuggled poison to him, to spare him the agony that Bolingbroke endured. The duchess’s clerk, John Home, is sent to prison, awaiting pardon. And the proud duchess is forced to do public penance.

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 Wstminster 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 watch from the steps of the great gate of Westminster Palace as she walks by, her gaze fixed on the cold stones beneath her flinching bare feet. She does not look up to see me, or the women who once scrambled to serve her, but are now laughing and pointing; she does not raise her head, and her beautiful dark hair tumbles over her face like a veil to hide her shame. The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down, and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they took the risk to dishonour their own. They are so anxious to save themselves that they thought they should throw her aside. Her husband, who is now generally known as the ‘good’ Duke Humphrey, declares that he was seduced into marriage by her witchcraft; the marriage is instantly declared void. She, a royal duchess, the wife of the heir to the throne, is now a convicted witch in her petticoat; no man will give her his name, and they will keep her in prison for the rest of her life.

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.