GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,
AUTUMN 1451

Richard’s mood does not lift as he prepares to leave for Calais. I send for Elizabeth, my oldest girl, to come home to see her father before he leaves. I have placed her at the house of the Grey family at Groby Hall, near Leicester, just fifty miles away. They are a wealthy family, with kinsmen all around the country, ruling thousands of acres. She is supervised by the lady of the house: Lady Elizabeth, heiress to the wealthy Ferrers family. I could not have chosen anyone better to teach my girl how a great woman runs her household. There is a son and heir at home, young John Grey, who rode out against Jack Cade, a handsome young man. He will inherit the estate, which is substantial, and the title, which is noble.

It takes her a day to ride home, and she comes with an armed escort, the roads are so dangerous with wandering bands of men, thrown out of France without a home to go to, or wages. Elizabeth is fourteen now, nearly as tall as me. I watch her, and have to stop myself smiling: she is such a beauty and she has such grace. At her age I was probably her match for looks but she has a calmness and a sweetness that I never had. She has my clear pale skin and my fair hair, she has grey eyes and a perfectly regular face like the sculpted marble face of a beautiful statue. 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 which I can neither imagine nor foresee.

Elizabeth’s sister Anne is her little shadow; at just twelve she copies every gesture of Elizabeth’s and follows her around like a devoted puppy. Richard laughs at me for my adoration of my children and my favourite of them all is Elizabeth’s brother: Anthony. He is nine and a brighter scholar never lost count of the hours in a library. But he is not just a boy for his books, he plays with the village lads and can run as fast and fight as hard as they, with fists or in wrestling. His father is teaching him to joust and he sits on a horse as if he were born in the saddle. You never see him shift to the leap of the horse: they are as one. He plays tennis with his sisters and is kind enough to let them win, he plays chess with me and makes me pause and puzzle over his moves, and sweetest, warmest of all, he goes down on one knee for his mother’s blessing night and morning, and when I have put my hand on his head, he jumps up for a hug and will stand at my side, leaning lightly against me, like a foal at foot. Mary is eight this year, growing out of her dresses every season, and devoted to her father. She follows him everywhere, riding all day on her fat little pony so that she can be at his side, learning the names of the fields and the tracks to the villages so she can go out to meet him. He calls her his princess and swears he will make a marriage for her to a king who will have no kingdom but will come and live with us so no-one will ever take her away. Our next child, just a year younger, Jacquetta, is named for me but she could not be less like me. She is Richard’s daughter through and through, she has his quiet humour and his calmness. She keeps a distance from her brothers’ and sisters’ tumblings and quarrels, and she laughs when they appeal to her to serve as judge and jury from the pinnacle of the wisdom of a seven-year-old. In the nursery, unruly as puppies, are my two boys John and Richard, six and five years old, and in the well-polished cradle is the new baby, the sweetest best-tempered baby of them all: Martha.

As Richard assembles the men he will take to Calais and starts to teach them how to use the lances, how to stand against a charge, how to march in an attack, I have to keep telling myself that this is the right thing to do – to send him off with the blessings of all his children; but there is something about gathering them together to say goodbye that fills me with dread.

‘Jacquetta, are you fearful for me?’ he asks me one evening.

I nod, almost ashamed to say yes.

‘Have you seen anything?’ he asks.

‘Oh no! Thank God! No, it is not that. I don’t know anything at all, nothing more than that I fear for you,’ I assure him. ‘I have not tried to scry or foretell since you told me to put it aside, after the trial of Eleanor Cobham.’

He takes my hands and kisses them, first one and then the other. ‘My love, you must not fear for me. Do I not always tell you I will come home to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have I ever failed you?’

‘Never.’

‘I lost you once and swore I would never lose you again,’ he says.

‘You found me by moonlight.’ I am smiling.

‘By luck,’ he says, a man of earth as always. ‘But I swore then that I would never lose you again. You have nothing to fear.’

‘Nothing,’ I repeat. ‘But I should tell you – I am with child again, and you will have a new baby next summer.’

‘Dear God, I can’t leave you,’ he says at once. ‘This changes everything. I can’t leave you here, not alone with the children, to face another childbed.’

I had hoped he would be pleased; I am determined to hide my own fears. ‘Beloved, I have been brought to bed nine times, I think I know how to do it by now.’

His face is creased with worry. ‘The danger is always the same,’ he says. ‘The danger of childbirth is the same the first time as the last. And you have lost one son, and I thought then your heart would break. Besides, the news from London is bad. The queen is certain to want you at her side, and I will be stuck in Calais with Edmund Beaufort.’

‘If you even get there.’

He falls silent and I know he is thinking of the idle ships and the army that wore out their time with a year of waiting, while their countrymen died outside Bordeaux.

‘Don’t look likt, I should not have said it. I am sure you will get there and then you will hold Calais for us,’ I say quickly.

‘Yes, but I don’t like to leave you here while the king is clinging to Somerset and York is building an affinity of more and more men who think as he does that the king is badly advised.’

I shrug. ‘There is no way out, my love. The baby is coming and I had better have her here, rather than come with you to Calais and give birth in a garrison.’

‘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 which will make our fortunes,’ I say. ‘Why else would God make them so beautiful?’

I speak bravely enough to Richard but when he musters his men and marches out of the courtyard and down the road to London where they will take ship to Calais, I am very low. My daughter Elizabeth finds me walking with my thick cape around my shoulders, my hands in a fur muff, beside the river, as the frosty banks and the icy reeds match my mood. She comes forwards and links her arm in mine and matches her steps to mine. I am only a head taller than her now, she keeps pace with me easily.

‘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.

‘It’s not something that I would press on you,’ I say. ‘It is a burden as well as a gift. And these are not the times for it.’

‘I don’t think you can press it on me,’ she replies thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think it is a gift you can give – is it? I just sometimes have a sense of things. At Groby, there is a corner, a cloister by the chapel, and when I walk there I can see someone, a woman, almost a ghost of a woman; she stands there and she has her head on one side as if she is listening for me, she waits almost as if she is looking for me. But there is no-one there really.’

‘You know the stories of our family,’ I say.

She gives a gurgle of laughter. ‘It is me who tells the story of Melusina every night to the little ones,’ she reminds me. ‘They love it, and I love it.’

‘You know that some of the women of our family have inherited gifts from Melusina. Gifts of the Sight.’

She nods.

‘My great-aunt Jehanne taught me some ways to use the gift, and then my lord the Duke of Bedford had me work with his alchemists, and sent a woman to teach me about herbs.’

‘What did you do with alchemists?’ Like any child she is fascinated by forbidden magic. The skill with herbs is too ordinary for her, she has learned it in my still room. She wants to know about dark arts.

‘I read the books with them, sometimes I stirred a mixture or poured it out to cool.’ I am remembering the forge in the inner courtyard and the great room like a vast kitchen in the wing of the house where they heated and cooled the liquor and stones. ‘And my lord had a great mirror where he wanted me to scry – to see the future. He wanted to see the future of the English lands in France.’ I make a little gesture. ‘I am glad now that I could not see clearly. It would have broken his heart, I think. I thought I failed him at the time but now I think I served him best by not seeing.’

‘But you could see?’

‘Sometimes,’ I say. ‘And sometimes, like with the cards or with the charms, you get a glimpse of what might be. And sometimes you show yourself only your own desires. And sometimes – though very rarely – you can put your heart in your own desires and bring them about. Take the dream and make it come into being.’

‘By magic?’ she breathes. She is quite entranced at the thought of it.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell her honestly. ‘When I knew that your father was in love with me and I was in love with him, I wanted him to marry me and make me his wife and bring me to England but I knew that he would not dare. He thought I was too far above him and he would not be my ruin.’

‘Did you make a spell?’

I smile, thinking back to the night when I brought out the charms but realised that I needed nothing but my own determination. ‘A spell and a prayer and knowing your desire are all the same thing,’ I say. ‘When you lose something precious and you go to the chapel and you kneel before the little glass window of St Anthony and you pray to him to find the thing you need, what are you doing but reminding yourself that you have lost something and you want it back? What are you doing but showing yourself that you want it? And what is that but calling it back to you? And so often, when I pray, I remember then where I left it, and go back to find it. Is that an answer to prayer or is it magic? Or is it simply letting myself know what I want and seeking it? 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?’

‘A spell would bring it back to you, you wouldn’t just find it!’

‘I believe that a desire and a prayer and a spell are all the same thing,’ I say. ‘When you pray you know that you want something, that’s always the first step. 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.’

‘How?’

‘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.

‘In my first marriage,’ I say quietly, ‘I knew that my husband would not have a child. But I had to let myself know that I was different from him. I longed for a baby, and I wanted to be loved.’

‘Did you wish for it?’ she asks. ‘Did you make a spell to make him change?’

‘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.’

‘And you wished for Father.’

I smile at her. ‘And for you.’

She blushes in pleasure. ‘Is this magic?’

‘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.’

‘Will you teach me?’ she asks.

I look at her consideringly. She is a daughter of our house and perhaps the most beautiful girl we have ever had. She has the inheritance of Melusina and the gift of Sight. One of my children must inherit the cards my great-aunt gave me and the bracelet of charms – I think I always knew that it would be Elizabeth, the child born of desire, of the herbs, and my wish. And as my great-aunt Jehanne said: it should be the oldest girl.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘These are not the times, and these are forbidden skills; but I will teach you, Elizabeth.’

Over the next few weeks I show her the bracelet of charms and the cards and I teach her about herbs that she will not find in Lady Elizabeth Grey’s still room. I take all the older children out on one frosty day and teach them how to find water in underground springs by holding a peeled wand in their hands and feeling it turn in their palms. They laugh with delight as we find a spring in the water meadow, and a dirty old drain from the stable yard.

I show Elizabeth how to open a page of her Bible and then think and pray over the text that comes to her. I give her a frwater pearl on a little cord and teach her how to watch it swing in answer to a question. 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 favour 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 the time comes for her to go back to Groby Hall she tells me that the young man of the house, John Grey, is a most handsome young man, kind and beautifully mannered, and that she wishes he would see her for herself, and not just as a girl being educated by his mother, one of three or four young women that Lady Grey has in her keeping.

‘He does,’ I assure her. ‘He sees you already. You just have to be patient.’

‘I like him so much,’ she confesses, her eyes down and her cheeks warm. ‘And when he speaks to me I say nothing of any sense. I speak like a fool. He must think me a fool.’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘Shall I use a love potion on him? Dare I?’

‘Wait for spring,’ I advise her. ‘And pick some flowers from an apple tree in his orchard. Choose the prettiest tree . . . ’

She nods.

‘Put the petals in your pocket. And when the tree fruits, take one apple and give him half to eat with honey, and keep the other.’

‘Will that make him love me?’

I smile. ‘He will love you. And the petals and honeyed apple will give you something to do while you wait.’

She giggles. ‘You’re not much of a spell-maker, Lady Mother.’

‘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?’

‘Pure in heart,’ she says.

Together we go out to the stable yard. The guard to take her back to Groby is mounted and ready. ‘One last thing,’ I 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.’

She shakes her head. ‘I wouldn’t. Not even Mary Sears. Not even when she smiles at him and curls her hair around her finger, and is so quick to sit beside him.’

‘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.

She kneels for my blessing. I put my hand on the pretty velvet bonnet and her warm fair head. ‘Bless you, my daughter, and may you remain pure in heart and get your desires.’

She peeps up at me, her grey eyes bright. ‘I think I will!’

‘I think you will,’ I say.