The Lady of the Rivers (17 page)

‘I am Mrs Jourdemayne,’ she says. ‘His Grace sent me to you with these as a gift.’

She nods her head and a lad jumps out of the wagon behind her with a wooden tray of tiny clay pots, each one holding a nodding head of a green plant. He sets the tray down at my feet and jumps back into the wagon to fetch another and another until I am surrounded by a little lawn of green and Mrs Jourdemayne laughs at my delighted face. ‘He said you would be glad,’ she observes. ‘I am a gardener and a herbalist. He said that I should bring you these and he has paid me for a week’s work. I am to stay with you and help you plant a garden of herbs, if you wish it.’

‘I do wish it!’ I say. ‘There is a herb garden here by the kitchen but it is very overgrown, and I don’t know what half the things are.’

‘Tell the lad where to take the seedling trays and we will start whenever you want,’ she says briskly.

I call my pageboy and he leads the way for the two of them while I go inside to fetch a broad hat to shield my face, and gloves for my first lesson as a gardener.

She is an odd gardener. She orders the Penshurst senior man to make twelve beds in the old kitchen garden, and while he is digging over the soil she lifts the little herbs, shows me their leaves and their flowers and tells me of their properties. Each new bed is to be named for a house of the planets.

‘This was the comfrey bed,’ Ralph says stubbornly. ‘Where are we going to put the comfrey now?’

‘In the Aquarius bed,’ she says smoothly. ‘Comfrey is a plant that flourishes under the water sign. And this bed here is going to be the place we grow the plants under the sign of Taurus.’

He puzzles over this all night, and in the morning he has a joke ready. ‘What will you plant there? In the Taurus bed? Bull rushes? Bull rushes?’ he asks, and doubles up at his own humour. That jest keeps him laughing all day, but Mrs Jourdemayne is not disturbed. She picks out seedlings from her tray of plants and puts them before me. ‘Taurus is an earth sign,’ she says. ‘When the moon is in Taurus, it favours the growth of crops that live below the soil. Root crops like white and purple carrots, onions, and turnips. It favours the herbs of Taurus, like mint and primrose, tansy, wormwood and yarrow. We’ll plant these in our Taurus bed.’

I am enchanted. ‘You have all these?’

She smiles. ‘We can plant some of them now, some of them will have to wait until the moon is in a different phase. But I have brought them all, in the green or in seed. Your lord commanded that you should have all the herbs of England in your garden. He said that you have a gift. Do you?’

I dip my head. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I know things, sometimes I know nothing. I am studying his books and I shall be glad to learn how to grow herbs and how to use them. But I have no certainty; all that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.’

She smiles. ‘That is the very path of learning,’ she says.

All afternoon we spend in the garden on our knees like peasant women, planting the herbs in the beds that she has prepared for them, and as the evening grows cool and the sun starts to set I get to my feet and look around the garden that we have made. Twelve regular beds fan out from the circular seat at the heart of the garden. All of them are dug over and weeded, some of them are already planted. Mrs Jourdemayne has labelled the seedlings with their name and their properties. ‘Tomorrow I shall show you how to make tinctures and dry herbs,’ she says. ‘I will give you my recipes.’

I am so tired from our work that I sleep well; but in the night, as if the rising moon is calling to me as well as to the rising sap of the plants, I wake and see the cool light lying along my bedroom floor. My maid is heavily asleep in the bed beside me. I turn back the covers and go to the window. I can hear something, like the chiming of a bell, and I put a gown around my shoulders and push open my bedroom door, and then go out into the gallery.

In the shadows I can just see the outline of a woman: Mrs Jourdemayne. For a moment I step back, fearful of what she is doing in the darkness. She is standing beside one of the windows and she has thrown it open, the singing is louder as if the clear sweet noise is pouring into the gallery with the moonlight. As she hears my footstep she glances around, her face alert, as if she expects anyone, anything; but she fears nothing.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says, though she should curtsey. ‘Can you hear it?’

I nod. ‘I hear it.’

‘I’ve never heard such a thing before, I thought it was the music of the spheres.’

‘I know it,’ I say sadly. I reach forwards and I close the window, at once the music is muffled, and then I draw the heavy curtain to shut out both music and moonlight.

She puts out her hand to stop me. ‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘Why do you shut it out? What does it mean?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ I say. ‘It is for me. Let me close it out.’

‘Why, what is it?’

‘I have heard it twice in my life before,’ I say, thinking of my little sister who died almost as she drew her first breath, and then the sighing choir that whispered goodbye to my great-aunt. ‘I am afraid it is the death of one of my family,’ I say quietly. ‘It is the singing of Melusina,’ and I turn from her and go down the darkened gallery to my bedroom.

In the morning she shows me how to dry herbs, how to make a tisane, how to make a tincture, and how to draw the essence from flowers using a bed of wax. We are alone in the still room, the pleasant smell of crushed leaves around us, the coolness of the stone floor beneath our feet, the marble sink filled with cold water.

‘And does the singing tell you of a death?’ she asks simply.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I pray that my mother and father are well. This seems to be the only gift I have: foreknowledge of loss.’

‘Hard,’ she says shortly, and passes me a pestle and mortar with some seeds for crushing.

We work together in silence for a while, then she speaks. ‘There are herbs especially for a young woman, newly married,’ she observes as if to the leaves that she is washing in the sink. ‘Herbs that can prevent a baby, herbs that can cause one. They are in my recipe book.’

‘You can prevent a baby?’ I ask.

‘I can even stop one coming when a woman is already with child,’ she says with a nasty little smile. ‘Pennyroyal, mugwort, and parsley will do it. I have planted the herbs in your garden for you to use when you need. If you ever need.’ She glances at the flatness of my belly. ‘And if you want to make a baby you have those herbs too, to your hand. Raspberry leaves from your orchard, and weeds, easy enough to find: nettle leaves, and clover flowers from the field.’

I dust off my hands and pick up my slate and chalk. ‘Tell me how to prepare them,’ I say.

Margery stays for more than the week that she has promised and when she leaves, my herb garden is planted with everything but those plants which need to wait for the descending moon, and the still room already has a few jars of herbs in wine, and a few bunches of herbs hung up to dry. She will go back to London in one of my lord’s wagons, her servant-boy with her, and I go to the stable yard to say goodbye. As I watch her clamber nimbly into the cart, a guard of half a dozen, with a messenger in my lord’s livery of red and white, clatter into the yard and Richard Woodville swings down from his horse.

‘My lady, I bring a message from my lord,’ he says. ‘He has marked it for you, only.’

I put out my hand, though I can feel my face is trembling and my eyes are filling with tears. I take the letter and break the seal but I cannot see what he has written for my sight is blurred. ‘You read it,’ I say, handing it to him. ‘You tell me.’

‘I am sure there is no cause for you to be distressed . . . ’ he starts, then he reads the few lines and looks at me aghast. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace. I am so sorry. My lord writes to tell you that your father has died. There is plague in Luxembourg, but your mother is well. She sent the news to my lord.’ He hesitates; he looks at me. ‘You knew already?’

I nod. ‘Well, I thought it was so. Though I closed the curtain on the moonlight and I tried not to hear the music.’

Mrs Jourdemayne, seated beside the wagoner, looks down at me with shrewd sympathy in her face. ‘Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see,’ she says. ‘May the Lord who gave you the gift give you the courage to bear it.’

PARIS, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1434–
JANUARY 1435

Woodville does not get his wish that I should see Grafton, though we stay in England for a year, and my lord never gets his wish for an adequate army to serve in France, nor – though he takes power and rules England – can he bring the king’s council or parliament into proper order. We cannot stay in England for the city of Paris sends for my lord duke and says that the people there are besieged by robbers, mutinous soldiers and beggars, and starving for lack of supplies.

‘He won’t refuse them,’ Woodville warns me. ‘We will have to go back to Paris.’

The seas are rough for the crossing and when we arrive in Calais the garrison is so dispirited that my lord commands Woodville to stay there, raise their spirits, and prepare the soldiers for an attack on the French as soon as the weather allows. Then my lord and I prepare to press on down the muddy roads for Paris.

Woodville stands in the archway of the great gate to bid us farewell. He comes beside me and, without thinking, checks the tightness of the girth on my horse, as he always does. ‘How shall I manage without you?’ I ask.

His face is grim. ‘I shall think of you,’ he says. His voice is low and he does not meet my eyes. ‘God knows, I shall think of you every day.’

He turns from me and goes to my lord duke. They clasp hands and then my lord leans down from his horse and hugs his squire. ‘God bless, lad, hold this for me and come when I send for you.’

‘Always,’ Woodville says briefly, and then my lord raises his hand and we clatter out over the drawbridge and I realise I don’t know when I will see him again, and that I have not said goodbye, nor thanked him for his care of me, nor told him – nor told him . . . I shake my head. There is nothing that the Duchess of Bedford should tell her husband’s squire, and there is no reason for me to have tears blurring my sight of the flat road in the flat lands ahead.

This time we ride in the centre of the guard. The countryside is lawless and no-one knows whether a French troop might be riding through, destroying everything they find. We ride at a steady canter, my lord grim-faced, exhausted by the journey, bracing himself for trouble.

It is miserable in the city. We try to keep Christmas in the Hôtel de Bourbon but the cooks are in despair of getting good meat and vegetables. Every day messengers come in from the English lands in France reporting uprisings in distant villages where the people have sworn that they will not endure the rule of the English for another moment. It is little comfort that we hear also that the Armagnac king is also troubled with rebellions. In truth the whole land of France is sick of war and soldiers and is crying a plague on both our houses.

In the new year my lord duke tells me shortly that we are leaving Paris, and I know him well enough now not to question his plans when he looks so angry and so weary at the same time.

‘Can you tell me if our luck will turn?’ he asks sourly. ‘Just that?’

I shake my head. In truth, I think he has bad luck at his heels and sorrow at hs shoulder.

‘You look like a widow,’ he says sharply. ‘Smile, Jacquetta.’

I smile at him and I don’t say that sometimes I feel like a widow, too.

GISORS, FRANCE, FEBRUARY 1435

My lord sends for Woodville to escort us from Paris to Rouen. He tells me nothing, but I fear that he thinks that the city of Paris would not hold if we were to come under attack, and that we can only be safe in Rouen. He hopes to get there and negotiate for peace with the French court from the heartland of the English-held lands. Woodville comes with extra guards, his face grave, musters the guard in the stable yard, commands the order for greater safety, and helps my lord into the saddle for the first day of riding.