The Lady of the Rivers (45 page)

‘And then he will be himself again? And remember everything?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t believe that they really know.’

‘What shall we do?’

‘I don’t know.’

She sits on the side of the bed, her hand cupped on her belly, and rises to her feet to look out of the window. Below her are the beautiful gardens running down to the river where a punt bobs invitingly at a landing stage, and a heron stands still and quiet in the water. She sighs.

‘Do you have any pain?’ I ask anxiously.

‘No, no, I can just feel the baby moving.’

‘It is most important that you remain calm.’

She laughs shortly. ‘We have lost Gascony, next the French are certain to attack Calais, the king has gone to sleep and cannot be wakened, and . . . ’ She breaks off. Neither of us has mentioned the duke taking her into his arms as an accustomed lover, kissing her face, promising to keep her safe. ‘And you tell me to remain calm.’

‘I do,’ I say stoutly. ‘For all this is nothing to losing the child. You have to eat and you have to sleep, Margaret. This is your duty to the child. You might be carrying a boy, it might be a prince for England. When all this has been forgotten we will remember that you kept the prince safe.’

She pauses, she nods. ‘Yes. Jacquetta, you are right. See? I will sit. I will be calm. You can bring me some bread and some meat and some ale. I will be calm. And fetch the duke.’

‘You cannot see him alone,’ I specify.

‘No. I know that. But I have to see him. Until the king wakes, he and I will have to decide everything together. He is my only advisor and help.’

I find the duke in his rooms, gazing blankly out of the window. He whirls around when his men hammer on the door and as they throw it open I see the whiteness of his face and the fear in his eyes.

‘Jacquetta,’ he says, and then corrects himself. ‘Your Grace.’

I wait till they have closed the door behind me. ‘The queen commands your presence,’ I say shortly.

He takes up his cape and his hat. ‘How is she?’

‘Anxious.’

He offers me his arm and childishly I pretend not to see the gesture but precede him to the door. He follows me out and we walk down the sunny gallery towards the royal rooms. Outside the leaded windows I can see swallows swooping low over the water meadows, and hear the birds singing.

He strides faster to come alongside me. ‘You blame me,’ he says shortly.

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘You blame me but, Jacquetta, I assure you, the first move was . . . ’

‘I don’t know anything, and if I know nothing then I cannot be questioned, and I cannot confess,’ I say, cutting him off. ‘All I want to do is to see Her Grace at peace and strong enough to carry her child to full term and bring him into the world. All I pray is that His Grace the king wakes up with a calm mind and we can tell him the sad news from Gascony. And I hope, of course, all the time, ceaselessly, that my husband is safe in Calais. Other than these thoughts, I don’t venture, Your Grace.’

He nods his head and we walk in silence.

In the queen’s rooms I see that the three ladies in waiting are sitting in the window-seats pretending to sew while craning their necks to eavesdrop. They rise up and curtsey and make a bustle as the duke and I enter and I tell them to sit again, and I nod to a couple of musicians to play. This covers the whispers between the queen and the duke. She allows him to sit on a stool at her side and she beckons me to join them.

‘His Grace says that if the king does not waken within a few days we cannot stay here.’

I look at him.

‘People will start to wonder and then there will be gossip. We can say that the king is weary and he can ride in a litter back to London.’

‘We can draw the curtains of the litter,’ I agree. ‘But what then?’

‘The queen has to go into her confinement at Westminster Palace. That’s been planned for months, it can’t be changed. I suggest the king stays quietly in his rooms.’

‘People will talk.’

‘We can say he is praying for her health. We can say he is keeping monastic hours.’

I nod. It is possible that the king’s illness can be kept from everyone but a small court circle.

‘What about meeting with the lords? What about the king’s council?’ I ask.

‘I can handle them,’ the duke says. ‘I will take decisions in the name of the king.’

I look sharply at him and then I lower my eyes so he cannot see my shock. This is to make himself all but King of England. The queen will be in confinement, the king asleep, Edmund Beaufort will step up from being Constable of England to King of England.

‘Richard, Duke of York, is likely to object,’ I remark to the floor beneath my feet.

‘I can handle him,’ he says dismissively.

‘And when the king wakes?’

‘When the king wakes we will all go back to normal,’ the queen says. Her voice is strained, her hand on her belly. ‘And we will have to explain to him that when he was taken so suddenly ill we had to decide what to do without consulting him.’

‘He is likely to be confused when he wakes,’ the duke says. ‘I asked the physicians. They say that he may have troubling dreams, fantasies. He will be surprised at waking. He will not be able to tell what is real and what is a bad dream. Best that it should be in his own bedroom at Westminster, with the country well ruled.’

‘He may remember nothing,’ the queen says. ‘We may have to tell him again all about the loss of Gascony.’

‘We must make sure that he hears the news first from us, and that we tell him the truth gently,’ the duke supplements.

They look like conspirators, their heads close together, whispering. I glance around at the queen’s rooms; no-one else seems to see anything out of the ordinary. I realise that I am the only one who suddenly sees a sickening intimacy.

The queen rises to her feet and gives a little moan at a twinge of pain. I see the duke’s hand fly out, and then he checks the gesture: he does not touch her. She pauses and smiles at him. ‘I am all right.’

He glances at me like a young husband prompting a nurse. ‘Perhaps you should rest, Your Grace,’ I respond. ‘If we are to travel to London.’

‘We will go the day after tomorrow,’ the duke rules. ‘I will order them to get everything ready at once.’

WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON,
AUTUMN 1453

The rooms for the royal confinement are prepared, according to the traditions of the royal household. The tapestries are taken down, the windows shuttered tight and hung with thick material to keep out the disturbing light and draughts of air. The fires are banked up: the rooms must be kept warm, every day the fire-boys haul logs up as far as the firmly barred doors. No man, not even the working boys, can come into the queen’s rooms.

Fresh rushes are scattered on the floor, especially herbs that are helpful in childbirth: shepherd’s purse and motherwort. A low birthing bed is brought into the room and dressed with special sheets. They bring in the royal cradle: an heirloom sent over from Anjou, of beautiful carved wood inlaid with gold. They make it up with the finest linen trimmed with lace. They /p>

In practice, in most households, a loving husband will break the rules and come in to see his wife during her confinement, as soon as the baby is born, washed, swaddled and laid in the cradle. Many husbands will not touch her until she has been churched, believing that she is unclean after the travail of childbed, and might contaminate him with female sin – but a husband like Richard disregards such fears as superstitions. He is always tender and affectionate and loving at these times and brings me fruit and sweetmeats that the older women say are not allowed, and has to be chased from the room by the midwives who protest that he will disturb me, or wake the baby, or make work for them.

No man will come near the poor little queen, of course. No man is allowed in the royal confinement chamber and her husband, the only one who might trespass, is in his own shadowy room washed daily as if he were a big overgrown baby, fed as if he were in his dotage, limp as a new corpse.

We are holding the terrible news of the king’s health tightly within the walls of the palace. The grooms of his chamber know; but they are so appalled at the work they have to do, and the collapse of the man they knew, that it has not been hard for Edmund Beaufort to take each one aside, swear him to secrecy and threaten him with the most terrible punishments if he so much as whispers a word outside the walls. The king’s household – his companions and his grooms, his pageboys, his master of horse and the grooms in the stable – know only that the king is stricken with an illness that makes him very tired and very weak, incapable of riding, and they wonder what can be wrong with him, but they are not troubled very much. It is not as if he was ever a lusty man who called for four hunters in the morning and would ride one after another, as each foundered. The quiet life of the king’s stables remains quiet; and only the men who see him inert in his bed in his peaceful bedroom realise how gravely ill the king has become.

We are helped in our rule of silence by the fact that most of the lords and gentry had left London for the summer and are slow to return. The duke does not summon parliament so the country gentry have no reason to come into the city, and everything that has to be decided in the kingdom is done with a handful of men in the king’s council in the name of the king but under the signature of the duke. He tells them that the king is unwell, too fatigued to come to council and he, Edmund Beaufort, as his most trusted kinsman will hold the king’s seal and use it to ratify any decision. Almost no-one suspects that the king is quite incapable of coming to the council. Most of them think he is in his private chapel, praying for the health of the queen, studying in silence, and that he has given the seal and the authority to Edmund Beaufort, who has always commanded so much anyway.

But the rumours start, as they are bound to do. The cooks remark that they never send good joints of meat into the king’s rooms but only soups, and then some fool of a groom says that the king cannot chew his food, and then hushes himself and says, ‘God save him!’ and takes himself off. Of course the physicians come and go in and out of the king’s rooms and anyone seeing them is bks tice that there are strange doctors and physicians, herbalists and practitioners of all sorts coming at the bidding of the duke and going into the king’s rooms. The physicians would not dare to speak; but they are attended by servants and have messengers bringing them herbs and physic. After a week of this, the duke invites me to his rooms and asks me to tell the queen that it is his advice that the king be taken to Windsor, where they can more easily nurse him without the news getting out.

‘She won’t like it,’ I tell him frankly. ‘She won’t like him being kept there, and her trapped here in confinement.’

‘If he stays here then people will start to talk,’ he says. ‘We cannot keep it secret. And she will want to avoid gossip more than anything else.’

I curtsey and go to the door.

‘What do you think?’ he asks me as my hand is on the latch. ‘What do you think, Your Grace? You’re a woman of gifts. What do you think will become of the king? And what of the queen if he never recovers?’