The Lady of the Rivers

by Gregory, Philippa

  ‘We are no longer of the House of Lancaster?’ I am still incredulous.

  Anthony nods. ‘It’s over,’ he says. ‘And we are lucky to have escaped with our heads on our necks.’

  ‘That’s all that matters,’ I say, grasping at a truth. ‘That must be all that matters, at the very end. You are alive, and your father. At any rate, that’s what matters most to me.’

  We lie, that night, like a poor family, in the straw together under our heaped capes for warmth, our small troop of men in the stable with our horses. Richard’s arm is around me, all the night long. ‘We’ll go to Grafton,’ I whisper as I fall asleep. ‘And we will be squires again, and we will think of all of this as a romance, a story that someone might write one day.’

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE,

  SPRING 1464

  I gather my children about me and Elizabeth comes home with her two boys from Groby Hall. She is all but penniless; her mother-in-law will not pay her dower and in these troubled times we have neither power nor influence to make her keep her side of the marriage contra

  ct which gave me such pride and pleasure only a few years ago, and now means nothing.

  Richard and Anthony are given official pardons and appointed to the Privy Council. The new king turns out to be an astute commander of men, a king for all parties. He rules with the advice of the Earl of Warwick who put him on the throne, but he calls as many of the lords into government as will come. He does not favour York lords, he truly seems to want to be a king for all the people of the country. A few lords go into exile, a few are with the queen, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in France, forever raising forces, threatening England, planning a return. I think I will never see her again, the pretty French girl who would not marry until I had told her what her destiny would be. It has been the wheel of fortune indeed. She was the greatest woman in England and now she cannot have so much as a roof over her head in her own country; but she is hunted down like the last wolf.

  I hardly ever hear of her, my news is all of the parish and the gossip is all from the neighbouring town. I see my son Anthony married to Elizabeth, Lady Scales, I start to consider suitable partners for my other children; but we do not command the wealth and the power that we had when Margaret of Anjou was on the throne and I was her dearest friend and lady in waiting, and my husband one of the great men of court. Now we are only squires of Grafton and though I find I am interested in my growing orchard, and even more in my children and grandsons, it is hard for me to look at other small country squires and think that my children should be married among them. I expect more for them. I want more for them.

  Especially for my Elizabeth.

  One day in spring, I go to the great chest in my bedroom, and I take out the purse that my great-aunt Jehanne gave me, all those years ago. I look at the charms, and at all the choices that there might be in the world for Elizabeth: a young woman – but not in the first blush of her youth; a beauty – but not a maiden; a clever scholarly girl – but not with the faith to make an abbess. I choose the charm of a ship to signify that she might travel, I choose the charm of a little house to signify that she might win her dower lands and get a house for herself, and I am about to choose a third charm, when one of them breaks from the bracelet and falls into my lap. It is a ring for a small finger curiously wrought in the shape of a crown. I hold it up to the light and look at it. I start to try it on my own finger and then I hesitate. I don’t want it on my finger, I don’t know what it means. I tie it on a long black thread, and tie the other two on their own long black threads and I go out of the house as the early silver moon starts to rise in the pale sky.

  ‘Can we come with you, Lady Grandmother?’ Her boys appear from nowhere, mud on their faces as usual. ‘Where are you going with that basket?’

  ‘You can’t come with me,’ I say. ‘I am looking for plover eggs. But I will take you tomorrow if I find a nest.’

  ‘Can’t we come now?’ asks Thomas, Elizabeth’s oldest boy.

  I put my hand on his head, his warm silky curls remind me of Anthony when he was a loving little boy like this one. ‘No. You must find your mother and eat your supper and go to bed when she orders you. But I will take you with me tomorrow.’

  I leave them and go across the gravel garden at the front of the house, through the wicket gate and down to the river. There is a little bridge across the river, a couple of small wooden planks where the children like to come to fish, and I go across, ducking my head under the upturned branches of the ash tree, and scramble down the little bank to the trunk of the tree.

  I put my arms around the tree to tie the three strings around it, and my cheek lies against the rippled grey bark. For a moment I listen. Almost I can hear the heart of the tree beating. ‘What will become of Elizabeth?’ I whisper, and it is almost as if the leaves can whisper back to me. ‘What will become of my Elizabeth?’

  I have never been able to foresee her future, even though of all my children she has always been the one that promised so much. I have always thought she might be especially blessed. I wait; the leaves rustle. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I say to myself. ‘Perhaps the stream will tell us.’

  Each charm is now tied to the tree by its own long dark string and when I throw them out into the water, as far as they can go, I hear three splashes like a salmon snapping a fly, and they are gone, and the threads are invisible.

  I stand for a moment and look into the moving water. ‘Elizabeth,’ I say quietly to the stream. ‘Tell me what will become of Elizabeth, my daughter.’

  At dinner that night my husband says that the king is recruiting soldiers for a new battle. He will be marching north. ‘You won’t have to go?’ I say in sudden alarm. ‘Nor Anthony?’

  ‘We’ll have to send men, but to be hone my dear, I don’t think they would especially want us in the line.’

  Anthony gives a rueful chuckle. ‘Like Lovelace,’ he says, and his father laughs.

  ‘Like Trollope.’

  ‘I should ask King Edward to enquire into my dower,’ Elizabeth remarks. ‘For sure my boys will have nothing unless I can find someone who will make Lady Grey keep her promise to me.’

  ‘Kidnap him as he rides by,’ Anthony suggests. ‘Fall on your knees to him.’

  ‘My daughter will do no such thing,’ my husband rules. ‘And we can provide for you here, until you reach agreement with Lady Grey.’

  Elizabeth sensibly holds her tongue, but the next day, I see her wash her boys’ hair and dress them in their Sunday suits and I say nothing. I splash a little perfume of my own brewing on the veil of her headdress, but I give her neither apple blossom nor apple. I believe there is not a man in the world who could ride past my daughter and not stop and ask her name. She puts on her plain grey gown and sets off from the house holding her boys firmly by their hands, walking down the track to the road from London, where the king is certain to ride by with his troop.

  I watch her go, a pretty young woman on a warm spring day, and it is like a dream to see her, stepping lightly down the lane between the hedges where the white roses are coming into flower. She is walking out to her future, to claim her own, though I still don’t know what her future will be.

  I go to the still room, and take down a small jar, sealed tight with a waxed cork. It is a love philtre I made for Anthony’s wedding night. I take it to the brew house and put three drops in a jug of our best ale, and take it to the great hall, with our best glasses, and then I wait, quietly with the spring sunshine coming through the mullioned windows and a blackbird singing in the tree outside.

  I don’t have to wait very long. I look down the road and there is Elizabeth, smiling and laughing, and walking beside her is the handsome boy that I first saw outside the queen’s rooms when he bowed over my hand so politely. Now he is a grown man and the King of England. He is leading his great war horse and high up on its back, clinging to the saddle, their faces bright with joy, are my two grandsons.

  I leave the window and open t
he great hall door to them myself. I see Elizabeth’s flush and the young king’s bright smile, and I think to myself this is fortune’s wheel indeed – can it be? Can such a thing be?

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I discovered the character of Jacquetta when I was working on the history of her daughter, Elizabeth Woodville, who made her extraordinary secret marriage to Edward IV under her mother’s supervision. Jacquetta was one of the named witnesses at the wedding, along with the priest, perhaps tw

  o others, and a boy to sing the psalms. She then arranged the secret honeymoon nights for the young couple.

  Indeed, she may have done more. She was later accused of enchanting the young king into marriage with her daughter; and figures of lead said to represent Edward nd Elizabeth, bound together with gold wire, were produced at her trial for witchcraft.

  Enough here to intrigue me! I have spent my life as an historian of women, their place in society and their struggle for power. The more I read about Jacquetta, the more she seemed to me to be the sort of character I particularly love: one who is overlooked or denied by the traditional histories, but who can be discovered by piecing together the evidence.

  She lived an extraordinary life, and one that is nowhere coherently recorded. In the absence of any biography of Jacquetta, I wrote my own essay and published it with two other historians, David Baldwin writing on Elizabeth Woodville, and Mike Jones writing on Margaret Beaufort in The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother (Simon & Schuster, 2011). Readers who want to trace the history behind my novels may be interested in this collection.

  Jacquetta married the Duke of Bedford and lived as the first woman of English-ruled France. Her second marriage was for love: she married Sir Richard Woodville, experienced disapproval and had to pay a fine for stepping outside the rules of marriage for royal kinswomen. She served Margaret of Anjou as one of her most favoured ladies in waiting, and was at her side through most of the troubled years of the Wars of the Roses – then known as the Cousins’ War. On the defeat of the Lancastrians at the terrible battle of Towton, her son Anthony and her husband Richard surrendered to the victorious Edward I V. The family would probably have lived quietly at peace under the new York regime, if it had not been for the beauty of their widowed daughter, the passionate nature of the young king, and who knows – the magic of Jacquetta.

  The family became kin to the king and Jacquetta took full advantage of her rise, becoming once again the leading lady at the royal court. She lived long enough to endure the murder of her beloved husband and son, to support her daughter through defeat and flight into sanctuary, and to witness her son-in-law’s triumphant return to the throne. For most of her life Jacquetta was at the very centre of the great events. Often she was a player.

  Why she has not been studied is a mystery to me. But she belongs to that large population of women whose lives have been ignored by historians in favour of the lives of prominent men. Also this period is relatively neglected compared to – say – more recent times, or even the Tudor period. I expect more historians will work on the fifteenth century, and I hope there will be more research into its women, including Jacquetta.

  I suggest that she was inspired by her family legend of Melusina, the water goddess, whose story is beautifully described in Luxembourg Museum as part of the history of the county. To this day the city guides point out the rocks through which Melusina’s bath sank, when her husband broke his promise and spied on her. Certainly, the legend of Melusina was used in the art and alchemy of the period, and Jacquetta owned a book that told the story of her goddess ancestor. I think it very important that we as modern readers understand that religion, spiritualism and magic played a central part in the imaginative life of medieval people.

  There is a thread running through the historical record associating Jacquetta and even Elizabeth with witchcraft, and I have based some fictional scenes on this. The use of playing cards to predict the future was a medieval practice; we would call the cards ‘tarot’. Alchemy was regarded as a spiritual and scientific practice, and Margaret of Anjou licensed alchemists when she was lookig for a cure for her husband’s illness, which was indeed blamed by some on witchcraft. The practice of herbalism and planting by the phases of the moon was well known in most households, and the rise of anxiety about witchcraft occurs throughout Europe around 1450 onwards. The trial and punishment of Eleanor Cobham is based on the historical records and she was one of the witch-hunt victims.

  There follows a bibliography listing the books that I have read for this novel, and readers may also like to visit my website www.PhilippaGregory.com for new essays, historical debates, and responses to questions about this and other novels in the series. The next novel will be about the daughters of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and I am already enjoying the research and excited about writing the story.

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