The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  His smile is bitter. ‘Both you and I will have to learn to serve a new master,’ he says. ‘Alas for us.’

  I am silent, and then I say, ‘I will go to the hall for dinner if you think everyone would like it?’

  ‘They would,’ he says. ‘Can you walk in on your own?’

  I nod. My ladies arrange themselves behind me and Richard walks before me to the double doors of the great hall. The noisy chatter behind the doors is quieter than usual: this is a house of mourning. The guards throw the doors open and I go in. At once, all the talk stops, and there is a sudden hush, then there is a rumble and a clatter as every man rises to his feet, pushing back benches and stools, and every man pulls off his hat and stands bareheaded as I go by, the hundreds and hundreds of them, showing respect to me as the duke’s young widow, showing their love to him who has gone, and their sorrow at their loss and mine. I walk through them and I hear them whispering ‘God bless you, my lady’ in a low mutter as I go by, all the way to the dais at the top of the hall, and I stand behind the high table, alone.

  ‘I thank you for your kind wishes,’ I say to them, my voice ringing like a flute in the big-raftered hall. ‘My lord duke is dead and we all feel the loss of him. You will all be paid your wages for another month and I will recommend you to the new regent of France as good and trustworthy servants. God bless my lord the duke, and God save the king.’

  ‘God bless my lord the duke, and God save the king!’

  ‘That was well done,’ Woodville says to me as we walk back to my private rooms. ‘Especially the wages. And you will be able to pay them. My lord was a good master, there is enough in the treasury to pay the wages and even some pensions for the older men. You yourself will be a very wealthy woman.’

  I pause in a little window bay and look out over the darkened town. An oval three-quarter moon is rising, warm yellow in colour in the deep indigo sky. I should be planting herbs that need a waxing moon at Penshurst; but then I realise that I will never see Penshurst again. ‘And what will happen to you?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘I will go back to Calais and then, when the new captain is appointed, I will go home to England. I will find a master that I can respect, offer him my service. Perhaps I will come back to France in an expedition, or if the king does make peace with the Armagnacs, then perhaps I will serve the king at the English court. Perhaps I will go to the Holy Land and become a crusader.’

  ‘But I won’t see you,’ I say, as the thought suddenly strikes me. ‘You won’t be in my household. I don’t even know where I will live, and you could go anywhere. We won’t be together any more.’ I look at him as the thought comes home to me. ‘We won’t see each other any more.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘This will be where we part. Perhaps we will never see each other again.’

  I gasp. The thought that I will never see him again is so momentous that I cannot grasp it. I give a shaky laugh. ‘It doesn’t seem possible. I see you every day, I am so accustomed . . . You are always here, I have walked with you, or ridden with you, or been with you, every day for – what – more than two years? – ever since my wedding day. I am used to you . . . ’ I break off for fear of sounding weak. ‘What I am really thinking is: who will look after Merry? Who will keep her safe?’

  ‘Your new husband?’ he suggests.

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine you not being here. And Merry . . . ’

  ‘What about Merry?’

  ‘She doesn’t like strange men,’ I say foolishly. ‘She only likes you.’

  ‘My lady . . . ’

  I fall silent at the intensity of his tone. ‘Yes?’

  He takes my hand and tucks it under his elbow and walks me down the gallery. To any of my ladies, seated at the far end by the fire, it looks as if we are walking together, planning the next few days, as we have always walked together, as we have always talked together, constant companions: the duchess and her faithful knight. But this time he keeps his hand on mine and his fingers are burning as if he has a fever. This time his head is turned so close to me that if I looked up at him our lips would brush. I walk with my head averted. I must not look up at him so that our lips brush.

  ‘I cannot know what the future will bring us,’ he says in a rapid undertone. ‘I cannot know where you will be given in marriage, nor what life might hold for me. But I can’t let you go without telling you – without telling you at least once – that I love you.’

  I snatch a breath at the words. ‘Woodville . . . ’

  ‘I can offer you nothing, I am next to nothing, and you are the greatest lady in France. But I wanted you to know, I love you and I want you, and I have done since the day I first saw you.’

  ‘I should . . . ’

  ‘I have to tell you, you have to know: I have loved you honourably as a knight should do his lady, and I have loved you passionately as a man might a woman; and now, before I leave you, I want to tell you that I love you, I love you . . . ’ He breaks off and looks at me desperately. ‘I had to tell you,’ he repeats. I feel as if I am becoming as golden and as warm as alchemy could make me. I can feel myself smiling, glowing at these words. At once I know that he is telling the truth, that he is in love with me, and at once I recognise the truth: that I am in love with him. And he has told me, he has said the words, I have captured his heart, he loves me, he loves me, dear God, he loves me. And God knows – though Richard does not – that I love him.

  Without another word we turn into a little room at the end of the gallery and he closes the door behind us and takes me in his arms in one swift irresistible movement. I raise my head to him and he kisses me. My hands stroke from his cropped handsome head to his broad shoulders and I hold him to me, closer and still closer. I feel the muscle of his shoulders under his jerkin, the prickle of his short hair at the back of his neck.

  ‘I want you,’ he says in my ear. ‘Not as a duchess, and not as a scryer. I want you just as a woman, as my woman.’

  He drops his head and kisses my shoulder where the neck of the gown leaves my shoulder bare for his touch. He kisses my collar bone, my neck, up to my jaw line. I bury my face in his hair, in the crook of his neck, and he gives a little groan of desire, and thrusts his fingers in my headdress, pulling the gold net off so that my hair comes tumbling down and he rubs his face in it.

  ‘I want you as a woman, an ordinary woman,’ he repeats breathlessly, pulling at the laces of my gown. ‘I don’t want the Sight, I don’t want your ancestry. I don’t know anything about alchemy or the mysteries or the water goddess. I am a man of the earth, of ordinary things, an Englishman. I don’t want mysteries, I just want you, as an ordinary woman. I have to have you.’

  ‘You would bring me down to earth,’ I say slowly, raising my head.

  He hesitates, looks down into my face. ‘Not to diminish you,’ he says. ‘Never that. I want you to be whatever you are. But this is who I am. I don’t know about the other world and I don’t care about it. I don’t care about saints or spirits or goddesses or the Stone. All I want is to lie with you, Jacquetta’ – we both register this, his first ever use of my name – ‘Jacquetta, I just desire you, as if you were an ordinary woman and I an ordinary man.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. I can feel a sudden pulse of desire. ‘Yes. I don’t care about anything else.’

  His mouth is on mine again, his hands are pulling at the neck of my gown, unfastening my belt. ‘Lock the door,’ I say as he shrugs out of his jerkin, and draws me towards him. The moment when he enters me I feel a searing pain which melts into a pleasure that I have never felt before, and so I don’t care about the pain. But I do know, even as we move towards ecstasy, that it is a woman’s pain and that I have become a woman of earth and fire, and I am no longer a girl of water and air.

  ‘We have to prevent a child,’ Wodville says to me. We have had a week of secret meetings and we are dizzy with desire and delight in each other. My lord’s funeral has come and gone and I am waiting to hear from my mo