The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ‘Is she a fish?’ I whisper.

  ‘She is a being not of this world,’ my great-aunt says quietly. ‘She tried to live like an ordinary woman; but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways; but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man’s world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man’s drum. Do you understand?’

  I don’t, of course. I am too young to understand that a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

  ‘Anyway, you can read on. It’s not long now.’

  The husband cannot bear to know that his wife is a strange being. She cannot forgive him for spying on her. She leaves him, taking her beautiful daughters, and he lives alone with the sons, heartbroken. But at his death, as at the death of everyone of our house, his wife Melusina, the beautiful woman who was an undine, a water goddess, comes back to him and he hears her crying around the battlements for the children she has lost, for the husband she still loves, and for the world that has no place for her.

  I close the book, and there is such a long silence that I think my great-aunt has fallen asleep.

  ‘Some of the women of our family have the gift of foresight,’ my great-aunt remarks quietly. ‘Some of them have inherited powers from Melusina, powers of the other world where she lives. Some of us are her daughters, her heirs.’

  I hardly dare to breathe, I am so anxious that she should go on speaking to me.

  ‘Jacquetta, do you think you might be one of these women?’

  ‘I might be,’ I whisper. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You have to listen,’ she says softly. ‘Listen to silence, watch for nothing. And be on your guard. Melusina is a shape-shifter, like quicksilver, she can flow from one thing to another. You may see her anywhere, she is like water. Or you may see only your own reflection in the surface of a stream though you are straining your eyes to see into the green depths for her.’

  ‘Will she be my guide?’

  ‘You must be your own guide, but you might hear her when she speaks to you.’ She pauses. ‘Fetch my jewel box.’ She gestures towards the great chest at the foot of her bed. I open the creaking lid and inside, beside the gowns wrapped in powdered silk, is a large wooden box. I take it out. Inside is a series of drawers, each one filled with my great-aunt’s fortune of jewels. ‘Look in the smallest drawer,’ she says.

  I find it. Inside is a small black velvet purse. I untie the tasselled threads, open the mouth, and a heavy golden bracelet falls into my hand, laden with about two hundred little charms, each one a different shape. I see a ship, a horse, a star, a spoon, a whip, a hawk, a spur.

  ‘When you want to know something very, very important, you choose two or three of the charms – charms that signify the thing that might be, the choices before you. You tie each one on a string and you put them in a river, the river nearest to your home, the river that you hear at night when everything is silent but the voice of the waters. You leave it until the moon is new. Then you cut all the strings but one, and pull that one out to see your future. The river will give you the answer. The river will tell you what you should do.’

  I nod. The bracelet is cold and heavy in my hand, each charm a choice, each charm an opportunity, each charm a mistake in waiting.

  ‘And when you want something: go out and whisper it to the river – like a prayer. When you curse somebody: write it on a piece of paper, and put the paper into the river, float it like a little paper boat. The river is your ally, your friend, your lady – do you understand?’

  I nod, though I don’t understand.

  ‘When you curse somebody . . . ’ She pauses and sighs as if she is very weary. ‘Take care with your words, Jacquetta, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that when you put such words out in the world they can overshoot – like an arrow, a curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly.’

  I shiver, though the room is hot.

  ‘I will teach you more,’ she promises me. ‘It is your inheritance, since you are the oldest girl.’

  ‘Do boys not know? My brother Louis?’

  Her lazy eyes half open and she smiles at me. ‘Men command the world that they know,’ she says. ‘Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves, they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women, but the realms of the unknown?’

  ‘But can women not take a great place in the world? You do, Great-aunt, and Yolande of Aragon is called the Queen of Four Kingdoms. Shall I not command great lands like you and her?’

  ‘You might. But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price. Perhaps you will be a great woman like Melusina, or Yolande, or like me; but you will be like all women: uneasy in the world of men. You will do your best – perhaps you will gain some power if you marry well or inherit well – but you will always find the road is hard beneath your feet. In the other world – well, who knows about the other world? Maybe they will hear you, and perhaps you will hear them.’

  ‘What will I hear?’

  She smiles. ‘You know. You hear it already.’

  ‘Voices?’ I ask, thinking of Joan.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Slowly, the intense heat of the summer starts to fade and it grows cooler in September. The trees of the great forest that surround the lake start to turn colour from tired green to sere yellow, and the swallows swirl around the turrets of the castle every evening, as if to say goodbye for another year. They chase each other round and round in a dizzying train, like a veil being whirled in a dance. The rows on rows of vines grow heavy with fruit and every day the peasant women go out with their sleeves rolled up over their big forearms and pick and pick the fruit into big wicker baskets, which the men swing onto carts and take back to the press. The smell of fruit and fermenting wine is heavy in the village, everyone has blue-stained hems to their gowns and purple feet, and they say it will be a good year this year, rich and lush. When the ladies in waiting and I ride through the village they call us to taste the new wine and it is light and sharp and fizzy in our mouths, and they laugh at our puckered faces.

  My great-aunt does not sit straight-backed in her chair, overseeing her women and beyond them the castle and my uncle’s lands, as she did at the start of the summer. As the sun loses its heat she too seems to be growing pale and cold. She lies down from the middle of the morning to the early evening, and only rises from her bed to walk into the great hall beside my uncle and nod her head at the rumble of greeting, as the men look up at their lord and lady and hammer on the wooden tables with their daggers.

  Joan prays for her, by name, in her daily attendance at church, but I, childlike, just accept the new rhythm of my great-aunt’s day, and sit with her to read in the afternoon, and wait for her to talk to me about the prayers floated like paper ships on the waters of rivers that were flowing to the sea before I was born. She tells me to spread out the cards of her pack and teaches me the name and the quality of each one.

  ‘And now read them for me,’ she says one day, and then taps a card with her thin finger. ‘What is this one?’

  I turn it over for her. The dark hooded shape of Death looks back at us, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, his scythe over his hunched shoulder.

  ‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘So are you here at last, my friend? Jacquetta, you had better ask your uncle to come to see me.’

  I show him into her room and he kneels at the side of her bed. She puts her hand on his head as if in blessing. Then she pushes him gently away.

  ‘I cannot bear this weather,’ se says cr