Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ‘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 hey be the swaddling board for the baby, his bands and his cap are all washed and pressed and made ready. An altar is set up in what is usually the privy chamber, and a screen placed between the bedroom and the chamber so the priest can come in and serve the Mass and the queen observe him without being seen. She will make her confession from behind a veiled screen. Not even an ordained priest can come into these rooms for six weeks before the birth and for six weeks after.

  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 b totice 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?’

  I say nothing. I am too old a hand at court to be led into speculation about the future of a king by the man who is standing in his shoes.

  ‘You must have thoughts,’ he says impatiently.

  ‘I may have thoughts; but I have no words,’ I say and leave him. But that night I dream of the Fisher King of the legend: a country commanded by a king too frail and too weak to do anything but go fishing, while a young woman has to rule the land alone, and longs for a man who can stand at her side.

  The queen finds her confinement tedious, and the daily reports from Windsor Castle only make the days worse. They are torturing the king with one remedy after another. The reports speak of draining him of cool fluids, and heating of his vital parts, and I know that they mean cupping him to draw off his blood and then burning him where he lies, silent as a crucified Christ, waiting to rise again. Some nights I get up from the little bed that I have in the queen’s room and pull up the corner of the tapestry over the window; so that I can see the moon, a big warm harvest moon, so near to earth that I can see every wrinkle and pockmark on her face, and I ask her, ‘Did I bewitch the king? Did I ill-wish him? In that moment of fright when I bade him see nothing did I, in truth, make him blind? Could such a thing be? Could I be so powerful? And if it was me – how can I take the words back and restore him?’

  I feel very alone with this worry. Of course I cannot share it with the queen who has her own guilt and fear. I dare write nothing to Richard; such thoughts should not be in my mind, never on paper. I am sick and tired of being trapped in these shadowy rooms: the queen’s confinement is long and anxious for us all. This should be the happiest autumn of her life, with a baby on the way at last; but instead we are all filled with fear about the king, and now some of the ladies are whispering that the baby wi