Westminster Palace, Spring 1421
Westminster Palace, Spring
BACK IN LONDON, the court is the headquarters of an army preparing for an invasion.
All women are superfluous but Jacqueline – she knows the countryside of northern France.
The king, grim-faced, meets with his privy council every morning and orders the muster of men from all around the country, transport ships to the port of Dover, forging and casting of cannon and cannonballs, and the training of longbowmen – the famous English longbowmen who won us France only six years ago and will win us France again.
He forgets nothing, not the smallest details.
The royal exchequer is commanded to pay Countess Jacqueline a fortune of one hundred pounds a month, and she will stay at court as his guest. He will keep her in England, and I will have to stay with her, while all the marriageable men ride off to invade France and leave only women and old men at court.
I can foresee spinsterhood as clearly as if I were saying my prayers backwards and throwing apple peel over my shoulder, but I would like to have someone read my fortune from the dregs of my cup or in the cards.
There is a wise woman who comes to advise the ladies of Westminster, and I think it worth a silver farthing to see what she says.
I wait beside the garden door of Dog Court – named for the dog’s face carved on the arch of the gateway.
The porter’s room beside the door is known as Mistress Jourdemayne’s room, as if she were a court official with a handle to her name and her own office.
The scholars from the universities come to her for the dark-blue ink she makes for them: the common ink from woad or the expensive one of lapis lazuli.
They buy her black raven quills and pay her for Seeings and Readings.
London physicians come to buy her dried herbs folded in silk, the little flasks of oils that clink in her leather satchel, and ask her to read the patient’s health from the dregs of his urine.
She is skilled in natural lore learned from her mother – a wise woman from generations of countrywomen.
Her mother was a seventh daughter, and Mistress Jourdemayne is said to have six older sisters.
The physicians and apothecaries are not the only customers for her drenches and drinks: the court noblemen come to her for salves when they have a pox; the swordsmen come for powders to make their blades sharper and more deadly; the ladies consult her for fortune-telling and secrets, for love potions to create desire and herbs to bring on bleeding.
Ladies giving birth send for her; she is a midwife famous for preventing pain, and she knows the stars that will bring good luck to a baby and how to time a birth for the best portents.
Wise woman to a court that has been at war for more than eighty years, she is skilled with healing wounds; she can set a bone and stitch a wound so tight that it leaves no scar.
Nobody makes a will without visiting Mistress Jourdemayne to ask her to look at the lifeline on the palm of their hand and tell them if they will come safely home again.
She is respected as if she were a lady in the stillroom of her castle or a scholar-nun in her library at her books of horoscopes.
She is well known for staying on the right side of the Church laws which ban demons and fallen angels, but if I were her, and I knew how to do it, I would call up a power greater than myself to fulfil wild wishes and worldly ambitions.
I would be thrilled to be a handmaid to a dark power: imagine commanding a fallen angel that could change the world!
But Mistress Jourdemayne’s reputation is based on her daylight skills in the natural world, and her safety depends upon her staying within the law, inside godly limits.
She has had her own room at court for the last four years, and on saints’ days and holy days, the ogive-arch door is propped open with a block of stone shaped like a huge snail shell, and anyone happening to pass by can slide it out of the way with their foot, close the door behind them, and tell her a secret or ask her advice.
I stroll past on the day of St John of Beverley – the king’s favourite saint – and the door is open, the guardian stone snail in place. I stand on the threshold and look in.
I was half-expecting a blind seer and a room smelling of burning tallow, but the woman behind the table is no old hag.
She is young and plain, cheeks rosy like a country girl, brown hair tucked under a linen cap, a blue gown like a yeoman’s wife: the sort of woman you might see at a market stall in any country fair, selling butter or cheeses.
But here she is, in the greatest palace in England, with her charts and herbal books and receipts on a shelf behind her head and a lump of crystal and some phials of liquids on the table before her.
‘Mistress Cobham.’ She knows me, though this is the first time we have met, so I guess that she is a spy as well as a foreseer and that she watches the present as clearly as she foresees the future. ‘Come in. Push the doorstop aside and close the door if you wish to speak without being overheard.’
‘What is it?’ I ask curiously, pushing the stone aside. ‘Is it a carving of a great snail?’
‘Nobody knows what it is,’ she replies. ‘But I have seen a cliff that is embedded with monsters and snails of stone, just like that one – great creatures that must have walked on the beach where I walked and were made into stone for their sins by the God who spared me.’
‘Why d’you keep it here?’
‘To warn everyone who comes through the door that a woman can turn to stone, just as a bird can turn into air, just as dragonflies from water. We are all creatures of change. We all become our true selves at our end. And a woman who hardens her heart will be as cold as her headstone at her end.’
I close the door and sit opposite her, on the stool. The room is warm, smelling pleasantly of the strewing herbs on the floor and a little fire of pine cones in a brazier. This is a woman so welcome at court that someone orders pine cones and lights a fire for her.
‘Is it about your lady?’ she asks quietly.
‘How did you know? How extraordinary that you know!’ I exclaim.
She snorts on a little laugh. ‘No need for you to act the country maiden with me, Mistress Cobham, and I won’t with you.
Stands to reason that you wouldn’t come for a love potion – I’ve seen you walk past the young men at court, and you’re sure-footed as a goat but not as randy.
What fear does a girl like you have of the future?
Someone’s bound to marry you. But your lady’s come a long way and made no headway – not with the king nor with his council. ’
‘Can you really foresee?’
‘Sometimes,’ she says simply. ‘Sometimes, I have dreams; sometimes, I can see a darkness around someone or a shadow at their heels. Sometimes, I can smell an illness on their breath or see it in their face. And sometimes – like anyone with eyes and ears – I hear or see what people are saying or doing, and it’s obvious what will happen, because they always do the same thing, over and over, even when it didn’t work before.
That’s the strongest foretelling of all – knowing someone’s pattern and watching them repeat it. ’
‘D’you use secret arts?’
‘Only what’s given by God,’ she says promptly.
‘Our Lady Herself heard an angel’s foretelling.
And I pray to Saint Cyprian of Antioch who protects and guides all good wizards, as he was a wizard and a saint himself.
All things have their properties – herbs, stones, and metals.
I know them, and I release their natural good, as the Church allows.
I do nothing outside the law: magic but not necromancy, white magic not black.
But anyway, I don’t need arts to tell you what your lady should do. ’
I lean forward a little. ‘You said someone’s sure to marry me?’
‘D’you want nothing more?’
‘Nothing more,’ I breathe.
She smiles. ‘You’re supposed to cross my palm with silver you know.’
‘Silver?’
‘It’s a golden fortune – it’s worth a little silver.’
I feel in my pocket for the smallest silver coin I have.
It is a silver farthing, a cross on one side, the pattern on the back blurred by use.
It’s been shaved and clipped all around the rim: this one is worth even less than a quarter of a penny.
She takes it without comment and slides it into a purse at her belt.
‘The countess can stay here and be honoured,’ she observes. ‘When her bad marriage is declared void by the Holy Father, she could marry well and be an English noblewoman. And if she was married and fixed here, she might get some of her rent from her lands for goodwill?’
‘That’s not a foretelling. It’s obvious. And it’s not worth a farthing.’
‘You didn’t give me a farthing,’ she observes.
‘It was a farthing once.’
‘She was a countess once.’
This makes me laugh, and she smiles at me, her eyes merry. ‘You see?’ she says. ‘Half of foreseeing is just knowing.’
‘So tell me the other half – the foreseeing I don’t know. Will she be a countess again? Will someone marry me?’
‘Yes,’ she says simply.
I lean back a little and take a breath. If true, this is worth a coin of gold: a noble. ‘Really? She will regain her title and rule her own lands, as she wants? And what about me?’
‘I can tell you this: one of the king’s men will win back her lands,’ she says casually, as if it were not an enormous prediction. ‘Not even she can do it alone. The king won’t do it for her. It will be one of his brothers: Duke John or Duke Humphrey.’
This is just what I have hoped. ‘For love of her?’
She shrugs. ‘Call it love, if you want to think of it like a story. But it’s more like calculation.
Duke John will help her only if it serves him and his brother the king.
He’s not a man to leap up for a forlorn hope.
Besides, he’s heir to the throne now; nobody will let him go into danger.
But Duke Humphrey . . .’ She smiles at me.
‘He’s a man looking for a cause. You watch him.
You look for his pattern. He’s satisfied now, playing soldiers with the king, but if they ever win peace, he’ll need a new game.
If the king gets a son and heir, both dukes drop down another step from the throne – Humphrey becomes fourth in line.
He’s a young man, used to being important.
He wants something to do – something showy. ’
‘Just as I tell her,’ I exclaim.
‘She won’t entrance him as you would,’ she warns me. ‘She’ll never be anything but herself: strong as a man, brave as a lion.’
‘Men don’t like that. A woman should be a clinging vine not a . . .’
She laughs at me. ‘Ah, you’re wrong. A man might like a clinging vine for the flowering season, but for life, he needs a staff.’
I nod; this is well worth a farthing.
‘It’s not her you need to work on; but the duke,’ she tells me.
‘You can’t change her – she’s her own governor.
She’s found her own shape: a woman of fire.
But him, you can guide.You can make him see her as a cause, as a quest. He likes Romance and chivalry; you can tell him a story. He likes a story as much as you do.’
‘I knew it! I entrance him for her.’
‘Try to keep yourself out of it.’ She smiles at me as if she sees me in the hard light that my mother always shone on my childish selfishness.
‘You’ll ruin everything if you can’t resist being first,’ she says.
‘That’s a foreseeing for you! Let your lady outshine you.
Be the maid not the mistress. Can you do that? ’
‘I’ve done it every day of my life,’ I say crossly. ‘I step back for everyone. At home, I was one of five and not even the son and heir. And here, almost every woman in the court goes before me. I’m the last one that anyone thinks of.’
‘An older sister before you,’ she guesses. ‘And a younger one after you. And you the cleverest and the prettiest but the least loved.’
She puts it so coldly that I look up to the high window and blink back tears. ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t want more . . .’
‘There are many women like us,’ she observes gently. ‘We need more than the ordinary – more than the obvious. We want to know more; we want to live more; we want more than one little life in one dull little place.’
‘I only want what I deserve. I want my just rewards.’
She laughs. ‘There’s no such thing as just rewards in this world,’ she says. ‘What you want is fame and fortune without working for it. That’s a devil’s temptation. You don’t want to call up a devil, do you?’