Baynard’s Castle, London, Spring 1431
Baynard’s Castle, London, Spring
I AM NOT well all winter. I tell Canon Southwell that I think I went bare-headed under the midday sun in the summer and have been burned with noxious rays.
I say that I think someone is ill-wishing me.
He recommends cooling drinks and days indoors, and says it is a pity that Margery Jourdemayne is arrested and her supplies locked up.
I stay in my rooms at the castle and rest, while my husband brings me dispatches from France.
Duke John has purchased the Maid from John of Luxembourg: a lucky man on the battlefield, descended from a family of water witches.
I don’t forget that he made a fool of my husband in Hainault, and now he has made a fool of England, selling us a violent peasant girl at the price of a witch.
Duke John takes the Maid into prison, and Cardinal Beaufort wrestles with her soul.
As I sit in my darkened room, the scent of camomile always around me, I think that it is odd that the French witch is having to face the men who despise me.
It makes me feel for her – poor girl. God spare me ever having Beaufort wrestling with my soul!
She confesses that she was a fraud and a nobody and throws away her soldier breeches.
She thinks she has made an agreement: the English will spare her life if she betrays herself, her vision, her soul.
I look out of the window of my tower at the green heads of the trees and the crying seagulls over the busy river and I know I would betray everything to stay alive, I would do it in a moment.
But I’d never trust Cardinal Beaufort’s word.
Idly, I wonder who I would trust with an agreement on my soul: not Beaufort, not any of the Beauforts, not my husband who is so changeable, not my father nor my brother.
I cannot think of anyone whose word I would trust for my life.
I must be very poor in friends if I am a duchess of England and yet I can trust no one.
Owen, I think. I would trust Owen. In all of England, he is the only man whose word is good.
I lie back on my pillow as my head thuds again.
I can hear a troop of horses clattering through the great gate.
I suppose it is more news from France. I expect to hear of the lifetime imprisonment of the witch and the young king travelling from Rouen to Paris.
Idly, I kneel up on the seat to look out of the window, and I see them ride under the archway, and a black dog, who was running after them, does not follow but sits, panting, near the well and then creeps over the cobbles on his belly to drink from the horse trough.
The door opens, and my husband bursts in, a letter in his hand.
‘She’s dead,’ he says without preamble. ‘They tricked her. She dressed in women’s clothes and begged for pardon, and they left her alone with a priest and her boy’s clothes, and she heard the voices of the saints calling her to prayer again, and she put on her boy’s clothes and said she would never betray her vision.
She defends the dauphin; she insists she was called by angels; she defies us. ’
‘And so they’ve killed her?’ I ask coldly.
He waves the letter like a flag over his head. ‘Burned alive,’ he cheers. ‘That’s the way to treat a witch! And Cardinal Beaufort had every scrap of ash swept into the Seine so that no one can make relics of her charred bones. She’s dead and gone. She’s dead, and France is ours again.’
‘Amen,’ I say coolly. ‘Praise God.’
I think, like me, she had no friend whose word she could trust. I glance out of the window, and the dog has gone.