Westminster Palace, Summer 1432
Westminster Palace, Summer
I THINK CAREFULLY how I shall break my promise and tell my lord of the king’s secret and how I can best use it against Owen and the vile woman who is dowager queen.
Days pass before I can get the king alone and discover where the secret lovers are hiding, and then he tells me – gleeful as a boy, quite unaware they have slipped through my fingers – that his mother has given birth to his third half-brother, but she would not stay, and she and Owen have left London and gone to Bishop’s Hatfield.
I go to find Margery Jourdemayne, under the stone mask of the dog, her door standing open with the snail shell in place.
‘I saved you,’ I say. ‘I spoke for you.’
She nods. She is paler than she used to be; a year in the cells of Windsor Castle has taken the countrywoman’s ruddy colour from her cheeks and wiped her sunny smile.
‘I thank you,’ she says. ‘You took your time. I had a year and a half of fear. I thought they would burn me.’
‘I spoke to my husband as soon as your case came before the privy council,’ I tell her. ‘I had no influence when you were in the hands of the Church. There is Church law and there is civil law, and I can do nothing against the Church.’
She nods. ‘Well, I’m released,’ she says. ‘Bound over not to do sorcery, which I don’t do anyway!’
‘I’m glad for you.’
I try to sound sincere, but I see the peep of her sceptical smile.
‘I’m sure you are,’ she says. ‘And you came hotfoot down here to find me, just to welcome me back.’
‘No, it’s about Catherine, the dowager queen,’ I admit. ‘A lot’s happened while you were away. D’you know where she’s living?’
She laughs. ‘Aye. I know. And with who! I guess your pretty nose is out of joint?’
‘How d’you know?’ I demand of her. ‘You can tell me – I’ve seen them together. And her fool son told me. When I saw her, she was big with their first child – she looked disgusting. And now the king says she’s on her third! How did you find out?’
‘Any woman who wants to survive childbed sends for me,’ she says, ‘especially when her waters break and the baby comes early at Westminster Palace! Owen ap Maredudd came running like a boy, kicked over the doorstop, and all but carried me over his shoulder to the monks’ infirmary.’
I look at the stone snail doorstop that he kicked over in his hurry. ‘Did she have pain?’ I say hopefully. ‘Was the baby strangled with the cord?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not with my herbs,’ she says proudly. ‘Not with my hands on him – another boy.’
I rise from my seat at her little table. I turn towards the door and look down at the stone snail, seeing nothing. ‘She disgusts me,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Why do I have no child and she has three in three years?’ I demand.
I can feel Margery’s sympathetic gaze on my back.
Without turning around, I say, ‘Owen ap Maredudd refused to marry me because he was in love with her. I married my lord, but the base-born Welshman refused me first. And she refused marriage with my husband because she was in love with Owen. They deceived us for years. She lowered herself and insulted my husband. Owen deceived me and broke my heart. The duke and I are a couple of high pride. Their very life together is an insult to my lord and to me.’
‘But you can do nothing against them?’
Slowly I turn back to ask her: ‘Will you help me?’
She hesitates. ‘I’m bound over. They’ll be watching me.’
‘What’s that terrible stink?’ I demand irritably.
‘Camomile oil.’ She points to the glass bottles on the shelf behind her, where a greenish oil is draining through fine linen from a suspended bottle into a jar. ‘Most people like it. It’s soothing.’
‘Well, I can’t stand it,’ I say rudely.
Silently, she passes me a pomander prickly with cloves.
I hold it to my nose. ‘Will you help me or not?’
‘Lord love you, I’m sorry for your pain, but I can’t do anything to hurt her, not now I’ve been her midwife,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t hurt her, nor her babies.’
‘But could you hurt her if you wanted to?’ I ask. ‘What could you do?’
She shrugs, her merry smile quite wiped from her face. ‘It’s not my work, and I won’t do it. I don’t know how to do it anyway. The learned men, from Oxford University and the Church libraries – they can change a man’s stars, change his life path.’
‘I want her to waste and die,’ I say in a vicious whisper. ‘I want her to lose her beauty and die. And I want him—’
‘Him?’
‘Owen ap Maredudd. I want him to die on the scaffold, in despair.’
‘Hung, and then his belly cut open and his organs pulled out?’ she asks. ‘While he’s still alive so he can see his beating heart? The worst death?’
‘Yes,’ I say crisply.
She looks up, her face drawn and pale. ‘Everyone dies,’ she says simply. ‘And many despair. It happens to us all. You don’t need to rush it on the two of them, just because they fell in love and are true to each other – just because he prefers her to you.’
‘You won’t help me?’ I say flatly. ‘Though it was my word that got you out of the cells?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not against them two,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t do it. But you can take it from me – she won’t make old bones, and he’ll face a terrible end. We live in hard times, even for a golden couple in love.’
‘They’re not a golden couple – they’re dirt,’ I say angrily.
‘We’re all nigredo – we are all dirt,’ she says. ‘Original matter. Dust to dust. Even you, my lady, risen so high, are followed everywhere by a black dog.’
I am not even listening as I open the door. ‘You promise, at any rate, that she’ll die?’
‘Of course she will.’
‘And he despair?’
‘He’ll die in shame, but you would know better than me if he’s the sort to despair.’
THE PRIVY COUNCIL meets without the king, though he has been home for months and has been crowned twice – once in London and once in Paris.
They meet in my husband’s own room, not the council room.
They acknowledge that it is my husband’s council, with his appointees, meeting in his rooms, as if my husband is the King of England and it is not the nervous boy who asks if he may be excused from attending, as he would rather pray.
My husband stacks the parliament, which defers to him completely. He does not try to interest the young king in the business of ruling, and the boy’s governor, Richard Beauchamp, allows him to spend his time in the monastery at Westminster Abbey, the only place he seems to feel at home.
There is an uneasy agreement about how we all manage the boy king since his return from France.
Everyone conspires not to trouble him: he cannot tolerate bad news; people tiptoe in the galleries outside his rooms: he cannot tolerate noise.
We keep a calm, almost solemn court around him, because applause or rowdiness disturb him, and anger and arguments send him white-faced and shivering to the silent peace of the royal chapel.
We are ostentatiously devout – it seems that he can only be happy if the court is in prayer.
No one is surprised that he goes missing when his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort finally comes home to face my husband’s accusations of smuggling treasure from the kingdom and evading taxes.
The cardinal confesses he was moving his treasure out of England – but claims it was his own fortune and that he had a right to it.
He agrees he should have paid a tax but offers to do so now.
He plays the part of a great man caught in a small mistake: he was in France; he burned England’s greatest enemy at a stake in Rouen town square when no one else dared to do it; he has spent half his fortune on English armies. Is this how he is rewarded?
I knew my lord would crumble before his uncle.
He is brave before an imaginary opponent, but he dares not face up to him in person.
The cardinal comes before my husband’s privy council and they lose their nerve and declare him innocent of all wrongdoing.
The cardinal must be laughing behind his hand as he pays his tax, gives up his fees from Winchester, and returns to his seat on the privy council.
The lords rally round him; they speak of comradeship and honour and chivalry.
I curb my impatience with them and hide my irritation with my husband.
I remember Jacqueline saying that a wise leader does not take the first advantage.
The cardinal will have to be crushed – sooner or later – but my husband lacks the determination or the courage to do it now.
I will have to think how it can be done – done by me – without him knowing.
‘And what else happened at privy council? You sat very late,’ I ask without real interest.
‘There was an application to give English citizenship to a Welshman . . . Owen ap Maredudd, actually,’ my husband says a little awkwardly.
‘Someone must favour that man – God knows who, I saw through him years ago. It went through on the nod, and he’s getting a new name, English-sounding. He’s calling himself Tudor.’
I notice that my fingers are clenched into claws. I stretch them out and stroke the back of my hand, as if I have torn my own tendons like a falcon gripping to kill. ‘Why did you not rule against it?’
‘It was the queen’s agent who brought it,’ my husband explains. ‘The queen commanded that his lineage be presented to the parliament. I couldn’t argue against the dowager queen in public. Turns out he’s descended from kings of Wales – the royal line of the Cadwalladers!’
‘Every Welsh scoundrel says that.’
‘And the queen’s given him lands worth a hundred marks of rent a year. Not bad for a lad who Sir Walter Hungerford asked me to take as a groom. My groom! A hundred marks a year!’
Humphrey speaks as if the morning in Hertford Castle is forgotten.
But I will never forget it. ‘I see now why he insulted me,’ I say sharply.
‘He did not need your favour, the queen is his patron. King of Wales indeed! I hope to God he never speaks of how he refused your direct order. It reflects so badly on you.’
‘It does not,’ he says instantly. ‘There’s no bad reflection on me.’
‘Those days were the worst of my life. I shudder now, thinking that you would have put my honour and my name and even my body into the keeping of that man.’
‘My God, yes!’ My husband is struck. ‘He has no honour at all.’
‘Pray God he never speaks of your proposal to anyone. I would be shamed if he were to repeat some story. I wish you’d never trusted him in the first place.’
My husband cannot bear to be in the wrong. ‘I’ll watch him,’ he says grimly. ‘Nobody fools me more than once.’
‘Nobody fools you at all,’ I say, as reliable as one of his little timepieces, striking the hour with a silvery tongue.
‘You are the greatest man in England, after the king. Nobody can ever fool you. But you should certainly refuse any more favours for Owen whatever he calls himself now! And you should watch him. Who knows what you might see? Who knows why the queen favours him so? Really, you have to wonder why she is so generous to him?’