Westminster Palace, Autumn 1435
Westminster Palace, Autumn
JOHN DUKE OF Bedford, heartbroken at the betrayal of Philip of Burgundy, exhausted by a lifetime of fighting for our lands in France, surrenders to death in the town where he burned the girl he named as a witch.
He is buried in the cathedral beside the river where he swept her ashes into the waters.
John’s widow, the girl Jacquetta, confirms she is not carrying a posthumous child, as Margery Jourdemayne predicted.
My husband is the last royal of his generation; only Henry, a frail child, stands between us and the crown.
It is as my advisors have foreseen. It is as I wish.
No one denies our importance. We decide policy – and even detail. I rule that the court will go into only a month’s mourning when Isabeau Dowager Queen of France dies, and I refuse to honour her daughter the Dowager Queen Catherine with a visit of condolence.
‘Get your clerk John Home to write for us both,’ Humphrey says. ‘A formal letter of sympathy. I don’t want her to have any complaint against us.’
‘She has no complaint against us – and no one to say it to,’ I reply smartly.
I think to myself Owen will comfort her; he will hold her when she cries for her mother. I know he will be tender with her. With a man like that, a woman could surrender to grief; she will mourn her mother as I could not mourn mine. I can never give in to anything.