Bella Court, Greenwich, Winter 1436
Bella Court, Greenwich, Winter
WE GO DOWNRIVER to our palace to take stock: I and my husband, our advisors, and the visiting scholars – mostly from Italy – who come to Bella Court as to a place of pilgrimage.
Everyone agrees: we are in a strong position to do whatever we choose.
Nobody is left in court or council, to speak against us.
The common people, in streets and fields, depend upon my husband for their safety.
Everyone knows that we are the king’s closest family and his mother is completely discredited.
My husband, already known as the power behind the throne and his brother’s true heir, is now hailed as the guardian that England needs, and I am known to love the little king in the place of his mother. I am much praised for my care of him.
Everyone remembers that the dowager queen is French and tainted with their lusts, that her father was insane and she must carry that madness in her own raging blood.
Can we even be sure that she has not passed it on to the little king?
Clearly, he is not fit to rule. Is it the Valois madness?
Or even worse – can we be sure that he is his father’s royal son and not a Valois-Welsh bastard: tainted and base born?
The court seethes with shock and with disgust, and the news from Hainault is barely noticed in the condemnation of the queen. In the whole of England, I am the only person who cares when the Hainault herald comes to announce the death of their Countess Jacqueline.
I command him to come to my own rooms and tell me how she spent her last days.
I don’t bother to ask if she ever spoke of me; I know she did not.
To her, I was one of many false friends: easily left without regret, easily forgotten.
And now, I will never be able to tell her that I meant to be true to her, that I will never forget her.
She taught me more than any other woman I have known: how to be a woman without womanly weakness, how to command like a man without the false pride of men.
She taught me to see truly, to think about what I have seen, and to act – imagining the next act and the one after that.
She trained me as if I were her daughter, teaching me far more than my own mother ever did.
And now they are both dead – my mother and my only friend – and I will never see either of them again, and I will never be able to explain that I was not as heartless as I seemed then. Now, I am worse.
The messenger tells me that Jacqueline was happy with the husband, whose life she bought with her birthright.
She died in his arms, her fierce pride and ambition finally satisfied by the love of a good man.
I could laugh at that – in the end, she thought that love was more important than wealth.
It is as if we have changed places, since all I care about is wealth and power.
I will not hear this last lesson she offers me.
I will not think of her dying in her lover’s arms; her last sight his beloved face, as he kissed her eyes closed.
I send the messenger away, and I decide not to think of her at all.
I cannot let anything distract me from our path to greatness.
Everyone who saw the collapse of the king must doubt that he can grow to manhood and certainly not to majesty.
Nobody who saw him writhing on the floor can think him able to marry nor that he could make a healthy heir.
The court and the City of London know that he is unfit.
The rumours will filter out that the young man does no more than open and close parliament, just as he did when he was a baby carried on a cushion.
He is as helpless as the baby who cooed as he lay, kicking his heels, under the royal canopy.
Henry is king only in name, and Humphrey is the king in deed.
Margery Jourdemayne closes the Dog Court door and goes to Bermondsey Abbey for a month.
The dowager queen gives birth to a baby girl.
As soon as she is churched and the baby christened, her son the king visits his mother secretly and prays with her for the health of her child, his half-sister, with the baby in his arms and his tears falling on her little sleeping face.
‘The prettiest babe I’ve ever seen,’ Margery remarks when she returns to Westminster Palace.
‘Her last,’ I say coldly. ‘Owen Tudor won’t lie on her silk sheets again – not if he wants to keep his head on his shoulders.’
‘There’s no need for you to threaten them. She’ll not have another child,’ Margery tells me gravely. ‘Her Grace is wasting away; she has consumption.’
I feel a jolt of joy, as at an annunciation – though this is a coming death, not a birth. ‘Oh, has she? Is it phthisis, or the king’s evil?’
‘Phthisis,’ she tells me.
‘Call it the king’s evil,’ I instruct her. ‘Tell everyone she is dying of the king’s evil and that her son cannot cure her, not with his holy touch nor his prayers. That’ll rack him with guilt if he thinks he’s not holy enough to save his mother. How long will she last?’
Margery purses her lips at my cruelty, but she answers me: ‘She won’t see the Lenten lilies, poor lady.’
‘Does the king know?’
‘Yes, she’s told all her family: her four sons – the king and his three little brothers – and her husband.’
I am instantly on the alert. ‘She told Owen? He visited her? Why didn’t you tell me that at once? Where’s he living?’
‘I never saw him. I only know when he’s been with her – she has a radiance and a peace about her.
She looks like a woman well-loved.’ She glances at me, and I know she sees, in me, a woman who has never been well-loved.
‘He could be anywhere: hiding out in the liberties of Southwark or in the byways of the City? But he slips in to pray at her bedside, and kiss her goodnight.’
I notice that my fingers are clenched like claws on the silk of my gown. I straighten them out. ‘I will give you forty gold nobles if you will tell me when he is there, so that we can arrest him,’ I promise her.
‘Not I!’ she says. ‘Leave them alone, for I can slake your hatred – I’ve seen his future and I know it to be true. I promise you: he will be defeated and die on the scaffold. He will be beheaded, and a madwoman will mourn him.’
For a moment, I have a terror that she means me. Is she saying that my wits are gone? ‘A madwoman?’
‘She’ll put a hundred candles around his dead body,’ Margery says dreamily. ‘And no one will ever know why.’