Westminster Palace, Winter 1440
Westminster Palace, Winter
MARGERY JOURDEMAYNE’S DOOR is open, propped by the snail stone. She is measuring out some thick oil, drop by drop into a jar. She does not look up when I come in but watches intently, counting the drops, and then corks the jar and puts it on a shelf.
I push the stone snail to one side and close the door.
‘I thought you were living high as a hog in the queen’s rooms at Windsor?’ she remarks. ‘I didn’t expect a visit from you this season – I thought you’d grown too grand.’
‘I should’ve come earlier. I should have spoken to you before. I have to have a son. I have to have a boy.’
She looks down at her worktable, picks up a tiny pair of silver scissors, wipes their sharp blade with a scrap of linen and puts them away. ‘Why so urgent now?’
‘It doesn’t matter to you. I have good reason. Dr Bolingbroke advised me. He said I should go to him if I had exhausted all you can do.’
‘Aye – you’ve had all that I would give any lady,’ she says cautiously. ‘I don’t have anything else in herbs or oils, nothing allowed by Church law. You know I can’t go into dark arts.’
‘But is there anything in dark arts that would work?’ I demand. ‘I don’t want to do it – to tell you the truth, I’m afraid of it all. But my need . . .’
‘Why is your need suddenly so great?’ she asks her in light incurious voice, and then her head comes up. ‘Ah, you’ve seen the Tudor boys.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I say grimly. ‘Tell me what I can do.’
‘Well, there are remedies,’ she says, lowering her voice, though the door is closed tight.
‘Dark magic, deep magic. It’s in the books in your husband’s library; his scholars know better than me – none better than Dr Bolingbroke.
I get their ingredients, strange old things and fresh herbs; I don’t do the work myself. ’
‘But does it work?’ I demand.
For the first time, she looks up at me; she has lost her merry smile and is winter-pale. ‘It works,’ she says. ‘It’s unpredictable, but it works. Why would people do it – why would half the men at court have their own scholar, pay an alchemist, consult wizards, if it didn’t work?’
‘Could I be harmed?’ My voice is very low. ‘Could it make me ill? Could I have a monster, not a baby?’
‘Yes,’ she says bleakly. ‘We could all be harmed. That’s why I do nothing but get the ingredients, and I only give them to the master.’
‘The master?’
‘Master Roger Bolingbroke – the greatest scholar in the world, greater even than the Arab masters. I’m not overpraising – he’s famous throughout Christendom for his learning.
You and the English lords call him Dr Bolingbroke from his studies at Oxford, but in Paris and Constantinople, they call him the master. ’
‘This is his idea,’ I say. ‘I trust him.’
She nods. ‘You’re safe with him. I’ll get what he needs to make a baby boy.’ She looks up at me. ‘A prince?’ she asks me, trying to smile, as if I am an ordinary woman coming to her to conceive an ordinary child, as if this is a moment of hope for future happiness.
‘He’ll be the next king,’ I tell her. ‘It’s worth almost any risk to me to keep . . . those two from the throne.’