Bella Court, Greenwich, Spring 1441 #2
I walk through the courtyard, to the scholars’ tower, smelling the fresh baked loaves from the bakery.
The door to the library is unlocked, and I pass the silent bookshelves, my lit taper throwing a bobbing reflection on the polished oak table, my leather shoes slapping the wooden floor.
I climb the winding stone stairs to the divining room on the next floor.
The door is ajar, the light from half a dozen candles spilling out.
I push it wide, and there is Roger Bolingbroke, terrifyingly tall with a tall, pointed hood in a white robe and cape.
I flinch back, and he looks around and sees me and says, in his low gentle voice: ‘Come in, Eleanor; there is nothing to fear.’
I step into the room. The charcoal brazier in the fireplace is lit and glowing red with coals, and to the side of it is a three-legged black iron pot filled with broken candles.
On the great stone table at the other side of the fireplace are bunches of herbs, golden wire, and wire cutters, a glass knife with a blade so thin that I cannot see how long it is, and a pair of silver scissors.
White wax candles burn in the sconces on all the walls; a roll of beautifully illuminated parchment is weighed down on the dark wood table on the south side of the room, where the moon shines in the south window and the chairs sit against the walls as if ready for judges to take their place.
It is not dark and fearful; it is as bright as the library lit with candles in scholarly evenings, but the night sky outside leans against the north windowpane like the back of a black beast.
‘This is the king’s horoscope,’ Roger Bolingbroke says to me, as calmly as if he were showing me a new manuscript from the Arab booksellers.
He gestures to the chart, and I go cautiously towards it, as if it might unroll itself from the paperweights and rear up and strike like a snake.
Henry’s date and time and place of birth are in the centre of a beautifully drawn circle of gold ink: December 6, 1421.
I remember the morning I woke to the noise of cannon fire celebrating his birth.
I have known him for all of his life. Now, I am foreseeing his death.
On his horoscope, the stars that saw his birth are shown on the rim of the golden circle like a wheel; the spokes are the planets.
Signs that align are joined by a line of ink, red as fresh blood; stars that show the weakness of his understanding, the frailty of his health, are blue – the colour of water – the fatal cold wetness in his humours that has brought us to this terrible dawn, this terrible deed.
‘And will he die young?’ I ask in a whisper, almost hoping that he will say that the king will live.
Bolingbroke produces a page, written in beautiful script, I recognise the flowing script of my clerk, John Home.
Bolingbroke reads to me: ‘He will endure a dangerous condition or event in his twentieth year.’ He looks at me over the page.
‘The root and origin of the infirmity will be of the nature of Saturn: fever with great tremor or moist infirmities or brought on by cold. The original illness will be excessive cold; the recovery will be excessive heat, such as fever and choleric abscesses. This will happen anytime from April 1441 and will continue for a year, especially July or August unless averted by wise action.’
‘We make him sick?’ I gesture to the silent circular room: the silver pentacle laid on the floor, the silver circle laid inside it, the lead weights on the table, the charcoal on the hearth, the pot, the candles. ‘Do we do it?’
He nods with a sort of measured pride, as a craftsman will look at a beautiful saddle or a smith at a piece of armour.
‘If God blesses the work,’ he says. ‘If it is God’s will.
If the king does not die this year, he will fall into something like a living death from his thirtieth year.
Then he will sleep like a princess in a tower, never wakened by any kiss.
He will never wake again. If he does not die as a sacrifice to his country he will be a Fisher King – incapable of ruling a country, blighting the land unknowing. ’
‘In pain?’
‘Better that we release him from the wheel,’ he says gently.
‘If the spirits agree that he should die. What we have agreed to do this night will spare him from the horror of losing his mind and seeing his country destroyed. We are not working alone here, Eleanor. There are greater forces than us who will decide his future.’
‘You’re going to summon them?’ My mouth is so dry I can hardly speak.
He glances at the great candle standing in the middle of the stone table.
It is barred with black ink lines; each one shows an hour for the candle to burn down.
There is a silver pin thrust into the ivory wax, precisely at the hour before sunrise, when the hour of Saturn begins, and another pin in the wax at the end of the hour.
‘When it is time,’ he says. ‘In the hour of Saturn. For now, we will prepare.’
He pours a jug of water into a white ewer, and we wash our hands together and dry them on a cloth of white linen. ‘Your heart is pure?’ he confirms. ‘You have abstained for two weeks and fasted?’
I nod.
‘You have confessed, and you are in a state of grace?’
‘I am, praise be to God.’
‘If you were to die tonight, in this work, you would be shriven?’
‘I might die?’ I ask.
‘We are summoning Death,’ he points out.
‘I am shriven,’ I say. He murmurs a prayer: that our holy work is guarded by God. He takes the warmed pot from the fireplace. Inside it, the wax of broken candles is soft and melting.
‘Funeral candles – from his own mother’s funeral. Take a handful.’
Shrinkingly, I pull the wax candles from the pot. They are soft and slick in my hands; I cannot conceal my disgust at the tepid wax.
‘Mould it into the body of the king, with head and body, arms and legs,’ Bolingbroke instructs me. He takes the gold wire and twists it into a little crown.
I squash the warm wax between my hands, shaping head and body.
‘Give him his face,’ he says.
I take up one of the little spoons from the bench and a little scalpel, and I scratch Henry’s thick hair on the back of the head.
On the front, I carve a little face – a horrid little face with staring eyes and a gaping mouth.
I have not the skill to make it look anything like the young man that I have held in my arms, who learned to toddle holding to my hands.
I have not the skill to show his sweetness, his girlish good looks.
Under my clumsy hands, he is a screaming doll of horror.
‘Write his name on his forehead,’ Bolingbroke tells me. ‘And write the word Saturn on his chest.’
I take the scalpel and carefully carve Henry on the white wax forehead and Saturn under the stump of the neck.
‘Now give it to me.’
I am glad to have it out of my hands. I rub my palms down my white gown; I don’t care about the greasy stains. I feel as if I will have the slimy feel of wax on my fingers and under my fingernails for the rest of my life.
Bolingbroke turns the little manikin over and carves the conjoined t and h of the symbol of Saturn deeply into his back. I almost protest; I think he will pierce the heart.
He glances up at me. ‘It won’t hurt him,’ he says. ‘He will fall asleep.’
The tinkle of the silver pin falling from the hour candle into the silver tray makes me jump.
‘The hour begins,’ Bolingbroke says quietly. ‘Take the hair from that box.’
He gestures to a box of black ebony wood. I open it, and there is a mass of curls of dark hair.
‘His own hair,’ Bolingbroke says almost tenderly. ‘From his barber. Put the manikin on the silk cloth and heap the hair all around him.’
I obey him, moving slowly, as if I am wading through deep water. I keep thinking: we are in the hour of Saturn, this will last for only an hour, and then it will be over, and I will go downstairs and pretend that it never happened, and I will be free of this horror.
‘Look in the red box,’ he prompts me.
Inside the red box are chips of what I think is river gravel; then I see the pebbles are chips of bone. There is a tiny little skeletal hand, the bones of a baby. I shrink from it, but Bolingbroke says: ‘Pick it up and put it on the manikin in the silk bed.’
I push my sleeves back, as if I want nothing of mine to touch the bones. I hesitate and look imploringly at Bolingbroke.
‘You can use the tongs,’ he says, gesturing to the silver tongs on the table.
I use them to grip the bones of the hand and the few pieces of shaved bone and put them on the silk handkerchief where the manikin lies in a nest of the king’s curly dark hair.
Bolingbroke kneels and holds out his cupped hands like someone receiving the Host, and I pass the silk handkerchief holding the horrible doll, the bony hand over the manikin like a claw in a bed of glossy black curls.