Westminster Abbey, Summer 1441 #2
‘Silver tray,’ I say.
She tucks her hand back under her apron as if she doesn’t care. ‘I ain’t got a silver tray,’ she says. ‘I don’t take letters, anyway. I’m paid to bring food and take out slops and guard the door. Not run errands.’
I gasp at her rudeness. ‘How dare you? Who has dared to give you these orders?’
‘Privy council,’ she tells me. ‘Those that’ve got your man on trial for sorcery. Singing like a blinded thrush in a cage. Says you wanted to know if you’d be queen, if the king would die. Says you cast a horoscope, ordered a black mass, and a funeral.’
‘Canon Southwell would never say such things of me! They are lies.’
‘It was John Home said it of you,’ she says. ‘Your clerk. But I’ll tell ’em you thought it were your chaplain.’
I MUST ALWAYS think of this as the creation of a conspiracy against me, never even in my secret planning let myself know the truth.
Never again must I name anyone who has served me: not for their safety – which does not matter – but for my own.
I have to create a world in which I am a frightened woman, innocent as a maid, with cruel men assembling perjured evidence against me.
And then I remember the last maid accused of witchcraft before Cardinal Beaufort was Joan of Arc – and he burned her.
Humphrey my husband will save me. It is for him that I’ve risked all of this; he will inherit when the king dies – he will be king, even if a promising young canon and a clever clerk are found guilty on all charges.
Even if they confess, they can say nothing to overturn the succession.
Even if they confess, they cannot stop the destiny that Bolingbroke read in the horoscope.
We raised Raum; we spoke the words of the Vindicta Troie, the Revenge of Troy.
The king is going to slide into a sleep like death, my husband will inherit, and my baby will follow him to the throne.
This has been promised to me; this is going to happen.
All I have to do is get through the next few weeks.
My lord husband,
I cannot understand why you have not come to see me?
I am unwell and perhaps suffering the effects of malicious magic from those that I trusted, men of God: my clerk and my physician, who you yourself appointed and recommended to me.
God knows who turned them to such terrible deeds; it can only be our enemies.
Why else would they use such arts to attack me?
I forgive them for myself; but if they have hurt one hair of the king’s head they must pay for it—
I break off as I think of the dark curly hair that we spread around the little wax doll. I swallow rising nausea. I put the image of the doll and the clinging hairs out of my mind.
I am sick, nearly unto death. I depend upon you coming to me and reassuring me of the king’s continuing love and favour to me. I have always been a second mother to him and a faithful wife to you.
Eleanor
I don’t bother telling him to be seen praying before he comes to me.
He has wit enough to know that we have to look like devoted servants of the Church and true subjects of the king.
I have given him enough information to prompt him to throw Southwell and Home to the judges and blame them for everything they have wickedly done.
My lord is quick and able in betrayal; I can trust him to denounce them and send them to the flames of a heretic’s death at Smithfield Market.
My lord is a Plantagenet – there is no one in the world quicker to save themselves.
I saw him turn from his first wife Jacqueline at the first hint of her defeat.
I know how well and quickly he can betray.
I am confident he will betray his friends and save me.
But still, he does not come. I am left with one horrible woman to serve me and a groom of the bedchamber, but no one else comes near me.
This is less like sanctuary and more like prison, and I feel a rising panic at the sense of being confined.
I am free to go to the Lady Chapel; but no priest will hear my confession, and no one prays beside me.
More importantly, the abbot does not visit me, and nobody asks me to make a statement so that I can be released to go home under sanctuary.
When the woman comes in with my dinner, she looks uglier than usual. I realise this is her gap-toothed smile.
‘You seem happy,’ I say pleasantly.
‘The wicked are coming to judgement, and the just rejoice,’ she tells me.
‘God be praised. What wicked?’
‘Margery Jourdemayne, the witch of Eye, long known for dark dealing, has been taken up,’ she says. ‘Her merry pride is humbled, and they will burn her for the witch that she is.’
‘You shock me,’ I say steadily. ‘You astound me.’
‘Oh, do I? Oh, do I really? For they all say that she was your midwife and gossip, and that she worked with your chaplain Southwell and your clerk Home. It was her provided the nasty goods and the heretical furniture for their misdoings, and she was up to her pretty neck in it. And they say you are too.’
I put my hands up as if to guard my throat; I manage a sort of choking laugh.
‘You are mistaken. Southwell was my chaplain and physician, recommended to me by the royal physician, Gilbert Kymer, his friend. Home was my clerk, friend of the king’s own tutor.
He did nothing but write my letters and work in my husband’s library as a copyist and librarian.
I consulted Margery Jourdemayne, as almost every woman of the court consulted her, for my wellbeing and especially to help me give a child to my most gracious and noble lord. ’
She looks at me, boldly disbelieving, and I look right back.
‘There’s nothing anyone can say against me,’ I say flatly. ‘And anyone who speaks now will answer for it when I come to my own again. Don’t you doubt that I will come to my own again.’
‘Don’t threaten me, my lady,’ she says, her eyes sliding from mine. ‘I just told you the news. I didn’t accuse you of nothing.’
She dips her head and lays my table. I eat well, savouring every mouthful of the sixteen dishes that she is obliged to carry up the stairs from the kitchen below.
I send back far more than I eat. I take a pride in sending back a fortune in food, and I wave away the costly wine.
She can boggle her eyes at the wealth that surrounds me.
I am a royal duchess, and that means something.
I see the net is widening and taking in my servants one by one, but I am of the royal family.
I cannot fall. There is no net wide enough to catch me.
SOMETHING IS HAPPENING at court or in the City to cause the morning service in the abbey to be half-deserted.
Perhaps the king is holding a ceremony of thanksgiving for his safety at St Paul’s Cathedral rather than here?
I think I can hear the deep-toned bell of St Paul’s over the jangle of all the other Sunday bells from the dozens of other churches.
Perhaps there is a special service at the cathedral.
Ostentatiously, I take my usual place on the chancel steps of the Lady Chapel, but I can’t follow the service taking place in the main body of the church, for the celebrant has his back turned to the church, and there is almost no one there to say the responses, and the whole church rings with the jangle of bells.
I work my way through the prayers, in case someone is watching me, and I add a few Hail Marys to show my devotion, and then I rise to my feet and go slowly down the side nave and outside to Cheyneygates.
That is when I hear the single bell. It is quite unmistakable.
I can hear the deep tolling of the great bell of St Paul’s, ringing over and over as if for a funeral.
But it is midday on a Sunday – no one gets buried at this time on this day, and yet the bell goes on and on, solemn and unhurried, as if it will ring all day.
For a moment, my heart leaps into my throat as I think it is a mourning bell and that it is for the little king and that he is dead and my husband is the new king.
I am listening to the knell that calls me to unquestioned greatness.
I stand still at the foot of the stone stairs to my rooms; the hood falls back from my head, and I feel the heat of the summer sun.
I don’t even let myself smile as the bell goes on and on.
But it cannot be the death of the king. If he were dead, all the bells of London would be tolling, and there would be noise in the streets; someone would have hurried in to be first to kneel to me as Queen of England.
There would be an outpouring of grief at his death, much more than just this one ominous clanging, over and over.
I climb the stairs to my room, taking each step in time with the low boom of noise.
I wonder if they are tolling for an anniversary, but it goes on and on, for more than an hour.
I think it is odd how the deep mellow note sounds ragged after the hundredth chime, how I am still shocked when it rings out, how it grates on my ear, how my skin crawls as the sound goes on and on like the ticking of an enormous clock and I, a little butterfly caught in the humming case between the hammer and the bell.
I am so deafened by the constant noise that I don’t hear the opening of my door as the ugly woman comes in, two bowls in her hands, her dirty apron raised up to grip the plates.
She puts them down on the table, plants a silver knife and spoon before me, and then brings half a dozen plates from the server at the door.
She gives me a silver mug of ale and water, instead of fine wine in a glass.
I look at her; I know her now: her malice will not allow her to stay silent.
‘You hear the bell?’ she asks. ‘You wonder why it’s tolling?’
I say nothing. She won’t be able to resist telling me.
‘It’s for Roger,’ she says.
The lovely blankness of my face shows that I have no idea who she means.
‘Roger the wizard,’ she says. ‘Bogeyman. Banshee. Bolingbroke.’