The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  THE

  LADY OF THE

  RIVERS

  By the same author

  The Cousins’ War

  The White Queen

  The Red Queen

  History

  The Women of the Cousins’ War:

  The Duchess, the Queen and the King’s Mother

  The Tudor Court Novels

  The Constant Princess

  The Other Boleyn Girl

  The Boleyn Inheritance

  The Queen’s Fool

  The Virgin’s Lover

  The Other Queen

  Historical Novels

  The Wise Woman

  Fallen Skies

  A Respectable Trade

  The Wideacre Trilogy

  Wideacre

  The Favoured Child

  Meridon

  Civil War Novels

  Earthly Joys

  Virgin Earth

  Modern Novels

  Mrs Hartley and the Growth Centre

  Perfectly Correct

  The Little House

  Zelda’s Cut

  Short Stories

  Bread and Chocolate

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Philippa Gregory, 2011

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Philippa Gregory to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  222 Gray’s Inn Road

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  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN HB 978-1-84737-459-2

  ISBN TPB 978-1-84737-460-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-430-1

  Typeset by M Rules

  Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

  For Victoria

  CONTENTS

  CASTLE OF BEAUREVOIR, NEAR ARRAS, FRANCE, SUMMER–WINTER 1430

  ROUEN, FRANCE, SPRING 1431

  CASTLE OF ST POL, ARTOIS, SPRING 1433

  PARIS, FRANCE, MAY 1433

  CASTLE OF CALAIS, FRANCE, JUNE 1433

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1433

  PENSHURST, AUTUMN 1433

  PARIS, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1434–JANUARY 1435

  GISORS, FRANCE, FEBRUARY 1435

  ROUEN, FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 1435

  ENGLAND, SUMMER 1436

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, AUTUMN 1436

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1436

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, AUTUMN 1436–1439

  LONDON, SUMMER 1441

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, OCTOBER 1441

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, WINTER 1441–1444

  NANCY, FRANCE, SPRING 1445

  TITCHFIELD ABBEY, HAMPSHIRE, SUMMER 1445

  LONDON, SUMMER 1445–1448

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1449

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1450

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SUMMER 1450

  LONDON, SUMMER 1450

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SUMMER 1450

  PLYMOUTH, AUTUMN 1450–1451

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, AUTUMN 1451

  LONDON, SPRING 1452

  THE WEST OF ENGLAND, SUMMER 1452>

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, AUTUMN 1452

  PALACE OF PLACENTIA, GREENWICH, LONDON, CHRISTMAS 1452

  THE TOWER OF LONDON, SPRING 1453

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SUMMER 1453

  CLARENDON PALACE, WILTSHIRE, SUMMER 1453

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, AUTUMN 1453

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1454

  WINDSOR CASTLE, SUMMER 1454

  WINDSOR CASTLE, WINTER 1454

  THE PALACE OF PLACENTIA, GREENWICH, LONDON, SPRING 1455

  HERTFORD CASTLE, SUMMER 1455

  GROBY HALL, LEICESTERSHIRE, AUTUMN 1455

  HERTFORD CASTLE, SPRING 1456

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, SPRING 1456

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SUMMER 1456

  KENILWORTH CASTLE, WARWICKSHIRE, SUMMER 1457

  ROCHESTER CASTLE, KENT, NOVEMBER 1457

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER–SPRING 1458

  WESTMINSTER PALACE, LONDON, WINTER 1458

  ON CAMPAIGN, SUMMER–AUTUMN 1459

  SANDWICH, KENT, AND CALAIS, WINTER 1460

  COVENTRY, SPRING 1460

  NORTHAMPTON, SUMMER 1460

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SUMMER 1460

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, WINTER 1460–61

  ON THE MARCH, SPRING 1461

  height="4" width="0" align="left">ST ALBANS, SPRING 1461 YORK, SPRING 1461

  GRAFTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, SPRING 1464

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  CASTLE OF BEAUREVOIR, NEAR ARRAS,

  FRANCE, SUMMER–WINTER 1430

  She sits, this odd trophy of war, as neat as an obedient child, on a small stool in the corner of her cell. At her feet are the remains of her dinner on a pewter platter, laid on the straw. I notice that my uncle has sent good slices of meat, and even the white bread from his own table; but she has eaten little. I find I am staring at her, from her boy’s riding boots to the man’s bonnet crammed on her brown cropped hair, as if she were some exotic animal, trapped for our amusement, as if someone had sent a lion cub all the way from Ethiopia to entertain the great family of Luxembourg, for us to keep in our collection. A lady behind me crosses herself and whispers, ‘Is this a witch?’

  I don’t know. How does one ever know?

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ my great-aunt says boldly. ‘Who has ordered the poor girl to be chained? Open the door at once.’

  There is a confused muttering of men trying to shift the responsibility, and then someone turns the big key in the cell door and my great-aunt stalks in. The girl – she must be about seventeen or eighteen, only a few years older than me – looks up from under her jagged fringe of hair as my great-aunt stands before her, and then slowly she rises to her feet, doffs her cap, and gives an awkward little bow.

  ‘I am the Lady Jehanne, the Demoiselle of Luxembourg,’ my great-aunt says. ‘This is the castle of Lord John of Luxem bourg.’ She gestures to my aunt: ‘This is his wife, the lady of the castle, Jehanne of Bethune, and this is my great-niece Jacquetta.’

  The girl looks steadily at all of us and gives a nod of her head to each. As she looks at me I feel a little tap-tap for my attention, as palpable as the brush of a fingertip on the nape of my neck, a whisper of magic. I wonder if standing behind her there are indeed two accompanying angels, as she claims, and it is their presence that I sense.

  ‘Can you speak, Maid?’ my great-aunt asks, when the girl says nothing.

  ‘Oh yes, my lady,’ the girl replies in the hard accent of the Champagne region. I realise that it is true what they say about her: she is no more than a peasant girl, though she has led an army and crowned a king.

  ‘Will you give me your word not to escape if I have these chains taken off your legs?’

  She hesitates, as if she were in any position to choose. ‘No, I can’t.’

  My great-aunt smiles. ‘you understand the offer of parole? I can release you to live with us here in my nephew’s castle; but you have to promise not to run away.’

  Th
e girl turns her head, frowning. It is almost as if she is listening for advice, then she shakes her head. ‘I know this parole. It is when one knight makes a promise to another. They have rules as if they were jousting. I’m not like that. My words are real, not like a troubadour’s poem. And this is no game for me.’

  ‘Maid: parole is not a game!’ Aunt Jehanne interrupts.

  The girl looks at her. ‘Oh, but it is, my lady. The noblemen are not serious about these matters. Not serious like me. They play at war and make up rules. They ride out and lay waste to good people’s farms and laugh as the thatched roofs burn. Besides, I cannot make promises. I am promised already.’

  ‘To the one who wrongly calls himself the King of France?’

  ‘To the King of Heaven.’

  My great-aunt pauses for a moment’s thought. ‘I will tell them to take the chains off you and guard you so that you do not escape; and then you can come and sit with us in my rooms. I think what you have done for your country and for your prince has been very great, Joan, though mistaken. And I will not see you here, under my roof, a captive in chains.’

  ‘Will you tell your nephew to set me free?’

  My great-aunt hesitates. ‘I cannot order him; but I will do everything I can to send you back to your home. At any event, I won’t let him release you to the English.’

  At the very word the girl shudders and makes the sign of the cross, thumping her head and her chest in the most ridiculous way, as a peasant might cross himself at the name of Old Hob. I have to choke back a laugh. This draws the girl’s dark gaze to me.

  ‘They are only mortal men,’ I explain to her. ‘The English have no powers beyond that of mortal men. You need not fear them so. You need not cross yourself at their name.’

  ‘I don’t fear them. I am not such a fool as to fear that they have powers. It’s not that. It’s that they know that I have powers. That’s what makes them such a danger. They are mad with fear of me. They fear me so much that they will destroy me the moment I fall into their hands. I am their terror. I am their fear that walks by night.’

  ‘While I live, they won’t have you,’ my great-aunt assures her; and at once, unmistakably, Joan looks straight at me, a hard dark gaze as if to see that I too have heard, in this sincere assertion, the ring of an utterly empty promise.

  My great-aunt believes that if she can bring Joan into our company, talk with her, cool her religious fervour, perhaps educate her, then the girl will be led, in time, to wear the dress of a young woman, and the fighting youth who was dragged off the white horse at Compiègne will be transformed, like Mass reversed, from strong wine into water, and she will become a young woman who can be seated among waiting women, who will answer to a command and not to the ringing church bells, and will then, perhaps, be overlooked by the English, who are demanding that we surrender the hermaphrodite murderous witch to the we have nothing to offer them but a remorseful obedient maid in waiting, perhaps they will be satisfied and go on their violent way.

  Joan herself is exhausted by recent defeats and by her uneasy sense that the king she has crowned is not worthy of the holy oil, that the enemy she had on the run has recoiled on her, and that the mission given to her by God Himself is falling away from her. Everything that made her the Maid before her adoring troop of soldiers has become uncertain. Under my great-aunt’s steady kindness she is becoming once more an awkward country girl: nothing special.

  Of course, all the maids in waiting to my great-aunt want to know about the adventure that is ending in this slow creep of defeat, and as Joan spends her days with us, learning to be a girl and not the Maid, they pluck up the courage to ask her.

  ‘How were you so brave?’ one demands. ‘How did you learn to be so brave? In battle, I mean.’

  Joan smiles at the question. There are four of us, seated on a grass bank beside the moat of the castle, as idle as children. The July sun is beating down and the pasture lands around the castle are shimmering in the haze of heat; even the bees are lazy, buzzing and then falling silent as if drunk on flowers. We have chosen to sit in the deep shadow of the highest tower; behind us, in the glassy water of the moat, we can hear the occasional bubble of a carp coming to the surface.

  Joan is sprawled like a boy, one hand dabbling in the water, her cap over her eyes. In the basket beside me are half-sewn shirts that we are supposed to hem for the poor children of nearby Cambrai. But the maids avoid work of any sort, Joan has no skill, and I have my great-aunt’s precious pack of playing cards in my hands and I am shuffling and cutting them and idly looking at the pictures.

  ‘I knew I was called by God,’ Joan said simply. ‘And that He would protect me, so I had no fear. Not even in the worst of the battles. He warned me that I would be injured but that I would feel no pain, so I knew I could go on fighting. I even warned my men that I would be injured that day. I knew before we went into battle. I just knew.’

  ‘Do you really hear voices?’ I ask.

  ‘Do you?’

  The question is so shocking that the girls whip round to stare at me and under their joint gaze I find I am blushing as if for something shameful. ‘No! No!’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you hear?’ she asks, as reasonably as if everyone hears something.

  ‘Well, not voices exactly,’ I say.

  ‘What do you hear?’

  I glance behind me as if the very fish might rise to eavesdrop. ‘When someone in my family is going to die, then I hear a noise,’ I say. ‘A special noise.’

  ‘What sort of noise?’ the girl, Elizabeth, asks. ‘I didn’t know this. Could I hear it?’

  ‘You are not of my house,’ I say irritably. ‘Of course you wouldn’t hear it. You would have to be a descendant of . . . and anyway, you must never speak of this. You shouldn’t really be listening. I quo;t be telling you.’

  ‘What sort of noise?’ Joan repeats.

  ‘Like singing,’ I say, and see her nod, as if she too has heard singing.

  ‘They say it is the voice of Melusina, the first lady of the House of Luxembourg,’ I whisper. ‘They say she was a water goddess who came out of the river to marry the first duke but she couldn’t be a mortal woman. She comes back to cry for the loss of her children.’

  ‘And when have you heard her?’

  ‘The night that my baby sister died. I heard something. And I knew at once that it was Melusina.’

  ‘But how did you know it was her?’ the other maid whispers, afraid of being excluded from the conversation.

  I shrug, and Joan smiles in recognition of truths that cannot be explained. ‘I just knew,’ I say. ‘It was as if I recognised her voice. As if I had always known it.’

  ‘That’s true. You just know,’ Joan nods. ‘But how do you know that it comes from God and not from the Devil?’

  I hesitate. Any spiritual questions should be taken to my confessor, or at the very least to my mother or my great-aunt. But the song of Melusina, and the shiver on my spine, and my occasional sight of the unseen – something half-lost, sometimes vanishing around a corner, lighter grey in a grey twilight, a dream that is too clear to be forgotten, a glimpse of foresight but never anything that I can describe – these things are too thin for speech. How can I ask about them when I cannot even put them into words? How can I bear to have someone clumsily name them or, even worse, try to explain them? I might as well try to hold the greenish water of the moat in my cupped hands.

  ‘I’ve never asked,’ I say. ‘Because it is hardly anything. Like when you go into a room and it is quiet – but you know, you can just tell, that someone is there. You can’t hear them or see them, but you just know. It’s little more than that. I never think of it as a gift coming from God or the Devil. It is just nothing.’

  ‘My voices come from God,’ Joan says certainly. ‘I know it. If it were not true, I should be utterly lost.’

  ‘So can you tell fortunes?’ Elizabeth asks me childishly.
>
  My fingers close over my cards. ‘No,’ I say. ‘And these don’t tell fortunes, they are just for playing. They’re just playing cards. I don’t tell fortunes. My great-aunt would not allow me to do it, even if I could.’

  ‘Oh, do mine!’

  ‘These are just playing cards,’ I insist. ‘I’m no soothsayer.’

  ‘Oh, draw a card for me and tell me,’ Elizabeth says. ‘And for Joan. What’s going to become of her? Surely you want to know what’s going to happen to Joan?’

  ‘It means nothing,’ I say to Joan. ‘And I only brought them so we could play.’

  ‘They are beautiful,’ she says. ‘They taught me to play at court with cards like these. How bright they are.’

  I hand them to her. ‘Take care with them, they’re very precious,’ I say jealously as she spreads them in her calloused hands. ‘The Demoiselle showed them to me when I was a little girl and told me the names of the pictures. She lets me borrow them because I love to play. But I promised her I would take care of them.’

  Joan passes the pack back to me and though she is careful, and my hands are ready for them, one of the thick cards tumbles between us and falls face down, on the grass.

  ‘Oh! Sorry,’ Joan exclaims, and quickly picks it up.

  I can feel a whisper, like a cool breath down my spine. The meadow before me and the cows flicking their tails in the shade of the tree seem far away, as if we two are enclosed in a glass, butterflies in a bowl, in another world. ‘You had better look at it now,’ I hear myself say to her.

  Joan looks at the brightly painted picture, her eyes widen slightly, and then she shows it to me. ‘What does this mean?’

  It is a painting of a man dressed in a livery of blue, hanging upside down from one extended foot, the other leg crooked easily, his toe pointed and placed against his straight leg as if he were dancing, inverted in the air. His hands are clasped behind his back as if he were bowing; we both see the happy fall of his blue hair as he hangs, upside down, smiling.

  ‘“Le Pendu,”’ Elizabeth reads. ‘How horrid. What does it mean? Oh, surely it doesn’t mean . . . ’ She breaks off.