The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  ‘Is she a fish?’ I whisper.

  ‘She is a being not of this world,’ my great-aunt says quietly. ‘She tried to live like an ordinary woman; but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways; but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man’s world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man’s drum. Do you understand?’

  I don’t, of course. I am too young to understand that a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

  ‘Anyway, you can read on. It’s not long now.’

  The husband cannot bear to know that his wife is a strange being. She cannot forgive him for spying on her. She leaves him, taking her beautiful daughters, and he lives alone with the sons, heartbroken. But at his death, as at the death of everyone of our house, his wife Melusina, the beautiful woman who was an undine, a water goddess, comes back to him and he hears her crying around the battlements for the children she has lost, for the husband she still loves, and for the world that has no place for her.

  I close the book, and there is such a long silence that I think my great-aunt has fallen asleep.

  ‘Some of the women of our family have the gift of foresight,’ my great-aunt remarks quietly. ‘Some of them have inherited powers from Melusina, powers of the other world where she lives. Some of us are her daughters, her heirs.’

  I hardly dare to breathe, I am so anxious that she should go on speaking to me.

  ‘Jacquetta, do you think you might be one of these women?’

  ‘I might be,’ I whisper. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You have to listen,’ she says softly. ‘Listen to silence, watch for nothing. And be on your guard. Melusina is a shape-shifter, like quicksilver, she can flow from one thing to another. You may see her anywhere, she is like water. Or you may see only your own reflection in the surface of a stream though you are straining your eyes to see into the green depths for her.’

  ‘Will she be my guide?’

  ‘You must be your own guide, but you might hear her when she speaks to you.’ She pauses. ‘Fetch my jewel box.’ She gestures towards the great chest at the foot of her bed. I open the creaking lid and inside, beside the gowns wrapped in powdered silk, is a large wooden box. I take it out. Inside is a series of drawers, each one filled with my great-aunt’s fortune of jewels. ‘Look in the smallest drawer,’ she says.

  I find it. Inside is a small black velvet purse. I untie the tasselled threads, open the mouth, and a heavy golden bracelet falls into my hand, laden with about two hundred little charms, each one a different shape. I see a ship, a horse, a star, a spoon, a whip, a hawk, a spur.

  ‘When you want to know something very, very important, you choose two or three of the charms – charms that signify the thing that might be, the choices before you. You tie each one on a string and you put them in a river, the river nearest to your home, the river that you hear at night when everything is silent but the voice of the waters. You leave it until the moon is new. Then you cut all the strings but one, and pull that one out to see your future. The river will give you the answer. The river will tell you what you should do.’

  I nod. The bracelet is cold and heavy in my hand, each charm a choice, each charm an opportunity, each charm a mistake in waiting.

  ‘And when you want something: go out and whisper it to the river – like a prayer. When you curse somebody: write it on a piece of paper, and put the paper into the river, float it like a little paper boat. The river is your ally, your friend, your lady – do you understand?’

  I nod, though I don’t understand.

  ‘When you curse somebody . . . ’ She pauses and sighs as if she is very weary. ‘Take care with your words, Jacquetta, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that when you put such words out in the world they can overshoot – like an arrow, a curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly.’

  I shiver, though the room is hot.

  ‘I will teach you more,’ she promises me. ‘It is your inheritance, since you are the oldest girl.’

  ‘Do boys not know? My brother Louis?’

  Her lazy eyes half open and she smiles at me. ‘Men command the world that they know,’ she says. ‘Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves, they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women, but the realms of the unknown?’

  ‘But can women not take a great place in the world? You do, Great-aunt, and Yolande of Aragon is called the Queen of Four Kingdoms. Shall I not command great lands like you and her?’

  ‘You might. But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price. Perhaps you will be a great woman like Melusina, or Yolande, or like me; but you will be like all women: uneasy in the world of men. You will do your best – perhaps you will gain some power if you marry well or inherit well – but you will always find the road is hard beneath your feet. In the other world – well, who knows about the other world? Maybe they will hear you, and perhaps you will hear them.’

  ‘What will I hear?’

  She smiles. ‘You know. You hear it already.’

  ‘Voices?’ I ask, thinking of Joan.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Slowly, the intense heat of the summer starts to fade and it grows cooler in September. The trees of the great forest that surround the lake start to turn colour from tired green to sere yellow, and the swallows swirl around the turrets of the castle every evening, as if to say goodbye for another year. They chase each other round and round in a dizzying train, like a veil being whirled in a dance. The rows on rows of vines grow heavy with fruit and every day the peasant women go out with their sleeves rolled up over their big forearms and pick and pick the fruit into big wicker baskets, which the men swing onto carts and take back to the press. The smell of fruit and fermenting wine is heavy in the village, everyone has blue-stained hems to their gowns and purple feet, and they say it will be a good year this year, rich and lush. When the ladies in waiting and I ride through the village they call us to taste the new wine and it is light and sharp and fizzy in our mouths, and they laugh at our puckered faces.

  My great-aunt does not sit straight-backed in her chair, overseeing her women and beyond them the castle and my uncle’s lands, as she did at the start of the summer. As the sun loses its heat she too seems to be growing pale and cold. She lies down from the middle of the morning to the early evening, and only rises from her bed to walk into the great hall beside my uncle and nod her head at the rumble of greeting, as the men look up at their lord and lady and hammer on the wooden tables with their daggers.

  Joan prays for her, by name, in her daily attendance at church, but I, childlike, just accept the new rhythm of my great-aunt’s day, and sit with her to read in the afternoon, and wait for her to talk to me about the prayers floated like paper ships on the waters of rivers that were flowing to the sea before I was born. She tells me to spread out the cards of her pack and teaches me the name and the quality of each one.

  ‘And now read them for me,’ she says one day, and then taps a card with her thin finger. ‘What is this one?’

  I turn it over for her. The dark hooded shape of Death looks back at us, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, his scythe over his hunched shoulder.

  ‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘So are you here at last, my friend? Jacquetta, you had better ask your uncle to come to see me.’

  I show him into her room and he kneels at the side of her bed. She puts her hand on his head as if in blessing. Then she pushes him gently away.

  ‘I cannot bear this weather,’ se says cr
ossly to my uncle, as if the cooling days are his fault. ‘How can you bear to live here? It is as cold as England and the winters last forever. I shall go south, I shall go to Provence.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were feeling tired. Should you not rest here?’

  She snaps her fingers irritably. ‘I’m too cold,’ she says imperiously. ‘You can order me a guard and I shall have my litter lined with furs. I shall come back in spring.’

  ‘Surely you would be more comfortable here?’ he suggests.

  ‘I have a fancy to see the Rhône once more,’ she says. ‘Besides, I have business to do.’

  Nobody can ever argue against her – she is the Demoiselle – and within days she has her great litter at the door, furs heaped on the bed, a brass hand-warmer filled with hot coals, the floor of the litter packed with oven-heated bricks to keep her warm, the household lined up to say farewell.

  She gives her hand to Joan, and then she kisses my aunt Jehanne, and me. My uncle helps her into the litter and she clutches his arm with her thin hand. ‘Keep the Maid safe,’ she says. ‘Keep her from the English, it is my command.’

  He ducks his head. ‘Come back to us soon.’

  His wife, whose life is easier when the great lady has moved on, steps forwards to tuck her in and kiss her pale cool cheeks. But it is me that the Demoiselle of Luxembourg calls towards her with one crook of her skinny finger.

  ‘God bless you, Jacquetta,’ she says to me. ‘You will remember all that I have taught you. And you will go far.’ She smiles at me. ‘Farther than you can imagine.’

  ‘But I will see you in spring?’

  ‘I will send you my books,’ she says. ‘And my bracelet.’

  ‘And you will come to visit my mother and father at St Pol in the spring?’

  Her smile tells me that I will not see her again. ‘God bless,’ she repeats and draws the curtains of her litter against the cold morning air as the cavalcade starts out of the gate.

  In November, I am awakened in the darkest of the night, and I sit up in the little bed I share with Elizabeth the maid, and listen. It is as if someone is calling my name in a sweet voice: very high, and very thin. Then I am sure I can hear someone singing. Oddly, the noise is coming from outside our window, though we are high up in the turret of the castle. I pull on my cloak over my nightgown and go to the window and look out through the crack in the wooden shutters. There are no lights showing outside, the fields and the woods around the castle are as black as felted wool, there is nothing but this clear keening noise, not a nightingale but as high and as pure as a nightingale. Not an owl, far too musical and continuous, something like a boy singer in a choir. I turn to the bed and shake Elizabeth awake.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  She does not even wake. ‘Nothing,’ she says, half-asleep. ‘Stop it, Jacquetta. I’m asleep.’

  The stone floor is icy beneath my bare feet. I jump back into bed and put my cold feet in the warm space near Elizabeth. She gives a little bad-tempered grunt and rolls away from me, and then – though I think I will lie in the warm and listen to the voices – I fall asleep.

  Six days later they tell me that my great-aunt, Jehanne of Luxembourg, died in her sleep, in the darkest hour of the night, in Avignon, beside the great River Rhône. Then I know whose voice it was I heard, singing around the turrets.

  As soon as the English Duke of Bedford learns that Joan has lost her greatest protector, he sends the judge Pierre Cauchon, with a troop of men behind him, to negotiate for her ransom. She is summoned by a Church court on charges of heresy. Enormous sums of money change hands: twenty thousand livres for the man who pulled her off her horse, ten thousand francs to be paid to my uncle with the good wishes of the King of England. My uncle does not listen to his wife, who pleads that Joan shall be left with us. I am too unimportant to even have a voice, and so I have to watch in silence as my uncle makes an agreement that Joan shall be released to the Church for questioning. ‘I am not handing her over to the English,’ he says to his wife. ‘As the Demoiselle asked me, and I have not forgotten, I have not handed her over to the English. I have only released her to the Church. This allows her to clear her name of all the charges against her. She will be judged by men of God, if she is innocent they will say so, and she will be released.’

  She looks at him as blankly as if he were Death himself, and I wonder if he believes this nonsense, or if he thinks that we, being women, are such fools as to think that a church dependent on the English, with bishops appointed by the English, are going to tell their rulers and paymasters that the girl who raised all of France against them is just an ordinary girl, perhaps a little noisy, perhaps a little naughty, and she should be given three Hail Marys and sent back to her farm, to her mother and her father and her cows.

  ‘My lord, who is going to tell Joan?’ is all I dare to ask.

  ‘Oh, she knows already,’ he says over his shoulder as he goes out of the hall, to bid farewell to Pierre Cauchon at the great gate. ‘I sent a page to tell her to get ready. She is to leave with them now.’

  As soon as I hear the words I am filled with a sudden terror, a gale of premonition, and I start running, running as if for my own life. I don’t even go to the women’s apartments, where the pageboy will have found Joan to tell her that the English are to have her. I don’t run towards her old cell, thinking she has gone there to fetch her little knapsack of things: her wooden spoon, her sharp dagger, the prayer-book that my great-aunt gave her. Instead I race up the winding stair to the first floor above the great hall, and then dash across the gallery, through the tiny doorway where the archway knocks my headdress off, tearing at the pins in my hair, and then I hammer up the circular stone stair, my feet pounding on the steps, my breath coming shorter and shorter, my gown clutched in my hands, so that I can burst out onto the flat roof at the very top of the tower and see Joan, poised like a bird ready to fly, balanced on the wall of the turret. As she hears the door bang open she looks over her shoulder at me and hears me scream, ‘Joan! No!’ and she steps out into the void below her./diight="0">

  The worst thing of all, the very worst thing, is that she does not leap into nothing, like a frightened deer. I was dreading that she would jump, but she does something far worse than that. She dives. She goes headfirst over the battlement, and as I fling myself to the edge I can see that she goes down like a dancer, an acrobat, her hands clasped behind her, one leg extended like a dancer, the other bent, the toe pointed to her knee, and I see that, for that heart-stopping moment as she falls, she is in the pose of le Pendu, the Hanged Man, and she is going headfirst to her death with his calm smile on her serene face.

  The thud when she hits the ground at the base of the tower is terrible. It echoes in my ears as if it is my own head that has struck the mud. I want to run down to lift her body, Joan, the Maid, crumpled like a bag of old clothes; but I cannot move. My knees have given way beneath me, I am clinging to the stone battlements, they are as cold as my scraped hands. I am not crying for her, though my breath is still coming in gulping sobs; I am frozen with horror, I am felled by horror. Joan was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led her to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.

  They pick her up lifeless, and for four days she does not move or stir, but then she comes out of her stupor and gets up slowly from her bed, patting herself all over, as if to make sure that she is whole. Amazingly, no bones have been broken in her fall – she has not cracked her skull, nor snapped so much as a finger. It is as if her angels held her up, even when she gave herself into their element. Of course, this will not serve her; they are quick to say that only the Devil could have saved a girl who went headfirst like that from such a tall tower. If she had died they would have said God’s justice had been done. My uncle, a man of dour common sense, says that the ground is so sodden, after weeks of winter rain, and lapped by the moat, that she was in more danger of drowning than
being broken; but now he is determined that she shall leave at once. He doesn’t want the responsibility of the Maid in his house, without the Demoiselle to keep everything safe. He sends her first to his house in Arras, the Coeur le Comte, and then we follow, as she is transferred to the English city of Rouen for trial.

  We have to attend. A great lord such as my uncle must be there to see justice being done, and his household must stand behind him. My aunt Jehanne takes me to witness the end of the Dauphin’s holy guide – the pretend-prophet of the pretend-king. Half of France is trooping to Rouen to see the end of the Maid and we have to be foremost among them.

  For someone that they declare is nothing more than a peasant girl run mad, they are taking no chances. She is housed in the Castle Bouvreuil and kept in chains, in a cell with a double-locked door and the window boarded over. They are all in a terror that she will run like a mouse under the door, or fly like a bird through a crack in the window. They ask her to give an undertaking that she will not try to escape and, when she refuses, they chain her to the bed.

  ‘She won’t like that,’ my aunt Jehanne says sorrowfully.

  ‘No.’

  They are waiting for the Duke of Bedford, and in the very last days of December he marches into the town with his guard dressed in the colours of roses, the bright red and white of England. He is a great man on horseback, he wears armour polishrsqo brightly that you would take it for silver and beneath his huge helmet his face is grave and stern, his big beak of a nose making him look like a predatory bird: an eagle. He was brother to the great English king Henry V, and he guards the lands that his brother won in France at the great battle of Agincourt. Now the dead king’s young son is the new victor of France, and this is his most loyal uncle: seldom out of his armour or out of the saddle, never at peace.