The Lady of the Rivers Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 crossly 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