witchcraft
The Lady of the Rivers
I’m sure Philippa Gregory needs no introduction: historian and mistress of fiction securely anchored by her meticulous research. She’s perhaps best known for her novels set in Tudor times, but she has also turned her attention to the powerful family who preceded the Tudors, the Plantagenets, and I’ve been completely absorbed in one of these: The Lady of the Rivers.
As usual the central character is a woman, Jacquetta, first lady of Luxembourg, about whom very little is known from the records which tell history through the lives of prominent men.
It’s the fifteenth century, the dangerous times of the Wars of the Roses, where rivalries between families in England and with France, are raging. Reputations, honours, lives, are won and lost upon a whim. Monarchs rise and fall, loyalties and titles fluctuate with them, and religion, spiritualism and magic play a central part in the lives of these medieval people.
From a young age Jacquetta is inspired by the family legend of their ancestor Melusina, the water goddess. She is aware herself of having mysterious other-worldly sensations and glimpses into the future, although as she says, these things are too thin for speech. Only time can demonstrate how accurate such predictions were, and throughout her life she identifies events which she foresaw in her youth. But the penalties for alchemy and witchcraft are severe, and she is at pains to downplay her gift and always to use it for good, never ill.
Knowledge is just another thing to conceal, these days.
These are brutal times and she’s only fourteen when she’s forced to stand with her aunt, calmly watching Joan of Arc being burned at the stake, a girl with whom she had established a close rapport, and who shared her experience of visions.
We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.
Then at seventeen she is required to marry the very man who ordered the burning to death of the Maid, Joan: the newly widowed John, Duke of Bedford, now in his forties, Regent in France, son of Henry IV. This alliance makes Jacquetta an English duchess, the first lady after the king’s mother in England; the first lady bar none in France.
On the eve of her wedding she learns that it will be her duty to retain the friendship of all his allies who don’t support this rapid marriage, but whom he needs to fight alongside him. But it’s not until the morning after the wedding that she learns that the Duke hasn’t chosen her for any reason other than her gift of forseeing. He wants her to help him create a new rich and peaceable world; to manufacture gold and silver, even life itself. And for this purpose he is going to keep her a virgin. Their marriage lasts two years until he dies.
However, Jacquetta, deprived of love and passion, has been falling in love with her husband’s handsome right hand man, Richard Woodville, and they marry in secret less than a year after she is widowed, before she can be betrothed to someone not of her choosing. This rebellious act results in her fall from grace and the forfeiture of her wealth and property, but the couple are blissfully happy. They quickly produce their first daughter, Elizabeth, to be followed by thirteen other children.
Before long the young king forgives them and they are summoned back to court. But the trial and burning at the stake of the very woman who taught Jacquetta all she knows about herbs and provided the potion to help her conceive – a herbalist now declared a witch –strikes dread into their souls. Now everyone who has been studying the stars or reading books or testing metals is under suspicion and the Woodvilles slink back to the country and their children for safety.
But then Jacquetta is chosen to go to France to bring back the fifteen year old Margaret of Anjou to be married to the timid ultra-religious twenty-three year old king Henry VI. Jacquetta quickly becomes chief confidante and most favoured lady in waiting and true friend to the new young queen of England. It’s not an easy role. The weak king and his more dominant queen are inexperienced, spoilt and badly advised. They make serious mistakes. Both Jacquetta and Richard long to be free of all the intrigue and fear and suspicions of court, but feel protective of their young monarchs who so badly need sound advice.
They make enemies every time they address parliament. The queen rides through the streets of London as if she hates the very cobbles.
Things deteriorate still further when the king develops a mental illness that renders him incapable of making decisions or even acknowledging Margaret’s only son Edward as his heir. The people start to riot. Law and order are overturned. Again and again Richard is rewarded for loyalty, bravery and leadership, rising through the ranks of titles and prestigious commands, but the Woodvilles pay a high price for their allegiance, and in the end when the Lancasters are thoroughly routed in a fearsomely bloody battle in the snow, they surrender to a new king, Edward of York.
The book ends with the Woodvilles being reduced to the level of a country squire and his wife, but history tells us that Jacquetta rose again to become a leading lady at the royal court following the marriage of her eldest (widowed) daughter Elizabeth to King Edward IV.
It’s a brilliant novel, beautifully conceived, intriguingly told.
Hold your Breath
Having written a thriller myself, I’m always now intrigued by their structure and component parts. One attribute is a capacity to make you suspend your breathing, just willing the protagonist to escape whatever horror lies in store. So Hold your Breath seems such an appropriate title for a book in this genre.
This one is by Barnaby Walter who dives into the disturbing world of mental illness – a world where things spin out of control, and people are scarily unpredictable. One key ‘character’ in this tale is the setting: a spooky forest, backdrop to shady night-time happenings.
Dark elements of child neglect and exorcism and witchcraft and disordered minds pile on the shivers. With the main action removed from the safety and scrutiny of suburban civilisation, events feel even more sinister, and the truth more elusive.
We know from early on that something dreadful happens, but so much is unknown and unknowable or half-understood because it’s synthesised through the young impressionable mind of the protagonist, Kitty Carlson. Adults are concealing the truth from her; she herself witnesses incomprehensible behaviours; we cannot be sure where fantasy ends and grown-up reality begins. As her mother’s mental health regresses we feel the approach of something dreadful, we hold our breath, fearful as to what form it will take.
Kitty is only 10 when the tragedy happens, but she’s already traumatised beyond her years. She knows that her family has secrets; they’ve always been different. It’s why her father took them to live in the woods during the half term holiday. It’s why unmentionable things are done in the haunted rental house, and why she’s sent to wander alone amongst the trees when the Catholic Father arrives.
As a young child she just buries her experiences.
She knows …
that her mother ‘gets upset’ and ‘makes scenes’, that her paintings have become disturbing, that she says and does violent things, that she needs to be handled with care, that she needs psychiatric help.
She knows …
that her father has become more like a dictatorial school teacher than a loving parent, that he is liable to ‘flamin’ rages’, that he is involved with another woman.
She knows …
that she herself is mesmerised by small living creatures, that she resents having her innocent enquiries deflected, that she has learned early on to be self-sufficient, that she is a loner.
It’s only when she grows up that she starts to ask the most difficult questions, and delve into painful memories. The past has been buried for a reason. Eventually she’s driven to write a book, crafting something definite, something physical, out of her dreams, her nightmares, her memories. ‘It was probably the fusion of catharsis and hate that did it. Working through my issues by putting them onto the page, only to shoot them through with a strong dose of anger and resentment.’ She has a story crying out to be told.
Although Kitty insists it’s fictional, there’s enough fact in it to identify people, places and events, and the book triggers powerful reactions. Her father and his new wife are incensed by the revelations. Her stepmother takes actions that have massive consequences. And 33 years after the tragedy, Kitty is summonsed to Newcastle to a police station. She is under caution, not yet arrest. But what she has to say could change all that.
Walter captures the perspective of a young girl sufficiently authentically for me to be taken in. I believed her account of what happened … the narrative that found expression in Kitty’s book. Writing it was ‘an act of self-therapy’; it blows demons right out into open view. Kitty herself knows she couldn’t cope with the attention a true-to-life memoir would attract, but nor can she relinquish her personal take on events and injustices. As a young girl she attributed human emotions to spiders and beetles; her mind has been altered by the things she’s seen in her childhood, by the emotions she’s suppressed. Small wonder that her own behaviours and reactions fall outside the box of normality.
The ending is rather too neat for my personal taste, but I was relieved that Kitty survived the re-living of her past. I cared about the child turned woman, and that’s another key element in the success of this book.