YULETIDE, YORKSHIRE 1483

Tankards slammed bawdily upon the trestle tables and the great hall of the Duke of Gloucester’s castle at Middleham guffawed with Yorkist laughter as the cockatrice, a gaudy, four-legged monster with the head of a rooster and the tail of a crocodilus, capered round among the revellers. By rights, the legendary creature should have had a piglike rear, but no one could be bothered arguing. It staggered and swore with two voices as someone grabbed hold of its scaly tail.

‘Ouch!’ spluttered Heloise Ballaster, who was playing the head. She recovered her balance and craned the cumbersome beak round to see which drunken lout was impeding her progress. The merrymaking had become suddenly too boisterous and some of the more unruly youths were trying to discover who owned the cockatrice’s legs.

‘I’ll deal with this knave,’ exclaimed the cockatrice’s tail. Will, the duke’s jester, loosened his arms from Heloise’s waist and jabbed two fingers out the rear end of the costume into the fellow’s nose, and then he squirted the contents of a leather bladder after it. The onlookers collapsed in fits of raucous laughter as the esquire staggered back in humiliated surprise, his face dripping with pudding ale.

‘We must end this, Will!’ Heloise muttered, lurching away as a reveller tried to peer inside the beak. Thank heaven she wore a black mask as well. Yes, definitely time to make their exit. This prank was growing far too perilous. God’s mercy! If it should be discovered that one of the duchess’s maids of honour was prancing in doublet and hose with a man’s arms and face against her waist – not that the jester ever showed any interest in women – her virtue would be put to the question. Besides, it was not just fear of disgrace that was fraying her wits but a gnawing sense of evil about to happen.

‘Shall we make for the great chamber then, mistress? Mistress?’

Heloise did not answer. She swayed as the rush of blood that precipitated a vision flooded her mind. Not now, please God, not now! But it came, unwanted – the nightmare image of the duke’s son choking for breath, writhing upon the floor.

‘Mistress?’ Will’s arms shook her back to the reality of the smoky hall. He turned her towards the dais, for the great chamber where they had left their outer garments lay beyond the high table – the high table where the duke’s heir, a giggling ten year old, was reaching out to a golden platter of wafers and sugar-coated almonds. Almonds that could choke a laughing child!

‘Jesu!’ Fear of discovery that the entire castle might shrink from her as a witch, warred with her duty. But how could she risk the life of Richard Gloucester’s precious son?

‘No,’ Heloise exclaimed. ‘No!’

The cockatrice hurtled up the hall, its rear staggering. It reared up to grab the platter of almonds, and tripped. Silver dishes skidded, sweetmeats flew as if magicked, goblets splashed their contents down the sumptuous cloth, the central trestle tumbled, crashing down the steps, and the duke and his guests sprang up.

The music and the laughter stopped in mid-breath. Heloise, blanching behind her mask, took an anguished look at the coloured shards of costly glass spattering the tiles, and gazed up wretchedly at his grace’s astounded face. But the boy was safe. Uncertain, surprised, but beside his father, safe.

Silence, growing more menacing by the instant, surrounded the grotesque cockatrice. Heloise backed into Will, wishing the floor would swallow her up. For an instant, it seemed to the onlookers that the monster’s back and front legs were trying to go in different directions, and then the creature shook itself into some sort of unison and charged out the nearest door.

‘That was impressive,’ commented a female voice, laced with humour. ‘We shall have to remember that for next year as well.’ Lady Margery Huddleston, the creator of the costume, had hastened after them into the great chamber. Briskly, she gripped the painted edifice that had been stifling Heloise and wriggled it free. Already there were raised voices beyond the door.

Heloise blinked at her helplessly, wishing desperately that she might turn time backwards. How could she possibly explain? ‘I am sorry, madam. I am so sorry.’ Here was the last person she wished to anger: Margery, the duchess’s bastard half-sister, had been a good friend to her.

‘They will want to understand.’ Margery tilted her head towards the great hall. ‘I want to understand? God’s mercy, where …’ Scanning the chamber, she snatched up Heloise’s discarded overgown. ‘Quickly!’ Hastily, she tugged it over Heloise’s head, struggling to hide the shirt and borrowed hose just as the door opened.

‘Aye, Mistress Ballaster!’ exclaimed the jester, crawling with sweating pate and scarlet face from the beast’s entrails. ‘Would you care to explain what in hell you were about? Oh, lordy, here is the judge and jury.’

Despite his thirty-one years, Duke Richard of Gloucester was not a tall man but, being a brother to the king, his authority gave him extra stature and he was looking stern enough to hang a man – or woman. His golden-brown eyes took in the discarded skin of yellow fustian, the scaled, flaccid tail, and rose questioningly to the scarlet-beaked head that his sister-in-law was hugging to her bosom. Margery gave a tiny shrug and the duke stared beyond her to his wife’s crumpled maid of honour.

‘Close the door!’ he ordered grimly.

Heloise’s face burned with shame as his shocked gaze fell upon the ungirded gown with its collar slatternly awry, and the loosened ginger legs of the cockatrice that puddled around her ankles. Gravely, she removed her mask. At least her accursed hair, bonneted into a coif, was out of sight. They had been so courteous and decent to her, these people, and this was how she repaid them. All the warmth and respect she had sought to kindle in her few months at Middleham were turning to ashes. Controlled though it now was, Gloucester’s voice was like a lash to her already-bruised morale.

‘Since you seem to be the brains of this creature, mistress, perhaps you would care to enlighten me as to why you upset our table?’

Others had followed the duke in, including the chamberlain and his grace’s chaplain, and she could hear an inebriated crowd gathering outside with the excitement of carrion crows anticipating a killing.

‘I thought my lord your son was about to choke.’ It was the truth. ‘I was wrong. I beg your pardon, your grace.’ Please do not send me home, your grace, her eyes beseeched him. Not to the beatings and the anger.

‘How could you discern such a thing?’ Dr Dokett, the chaplain, stepped forward, his huge black sleeves aflap with malevolence. ‘You were at the end of the hall. How could you possibly see?’

‘I …’ The right words evaded Heloise. How could she tell these noblemen of her premonitions without making them loathe her, fear her? Even Duke Richard, sensible as he was, would send her away. People did not want to hear. It terrified them. Dear God, it terrified her.

Then suddenly there was shouting and the oaken door was wrenched open. The throng crowding its portals separated as Anne, Duchess of Gloucester, eyes awash with tears, pushed through to sag against the doorway.

‘What is it?’ Gloucester asked, his voice serrated with the edge of sudden fear.

‘Our son,’ whispered the duchess, fingers pressed against her lips. ‘He choked on a sugared almond, but Richard Huddleston turned him upside down, thank God, and he is restored. Oh, my dearest lord.’ With a sob of relief, she flew across the chamber to the comfort of her husband’s arms. Although Gloucester lovingly stroked the back of his fingers down his wife’s cheek, above her head he was staring at Heloise. ‘When? Just now?’ he asked his duchess.

‘It was probably the excitement. Foolish child.’ Anne of Gloucester raised her head cheerfully, knuckling her tears away, and then she sensed the tension around her and recognised Heloise and Lady Margery, snared in the midst of it. ‘Let us not spoil the feast,’ she said quietly, receiving a plea from her half-sister. ‘I pray you, my lords, let us return to the merrymaking.’

The duke hesitated, confusion behind his frowning brow. The duchess drew him away, but he was still glancing back at Heloise as the company thronging the dais drew aside deferentially to let their lord and lady pass.

‘Cockatrice!’ sneered Dr Dokett, delaying to cast an evil look at Lady Margery and her accomplices. He drove a sandalled foot savagely into the belly of the carcass. ‘A work of the Devil! And that foul Fiend already has your soul! Cavorting shamelessly, and you a maid. You should be dismissed!’ He hurled the words at Heloise like salt over his shoulder, as though she were a demon.

Perhaps, thought Heloise, shaken by the ugly hatred, perhaps she was.

It was a while before the duchess’s newest maid of honour had a chance to leave the sullen jester and a pensive Lady Margery Huddleston in the great chamber. With her gown belted and her veil and cap back in place over her coif, Heloise stole out through the side entrance of the great chamber and down the stairs to the torch-lit castle bailey. Frosty, smoke-laden air enveloped her, but she desperately needed solitude and the shadow of night would hide her.

Climb back into the saddle, Margery had advised, face them! But Heloise’s usual bravery was at a low ebb. The ache of foreboding was still with her, duller now – the certainty that the chaplain would ensure she became despised. All her delight in life at the castle was gone. Her fate would be to return home a failure and an outcast, to a lifetime of recriminations from her father. For just a little space, back there in the hall, inside the cockatrice, she had felt such confidence. But now …

Leaning her shoulder against the cold stone wall, she tried to understand. Had the faeries sent her the premonition? But why, if someone else had been meant to save the boy? Or, worse, was she the Devil’s instrument? Had her action caused the child to choke? Yet, forewarned, how else could she have acted? But the cost? Oh Blessed Christ, the cost! Why could she not have been born ordinary? Even the grinding labour of a kitchen wench was better than this wretchedness; a scullion would sink into her cot too worn to dream. Why have you done this to me? her mind called out in pain. But neither God, the Devil nor the faeries answered.

She must have lingered outside for longer than she realised, not heeding the cold in her despair, when a young man’s voice close by jerked her to her full senses.

‘Mistress Ballaster.’ The vapour from the unexpected words hung in the freezing air. The moonlight lit the face of Piers Harrington, one of the esquires. ‘Why were you not at the feasting, mistress?’ A warm hand fastened round her wrist. ‘Still, no matter, it’s my good fortune that you are here now.’ He might not have seen the cockatrice wreaking disaster, but a chance assignation was the last thing Heloise could stomach.

‘Your pardon, Master Harrington, I cannot stay.’ She was shivering, both with cold and the guilt of how unseemly it would be if they were noticed – another arrow to be loaded into the priest’s quiver of complaints, especially as Harrington was the chaplain’s nephew.

‘What? No reward for finding you, lovely Heloise?’ His tone was slurred but drink had not slowed his wits. In an instant, his arms were caging her against the wall.

‘Another time, sir.’ Heloise kept her voice amiable and ducked, but two hands thrust her back. His body pinioned her; unfeeling stone pressed against her back. This was not the love that the minstrels sang about. Being fumbled by a wine-reeking youth. Any maidenly fantasy she might have cherished of stolen meetings with an adoring lover now perished. Was this reality? And to think she once had weighed Harrington as a potential husband.

‘Stop that, Master Harrington,’ she hissed, slapping at his adventurous hands and dipping her face to escape his breath.

‘Damn this!’ He snatched at the wire and tisshew veil of her butterfly headdress, which was crowding his face, and wrenched her cap and coif away. Heloise turned into a Fury; fists, elbows and toes beat, jabbed and kicked him.

‘There is no shame in kissing a man,’ he laughed, lunging in again, and then miraculously there were footsteps and an unseen force lifted the youth into the air and heaved him aside, but not before Harrington had glimpsed her loosened hair. The full moon betrayed her. A stable oath ripped through the air, and he was gone.

‘Drink this.’

Margery pressed a beaker of mulled wine into Heloise’s frozen hands and tugged the furred wrap closely about her shoulders. ‘It was a prank, for God’s sake. Her grace will not send you away for that. And the little lord has sworn to my husband that you are not to blame. He was laughing at a page’s antics when he choked.’

‘But the chaplain, my lady. He already thinks me a cursed changeling. Dear God, I should have kept my own counsel.’

‘And not obeyed your conscience?’

‘I believe this is yours, mistress,’ interrupted an unfamiliar voice from the threshold. Male arms unfolded and long fingers held out Heloise’s damaged headdress and muddied coif. Heloise shyly took the ruined headgear back, not sure how long Sir Richard Huddleston had been leaning against the doorframe. She had not met him face to face for he was newly arrived from Cumbria.

‘I have to thank you, sir, for rescuing me from Master Harrington,’ she said huskily. And saving the duke’s beloved child.

‘Think nothing of it, demoiselle.’ Sir Richard brushed one hand against the other as though dealing with Harrington had sullied his palms. His languid gaze lingered fondly upon his wife before he glanced back at her companion. If he felt surprise or loathing at her witch’s hair spread wild and loose, his green eyes gave no sign of it. ‘There is a messenger come from your father, Mistress Cockatrice.’

‘Ill news, sir?’ She slid off the bed in alarm, ignoring the name.

‘I cannot say, demoiselle. His grace will speak with you tomorrow.’ He stepped forward into the bedchamber, tossing his hat and gloves upon the bed. ‘Your handling of the cockatrice was skilful, Mistress Ballaster, and the eggs …’ His wife smiled and the air crackled between the two of them. ‘… were a masterpiece.’

‘Well laid?’ Margery smoothed her skirts skittishly at her husband.

‘Oh, very.’

Heloise had heard outrageous rumours about this pair: how King Edward had seduced Margery, Warwick the Kingmaker’s bastard daughter, and sent her to France as a spy. Could it be true that Richard Huddleston had committed high treason, joining Warwick’s rebellion, to win her love? Seeing them now together for Yuletide, she could believe it.

‘I was telling Heloise this morning about the donkey,’ Margery said softly. ‘How it dropped gingerbread in the King of France’s lap.’

‘The donkey of Angers! Oh surely that was I,’ answered Sir Richard, raising his enigmatic gaze to his lady’s eyes for the answering echo of his meaning.

Oh, this was love! This was what Heloise desired of life. She felt privileged to witness the love between these two and yet bereft, for she could not imagine Piers Harrington gazing on her like this. The realisation brought a sense of reprieve.

‘Heloise has been afraid to let people see her beautiful hair,’ Margery was telling Sir Richard.

‘I cannot think why,’ observed her husband. Perhaps his matter-of-fact tone was intended to be reassuring, but Heloise still felt uncomfortable beneath the man’s intelligent study.

‘The other children used to say I had witch’s hair,’ she whispered.

‘And once upon a time, people used to say I was a whore.’ A trace of pain laced Margery Huddleston’s voice. ‘You must not be ashamed. Your hair is a gift from God, not the Devil. It is what you believe that counts. Now, be cheerful, you do not lack for friends.’

Heloise’s childhood fear that the faeries had stolen the real Heloise Ballaster from her cradle was beginning to dissolve. Oh, the belief seemed foolish now, in this sophisticated company, but she had been bred on such teasing. First her dreams, and then her dark brown hair, turning silver like an old woman’s, had convinced her she was different from other children. And her father’s scoffing and saying only a blind man would take her for a wife. Well, changeling or not, she would show him. She lifted her chin defiantly and smiled.

‘And I should look higher than Harrington if I were you,’ Margery added, as if she too had the gift of reading minds. ‘Marriage is not always an answer.’

‘But merely the beginning of the question.’ Sir Richard took his wife’s hand and drew her to her feet. ‘Lend Mistress Ballaster one of your caps, my love, and let us see her safely to her quarters.’

‘Pleasant dreams,’ they wished her kindly. Dreams? That was the crux of the problem. She was young, accursed and afraid to dream.

Fattened on Yuletide fare, hoarse with carolling and aching from the carousing, the household was sluggish and subdued next morning as Heloise followed the page on duty through the great hall to the Duke of Gloucester’s more private demesne.

The southern-facing chamber was warm from the fire and lit by wintry sunlight. The Huddlestons, after months apart on their respective duties, were inevitably together, decorating the windowseat in their silk and velvet, their conversation in full sail while their infant child, fetched from the nursery, crawled about their feet.

Closer to the hearth, Richard, Duke of Gloucester lolled upon the cushioned settle, with a hound lying belly-up close by, and his son propped against his bootcaps. The pages of a bestiary lay open across the child’s knees.

‘But it says here, my lord father, that the stone from a hyena’s eye can make you prophesy if you put the stone under your tongue. Does—’ The duke’s hand shook him to silence as Heloise curtsied in the doorway.

‘Ah, Heloise.’ The Duchess Anne, a younger, compact rendering of Margery Huddleston, looked up from her playing cards. Leaving her mother, the Countess, widow of Warwick the Kingmaker, in mid-game, she came across to stand beside the duke.

The duchess’s errant maid of honour curtsied again and waited, feeling as if she were already on the executioner’s scaffold. At least the chaplain was not present.

‘Woman’s intuition is a strange commodity,’ observed the duke, fidgeting with the ring on his smallest finger. ‘Expensive, too, it seems. You have dented my ledger, Mistress Ballaster, not to mention our best flagons.’

‘It was out of no malice, I swear to you, your grace.’ Desperate, she turned her face to the duchess. ‘Please, I beg you, do not dismiss me, madam. It shall not happen again.’

‘It is not why we summoned you, Heloise,’ Gloucester said gently. ‘Indeed, we are certain you acted honestly last night, and we thank you for your care of our son. No, rather, it is this.’ He lifted up a parchment from the cushions beside him and held it out to her. ‘Your father’s letter changes matters. Sit down and read it.’

With no choice, she sank down obediently upon the tapestried stool and unfolded the parchment. It contained what she had feared. In twelve meagre lines dictated to his notary, Sir Dudley Ballaster was summoning her back. Because her delicate stepmother was with child – and since no man had yet offered for Heloise – she was to come home and become their chatelaine. Home? No, not the childhood home she had left in Northamptonshire, but a castle called Bramley in Somerset which (her father proudly informed her) had been bequeathed to him by a friend.

‘It seems we must lose you, Heloise. Your father’s man, Martin, is bidden to escort you back.’ Duke Richard stood up and kindly drew her to her feet. The boy rose also, straight-shouldered like his father.

Heloise wore her disappointment openly. Free from her father’s tyranny, Gloucester’s household had given her life a new order and beauty. But nothing endured. If she stayed, the whispers of her premonition and strangeness would seep out and the servants would be crossing themselves as they passed her by. Her fellow maids of honour had previously kept silent about her witch’s hair, but now they would begin to look on her with suspicion. The chaplain would see to that.

The duchess fondly set a hand upon her lord’s brocaded arm. ‘We …’ she glanced at her husband, ‘we wondered if you would like us to receive your younger sister when you can spare her. Of course, there is no need to make a decision now.’

‘I thank your grace.’ It was a generous offer. Dionysia was beautiful, normal. Dionysia would soar like a comet in the world of Middleham. ‘With my father’s permission, I should like to send her here as soon as I may.’ That at least would soothe her father’s temper.

‘Good lass,’ Gloucester nodded approvingly. ‘Well, it is decided that you should leave tomorrow with Sir Richard and Lady Huddleston as they ride south. Best go while the roads are hard with frost.’

‘You have been very diligent in your duties, Heloise. We have grown fond of you.’

‘I have been so happy, madam,’ Heloise exclaimed, the duke and duchess blurring in her vision like a disturbed watery reflection.

‘I know what you return to.’ Her grace’s hands framed her maid of honour’s shoulders. ‘I know how difficult fathers can be, believe me.’ She turned to include Margery in her observation before adding, ‘And I think you shall be missed, Heloise, especially by a certain esquire, hmm?’

‘No, I do not think so. No, your grace, not after last evening.’

Margery came in a slither of silk to curl her arm within her half-sister’s. ‘Heloise is afraid that her unusual hair will repel any suitors.’

Gloucester frowned. ‘Yes, I heard.’ He glanced warily at the blue velvet cap and the carefully pinned veil that Heloise was wearing. ‘Silver, I believe.’ His golden mead eyes lit with kindness. ‘Surely not so rare as you imagine.’

‘What is wrong with it? Can I see?’ The child’s voice chimed between them at breast height.

‘Nothing is wrong with her hair,’ interfered the boy’s grandam firmly from her seat at the small table. ‘But Mistress Heloise wants to be the same as everyone else. So will you when you get to her age.’ Then the countess turned the overweight cannon of her fifty years fully upon Heloise. ‘You will find, young woman, that other worries will chase away such idle thoughts as you grow older. A broken fingernail or tresses that do not curl will become insignificant when you have a house to run and children at your skirts. You will see.’

I have already seen, thought Heloise rebelliously, biting back a retort, angry that the older woman thought her vain and frivolous. I have already slaved day and night for my father with no smile or word of thanks to ease my burden.

‘My lady,’ she protested, ‘I assure you I know that hard …’ She faltered, not because the countess’s attention was back upon the playing cards, but because it was happening again – the blurring of reality and possibility.

It was as if her lungs were bursting. Before her eyes, Duchess Anne’s skin was paling. Blood flecked the lady’s lips like spittle, the serene eyes were retreating, distressed, dilated, into cavernous sockets, and the world was darkening.

‘Heloise! Heloise!’ Margery Huddleston’s fingers were clamped about her wrist, jerking her back by physical pain into the present.

‘I must go,’ whispered Heloise, her mind shrieking at the invasion, not daring to look at any of the others, lest the vision return.

She would go from Middleham. Aye, but then what?