Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

She still can’t believe Edward didn’t recognise the necklace as the one he gave her last month.

  EIGHT

  My lord of Lancaster is walking alone in the rose gardens at the Savoy. The first drunken scents of summer are coming from the flowers he’s ignoring. He doesn’t notice the grandeur of his surroundings: the ornamental railings; the quadrangles; the flattened arches and fan vaulting that he’s had Yevele the mason bring to the great hall; the barges waiting, draped in velvet, on the Thames; or the treasures of armour, plate, furs, jewels, and art. This is his favourite palace, but it’s familiar too: he’s here half the year. The other thirty palaces, or a good many of them, he squeezes into a summer tour, most years, if the state of the war allows him a gallop around his own country. But it’s from here he actually governs the Duchy of Lancaster. He sees it all the time. He’s not thinking about what it looks like today.

  Instead he’s looking pensively out over the Surrey marshes beyond the dance of river water and waterfowl, and stroking his neat black beard with one slim hand. How dark he is, and how underfleshed considering his height, with that beak of a nose under piercing eyes as thin as a knife in elegantly hollowed cheeks. How upright he keeps himself, so taut about spine and shoulders that perhaps his gait has given him the headache that he’s trying, by pressing points along his eyebrows and forehead with fore-finger and thumb, to banish.

  John of Gaunt – self-styled King of Castile, outright ruler of a third of England, the country’s first duke, and a richer man, through the Lancastrian inheritance his dead first wife Blanche brought him, than even his elder brother, the Prince of England – is thirty-four. He’s feeling his age. He’s burdened by responsibilities. He’s tired.

  Sometimes it seems to him that he has spent a lifetime trying to be a man of honour – and failing.

  He’s married less to a princess than to a chivalrous cause. He’s spent the past three years devoted to winning back the throne stolen from Constance of Castile’s father by his bastard brother. But Enrique de Trastamara is still firmly on that throne, and John, on the rare occasions when he now enters Constance’s rooms, can understand that the twitter of Castilian from her ladies is not as respectful as it might be.

  Castile isn’t the only dagger in his side. He’s spent the past two years obeying the commands of his father, and his elder brother, those legendary commanders of the past, to win France. There’s nothing he wants more than their approval; and there’s nothing he more wants their approval for than success in France, the great dream of war that he and his siblings have grown up with. He loves, respects, admires, almost reveres, those two men, no one more, always has; he’s done everything in his power to win them the country they want. But…he shuts his eyes against the vast futility of it. Weeks of heaving ship decks, the crash of water on mast, the gut-churning, the screams, the forced return to port – for what else can you do when even the seas and the winds turn out to be your enemy? The landscapes he and his men marched through for all those months, golden, silent, smoking, with every village and church abandoned and empty, every crop gone, or burning, and only the hills full of knowing eyes. Gone, now, Gascony, except for Bordeaux and Bayonne. He’s lost the lot. And it’s not even that he did anything wrong. He spent the money, he raised the armies, he provided the equipment, he led, bravely enough, from the front. There’s nothing that even Edward, his brother, who will for ever be a hero in every Englishman’s eyes for taking King Jean of France prisoner on the battlefield, can really reproach him with. He just didn’t have the right tides, and winds, and weather. He’s unlucky at war. That’s all there is to it. At the times when his head aches, as now, he stops being able to remember that he’s also known as the best, most dutiful, administrator in the country. There’s no corruption, no waste, no mess, in John’s Lancastrian lands. He’s patron to artists and church-builders and castle-builders and writers (Chaucer, of course, whose spry wit he has always admired; and Stury, likewise; but also the morose John Gower; and Yevele the architect, who can make poetry from stone). John of Gaunt rewards the worthy, hurries the tardy, protects the vulnerable, builds and tends his wealth, is prudent with money, and safeguards the North from the Scots. He keeps his nobles from squabbling. He keeps rivers flowing and fields tended. He loves his children. He looks after his soldiers. He treats his wife with honour. But none of it counts, when this mood is on him; the weight of military failure feels too much to bear.

  If John were less taken up with his wish to please his father, by doing well at the French war, he might have been better able to examine this dark, inarticulate misery that comes over him whenever he’s called south, and remembers France. It might have occurred to him that, deep down, he doesn’t want to fight this war any more. He doesn’t believe England has the right to France that his father claims; he doesn’t believe England can take the French in battle either, if God isn’t with them. Yet John doesn’t know the words to express that belief – because in a land ruled since before most people were born by a warrior-hero King, the words of war are all people understand. Anything else they call failure. People have forgotten the language and virtues of peace, John no less than the rest.

  Maybe that’s why he’s so attracted by men with golden tongues. John loves to listen to Stury, and Chaucer, and Gower, and John Wyclif, his father’s eloquent confessor; he’s enchanted by the quick play of words between these learned men, like sparks from a fire, or quicksilver. He’ll never have that gift, but how intensely he appreciates it in others. If any of those men knew all he knows about the war, he senses, they’d find a way of talking about it that might adequately convey the unease he feels, even to men as passionate about, and defined by, the war as John’s father and brother. They’d find the words, if they knew. But they don’t know. And they never will, because they don’t go to the war.

  So John keeps quiet, and soldiers on. That’s what he was raised to do. It’s what he did, before, when his sister-in-law unexpectedly died, doubling his inheritance from Blanche, and evil tongues said he’d poisoned Maud for the money. And when he has to be in the South, exposed to criticism, he lives with his headaches.

  No one likes the truce he’s been forced to make, for lack of English money, though he’s quietly pleased it’s allowed him to be out of France, and home. He’s spent the months since tucked away in the North, on his lands, avoiding the court, where he’s unpopular for having dissipated England’s glory, and London, where he’s apparently unpopular for having spent the merchants’ money in vain on a failed campaign. (As though those limp-muscled moles of traders have a right to care, down in their burrows, counting their bags of coin; they get their interest paid, so what have they got to complain about?) He’s just come south to see his father and brother, and do his business at the Savoy, and take the temperature of relations with France. On that front, everything is still inconclusive. There’s no money to go on fighting, and, perhaps mercifully, no sign of money coming. So, at year-end, he’ll go back to Bruges and try to negotiate another one-year truce.

  But, meanwhile, he can return to the North for the summer, away from the complaints, and be at peace. And not alone.

  He scans the trailing roses. He’s looking for someone under these arches draped in thorny pink. He’s looking for the one person who can charm his worries away; charm out the pain behind his eyes.

  Not the knot of secretaries pursuing him from the palace side, thinking they’re so clever he can’t see them skulking there behind that hedge with their papers; they’ll ambush him with their quills and ink as soon as he passes back into their parallel avenue, hardly breathing with the breathless scale of their ambition. Their transparent cunning only makes him grunt, and, almost, grin. They’re afraid of him. People often are, though he doesn’t intend them to be. Usually. Anyway, they’ll wait.

  It’s only when he hears a rustle from the other side, the river side, that he looks up. In an instant, the strain goes out of his head. If he could see himself from outside, he’d realise tha
t the forbidding look his lean face so easily takes on has gone, too. His cheeks have lost their pallor. There’s colour in his face, hope in his eyes. He looks, suddenly, tender…happy. He moves as fast as a black wind.

  Alice bobs, and lifts laughing eyes to the Duke’s face. ‘Why, my lord,’ she says, guilelessly, ‘what a happy coincidence…as it happens, I was just thinking, there were a couple of things before you go…if you have a moment?’ She’s happy to have been able to catch him like this, for a few moments of what may seem to him like casual chat. It makes it almost worthwhile having had to accept the honour of being his Duchess’s occasional demoiselle last year, even though Constanza, that pinch-faced sallow thing, never said much to Alice when she came, just lisped demurely away in Castilian to the other yellow-faced recluses and pretended Alice wasn’t there. The benefit: Alice now knows some of the ways of the Savoy. She knows where people meet, and where they go to be private. It hasn’t been hard to come across the Duke by chance.

  She knows he’s off any day now on his frantic ducal summer jauntings. To Tutbury Castle, by 26 July, where he’s scheduled to find his Castilian lady Constanza and be reunited with her and their toddler daughter (and his son and two daughters from his first marriage, the little princesses now looked after by Katherine Swynford, who’ll be heading north with him from here, for a meeting that will, come to that, also include the other de Roët sister, Geoffrey Chaucer’s disagreeable wife, who’ll be there waiting on Duchess Constanza, and the stuck-up sounding Chaucer children too). Perhaps unsurprisingly, after just five days of all those mothers and babies, he’ll be hastily off again by month-end, and on to Leicester for the month of August to do some solid work governing his Duchy. A gallop back to London for 12 September, the anniversary of his first wife’s death, the first time he’ll have been in England to take part in the procession from the Savoy to St Pauls in the entire six years since she went. Then back north. Tickhill Castle in Yorkshire by 22 September. South to the manor of Gringley in Nottinghamshire by 23 September. South again, thirty more miles in the next two days, to Lincoln for a week. Then – and how grateful Monseigneur must be of this, after all that rushed time in the saddle – to London for the rest of the year.

  She’s so concerned for his future fatigue after that busy programme, and so pleased at her cleverness in finding him now, that it takes a moment for her to notice that he does not, altogether, share the pleasure.

  He’s poking at his forehead with his hand, wrinkling his brow, kneading it with his fingers.

  She’s dimly aware that, for one brief moment when she first appeared through the archway, and caught his eye, he looked happier. As if he’d been expecting someone.

  ‘Do excuse me, Madame Perrers,’ he says, rather faintly. He’s dignified, though, and as courteous as if she were a queen. ‘Splitting headache. But – talk – of course – delighted.’

  And then he waits. Not coldly, exactly, but without noticeable warmth either.

  Alice says, uncertainly, feeling the chatty brightness in her voice ring false, wondering if she’s done the wrong thing by coming, but banishing that thought, ‘Well, Chaucer…he’s settled in. I’ve been to see him a few times. He’s getting on well with Walworth, who’s being sworn in this week…It’s all started off well.’

  There’s a faint noise from the tall Duke. Alice isn’t sure that he’s properly listening, but she takes the plunge anyway. He’ll be so pleased to hear what she’s got to say next; and he’ll have all summer to reflect on how it’s all thanks to her.

  ‘Secondly, I’ve negotiated a deal,’ she says, modestly lowering her eyes. ‘Which I think will help your cause. I don’t know if my lord your father mentioned…?’

  He starts to shakes his head, then winces, and half closes his eyes instead.

  ‘I’ve been lucky enough to be in a position to arrange a loan to the Crown,’ she persists valiantly, ‘from Richard Lyons. The Flemish vintner. To be signed in the next few days. Twenty thousand…’

  She sneaks a look up; Duke John’s eyes are closed fully now, his thumb and forefinger pressed above the bridge of his nose. Trying not to be discouraged, she presses on with the detail: the repayments in Italian debt paper, which in turn raise the possibility that the Italians may start lending to England again. She keeps waiting for the joyful smile to break out on his face when he realises he can do what all lords want, as a result of her cleverness, and go back to war.

  ‘…So you can be confident, when you go to the peace talks at the end of the year, that you’ll be negotiating from a position of strength,’ Alice explains carefully, suppressing her impatience to share a moment of triumph with him, giving him an encouraging smile (is he simply not very intelligent? Why isn’t he reacting?). ‘At the very least. And, if the talks go badly, you’ll probably even be in a position to go back to war. You could start planning a new campaign for next spring.’

  In one part of her mind, Alice knows that, if she and Lord Latimer do cash in the discounted Italian debt paper at its full face value, there probably won’t be much spare money in the royal coffers by year-end. But she has shut that knowledge away, almost forgotten it, at least for the purposes of this discussion: they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.

  For now, she’s just expecting radiant gratitude. Which isn’t coming. What’s wrong with the man? Why doesn’t he do anything?

  She’s so uncomfortable with her bright voice and her brighter smile by now that she’s almost ready to wonder whether he suspects the thing she’s not telling him, when John of Gaunt finally nods. She breathes out. But there’s no triumph, or even pleasure, in his face. It’s the sick, pained nod of someone who’s lost in their own physical discomfort, or, possibly, is actually displeased about what he’s hearing. Absently, he says, ‘Good.’ Then, after a few experimental eyebrow wiggles, another ‘good’. But what his face seems to be saying, or so it seems to Alice, is ‘bad’.

  The poor man, Alice thinks, trying to turn her puzzled disappointment at this lacklustre reaction into anxiety for him. His pain must be agonising. She’s never had a day’s illness in her life and usually she is sceptical about other people’s illnesses, assuming they are exaggerating their symptoms, but not now. She has never had a headache like that so, she tells herself sternly, how can she hope to imagine the pain? More’s the pity, she’s sent her friar who understands medicine to Pallenswick, where she’ll be sleeping tonight. But perhaps she should call at an apothecary in London, and send Monseigneur a potion. She’s told him about the deal, which is the important thing. For now, he’s too sick to express his appreciation. But once he’s better, if she’s been solicitous enough, he’ll appreciate her concern almost as much as her commercial nous.

  ‘I’m so sorry for your pain,’ she says with real sympathy. But she can’t leave him just yet. ‘There was just one other thing.’

  The Duke looks at her again with those dead-fish eyes, expecting nothing from her.

  She sees she should go. But she has to say this. She knows it for another good idea.

  It’s Chaucer who first came up with this suggestion, for Alice has been dropping in on Chaucer fairly frequently, on the trips from Sheen to London she’s been making to finalise the Lyons deal. He’s so sharp-witted and so sweet with her that he’s got behind her defences; she likes to sit and chat with him, as if she had nothing better to do. She finds excuses to visit him. It’s years since she had a friend like him.

  Chaucer doesn’t know about the Lyons deal, of course. She’s not telling anyone, except the Duke, till it’s happened. (Even then, she’s not going to tell anyone, ever, about the secret part. That’s just for her and Lord Latimer and Lyons to know.) But she likes the way Chaucer worries about the public finances, like the conscientious official he is, and the way he’s been talking long and honestly to her about his concerns (especially when he’s a little tipsy, she’s noticed; so Alice has made a point of making sure he’s lavishly supplied with wine). Since Chaucer’s started
spending so much time with Walworth and the oligarch merchants, he’s understood better than before how hard it’s always going to be for the Crown to wring money out of either merchants or – if they ever dare call another Parliament – the people: the knights and small landlords. And Chaucer loves the King and the Duke, in that straightforward way that men do love the leaders who’ve been good to them; he’s been putting his mind to helping them.

  What Alice is about to suggest to the Duke is, she thinks, the best idea Chaucer’s had. She smiles affectionately as she remembers the conversation. Chaucer laughing, with a bright, excited look in his eyes, as he said, ‘Well, I can think of another source of money for the King…And I can tell you something for nothing: tapping that source would make the King very popular in London – or the Duke, if it was by his order…’

  ‘What other source?’ Alice said quickly.

  ‘He should be getting money out of the Church, of course.’

  Incredulously, Alice laughed back. What, go on bended knee to the Pope, or Archbishop? And come away with bags of money in your hand? She replied, ‘Don’t be silly, Chaucer. That’s about as likely to happen as Hell freezing over.’

  But Chaucer wasn’t crushed by her friendly scorn. He’s braver than you’d think, once he gets going with an idea. He just said, in the voice of someone who enjoyed arguing, ‘Well, there are already people saying the Church should be stripped of its wealth. That it should be poor as Christ himself was…It’s one of the things Stury says, for instance.’ He couldn’t restrain a grin at Stury’s name, for it’s hard to take the poetical knight’s whimsical religious feelings seriously, so Chaucer rushed on, more earnestly: ‘And there are people inside the Church who say the same sort of thing, too. Think of Wyclif.’

  Wyclif. At first Alice conjured up the picture of Edward’s chaplain without great enthusiasm. John Wyclif is a doctor of divinity at Oxford, a man in his forties, a person of indifferent, blunt, mid-height, mid-brown looks, with a chubby curve to his jaw and a fleshiness to his lower lip. He’s made it his life’s work to disapprove of things. He disapproves of the war, for instance; says it’s vainglorious. He disapproves of monks. And he disapproves of his wealthy masters in the Church of Rome. You’d never think Wyclif attractive to look at, even when he opens his plain face to you in a smile of unusual beauty and openness – until he speaks. He has a cultured voice, a dark, rich, melancholy voice, with a tremble of tragedy never quite absent. Women turn round and go thoughtful and a little pink-cheeked at that voice. Men fall silent. Even Alice has felt its power.