Sometimes they take cash bribes. (This is where Wat’s come unstuck just now. One of his men picked on the wrong sort – some merchant with an inflated sense of his own honesty, and a bigger gang of heavies than Wat could lay hands on at that moment.) But that’s not the only extra deal Lyons has going on. This is the part of Wat’s story that most interests Alice. The most important job-on-the-side has been to confiscate and impound a huge proportion of the foreign foodstuffs imported by the big three London merchants, the grocers. Lyons is stockpiling the pepper and the spices entering England – grocers’ imports. It’s an indirect trade attack, not on Walworth the fishmonger, but certainly on his two closest allies in the City, Brembre and Philpot. Wat doesn’t know why Lyons has gone for this, not for sure, but it stands to reason Lyons will try and sell the goods himself, later on, at an inflated price, having cornered the market.
Lyons is always two or three tricks ahead of the rest. You never quite know, with Lyons, where things are going. At first Alice just thinks, with dawning understanding: So he’s taking on the grocers. I see. His war with Walworth and his men is hotting up. Next she thinks, with more resentment than she’d have expected against her City business partner, so charming yet so violently coloured, so orange and pink and purple, the man whose business she’s been out doing today: He never told me about that. Shouldn’t he have?
‘Penny for them,’ Wat says, still the same boy, tiptilted nose, sunsplotches, aware of her mood, even if he now has this coarser, uglier, stranger’s version of his face, and she realises she’s been sitting in silence, she doesn’t know for how long, wondering about Lyons.
She laughs, a bit uneasily. ‘Oh, just thinking,’ she says, feeling her own intonations go back to a time before she spoke French, or knew courtiers. ‘You never bloody well know with Richard Lyons…what he’s up to. Do you?’
He grins back, but glassily. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care, either, she sees, as long as Lyons pays. He’s too happy-go-lucky to bother his head with complications.
Perhaps she should feel the same way.
She tries the same kind of big bland grin. ‘Ah well. He’s loyal. He got you out today,’ she says resignedly. Resentment prickles. ‘Or at least, I did.’
She sees Wat’s sudden regret at having turned the conversation only to himself. How many chances will he get in life to sit drinking with the King of England’s mistress?
‘You saved my bacon,’ he says hastily. ‘I know that.’ He’s drinking her in again with those cheery dancing eyes. He’s practised that merry roguish look over the years, she realises. He uses it to fob off trouble. He goes on: ‘Not good at fine words, but you know I’m grateful.’ Rather shyly, he adds, in a slower voice, ‘I don’t know what to ask you about your life. I mean, a lot I know already…’ He flaps a helpless hand at her rich clothes.
How easy to know about her life, she realises, suddenly sympathetic again. She’s famous (or infamous). They make up songs about her in the taverns of London. What can he possibly ask that he doesn’t already know?
‘Don’t know everything, though. How did you…’ He hesitates, looking a boy again. ‘…meet…him?’
Her laugh is short and without much humour. Before she speaks next, she understands with surprise that what she’s been feeling, as Wat speaks, is envy.
She’s been envying the freedom and straightforwardness of his life: here one day, somewhere else the next, always someone new to shake down, and always a tomorrow to wake up to.
What can she tell Wat about all her yesterdays? A little caustically, she answers, ‘Well, obviously, I was always going to end up with some rich old man. Not much else to do, if you’re a girl.’ And he nods. She can see him imagining that. Not liking the idea much, perhaps. She can even see him sympathising, a little. But not pitying her. Neither of them does pity.
He says, ‘I suppose not.’
She misses out the merchant husbands. Wat saw the first one, for a few hours, when the lost, footsore Champagne family stopped that first night at the tilery, once they’d got themselves properly lost in Essex, looking for the manor that some distant relative’s death in the Mortality had brought them. He’ll have worked out that she married the dad, surely? And that the manor was a hopeless ruin, and that she became a London baker’s wife? He can sketch the rest in for himself. She misses out Froissart, too, the French teacher Tom Champagne hired, coming across her again as a comely widow, the resumed French lessons now she had her own money, the cheerful lovemaking now she was her own mistress. Not that little Jean Froissart really wanted her, not for ever. He was in love, by then, once he’d been made the Queen’s official chronicler, with the great idea of chivalry, the romance of ladies and knights and impossible quests. And, like everyone else at court, he was at least halfway to being in love with the Queen his employer. He couldn’t stop talking about her. The Queen, so beautiful; the Queen, so loving; the Queen, so good. The Queen, fifty if she was a day by then. But she’d given him, a town boy, a job at court. No wonder he loved her. Alice Perrers was ever only an interruption to him, a bit of reality before he went back to his dreams and his stories. Still, Jean knew Alice had her way to make in the world, like him, and he was a generous lad. He got Alice her first taste of court. He took her to a tournament. ‘I want you to speak to the Queen in your French,’ he said excitedly beforehand. ‘I want you to tell her I taught you everything you know. She will be so impressed.’
Alice discards all that, now. ‘Someone took me to a joust,’ she says calmly, remembering sitting over the street on the ladies’ platform as the men charged below, but remembering, better, Queen Philippa’s great wrinkled moon of a face, the kindly look in those faded blue eyes, and the gratitude when Alice noticed her little shiver of pain and came forward to attend to her. ‘And the Queen took a fancy to me. It was a bit of luck really. One of her sons had got one of her ladies-in-waiting knocked up. There was a vacancy. She gave me the place.’
Wat nods, meditatively, and whistles through his teeth. ‘Like you say,’ he says, looking at her with slow admiration. ‘Your lucky day.’
It’s as if all those years since they last talked have been a dream. There are ways she’ll never be able to trust anyone as she can trust Wat. They know each other too well to need pretence. They can talk.
Her prickles vanish. She finds herself telling him more, or beginning to: more private things. She tells him about meeting William of Windsor soon after she got to court (though not the shiver when she first felt his quiet blue eyes on her; not the tumultuous feelings that had so astonished her. She thinks Wat will understand other things better). A knight from Northumberland, she says; done well in France. Just back from Ireland with the King’s son Lionel of Ulster, the one who died.
‘You’d have done well to marry him,’ Wat says. ‘Been a lady. Gone north.’
‘But,’ she says, and she realises she’s never really talked about this to anyone, since the difficult time when she was deciding what to do. Never had cause. It makes her uneasy. ‘Then, the King…’
‘Yeah,’ Wat says sympathetically. ‘You chose different. Course you did. Anyone would, in your shoes.’ He laughs. He has a friendly, uncomplicated laugh. It draws her in.
She sees she doesn’t need to tell him the rest – the details. He understands the important stuff anyway. Just as well, too, maybe. As old Alison always said, best keep mum unless you need to talk.
She breaks the companionable silence that follows by asking: ‘Have you ever come across the others?’
He shakes his head. Not really. He says, ‘I heard Johnny’s in Kent. Has a bit of land and a family. But…no one else.’
The words open up an uncrossable gulf between Johnny, who with Wat used to be her favourite of the nearly ‘brothers’, and her. She imagines Johnny with peasant children, and a weathered, simple face. None of Wat’s deadpan intelligence in that other man’s eyes. She thinks: I won’t be looking Johnny up.
She says, ‘You know I’v
e moved Aunty Alison to live with me?’
She’s startled when Wat replies, calmly, ‘At Gaines. ‘Course.’
‘You knew?’ she asks. ‘Did you?’
He nods. ‘Been there, in’t I? Couple of times. Saw the kids and all.’ His calm face opens. ‘Growing up good, they are, all three of them. Nice boy. The little girl. Joan, Jane? The younger one? Got spirit. And she’s the dead spit of you.’
There’s a glow on both their faces when they leave the Dancing Bear. The jug is empty. There’s a glow in Alice’s heart too. It’s been good to find this man, who’s so like kin. She’s happy Fortune’s sent him her way again.
Before they part, she gives him money: quite a lot of it, in a leather purse that clinks with gold. He weighs it in his hand, raises his eyebrow, then, impulsively, kisses her. She says, ‘Now don’t get ideas,’ and wags a finger in his face. ‘There’s no more where that came from, not for you. And we’d best not meet, either.’
He nods. He’s Lyons’ hit-man. He lives in the shadows. Being known to know each other could compromise them both. ‘I was thinking that myself,’ he says.
But it’s not good enough, that. She sees his uncertain look. Neither of them have words, or behaviour, that adequately express feelings, those unnecessary luxuries. ‘But we can always get in touch if we need to,’ she adds, in a half-question. ‘Can’t we? Through Aunty?’
He nods again. He looks happier with that. ‘She’ll know where to find me,’ he promises thickly. ‘She always will. Good old Aunty.’ He reaches a hand out to her shoulder. He pats it. He can’t bring himself to say goodbye. ‘Till next time,’ he says, finally, and she sees tears in his eyes.
Lyons leans forward on the leopard-skin rug he’s placed on the biggest bench in the room. He has his back to the window, and the late afternoon sun is behind him so Alice can’t see into his face; she can just see his silhouette. But he, lord of all he surveys, can stare into her eyes. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in.
This room, Lyons’ great hall, makes Alice uncomfortable at the best of times, with its mute proofs of its owner’s rampant self-importance. Lyons by name, lions by nature, as he likes to say of himself. Since he threw out his wife, and divorced her (poor Isabella, so English, so outraged), it’s only got more extreme. There are ermine skins sewn on to borders and fringes in here; royal furs (what would the sumptuary law enforcers have made of that?); and, squashed in among the arras that were already hanging everywhere, there are now curtains in the boldest blue and red, embroidered with royal(ish) lions.
‘Your man is free,’ Alice is telling the shimmering silhouette, wondering as she speaks whether it would be wise to mention what she’s found out about some of Lyons’ other entrepreneurial tricks while setting Wat free, then opting (for the thousandth time when it came to him) to let sleeping dogs lie. Best not to be seen to know too much. ‘Belknap didn’t make much fuss.’
Lyons’ head nods. He rumbles appreciatively: ‘Ach, Belknap, that great coward.’
He laughs his bass laugh. ‘You’re more than a match for him, Alice.’
Alice is remembering the softness on Wat’s hard face when he talked about seeing her children in Essex. She’s remembering the tears her nearly-brother couldn’t stop when he couldn’t say goodbye. She’s remembering how Wat, to whom she feels so close, and whom she might never have seen again if he hadn’t fallen foul of some Mantuan murderer and escaped home, has been saved from destitution because Richard Lyons decided to employ him.
It doesn’t make any difference. She’s got to do what she’s got to do.
She says, ‘Now you have to turn him loose. Your man. Tyler. His cover is blown. If they arrest him again…’ She draws a finger across her throat.
‘…it wouldn’t be good for me, you mean?’ Lyons’ voice comes out of the glitter.
Alice says, ‘Give him enough money to go away. Abroad, maybe. He’ll be fine there. He’s a natural recruit for the Free Companies.’
She laughs. She can see the dark head nodding agreement, moving against the gold behind. Lyons doesn’t bother to tell her that his heavy has escaped to him from the Free Companies. Lyons is as economical with words as Alice is. Words dilute and dissipate intent; words can be dangerous.
Alice goes to bed that night still thinking of Wat, still full of warmth and nostalgia and guilt. She’d have so liked to see him again. If only he hadn’t told her so much. If only he hadn’t said he’d seen her children.
ELEVEN
Alice has always prided herself on being more alert than most to the first whiff of danger, and quicker than most to neutralise it, too.
But she is far from even imagining the four people walking, very fast, around the cloister of the Abbey of St Albans, in a dusk with snow threatening, as the year 1374 draws to a close. There are three men and a woman in the group. It’s the woman who’s talking, flashing her eyes, sweeping her long cloak behind her. But all of them, one way or another, are Alice’s enemies, or are about to be.
It’s the Prince of England who has called these people together. From his stinking, miserable sickbed, he’s been planning action ever since the spring night when Joan, his wife, came back, pinch-lipped and angry, from Westminster, with the information that that woman, the whore, had been dancing with John.
Edward of England remembers the moment he heard those words like a knife thrust in the side. ‘He’s going to try and make Perrers his creature,’ he remembers saying; and Joan, with her eyes, so like his, long and almond-shaped above high cheekbones, agreeing: ‘Or she to make him hers.’
Edward and his wife, cousins, like as twins, have always shared thoughts that scarcely need to be put into words. But it’s only in these last years, the years of his decline, that they’ve started to share the same all-consuming fear.
Their shared fear is so terrible that, for a long time, they even feared to give it words, a shape, a living, breathing form that might come roaring out of the darkness of the night. But that was the night when it did, finally, emerge.
What they fear, this dying Prince and his Princess, is the Prince’s brother.
Not John himself, for there’s a part of John they’ve both always loved, a John who grew up in the same nursery they remembered, even if he came a few years later; a John they recall as a solemn, intense, dark-eyed toddler for whom, as merry twelve- and thirteen-year-olds with life unfolding brightly just ahead, they hid Easter toys in tubs of bran, whom they made jump for honeycakes.
There’s a way in which they both still love the present John, too, a prince who shares their slanting Plantagenet beauty and finely honed sense of honour and pride in his own nobility. He’s richer than them, but he’s never inspired the great love Prince Edward commands from his people, or become the war hero his older brother once was. There’s nothing in John, this John, to arouse their fear.
It’s the thought of John in the future that makes the Prince and Princess of England wake in the night, more and more often, with their hearts thudding in their chests. It’s the choking fear of what John might be moved to do to their only child if Prince Edward were to die before his time.
They both know Prince Edward will die before his time – soon – though they dare not voice that thought to each other. Richard is not yet eight. What grown prince, faced with a throne that would be so easy to steal, would resist the temptation?
So John has become mylordofLancaster in their minds: the implacably waiting enemy, the besieging army, the darkness waiting to come crashing through their walls to destroy their child’s life. The change in their feelings has come quietly, imperceptibly. There’s never been a harsh word said, never a blow struck. They don’t even know if John is aware of their fear.
But, around the sickbed, they talk of nothing else. MylordofLancaster has to be contained, his alliances watched, his every move considered and countered. Fearing him has become the centre of both their lives, a chilly darkness eating away at them from inside.
They’ve s
niffed at, fretted over, ferreted out more information about, considered from every angle and finally decided there’s no danger to Richard in John’s affair with the pretty widow Madame de Swynford, which he still thinks is a secret.
They’ve narrowed their eyes at, called in priests over, sent out spies to investigate further and finally decided there’s no real danger to Richard in mylordofLancaster’s flirtation with Wyclif.
But all kinds of harm might come from mylordofLancaster turning his mind to a friendship with Perrers and the rest of the grubby, gleeful thieves who’ve come swarming into the palaces of the court like rats ever since the King has grown too feeble of mind to loathe them for the vermin they are, and ever since his oldest son has grown too weak of body to catch them and swing them out by their tails.
Edward can only guess at what the harm might actually be. But each vague picture is more frightening than the last. And the one that stays with him is this. Perrers, he knows, is in cahoots with the merchants. What if she somehow finagled it so John got into the good books of the money-men of London, and made the City his power base? What if the merchants backed John for King?
It’s time for action. Or it would be if Edward weren’t reduced by the illness he’s suffered from for seven years to a sodden, skeletal, exhausted, living corpse.
So Edward and Joan have fretted impotently at how to best to counter the threat of mylordofLancaster’s friendship with Perrers, all through the summer, all through the autumn.
Vanora Bennett Page 19
