If asked, neither of them would remember what it was that made them agree to marry. Not that it was ever overwhelming love, exactly, but there must have been a time when they had hopes of each other, and could take pleasure in each other’s company, and believe marriage might bring them happiness. Philippa’s long forgotten the agony she suffered, at the childlike age of twelve, over the other demoiselles’ malicious tittle-tattle that she might be sleeping with Duke John. Likewise, Chaucer’s put out of his mind the pleasure it once gave him when the Duke – as uncomfortable as Philippa about that rumour, which was upsetting his adored wife Blanche – took him aside for that awkward chat about marriage. ‘Beautiful girl. No money, of course…but the bluest blood…and the apple of my lady mother’s eye. Just the wife you need to set you on your way.’ All Philippa now remembers is what the Queen told her about him in a separate quiet chat on the same day: ‘Solid merchant wealth behind him, and one of the brightest and best of my lord’s young men. A splendid future in governance, if he chooses it; unless he prefers to go back to the war, in due course. He’s served in France already, brave boy…a knighthood on the horizon, either way.’ It was enough at the time to convince an anxious orphaned girl from Hainault; but Philippa’s been throwing that over-optimistic praise back in her husband’s face ever after, and nothing, since then, has ever gone right for them. There were only a couple of nights of what Chaucer remembers as maybe inept, possibly puppyish, though interested, love-making, before Philippa was expecting her first child. A year or more later, though with more intensely long-suffering looks this time, there were a few more anxious fumbles; and then there was Thomas. A son. And the battle lines being laid out in earnest. You have an heir. I’ve done my duty. But what about yours? Where’s the fortune, the war record, the knighthood? Philippa’s disappointment in her husband is corrosive. It’s grown more bitter with every day Chaucer’s failed to advance as she expected, and with every comparison she’s made, as the years pass, with all the other husbands she might have had. She’s even envied her sister her penniless, semi-literate hulk of a spouse, because at least Sir Hugh Swynford was gently born, and believed in bravery, and had a good seat on a horse, and, died gallantly, fighting in France.
The war between the Chaucers has become a matter for concern even outside their family. The Queen is no longer there to see the hostility that husband and wife can barely conceal, even in public. But the Duke’s obvious discomfort at having pushed the pair of them together may explain why he’s gone on, for all these years, encouraging his second wife to keep employing Philippa as a demoiselle, even though Constanza would really rather only have Castilian ladies around her. It’s a relief, Philippa’s job, as well as a muchneeded extra income. At least the Duchess’s travels give the Chaucers the excuse they need to live more or less apart, while preserving the outward decencies. Chaucer went on hoping, at least until he came to the City, that his wife might soften towards him during her long absences, but has given up even that hope in the past few months; he is grateful for the absences, at least. He’s grateful, too, for the feelings of guilt he suspects have prompted the Duke to stay hovering on the edge of his life, praising and commissioning his poems, and, periodically, reminding the King to give a man too modest to push for his own advancement at least something in the way of pensions and favours and rewards.
But there’s nothing anyone can do to make a real peace between the Chaucers.
Now both of them are marshalling their defences, waiting for the sly ambush they each suspect the other of being about to initiate. It is Philippa’s announcement that she and her sister have been corresponding that opens the real hostilities. The sisters have decided, she continues, pleating her skirts, to enrol their daughters, who will both be ten this year, as nuns at Barking Abbey in the summer they both turn twelve – the year after next.
Chaucer is so shocked that, for a moment, he forgets the rules of engagement. Little Elizabeth’s face flashes up inside his head – a bit younger than now, back when he saw her all the time, with eyes full of delighted mischief and blonde curls bouncing as she tottered towards his hand to snatch a sweet from it, gloating, ‘Lizbeff got daddysweet, Lizbeff got daddysweet,’ as he chuckled back down at her, and shrieking with terrified laughter, a moment later, when he swept her up off her feet into a whirling embrace: ‘Daddy you tickle!’ Thomas is lost to him, he can see that, though he can’t begin to understand how the sweetness died out of those other beloved eyes. But Elizabeth is his darling. If she goes to a nunnery, he’ll never see her again. He has to be here in London every day; he wouldn’t be able to go traipsing off through the Essex countryside on whatever rare occasions the Abbess saw fit to allow visitors. He thinks: I can’t lose her too.
He is still holding the poker as he turns to face his wife, suddenly desperately wanting to turn this conversation into a blazing row of the kind Philippa refuses to have. ‘What do you mean?’ he almost howls, waving the poker emphatically in the air to punctuate his words. ‘I don’t care what Katherine does with her child. She can marry her to the King of France for all I care. You’re not sending my daughter to a nunnery.’
But he can’t get in front of Philippa to meet her eye. She’s picked her ground too carefully. She keeps her face turned resolutely towards the fire. She purses her lips.
‘It’s our family tradition,’ she says faintly. ‘The de Roëts. My sister Elizabeth went. The oldest daughter always does. That’s why we named Lizzie for my sister. You know that.’
‘She’s just a child,’ Chaucer shouts, but he’s recollected himself enough to lower the poker, and he’s shouting at the fire now. With a lurching in his heart, he knows that means she’s winning. He lowers his voice, a bit, but he talks faster. ‘It’s completely different. You can’t start talking about sending her away for ever. It’s absurd. She’s hardly out of the nursery.’
‘Children grow up. You know that, Geoffrey.’ How dare she sound so condescending?
‘Yes,’ he says, teeth gritted. ‘Of course I know that. I just don’t see why I should want to give my little girl away before she’s even had her childhood.’
‘Traditions are what make a family,’ Philippa says, through thin lips. ‘Of course it’s not always easy, saying goodbye. But it’s important to have standards. And you have to plan ahead to get the best. This is an opportunity. Surely even you can see that, Geoffrey. It’s – well, Barking, you know. Not just any nunnery.’
That’s what’s impressed her, Geoffrey thinks, as the sick awareness of defeat he’s been trying to keep at bay comes closer. Barking bloody Abbey. Well, it would. Barking is grand. The Abbess has the status of a baron and is the foremost Abbess of England. Only the daughters of the rich and influential can get in. You have to be personally nominated by the King to be accepted.
‘She’ll never get the nomination, anyway,’ he says, voicing the reassuring thought as soon as it comes into his head.
But Philippa has thought of that. ‘As it happens, she will,’ she ripostes coolly. ‘Katherine’s already asked my lord the King. He thinks it’s a beautiful idea.’
Chaucer suppresses an oath. The blood is beating in his temples.
‘She’s a Chaucer. She’s my family. I decide,’ he says. He has no other weapon left.
Philippa holds up her beautifully manicured fingers and regards them with interest. They both know she has saved her best blow till last.
She waits. She’s a master of timing, Philippa. The room goes so quiet you can hear the logs settle and die.
‘Actually, you’re wrong,’ Philippa finishes. ‘Since the King has given his permission, it’s not up to you any more. The decision’s taken. And Elizabeth’s thrilled at the idea of being with Margaret at Barking. She wants to go.’
The snowstorm blows out by afternoon. The streets have become magically white and clean.
Chaucer’s in no mood to appreciate the joys of nature. He answers the door with glassy eyes.
What Alice sees, fr
om the doorway, is wildly rumpled hair. His usually trim dark beard’s longer than it’s supposed to be, and there’s stubble on his cheeks. His hands are shaking. It’s not difficult to work out why. There’s an empty flagon of wine on the floor beside the fireside bench he’s been lying on, and a half-drunk one beside it. Just one cup.
Recognition dawns only slowly in his eyes as she stalks in, shaking snow on to the floor with the tumble of her cloak.
‘You look terrible,’ he says. ‘What’s happened?’ She hears sympathy in his voice. She also hears the slur of too much alcohol.
‘I could say the same for you,’ she replies tartly. She could do without anyone’s sympathy making her feel worse than she already does,, especially if it’s the sympathy of someone in the state Chaucer’s in. She could do without him being drunk, too, if it comes to that. She’s been hoping for the comfort of some of his spry wit. Seeing him sodden with drink surprises her, if she’s honest. She’s always thought he’d be too…precise…or puckish, to abandon himself alone like this.
He gestures down at the jugs. ‘Been worshipping at the temple of Bacchus,’ he intones, and then, with such profound gloom that, despite herself, she bursts out laughing: ‘drowning my sorrows.’
‘We’re a right pair,’ she says after a moment, through the last of her harsh snorts. For all her own darkness, that moment of laughter has given her the new strength she needs to be at least a bit sympathetic. Something terrible must have happened to him. ‘Just look at us. What’s the matter with you, then?’
‘Wife,’ Chaucer offers vaguely, sinking back down on to the bench. Or was that ‘wine’?
She shakes her head. Then she shrugs. Why not? She can see he’s going to be some time telling her his troubles. She sits beside him and sips.
But as he confusedly pours out his troubles, and she strains forward to make sense of the slurred words and meandering phrases, she realises he did mean ‘wife’, not ‘wine’. Her sympathy evaporates when she realises how trivial his trouble is. The only thing that actually seems to be wrong is that his wife has raised the possibility of sending their daughter to the poshest nunnery in the land, and even that only in two years’ time – and, for the love of God, even if he hates the idea, how much can change in two years!
All at once, it comes to her that part of the reason she wants to see Chaucer is that she’s furious with him. La Swynford is his wife’s sister, after all, the very wife he’s moaning away about now. And the sisters are thick as thieves, always have been. So Chaucer must have known for years about Katherine and the Duke. But he never breathed a word. Thinking of the disloyalty of it stings the beginning of tears into her eyes. After all she’s done for Chaucer, he might have dropped a hint. Even if he doesn’t realise how desperately she wants to strengthen her ties to the Duke, he must have seen it would be useful information. For a moment more, she’s speechless. But then she’s off.
She sits up straight. She breaks through his self-pitying drone. She says, sharp as a needle, ‘Master Chaucer, haven’t you got anything more useful to tell me than this?’
He stops, staring slack-jawed and uncomprehending at her. He’s never seen her angry. He says, ‘What?’
She crackles on: ‘I’ve heard quite enough about your wretched daughter. What I haven’t heard nearly enough about is your wife’s sister.’
‘What?’ Chaucer repeats, dumb as an ox.
‘Shouldn’t you at least have thought to warn me beforehand that the merry widow Swynford, whom I’ve just had to spend the full twelve days of Christmas with, is with child? And that it’s the Duke’s?’
She turns to face him on the bench, putting her hands on his upper arms to drag him round so their eyes meet, so she can make quite sure he’s understanding. She’s ready to shake him into listening if he’s not. But he is. She has his full attention. In fact, he’s so startled that he no longer even looks drunk.
‘What?’ he says, a third time. But his voice is sharp now, sharp with disbelief.
‘Their second child,’ she finishes – a phrase she’d intended as the final blow of her tongue-lashing. ‘And I didn’t know.’
But her anger’s dissipating, as the truth dawns on her.
‘Oh,’ she says flatly, realising too that there’s more to Chaucer’s misery about his wife than a single spat over the daughter. ‘You didn’t know either.’
For a little while, they go on sitting facing each other, hushed by the enormity of their shared discovery.
Alice finds herself comforted a little by his presence – by the sheer physical warmth of Chaucer’s arms under her grasping hands. She’s also reassured, in an odd way, to see how the news has shocked Chaucer into his own, separate, suddenly sober state of frantic preoccupation.
Behind Chaucer’s dazed eyes, his mind is racing back through his picture of the past two years, taking apart what he knows of his wife and her sister, as if unthreading a tapestry with a mistake in it, and putting the coloured strands back together differently to make a new pattern. Not that he’s ever had much to do with Katherine, who’s always been disdainful with him, rolling her eyes and turning restively when he talks to her, like a palfrey about to buck off an unwanted rider. He’s never enjoyed feeling like that rider. But, he’s thinking now, of course, of course. He’s had no idea why Katherine has taken to spending so much time in the country these last couple of years when until then she’s seemed happy enough, in that careless aristocratic way of the de Roëts, to leave her four Swynford children to grow up wild in the care of nurses and monkish tutors. All those apparently endless trips to Lincolnshire last year to supervise the building works at Kettlethorpe – while the Duke was in the North and Midlands, touring his domains…and perhaps she with him. And Philippa’s wish to spend the whole of the last two summers at Kettlethorpe with her sister. She probably wanted to be there to play with the Duke’s love-child. The first one. It’s all beginning to make sense – even, perhaps, his children’s growing distance from him. They were at Kettlethorpe last summer. They must be in the secret too.
If his own wife has known this all along, and never told him, then the relationship between the Chaucers must be deader than even he has imagined.
He shakes his head. He’s counting months and absences. Katherine got her new job of governess to the Duke’s little girls (rather than demoiselle to the Duchess, with Philippa) two years ago, after the first of her long absences at Kettlethorpe. That must be when it started.
It all makes sense, except that he’s astonished by the compromise the Duke has made to see his lover more easily. What kind of morality can a man expect his mistress to teach his daughters?
After a long while, he thinks, still wonderingly, but with the first glimmer of resigned amusement, ‘Well, I suppose a governess with a secret lover is like a poacher – the best game-keeper.’
It’s only when Alice laughs too that he realises he’s spoken his thought aloud.
He’s almost surprised to find her arms still on his shoulders, and her face, creased into laughter that seems to have come from somewhere else, and doesn’t have anything to do with the moistness about her eyes, so close to his. He’s so near he can smell her: fur, and musky rose and sandalwood, and snow.
They’re both almost surprised to find their bodies moving into an embrace. But by the time their lips meet, and their eyes close, the surprise has passed, to be replaced by the blind, questing hunger of the body.
He’s lit a candle in the bedchamber. He’s sitting up in the bed next to her, wrapped in a quilt, with his hands round his knees. She looks beautiful, naked. She’s smaller, and more luxuriantly fleshed, and more pointy-kneed and curvy than he’d thought she would be, and there’s something so mischievous about her long eyes and pretty, uptilted, naughtily freckled nose and bouncy black curls, sensuously spread out on the pillow like a dark halo, that he wants to laugh again, out of astonishment and relief, as they’ve both been laughing through the past hour, just looking at her.
&
nbsp; He’s surprised again, this time at how easily their friendship, this wish to talk that they’ve shared from the start, has become physical. He’s never realised until now that he wants her. He’s surprised, too, at how relaxed she is at finding herself here. She still thinks it’s funny. She’s laughing up at him from her pillow. She doesn’t feel guilty, or sinful, or worried. And he can see from her casual grin that the act of love hasn’t made her think she’s in love with him any more than he’s in love with her. With relief, he understands she’s too much of a realist for that.
But their being here together, the touching of their bodies, the ease and languor of satisfied desire, isn’t without its worrying aspects. He’s trying to banish the thought: I have the King’s lover in my bed; but other, almost equally paralysing, anxieties can’t be kept off his mind.
He whispers, biting his lip, ‘You couldn’t, could you, be…’ but doesn’t know how to finish the thought.
‘Pregnant, you mean?’ she says, impishly. ‘Is that what you’re worrying about now?’ He’s relieved and shocked in equal measures by her frankness. He nods. She shakes her head and smiles reassuringly up at him.
He leans down and kisses her forehead. ‘Well, thank God for that, anyway,’ he says, releasing a whoosh of pent-up breath. Then, worrying he’s sounded unkind, if barrenness really is, as he’s sometimes thought, the secret tragedy at the heart of Alice’s life, he goes on, more tenderly, ‘Did you ever want to have children?’
She gives him a long, thoughtful look. Chaucer looks at the damp dark curls, and the delicious freckles on her nose, and is just thinking he might kiss them, when she answers.
‘But I do have children,’ she says, and she isn’t laughing at all. The confession comes out in a rush of air. ‘I just don’t tell people about them.’
Chaucer is mid-way down to land his kiss, with one bare flexed arm holding his weight.
But that stops him. He hovers there, staring at her face, trying to see if she’s teasing him, imploring her with his eyes to be teasing him. She isn’t.
Vanora Bennett Page 22
