Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  Alice shakes her head. She hasn’t the strength to walk straight in and tell them it’s all wrong. So she just sits tight and lets the children’s stories start coming out, which they soon do, in those high, excited little voices. She hears, first, that Wat’s taken Johnny out robbing on the roads three or four times already. He’s nearly twelve. High time, Wat says. There’s a proud light in the boy’s blue eyes when Wat tousles his hair and says proudly, ‘Got ourselves a good little fighter here.’ Then she hears that Aunty’s taught Joan and Jane to climb through windows, and wriggle under cracks in doors, and pick pockets, and set snares for hares, just as she taught Alice, long ago.

  Aunty’s voice cracks with pride as, forgetting her watchfulness earlier, she says, ‘Yeah, they’re as good as you ever were, by now, dear. Could send them out any day to earn themselves a living, if they had to.’

  Alice asks: But where’s the priest who was supposed to be teaching the children their letters and Latin?

  ‘Oh, gone, dear,’ Aunty replies blithely. ‘No loss, either. We couldn’t be doing with him. A right old woman, he was. Always nagging us to give everything we grew to the Bishop and spend our Sundays on our knees. Well, I said to him, we got no time for that. Too busy. And if we give you all our turnips, what’ll we eat ourselves? So he went.’

  Alice says weakly, ‘But, Aunty…’

  But Aunty’s never had any time for priests. Alice has always known that, too. So she has no real right to be shocked now.

  ‘There’s a lovely young man comes to the village sometimes, dear. Much better,’ Aunty confides. ‘They lock him up sometimes, but he always gets out. Pops up in the market place. Gets a good crowd, he does. Preaches a lovely sermon.’

  It’s little Joan who picks up Aunty’s story. In a deep imitation-man voice, the ten-year-old intones: ‘My good friends, things cannot go well in England, nor ever will, until everything shall be in common.’ Wat and Aunty start to laugh and clap their big raw hands against their thighs.

  It would be enough to make anyone howl with laughter, if anyone weren’t a mother who’d somehow managed to convince herself that her children were turning into little ladies and gentlemen out here in the countryside, and not the budding Lollards and thieves she now sees stuffing themselves with stew.

  Alice keeps quiet. She’s thinking. Thinking wearily of the unbridgeable gap between here and Aldgate; of the impossibility of explaining to Chaucer, or anyone else she knows in that other life in the centre, how things are here. Not knowing, herself, which of her own selves to be, because a part of her would like to be laughing along with the rest of them, not giving a damn about anything outside these walls. She’s spent all these years working so hard at getting rich, but how rich does she need to be, really? And what for? She’s flown so high, yet she’ll never be truly respectable, however far she climbs. At least, she’ll never, despite that dizzying ascent she’s already made, have the grand worldly position that truly noble blood brings. And suddenly she’s weary of the fear and anxiety that her strivings have brought her along with the wealth. Wouldn’t she be happier just stopping trying, and joining in with her family’s roars instead, and embracing their view of things?

  No one notices her silence. There are tears of mirth coming into everyone else’s eyes as Alice’s child goes on, grinning and enjoying the attention she clearly knows she’ll get, because this is clearly something she often does: ‘…when there shall be neither vassal nor lord and all distinctions levelled…when lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.’

  You can’t send Johnny out with Wat, she whispers to Aunty, in the darkness, inside the bedcurtains, when she thinks the children, and Wat, in the other two beds, are asleep, when the whole world, outside, has gone that velvet quiet of a country night. What were you thinking? Robbing priests, indeed.

  Aunty knows that, at least, really. She just doesn’t want to admit it.

  You never even said you had Wat living here, Alice goes on. He’s got to go. Get rid of him.

  Aunty wriggles, rebelliously, at her side.

  Well, I will then, Alice hisses. First thing tomorrow. And I’m sending another priest down here, too, for the schooling. So don’t you scare that one off.

  Wat knows, really, too. She catches him in the morning, first thing, shakes him up from his bed and takes him out into the yard, bundled up in any old clothes that came to hand in a hurry, to talk. ‘Ow, all right, Allie,’ he mumbles, grinning sheepishly as she tweaks his shoulder and nudges him along, ‘only stop that pinching, do, I’m coming.’ He’d like to make her laugh, and relent. But even as he tries to jolly her along, he’s avoiding her eye, because of course he’s ashamed to have been caught here, taking advantage of her hospitality on the sly.

  The awful thing is, she almost does laugh. It’s not that she can’t see the funny side herself, at least while she’s out here. She just can’t afford to.

  So she hardens her heart and takes Wat off to the squeaking gate, and they both lean on it, and look out at the big sky, while she says, ‘Right, you. A joke’s a joke, but you’ve got to move on.’

  Wat just nods. He didn’t really think she’d let him off, teaching her kid to be a highwayman. He’s already thought out what he’ll do next. He says, straight away, ‘Yeah…I know…I’ll go to Johnny.’

  ‘What, our Johnny?’ Alice says, caught out of breath again. She knows Wat doesn’t mean her son this time. He means the smallest of Aunty’s kids, Johnny with the red freckly nose and the perpetual sniffs. Johnny with the stag beetle collection in his purse, who could turn cartwheels. Johnny who grew up and went for a carpenter on the road. The Johnny Wat told her once he’d found again, grown up. With a bit of land, and a family, in Kent. Grown dull and respectable.

  ‘Yeah. He’s settled down. In Dartford. Married, children, working, everything. I told you, didn’t I? He’ll put me up for a bit, help me find my feet.’

  Doubtfully, Alice says, ‘What, you, farming with Johnny? You’d be better off overseas.’ She’s thinking: I’d be better off if you were safely back overseas. Didn’t I do my best to get Richard Lyons to send you back over the water? But Wat’s not interested in foreign parts any more.

  ‘Don’t fancy it. Plenty to be getting on with here. And Kent’s a good place. Down by the sea. Busy. Plenty on the roads.’ So you won’t be farming, then, Alice thinks; but it’s not for her to criticise. She hasn’t helped his career, so why turn her nose up if he makes his crust from the roads? ‘Anyway,’ he adds truculently, ‘I’ve got a reason to stay.’ She must have looked blank. ‘Lyons,’ he explains. ‘I don’t take kindly to being humiliated. And he fired me. Made a fool of me in front of my men. I want my own back. I’m biding my time, mind. But one of these days I’ll get him. And I can’t do that from overseas.’

  She laughs a bit at that. ‘No chance,’ she says. ‘Not with Richard Lyons.’ Still, there’s admiration in the kiss she gives him. He’s right. Lyons, back then, took no notice of her idea to set Wat up with money to go back abroad. So no wonder Wat feels resentful that the man just discarded him when Wat could be of no more use to him in England. He’s got spirit, Wat. Always had.

  He’s gone within the hour. ‘Well, ‘bye,’ is all he says. They watch him stride off towards the river with his bag on his shoulder. Presumably the five nobles are in there with his clothes, as no one has mentioned them again. The house seems quiet without him. Aunty clanks reproachfully around the kitchen. The children are quiet too. Johnny disappears. The girls sit by the fire, playing pick-up sticks, muttering something that Alice hopes isn’t betting talk. No one meets Alice’s eye.

  Alice sits at the table, feeling unpopular. Making alternative plans. Because she can’t bring Johnny with her to London now. Not the way these children have got.

  But the idea of letting go of any of the solutions Chaucer’s thought of brings back the panic. So she needs to make compromises; make it all still seem possible.

  She’s thinking she’ll send her ol
d friar down here for a couple of months. She’ll tell him not to bother Aunty with priest-talk: no lectures about Mass, or tithes. Then perhaps Aunty will return the favour and leave him in peace too. And Friar John will school the kids a bit. Maybe before the end of Parliament he’ll have undone the damage. Taught them some manners. Bring Johnny back with him, possibly. She can think about trying to get him his knighthood then.

  She stays the night. She leaves the next morning. Those servants waiting at Upminster will be fretting, at the Boar.

  But first she gets the children to sit up in their bed and gathers them all awkwardly into her arms for an experimental embrace. This might be what Chaucer might imagine her doing, she thinks. They’re surprised, though not unwilling. They melt sleepily against her. Just for a moment, touching their hot animal little bodies, she lets herself be lost in might-have-beens. But she stops herself getting emotional. What good would that do?

  Instead, she pats them, and gets up again, and says, briskly, ‘I’ll be sending another priest along. You make sure you do your studies with him, mind. And don’t let Aunty bully him into going this time, do you hear?’ The eyes that look back at her are wild eyes – the same wild watchful eyes she and Wat and Johnny and the others must have had, years ago – and the heads that nod ‘yes’ have other ideas in them. They look like her, true. Alice loves the way she recognises her own fingers and toes and nose and sharp eyes on their grubby bodies; but at the same time, she thinks wearily, they’re strangers. They’re not the children she should have raised, knowing what she knows now, having become who she is now; they’re just another brood of Aunty’s kids. The thought of changing them – turning them into clean, groomed, well-schooled playmates for Chaucer’s children, say, lapping up their Latin and a dab hand with a sword – seems impossible in that discouraged moment. She’s failed them, she thinks. She can only hope there’s still time for the errors of the past to be reversed.

  EIGHTEEN

  They come face to face in the King’s antechamber, Alice and the Duke.

  Alice has dressed for the occasion of coming accidentally across the Duke again (dark, modest clothes; no jewels). She’s picked her moment: a quiet early afternoon, after Council’s over and done with, when he’s just coming in to see his father out of filial devotion and has nothing in particular on his mind. To him, meeting her is happenstance. But when she sees the tension in his body, she realises, all the same, that he’s thought about this moment too.

  They approach each other watchfully.

  In the Duke’s eyes: fear that she’ll know what his father has said about him and how he’s handled the peace talks, at times when the old man’s been more lucid than he is now – and that it won’t be approving.

  In Alice’s eyes: nervousness that he’ll have found out she’s been stealing. And that he won’t be happy.

  So they’re both scared, and both trying to pretend they’re not. Brazening it out. As she steps closer, Alice sees that the Duke looks older, with grey dusting his dark hair. Sadder, though of course he’d be sad. Never mind the French, and the Parliament. He’s just buried the baby son his wife gave birth to at Ghent, before the peace talks. So they say.

  You don’t grieve publicly for a child so young. Condolences would be wasted.

  But Alice puts her hands in his, as she rises from her swoop of a bow, trying to convey mute comfort. He’s become so bleak, so bloodless, so lean. The skin on his hands is papery. With a flash of compassion she hasn’t expected to feel, she murmurs, ‘How glad I am, we are, to see you back…After all those months of tireless work…The whole of England is grateful…We’ve missed you…I know my lord the King has missed you.’

  She wishes she’d done better by him. The way he looks wrings her heart. He’s a good man, put upon by Fate. Still, it’s best not to dwell on that now. A few gracious words are enough, for the moment. Just sit tight. She’s comforted by the brief, grateful look the Duke bestows on her, in return.

  She’d like to say she saw only warm friendship in his face, of course. That’s not exactly true. There are lines of bitterness and disappointment drawn all over it.

  Not for her, though. And that’s what counts.

  She gestures him towards Edward’s bedchamber. ‘He’s awake.’ She indicates, with a brave, sad expression, that the King is not going to be capable of much in the way of talk. ‘If you want to go in…’

  The Duke is relieved that Alice Perrers is sidling up to him like this, with her round little face so eager and full of intelligent understanding, her hands so warm.

  He breathes more easily. He can see loyalty, and the wish to please, shining in her eyes. He sees now that she won’t have been criticising his every step at Bruges, from his negotiating style to his hospitality bills.

  He’s had enough of that, from the savaging he got at Council last week to his trip to the City this morning to meet the fat, insolent new Mayor, Warde the grocer. His coats of arms were hung along Chepe beforehand in what was supposed to be a mark of respect. But by the time he rode by they’d all been turned upside down: the mark of a traitor. He could see idlers by the roadside smirking all over their downturned faces at their practical joke. The dishonour of it made his flesh creep and his hackles rise…the malice. But when he strode in and furiously told Warde to have someone flogged for it, the Mayor only smirked too, until his flesh wobbled, and said, far too indulgently, and with an edge of malice of his own, a hint of criticism, ‘Dear me, some wag…some scallywag…of course there’s been bad feeling about the truce, but this is disrespect…I’ll look into it.’

  It took the Duke’s breath away. It wasn’t for Warde-the-grocer to comment on his truce, and as for the beggars of Chepe…Who do these City nobodies think they are? That’s the trouble with merchants. No one born without blue blood in their veins has any conception of what a fighting nobleman has to do, and risk, to keep them safe in their counting-houses. They’ve no idea of honour, any more than a rat in a granary does. Yet they’ve got so puffed up with pride, just because my lord father has allowed them to contribute money to the war, that they’ve taken to thinking they can dictate to a prince of England how to conduct relations with England’s enemy.

  At least Perrers knows her place, the Duke’s thinking approvingly as he steps through the curtains and approaches his father’s bed. She’s enjoyed her clothes and her jewels and her parties in the past, true; she interests herself in politics. She’s quietly stacked up money, too, he knows. (He’s heard them blame her money-making for half the country’s woes, in the City, since he’s got back, though he’s ignored all that; he’s actually inclined to think the better of anyone whom those thieving granary rats criticise…which he suspects that they’re only doing to cover their own trails of stolen grain anyway.) What he enjoys about his father’s mistress is that, gifted though she obviously is at handling men and money, in all his dealings with her, she’s never presumed to know better than him, never criticised, and never carped at his princely choices or underestimated the princely burden he carries on his shoulders. She’s not the type to get ideas above her station. He likes it, too, that she’s gone on sitting here quietly nursing my lord through his twilight years. A change from the gaiety of before. Sad sort of life. Other women might have married, or retired from court. He values loyalty.

  His father is propped up on a mound of pillows. The sour smell of old age hangs in the air. Duke John leans down, kisses his father’s familiar forehead, and looks into the beloved eyes. He’s expecting a stranger’s eyes: no recognition. But they light up. For a moment, the Duke thrills at that pleasure. ‘Edward,’ the King says, with weak joy. ‘My dearest boy.’

  Gently, the Duke shakes his head. ‘John,’ he says with sinking heart, sitting down on the bed, taking his father’s hands. ‘I’m John.’ Hoping the excitement won’t go out of those pale old eyes. Knowing it will.

  Once John has gone in to his father, Alice stands quiet for a moment, letting the waves of relief pour through her a
s she remembers how trustingly Duke John looked at her.

  He’s not angry, after all. She can rely on him. He’s still her best hope for the future.

  Then she turns her attention to the Duke’s entourage. She shows the men the wine and cakes prepared for while they wait, whisking off the muslins that have kept the baked goods fresh, letting the smell of them rise invitingly into the air. Out of sheer relief, or perhaps just to remind herself that she can, she smiles invitingly up at the steward John’s brought – the same awkward Leicester gentleman she once wheedled information about Katherine Swynford’s children out of, she sees – and pats the stool beside hers as she sinks back down and takes up her needlework.

  The man sits down with her, looking bashful but flattered to be singled out. John de Stafford, she remembers he’s called. Dark, big, perhaps shy behind his muscle. She can see he’s got a soft spot for her, or is ready to have.

  ‘Now, Monsieur de Stafford,’ she begins, and puts down her needlework again, and serves him wine and cake herself, with a rush of hospitable housewife talk about the saffron and fruit in the creamy buns, as if she’d baked them with her own hands. He chomps appreciatively as she nods at the goblet to make him drink up. ‘And how have you been up in Leicester, and how is my lady Swynford?’ she twinkles at him, reminding him of the private moment they shared at Christmas. He shakes a rueful head back. She can see at once he still doesn’t like La Swynford. It took only those few words to make them fellow-conspirators, ready to whisper pleasurably together, even flirt a little, maybe, because, after all, life’s not all fear and fretting.