Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  His mind is racing. It was always stupid to try and make Alice out to be a witch. And there hasn’t been enough evidence to accuse her of embezzling government money, either, however many times her name has been named in this connection. (She was right about that.) There have been vague accusations from the Commons that the King gave her thousands of pounds a year – three thousand, by one account. There have been accusations that she invaded the courts of justice, sitting on the King’s Bench. There have been the usual accusations that she used her position of influence with the King to further her own business interests, and wore the Queen’s jewels. A man has even been dragged in who said, with no evidence, that Alice had paid a squire of her retinue to kill an unnamed sailor against whom she had a grudge. But there’ve been no facts, just stories. And none of the dirt has stuck.

  Perhaps de la Mare is despairing of a real charge. Perhaps he just wants to get Alice, somehow, anyhow, before the Parliament ends. But they’re angry with her about money, not sex. And to frame one kind of charge in punishment for a different kind of offence doesn’t seem in de la Mare’s nature. He’s been more precise, until now. He hasn’t gone in for unsubstantiated slanders.

  Especially this one, which as well as being foolish seems impossible to prosecute. They’d have to hand Alice over to the Church for trial, if they pursued adultery…and Chaucer can’t imagine that de la Mare will be expecting the Church, in the shape of Edward’s tame Archbishop Sudbury, to dance to his tune and destroy Alice for mortal sin, just on the Parliament’s say-so, or even to have her hair shaved off. It would be absurd.

  Chaucer can’t make out what the man’s game can be.

  Because, really, adultery…well, it’s just one of those holier-than-thou pulpit words, isn’t it? Something to accuse your enemies of, if you’re minded to be vindictive, while not looking too closely at your own affairs, because everyone…

  It’s only now that something else dawns on Chaucer – an idea so utterly horrifying that he feels the blood draining away from his head until he’s dizzy and has to reach for the table to hold his back straight, then rushing back, whooshing in his ears and staining his face the guiltiest possible harlot scarlet.

  They can’t, can they, they can’t possibly be meaning……he conjures up Philippa’s sleek head; her scornful smile…and he smells the smell of Alice’s rose-scented flesh, moving under him…

  …him?

  Because he knows, who better, whom Alice Perrers has recently been committing adultery with. He’s just not thought of it like that. Never given it a name at all.

  But surely the Parliament doesn’t know, or care, about him. Surely not even Peter de la Mare, with his uncanny knack of ferreting out hidden knowledge, with his relentless mills-of-God approach to justice, going on and on, grinding more and more exceeding small every day, can possibly think that what Alice Perrers has done, just a few times, in a quiet corner of the City, far from prying eyes…

  The clerk’s shaking his head, enjoying his tale. Pleasurably, he explains, ‘Turns out she’s been married, for years – to William of Windsor. The one in Ireland.’

  Chaucer nods, too stunned to say anything. ‘Oh,’ he mutters. For now, all he can feel is selfish relief. He’s weak with it. He bends over his work, waiting for his flush, and his panic, to recede, thanking God with every ounce of his sullied flesh that, at least, not that; he won’t be dragged through the mud…disgraced.

  It seems a long while before his mind begins to function; before the questions begin again.

  But they do.

  De la Mare must have dug deep, been forced to dig deep, to accuse her of adultery on the basis of that old relationship with William of Windsor – to have even begun to think that she might once have been the wife of a man who’s spent the past decade in Ireland. How can he have found out?

  Chaucer knows that this story is more or less true, because Alice has told him. (Though he doubts she and William of Windsor were ever formally blessed in a church; but there are the children; the Church might take their existence as proof of a permanent union, if it were minded to…if it knew about the children…which de la Mare can’t…though then again how can he know any of it?)

  What puzzles Chaucer most is that he knows Alice doesn’t talk about her past love. Chaucer supposes it’s possible that little Froissart once knew – she was close to him at that time. But he’s not been in England for years. And, after that, Chaucer believes, she’s never mentioned it again. To anyone. Until she told him.

  It can’t even be William of Windsor himself who’s talked. He’s not here either.

  So how can de la Mare know? The man’s grim reach seems almost superhuman.

  It seems a long time that Chaucer agonises over this.

  It seems a long time before he remembers himself blurting out to Philippa, months ago, that Alice’s children aren’t royal bastards; remembers saying the name, ‘William of Windsor’; remembers the answering gleam in his wife’s eye.

  It’s only now that he realises he’s known all along that he shouldn’t have said it.

  It was only a rash comment made in the heat of the moment. It should have died and been forgotten. He shouldn’t have to feel responsible.

  But he does. Oh, how he does. He’s staring into an abyss of wordless, eye-closing, stomach-churning, howling self-reproach that’ll be with him for ever.

  For all his hopes and good intentions, it’s he, Geoffrey Chaucer, who’s betrayed Alice to her enemies. It’s he, Geoffrey Chaucer, who is to blame.

  A few hours later, Alice is brought to the lectern and sworn in. She’s spent a week in polite custody – in a good enough room overlooking the river, with clothes cared for and palace food provided, and even hot bathwater, but with men at the door whom she can’t make friends with, and watched all the time by servants she doesn’t know, who only shake their heads at her falsely casual requests to provide her with writing materials, or carry messages to the King. (She doesn’t even ask whether they’ll take messages to Richard Lyons or Chaucer.) She’s not in despair, exactly; she’s been keeping herself light on her toes, whistling under her breath, not letting her mind stop too long on what the Forespeaker might accuse her of. They’ve got nothing against her, she keeps telling herself, trying not to remember that they didn’t seem to have much on Stury or Neville either at the start, but found charges anyway. They’re fools, these parliamentarians. Hicks. What can they pin on her? She’s also found herself, more than once, taking comfort in the thought that the Duke will intercede to stop them bullying her; she only wishes she could be more certain that this were definitely true. For the opening part of this session, he hasn’t looked at her. He hasn’t looked at anything much, except the backs of his hands. He looks, she thinks, glancing sideways at him, letting her lungs deflate, rather hopeless…defeated, almost.

  For the past hour, while the knights troop in and the formalities are completed, she’s been kept at the back of the room, between Sir John de la Mare and his unchivalrous knightly friend (who enjoyed arresting her friar and also their miserable ride from Pallenswick with her last week so much that they’ve volunteered to accompany her to the chamber today, too, as guards, and are still giving her triumphant little looks from mean eyes) during an entire peroration by Peter de la Mare about the allegation that she ‘had been preferred in the King’s love before the Queen’. Well, she’s thinking defiantly, so what if I was? I wasn’t the only one, by any manner of means. And you’ll never prove, one way or another, when it all started between me and Edward anyway. Is that the worst you can do? She raises her chin.

  The King is reclining on his litter. They’ve asked him to attend today, specially, the servants were saying. He’s looking puzzled. Lost. Tentatively, she smiles at him. He throws her a sad answering look. Take me away from here, he seems to be signalling. Let’s go home. For a moment, her heart leaps with the possibility of it; with the possibility of all this being over, and her being able to go back to looking after her poo
r old darling, quietly, with trees outside the windows, and none of these people here. But then she realises he’s hardly recognised her. It’s not a look specifically intended for her, Alice Perrers, the woman he’s loved for so long. It’s just a woeful old-man’s look, meaning, ‘I need peace and quiet…why am I here, surrounded by enemies?’ Poor Edward. She doesn’t think he understands any of it.

  She’s heard that the Prince of England also comes to the sessions in a litter. But there’s no sign of him today.

  Peter de la Mare leans forward. She can smell the hatred on him, the expectation of an almost sexual pleasure in her disgrace. She doesn’t care. She’s been scared long enough. She’s fed up with the fear of these past months. It’s a surprise, but a not unpleasant one, when she identifies the feeling inside herself as anger. She thinks, almost with relief: How I loathe the sanctimonious look on his grey face.

  She grins defiantly at him. Nothing is actually going to happen to her, is it? There’s nothing that this bullying man can say that can actually shake her out of the life she’s earned, at the top; nothing that can make her world spin and crumble to dust behind her.

  ‘Are you, Alice Perrers…’ he intones, ignoring her monkey grimace.

  Misunderstanding his intonations, she answers, sweetly enough, ‘Yes.’

  He tuts, and continues, as if she’s deliberately obstructing the course of justice by interrupting him: ‘…the wife of Sir William of Windsor, of Greyrigg, Northumberland?’

  For a moment she doesn’t even take it in. Because there’s no way he can know that.

  Is there?

  There’s no one in this land who knows.

  Except Chaucer.

  That’s when she looks at Edward and sees his white beard quiver, and his eyes seek her out and suddenly know who she is; and the pitiful look in them is a betrayed look, a dog shut out of the house and deprived of its bone.

  Chaucer? Her friend? Chaucer, whom she trusts?

  That’s when the world starts to spin.

  Chaucer doesn’t rejoin the Duke’s entourage when he gets off the boat at Westminster. He’s too scared. He feels too guilty. He can’t be in that room, where Alice might see him. But he does find his way back to the upstairs gallery, and squats there, alone, trying to stifle sneezes and sniffs, above the Duke’s head, trying to catch the voices.

  He cranes forward when they bring Alice forward to swear her oath. He sees her, all right. She goes white when de la Mare makes his adultery charge. She looks around, as if in panic, as if she’s looking for the escape route, or the friend who isn’t there. She sways. They put a stool behind her, and she sinks down. She doesn’t say anything; doesn’t even answer the charge. There’s no need, really. Not right now. Her face says it all. Her face stays grey.

  He can’t see the King, swearing an oath on the Virgin that he’s not aware of any marriage. But he hears the weak old voice as the King pleads: ‘…Master Forespeaker, I beg you to have mercy on her, out of love for me.’ And, like everyone watching below, he hears the voice waver and crack on those last words. He thinks the King, who for all his nearly fifty years on the throne has been loved for the freedom of his emotions, might be publicly weeping.

  The Forespeaker nods, and clears his throat. Not a man of easy emotions himself, he seems embarrassed to be distressing his monarch. From the bottom of his self-dug pit of despair, Chaucer leans forward again as de la Mare turns back to Alice, as if looking at her is easier, and resumes, in that velvety, yet insistent, voice: ‘Mistress Perrers, will you answer the charge?’

  Alice rises to her feet. She stands there for a long moment without saying anything, just swaying. She’s plucking at the stuff of her skirt with one busy hand.

  Chaucer remembers he’s not breathing, and gulps in air.

  Eventually, Alice finds her voice, and a glimmer of her old cheek. She looks up, and meets de la Mare’s eye. And she says, with a shrug, and the beginning of her familiar devil-may-care grin: ‘Well, Master Forespeaker, all I can tell you is that it was a long time ago…and only a marriage at the church door.’

  Chaucer can see why she’s trying this tack. The Church has never been sure it accepts those vague pledges people sometimes make at the church door, without benefit of clergy (without benefit to the clergy either, as there’s no marriage fee involved), as real marriages in the eyes of God.

  But it comes out wrong. It sounds…cheap, that defiance; it sounds like just the kind of wilful tricksiness that these men are trying to eradicate. And, by saying it, she’s admitted that at least a form of marriage took place, and that she is, as alleged, an adulterer. He can see that from the small smile de la Mare can’t keep from his face. And he can hear it’s gone down badly from the sudden hubbub in the room, the excited murmurings and quick movements of triumphant eyes.

  He shuts his eyes. He leans back, covering his face with his hands. He doesn’t want to have to see Alice’s face, as she realises her sally’s only made things worse for her. He’s heard enough.

  On the boat, the boatman gloats: ‘If you ask me, they won’t have mercy. I’ve heard they’re going to call in the Bishop of London tomorrow.’

  Chaucer stares fiercely at the ripples, trying to ignore the wrenchings of his gut. He hasn’t thought, until now, that anything could make him feel worse. But now he does. If gentle Archbishop Sudbury is being passed over in Alice’s case, and William Walworth’s pocket churchman coming to judge her instead, then…

  ‘Adultery is a crime against God,’ he hears the boatman saying from very far away. ‘So she’ll hang. Bishop Courtenay will tie the noose himself.’

  But something else happens, before the trial of Alice Perrers goes veering off in this altogether more threatening and sinister direction – something that utterly overshadows, and briefly halts, Peter de la Mare’s puppet show at Westminster.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Muttering, fiddling with his rheumatic fingers, and with tears streaming down his face and into his beard, tears which are not altogether the work of the unkind wind, King Edward has himself rowed across the river from the session at Westminster to the palace at Kennington.

  De la Mare, following in a hired boat, watches that frail figure with pity colouring his usual awe. De la Mare feels sorry that he’s had to distress his monarch by asking the questions he’s had to ask today; but that England needed to have the immorality of the Perrers woman publicly aired he has no doubt, since her dishonest dealings with money, which are proving so hard to pin down, are surely along the same lines as her years of dishonest behaviour with men. Now, he thinks, the King will take comfort with his son; and the rightness of that mixes in his mind with his own dutifully suppressed desire to be home watching his own boy mount a horse and gallop along the riverbank, all freckles and spontaneity, shouting with happiness. De la Mare reveres everything about the King, and now, on this boat, nothing more than the love the old man bears his eldest son. He can well imagine the thoughts chasing through the King’s confused head: My son will understand. My son will explain what’s going on.

  But there is to be no comfort for the King across the water. What awaits the newcomers at Kennington Palace, coming from the darkened bedchamber of the Prince, is the sound of screaming.

  The bouts of coma that the Prince has been suffering in recent days are now interspersed with waking periods of agony. Looking up the great stairwell, at the bent old back labouring up those steps towards his daughter-in-law, Sir Peter can see that Princess Joan’s face is twisted with anguish. The doctors’ faces are twisted with terror.

  Edward hastens on, and vanishes with Joan into the noise. The door shuts.

  Sir Peter is left in the hall downstairs, ignored by the scurrying servants, alone with his thoughts.

  He knows the King has buried four grown-up children in his time; he’s lost two boys himself. He can well imagine that the King, too, must feel the continuing pain of each of their deaths like an amputation. But this must be different. Worse. This is King
Edward’s most beloved child; his treasure, his consolation.

  The screaming upstairs stops after a while. But the frantic running-around downstairs persists. Men rushing upstairs with new slops buckets, water, wine, blankets, linen, and braziers to cut the stink; and others rushing downstairs with used articles, which no one wants to look at.

  Sir Peter is still there, overwhelmed by pity that’s becoming almost unbearable, when a litter bearing the now silent Prince makes its unsteady way down the stairs, followed by King, Princess, little boy, doctors, knights of the body, attendants, and more servants carrying boxes and bags. The King’s head is bowed. He makes no attempt to hide the tears pouring down his face.

  Sir Peter can see the howling emptiness in the old man’s soul as he watches the litter being manoeuvred on to the boat, and the King, with a strange return to majesty, handing Princess Joan down into it after her husband. The King is taking them back to Westminster with him. Sir Peter understands, or thinks he does. This is the end, and the King wants only what every good father would, when what is about to happen is something no good father can bear to contemplate. At least, at the last, he wants his family to be together.

  So there is no Parliament at Westminster in the days that follow. There are just the screams, which set everyone’s teeth on edge, and the silences, which set everyone’s teeth on edge worse. And in between there are the busy moments of consciousness, when the Prince sits up and calls the trembling lawyers to his side to dictate that after his death this war-horse will go to that knight, and his bed-furniture embroidered with the deeds of Saladin to his son, and this silver cup to that servant; when he calls the quiet little boy trying not to move next to Princess Joan and asks him to keep on all his retainers; when his long will is finally read over, on 7 June, and more changes and additions made, and his executors named. He is to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral, in the undercroft beneath the shrine of St Thomas the Martyr, with his shield, helmet, sword and surcoat above his grave. He wants a French poem inscribed on his tomb, and also the badge of three ostrich feathers and the Flemish motto Ich Dien, which he used at Crécy, his greatest victory. There’s a moment when he assembles his family – the Princess, and the scared boy by her side, and the King, and John, Duke of Lancaster, and his two younger brothers – and orders the men of his blood to swear on the Bible to protect his son. He watches his brother, mylordofLancaster, through fierce, narrowed eyes, as John takes the Bible; he’s aware of Joan doing the same from her corner. It is important to him to die well, with all his worldly affairs settled.