Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  He says, ‘Go there. Let the dust settle. Let the lie of the land emerge.’

  He says, ‘Get your strength back.’

  He says, ‘It’s not all bad. At least you’ll have your children with you.’

  She doesn’t understand why the mention of children makes his mouth, briefly, twist. She doesn’t ask. She’s too absorbed in her own problems.

  But he’s so insistent about sending her to Gaines that, at last, she nods her head. She does see that it might be bad for his prospects, harbouring her right here, under their noses.

  When he sees her nod, finally, he puffs out a great sigh of relief. ‘Good,’ he says with satisfaction. ‘Gaines it is. Now, let’s get started.’

  He’s treating her like a child, not a lover. She’s grateful for that. She’s lost all ability to take decisions.

  First, he wraps up bread and meat for her.

  Next, he gives her a little bag of money. She takes it without a word. (Last time, last trial, she remembers, numbly, it was the Duke who rescued her and gave her money. How grateful she was then; but how pointless her gratitude has turned out to be.)

  Thirdly he hands her a key. ‘To here,’ he says. ‘The door here’s always open to you.’

  Finally, Chaucer takes her down and puts her on his own horse. She thinks: He’s not a rich man. Somewhere inside, she’s grateful to him again. More than grateful. It’s a grey day, bitterly cold, but mercifully the sleety snow that’s been threatening all day is holding off.

  It’s only when he’s heaved her up, and walked her out through the gate, in case of questions, and settled her at the back of a late train of tradesmen making their way to Waltham, that he reaches up, puts a kindly hand on her back, and grins encouragingly at her.

  ‘Life has so many surprises for us all,’ he says, squinting up, as if trying to impart some great secret. ‘You never know what you’ll find at the end of your road.’

  She knows he means to be encouraging. She nods, dully. She kicks on the horse. She doesn’t mean to be rude. She just doesn’t want to leave all this behind. If she doesn’t say goodbye, doesn’t freeze her feelings into words, she’s thinking, it may not be for ever.

  A few minutes after Alice has gone, Chaucer’s hands start to shake. It’s only when he’s alone again, picking up the empty goblets and finding them, unaccountably, rattling against each other, that he realises how close he and Alice have been, all day, to being caught. The risks he’s taken. He gives up on clearing away. He sits down, feeling suddenly cold, and wraps his arms around his knees, waiting for the trembling to pass. He’s seeing, for the first time, how close bravery is to thoughtlessness.

  This time, when Alice reaches the quiet road to Gaines, there are no children playing in the fields. There’s just a man, with grey hair and a neat grey beard, stiffly tying up a horse at the iron ring in the wall.

  She looks warily at him as the horse shakes her forward. Another stranger. She’s starting to fear strangers.

  He has big broad shoulders. He’s very tall. He’s well made. Must have been handsome in his time.

  She’s close, very close, by the time he turns round and gives her an equally suspicious stare from pale, pale blue eyes.

  It’s only then that she realises whom she’s looking at. Was this what Chaucer meant by surprises at the end of the road? Could Chaucer possibly have known?

  She reins in the horse. ‘Will,’ she says, expressionlessly, from six feet away, from high up.

  He goes still. He’s recognised her voice, all right. He’s just not sure…

  She’s in her nun’s garb, she remembers. She puts down the hood.

  He’s never been given to displays of emotion. He looks at her for a long while before he answers, even more blankly, ‘Alice.’

  He’s never been given to displays of emotion, she reminds herself. But she’s not sure she can hear the tenderness she might have wanted in her husband’s voice.

  What follows next is almost enough to make Alice laugh, especially when she imagines Chaucer, sitting in his mess of bits of paper, with his endless flow of talk and ideas, with his generosity of spirit, with his eyes shining, picturing her in some happy-ever-after Christmas moment, being reunited with her lost love, being hugged by clean pretty rejoicing children.

  William takes her inside, takes her upstairs, unbuttons himself, pushes her down on a bed, pulls up her skirts, and makes love to her, in no-nonsense military fashion, without a word of endearment.

  He smells familiar, like remembered happiness. And everything, for days, has felt so unreal anyway. And she’s interested. She lets it happen. This might be the future. Why protest?

  But when he sits up and starts to talk – he doesn’t seem to expect a word from her, even an explanation of the nun’s habit he’s just unseeingly desecrated – and she sits meekly listening and watching, relearning his tics of eye and mouth and expression, remembering the timbre of his voice, recalling, now she sees it again, that roll of fat behind his ears that she never liked, she begins to realise that, though he seems a greyer, harder version of the man he was before, she might have changed more. Did she really just sit, in this slumped silence that seems so familiar, while he gave orders, before? Wasn’t she ever the centre of attention, back then? Didn’t he ever listen while she laughed, and made jokes, and amused him with her wit? She begins to think that the woman she’s become, in the years of running things, and planning things, and jollying people along, might never be able to accept that this man – this abrupt-mannered, cold-eyed, order-issuing soldier – could ever bring her the kind of happiness she’s come to want.

  It seems he’s been here at this house for a week, and he’s been travelling to find Alice for a good while longer; since soon after he received a letter from Chaucer, who’d thought, but not been sure, that Alice would sooner or later pitch up here. (Chaucer, she thinks, with a burst of nostalgia for her London friend’s verve and intelligence; always one step ahead.) Because William didn’t know exactly where to find her, he tried Wendover and a couple of her other manors en route. His next stop would have been London, except that when he reached this house, and found the children and Aunty Alison were still here, as they had been all along, he also heard that Alice had been arrested. So he decided to wait out the trial here. He hasn’t been doing the things that Chaucer was advising Alice to when she reached Essex: letting the dust settle, getting the lie of the land, gathering strength. That isn’t Will’s way. He’s a soldier. He’s been making a thorough investigation of everything, putting everyone here through their paces, and smartening everything up.

  ‘Servants were running wild when I got here,’ he barks. ‘So – had a few whipped. Discipline, you know. Discipline. All fine now.’

  It’s true, she realises. It’s more orderly here than she remembers. The house is strangely neat. So is the yard. The usual clutter of half-mended farm implements and cracked leather buckets and discarded boxes and big bits of wood that might, one day, be useful for something has vanished from the courtyard. The peasants are in the fields, turning over the earth, ready for spring. The horses are in the stable. The servants are in the kitchen. The chickens are in the hen-run. There are cooking smells in the air.

  It no longer looks the kind of place where the lord lives scarcely any better than the peasants he reigns over. Alice thinks, not without admiration, that with someone like Will in charge, who knows? The land at Gaines might actually make some money, for once. Of course, she also thinks, since Will’s techniques seem to involve beating his subordinates into submission, the price would be unhappiness all round. But a proper income from the fields might be good.

  Alice can scarcely think how Aunty Alison can have taken to this soldierly make-over, though she can imagine a good many tart comments that might have come from the old woman’s lips.

  ‘Whatever did Aunty say?’ she asks with the beginning of a smile. She’ll break the ice between them, she thinks, suddenly hopeful. She imagines she’s going t
o hear about an epic tussle of wills. Then she’ll tell Will a few stories about Aunty and her odd ways, perhaps; it will be the first laugh they’ll share.

  Will looks back, not registering the laugh. ‘Your old nurse?’ he replies seriously. ‘Complained. Lippy type. I’ve moved her off to sleep with the servants. Right place for her. Been getting above herself; taken over running the house. Gossiping with serfs. Egging them on. Whatever next.’

  Alice’s eyes widen, though she stays tactfully silent. Poor Aunty. How furious she must be.

  Will continues, even more sternly: ‘She should watch herself. That old woman. Talks too much. No discipline. I’ve got half a mind to get her flogged too. Set an example.’

  There is a moment’s pause.

  I must find Aunty, as soon as possible, Alice thinks, feeling her hands already flapping around uneasily on the quilts. I must find out what’s been going on.

  But she smiles up appeasingly at her husband. Cautiously, with sinking heart, she asks the next question. ‘And the children…where are the children?’

  He hasn’t mentioned them, either. Not that he’s ever shown much interest in them, in all those years in Ireland. But still…they’re his own children…and his only children that she’s aware of. They must be on his mind?

  He looks blankly out of the window. She thinks, hopes, that he isn’t too angry with her for letting them grow up such wild little peasants. It takes her a moment to realise that he might be feeling the same mixture of worry and guilt she does. He’s been away all their lives too, after all. And he’s their father.

  ‘Sent them up to Greyrigg,’ he says guardedly. ‘No choice. Boy can’t hold a bow, let alone a sword. Girls can’t sew. No priest to teach them, here. They can hardly read. No French. And they can’t so much as mumble a prayer in Latin. Best they go home. Get a bit of schooling.’

  With the light on his granite face catching his pale eyes, he’s handsome, as statues are handsome. How strange, Alice thinks; he’s taken them on as his, then. She wanted that once. But now all she can think is how sad Aunty will be.

  ‘They can come back in the summer,’ he adds. ‘Maybe. With a tutor. If they’ve done well.’

  For all the harshness of his tone, Alice thinks she’s hearing an apology, or the nearest he can come to it: a concession to the presumed maternal instinct in her that he thinks he must have gone against.

  She lowers her head. She doesn’t know what she feels. She thinks she’s relieved. This is difficult enough as it is. So she nods.

  ‘But, Will,’ she says, giving in to the way things are going, since there’s nothing else to do, and asking him for leadership, as she can now see she must always have done in the past, ‘what will we do?’

  She means, ‘now that I’ve lost everything’. She means, too, ‘now that you’ve lost everything’. Because, since he was sent home in disgrace from Ireland, he has no cosy government position, no favours from on high; just his rents from his northern manors, just obscurity, like her. Desolately, she thinks: All those years of effort, wasted.

  He knows the answer. He’s a leader of men. He always knows the answer. Will doesn’t do might-have-beens, or regrets. He’s accepted the way things are, after defeat in the last battle. But he’ll always want to fight on.

  ‘Let the dust settle,’ he says firmly. ‘See how the land lies. Then, see what we can get back.’

  Alice recognises those phrases. William must have taken them from whatever Chaucer wrote to him. He’s quoting, though he probably doesn’t even realise that he is. For the first time, Alice feels just a little comforted.

  But, in the weeks that follow, there’s little else to comfort Alice. Over a muted Christmas, while she’s trying not to think of the splendid style in which she’s celebrated previous Christmases, running the court, William has a list made of her properties. Aunty, meanwhile, makes a list of gifts she’s going to send after the children, from her and, as she tells Alice, ‘from their mum. They’ll like that.’ There isn’t a hint of reproach in her voice. She’s obviously always said this. After Christmas, William sends clerks to each of the manors Alice so recently owned. Then William strides around, shouting at the clerks when they return, one by bedraggled one, with their separate pieces of inevitable bad news. William shouts at Aunty, that bristling stick of resentment, stuck away upstairs and in the kitchens, seething. William scarcely speaks to Alice, except to update her on the property news, or to order her to order Aunty to change the way the house is run, or to find grease for his armour, or better oats for his horses, or a priest, for God’s sake, why is there no proper priest in this place?

  He wants to do something to fight back. But he’s lost, away from his troops and garrisons. He’s not a man of the mind. He doesn’t know how to fight, except with a sword.

  Alice is too grateful to be alive, and free, too relieved no one has come after her, to feel as desolate, yet, as she thinks she will when she really begins to believe it’s going to go on for ever. Still, time hangs more heavy on her hands every day. She tiptoes around. She rides around the bare winter fields, noticing how quiet the peasants have gone (they’ve never had serfs at Gaines; ‘Can’t see the point of it,’ Aunty’s always said). The servants’ pay’s been cut, she knows. Their hours have been raised. Aunty’s seething (though only in a whisper). Those peasants were her friends.

  She sneaks off to the solar and kitchens, sometimes, and talks to Aunty – tells her, in a whisper, the story of the trial, and the escape, and Chaucer’s unexpected and triumphant rising to the occasion. ‘He sounds a good boy, your Chaucer,’ Aunty says, putting aside her own woes, and considering. ‘We both like a lad with a bit of wit and mischief in him, don’t we, dear?’ Then her thin old face darkens, and her loose old-lady mouth tightens, as she mutters, rebelliously: ‘Not like old Lord Misery-guts out there.’

  Aunty has nothing much else to say about Will. But she tells Alice that the children knew, before they went north, that their mum was on trial. That they were worried. That they asked Aunty all the time, ‘Will she be safe?’ and that they had tears in their eyes.

  Alice doesn’t know exactly what the confusing feeling is, churning inside her, when she hears that. She just nods. ‘It’s for the best,’ she says, wondering why her voice feels so choked.

  ‘They’ll have heard you’re out and safe, at least, dear,’ the old woman says reassuringly, and her thin turkey-jowls quiver. ‘The boy will have got there by now. That’ll be a weight off. Poor little mites.’

  Alice can’t talk to Aunty all the time, because Aunty’s so often out these days. To keep out of Will’s hair, the old woman trots off to Brentwood every few days to hear the hedge-priest’s insurrectionary sermons in the cemetery, outside church, on the days the real priests don’t come out and chase him away. ‘You should come too,’ Aunty says with wickedness in her grass-green eyes. ‘Ooh, how that man can talk. You’d enjoy it. I can tell.’ But Alice knows Aunty just wants to rile Will with this invitation, because Will makes no secret of the fact that he wants to get the ranting revolutionary, who’s called John Ball, locked up for preaching that there should be no more lords, and no more princes of the church either, and certainly no taxes. Alice doesn’t want to rile Will, so she stays put. And when Aunty tells her that there’s a bit of a society being formed among the hedge-priest’s supporters, a secret sort of thing called the Magna Societas, and that they’re doing a bit of letter-writing to spread the word among the people, because the collectors are out gathering this new poll tax, and it’s an outrage, dear, just imagine, a groat a head, from the poorest in the land, when the wages have been cut back to twopence a day (by Lord Misery-guts and his landlord friends), and so Aunty’s promised to help with the letters, because of course it’s a good cause, and worth the time, only she’s not that good with a pen, so perhaps Alice might…? Alice just smiles, a bit sadly, and shakes her head. Aunty’s never allowed herself to be bored, however unpromising her circumstances. That hasn’t changed. But A
unty’s flirtation with a new form of risk isn’t for Alice.

  Sometimes Alice is so at a loss for ways to occupy herself that she even reads. Aunty scoffs, ‘Well, look at you,’ when she catches her, but Alice thinks that’s because the only book she has is a Bible. She can only half understand the Latin. Sometimes she wishes she’d asked Chaucer for some of his work. He writes in English. She’s never read his poems.

  Once every few days, Will unbuttons himself and pushes Alice down on the bed, with never an endearment, never a soft word. She opens her eyes, sometimes, and looks wearily around as he labours over her, grunting energetically. Was this really what she’s swooned to remember all her life, this muscular, dull coupling? Surely she enjoyed herself more, laughed more, on those few snatched nights with Chaucer, talking half the night; Chaucer, whom she’s always taken so lightly, whom she’s always thought of as a friend more than a lover. Why didn’t she notice at the time?

  There’s no lightness now, that’s for sure. Even if Will’s not admitting it himself, even if his mind doesn’t admit of might-have-beens, or deal in fancies, she can see he’s angry with life for this reversal, angry with God, and angry with her.

  What Will wants more than anything else, she comes to see as the estate visits go on, and the list-making, and the futile shouting, isn’t her, it’s getting the property back. All those estates she might have brought him; all those estates she had in her hand, and lost. He thinks of nothing else. He recites the names, and the fates, of each unknown manor. He knows the acreage. He knows the yield. He knows the rents. He knows who’s taken over. He knows whom he’d get revenge on, if he could. But he doesn’t know how.

  It’s February, or March, and the first green fuzz of buds is appearing on the bare branches, before she realises that she actively dislikes her husband. She doesn’t want to hear him muttering the names of the estates she’s lost any more, or shouting at any more clerks, as if it were their fault the lands have gone. She’s lost in her numb grey cloud here; she’s got no use for the rents she’s lost, now she’s got to be here. And nor does he. Yet he wants those lands more than she does, even though it was she who earned them, and on her back, too, half the time. With the first stirrings of conscious resentment, she thinks: It’s wrong that he’s so much more desperate than me for the profit he feels he should have made from pimping his wife, all those years ago, to another monstrously selfish old greybeard like himself.