Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  Aunty’s been rushing round for the past two days, preparing. Aunty’s been carrying on like a lunatic. Aunty’s been saying, ‘They’ll be so excited to see you,’ and squeezing Alice, and rushing off again, when all along it’s been clear that it’s her own excitement she’s talking about, her own almost uncontainable love. Alice doesn’t remember any of this excitement from when she was a kid. Back in those days, there was just the watchfulness, the waiting for the next snatch, the sheer thrill of surviving from one day to the next. But it was always fun, at least, she thinks; they always had a laugh. Alice never felt lost. She doesn’t feel lost now, come to that. Not completely. She’s grieving for everything else; but she’s pleased to be back with Aunty. Perhaps, back then, they just never had the luxury of time, to think about love; or the words. Alice even said to Aunty, last night, ‘Do you think people go on learning to love, better, all their lives? Do you love these kids…more…?’ She didn’t need to say more than whom. Aunty understood, and patted her shoulder, and grinned. She shook her head. Then she kissed Alice’s forehead, and scurried on; and Alice sat astonished at the table, feeling the papery lip-print still on her forehead. Aunty’s never done that.

  It’s Aunty who turns round now. It’s always Aunty who sorts things out – a mother in all but name.

  ‘Come on, love,’ she calls with a hint of impatience in her voice. ‘Don’t get left behind. Because it’s their mum they really want to see, isn’t that right, kids?’

  They tighten to Aunty.

  But she pushes them forward. ‘Give your mum a kiss,’ she urges. And it’s Johnny who comes, in the end: a bit shy, but with a cautious smile.

  Alice steps forward too. She doesn’t want to frighten him. He doesn’t look as though he despises her, or knows her to be bad, deep down. She’s warmed by that careful wish to please.

  And she’s pleased, in her own cautious way, when he approaches her from the side and puts his left hand round her back, in that same comradely knight’s embrace. They walk into the house side by side.

  Alice has spent the past fortnight trying to shut the past out of her mind.

  It comes back, though. It sneaks up on her when she’s alone at night. Aunty doesn’t comment on her red eyes in the shadows of the morning. Aunty just gets her busy, out supervising something, or talking to someone. It passes.

  Alice wants it to go easily with the children. But she wants it to partly because she hears Chaucer’s voice in her head, saying, ‘Make them your comfort,’ and she’s trying to follow his advice. And whenever she thinks that it starts her thinking about Chaucer, standing in his nightgown, just inside his door, on the last day she’d see him, in one of the places she could no longer go…

  Fiercely she dashes the wet from her eyes. Get a grip on yourself, she says. This is what is meant for you on this earth. Make the best of it.

  But, even now the children are here, running around, happily checking on their beds and their favourite climbing tree and Tom the cook’s missing finger, all the familiar things they’ve missed, with a Yorkshire priest vainly following them urging them to sit down quietly and read their psalters with him – even now that a part of her is entering into the merriment of it – a deeper part of her is sad.

  She wanted the children to be brought up like ladies and gentlemen. She keeps telling herself that. They should have been pages and demoiselles in a household by now. They should have…but that’s excuses, not why she’s sad. Not really.

  She can’t help herself. She feels left out. There’s a world out there, getting on without her. Chaucer, at his table, writing. Chaucer, lying in the bed she used to—

  She knows she’s brave. She knows she’ll conquer the sadness.

  She thinks she will, anyway.

  The meal’s less shy. The priest who’s come with the children has been put to bed with supper in his room: broth and bread. No point offering him meat, Aunty says derisively. He’s supposed to be poor, isn’t he? Alice knows she’ll have to do something about Aunty’s hatred of priests; she knows the children have got to be educated, after all. But she’ll do it tomorrow. She’s tired. ‘Wat’ll be here tomorrow,’ Aunty’s shouting, comfortably, over the din of the fire, and the turning of the spit. (She’s had a lamb slaughtered: ‘No point not celebrating, eh?’ as she said.) ‘Up from Kent. Brentwood Assizes in a day or two. Market, too. He never misses the fair there.’ She winks.

  ‘Why?’ says Joan with wide eyes.

  ‘I like fairs, I like jumbles and ribbons, can we go?’ says Jane.

  ‘You’ll have to ask him why,’ Aunty says. She winks again. ‘I’d say there’s a girl in it. Wouldn’t you?’

  Alice sees Johnny, who’s fifteen now, after all, and nearly as tall as she is, blush at the idea. But the girls laugh delightedly. ‘Is he in love, then?’ Jane says, trying out the word, twisting her lips over it.

  Aunty only shakes her head. ‘You ask him, love,’ she says. ‘He hasn’t told me anything.’

  Johnny’s hovering not far away from Alice, having found her a stool. He gives her another careful, solicitous look. As if she’s ill. As if he’s going to look after her.

  The children have never talked about her past life away from Gaines. They’ve never asked; she’s never said. They have no idea, beyond Yorkshire and Johnny’s one trip to London. It’s beyond their ken. Still, it must seem strange to them that she’s back for good. Especially to him, because he’s seen…the other thing. The luxury of it. The elegance. Perhaps that’s why he’s looking at her like that. Or perhaps the servants talked about it, up where they’ve been – about her disgrace.

  ‘What did you learn up there?’ she asks, fumbling for words. It hurts, in a way she doesn’t understand, that they might know of her humiliation.

  They burst into eager responses, all at once.

  ‘We sewed. For hours every day. Stuck inside. I hate sewing. I hemmed and hemmed and hemmed and I lost my thimble and my fingers are stuck full of pinpricks,’ Jane says. ‘They kept trying to make me do punching – nasty little holes. It kept going wrong though. And they wouldn’t let me on to embroidery or tapestry ‘cause I was so bad. Ever.’ She doesn’t sound as though she cares.

  ‘“Pater noster qui es in caelis sanctificetur nomen tuum adveniat regnum tuum fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra,”’ Joan lisps, without pauses, and giggles when Aunty purses her lips. Teasingly, she adds: ‘Amen!’

  Johnny says, a bit hesitantly, ‘No one really knew what to do with us. I worked with the reeve on managing the estate, a bit. And Father Thomas taught us some Latin. There was archery practice on Sundays, after church. And I went out riding with a boy from nearby, and his father taught us swordsmanship.’

  The others have stopped now. They’re nodding. He’s their spokesman, Alice can see. He’s good with words. He goes on: ‘We didn’t know what to do with ourselves at first. We couldn’t understand the way they talked, even. And we didn’t know anyone. And it was so cold. It’s cold now, up there. There was still snow on the ground when we set out last week, and it’s April. But it got better.’

  ‘And it was better than being here…’ Joan says.

  Jane finishes: ‘…with him.’

  Aunty nods, bright-eyed, and says nothing. Alice nods too.

  ‘They told us he was in France now,’ Johnny went on, giving her another of those careful looks. ‘They said you’d be going too, to be Lady of Cherbourg.’

  Alice keeps the smile on her face – she doesn’t want to disrespect their father – but she shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘I’m staying here.’

  ‘With us,’ Jane says. She turns her eyes softly on to her mother.

  They don’t say anything for a few minutes, but Alice sees Joan’s little dark head is nodding, and Johnny’s come closer to Alice’s stool. Alice can feel his warmth against her shoulder.

  ‘They said you’d been in trouble,’ Johnny says into the quiet. He’s a brave boy.

  ‘Over n
ow,’ Alice says quickly back, and then wishes she hadn’t choked him off. He’s braver than she is, perhaps. And she can see he’s been worried.

  ‘We prayed for you,’ Joan says. She gives Aunty a triumphant nod. ‘And, look, it worked, see?’

  Aunty’s over by the spit, prodding at the meat with a skewer. ‘Come on, kids,’ she calls in her rough rasp of a voice, ignoring Joan’s religious enthusiasms. ‘Let’s get this carved and inside of you.’

  They rush over to help. In the ensuing clatter of wooden platters and knives and squeals over spitting fat, with everyone giggling and bumping into each other, Alice gets up from her stool. ‘I’ll fetch the ale,’ she says. She gets down a jug from the shelf and goes towards the cool cupboard where the ale barrel is kept.

  Then everything goes round.

  From very far away, she hears the bang of metal.

  She finds herself slumped, half-lying, half-sitting, on the floor, still holding the pewter jug. It has a big dent in it. She stares at it. How did that happen? It’s a moment more before she realises someone’s saying, very sharply, ‘Are you all right?’ When she looks up, she sees them all staring down at her. Aunty bends down and scoops her up.

  ‘I must have tripped up,’ Alice says a bit shakily. She kicks at the flagstone. ‘Careful of the floor.’ She tries for a perky grin. She retreats to her stool, where Johnny brings her the first platter of food.

  The meat’s greasy. The smell of it turns her stomach. She doesn’t want it. She prods at it and pushes it around, cutting bits of gristle off.

  ‘Can I have that bit?’ Joan says, growing in confidence. The little girls begin to fight over scraps from Alice’s meal.

  Alice half closes her eyes, trying to control the nausea. Even looking down, she can feel Aunty’s eyes on her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Aunty asks, sticking her head through Alice’s bedcurtains with a lighted candle. ‘You were white as a sheet, down there.’ She clucks and peers closer. ‘Looking a bit better now, though.’

  Alice nods. She can’t speak, because she’s afraid any talk will break down the comforting certainty she’s clinging to. Aunty knows, she’s been thinking with something close to panic; Aunty delivered all the babies. Aunty remembers the last time: the weeks of bleeding, the fever, the panic. Something ruptured, something that nearly killed her. They even joked about it afterwards, deadpan Aunty-style: So God (or the Other One) nearly got you then, eh. Aunty will know, as surely as Alice knows, that she can’t have any more babies. Alice has never even worried about getting with child again. It’s never happened. Because it can’t. And it can’t be why she fainted, down there. Can it?

  Aunty gives her an even more searching look. But the old woman’s never been one to poke her nose in where she’s not wanted. When she sees the closed look on Alice’s face, she goes on, peaceably enough, ‘Coming down with something, maybe. Get a good night’s rest, eh?’

  The children creep whispering and giggling into Alice’s bed at dawn, with big eyes and the smell of outside on them, bringing her a daisy chain and a bunch of primroses in a little jug, chasing away the troubling wisps of her dreams. They sit playing clapping games in the warmth of the quilts. They have muddy feet, crossing over each other an endless kneading and squirming of limbs, like kittens in a basket. It’s clear they’re happy to be back home. Alice thinks they’re also happy to be in this bed, curled up with her. They’ve never come to her like this before. She doesn’t care about the mud, especially once Joan snuggles her head against Alice’s shoulder, and then, seeming not to notice what she’s doing, lets her arm cross over Alice’s front. She curls up with them, sleepily enjoying their talk, trying to empty her mind of everything else.

  Chaucer’s there, though. Looking through the bedcurtains, nodding his head, grinning at her, one eyebrow up. ‘There, you see,’ he’s saying. The thought’s a soft knife-blow to the heart. She raises herself on her elbow, shutting him out; dislodging Joan, too, but the little girl just adjusts her position, leaning against her mother as if she were a comfortable settle, putting a trusting hand on Alice’s shoulder.

  ‘What shall we have to eat?’ Jane’s saying.

  ‘Aunty’s ham, of course,’ Johnny says, forgetting his grown-up ways, flicking his hair back out of his shining eyes.

  Joan says, ‘With the honey.’

  For a moment, Alice feels sick at the thought of that ham, with the muslin on it to keep the flies off, with the great thick crust of white cold fat on the outside, blackened with charred honey. She lies very still. The feeling passes.

  It doesn’t mean anything, she tells herself while the children go back to chanting ‘Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip!’ in thin high voices, crossing their hands over each other’s as they clap. She hasn’t lost her appetite, not really. She’s got a great thirst for milk. And cheese. And ginger, she’d like ginger jumbles, only there is no ginger out here, of course.

  It’s only after they’ve scampered off to make mischief downstairs, and Alice throws off the bedclothes herself, feeling warmer and more cheerful than on most mornings, and jumps out, that she finds her head rushing and spinning dizzily again. Hastily, she sits down. She tells herself she’s sat down, anyway. But she knows it was more like a fall.

  It’s three days till Wat comes, only after the Brentwood Assizes, and, to the children’s disappointment, the market. He must have ridden straight there from Johnny’s in Kent, even though the straightest route to Brentwood Town is up this way, through Chafford Hundred, right past Gaines and Upminster, and it would have been no trouble to stop off here.

  When he does come, he’s got news. He’s going to get married. He’s looking less ratty and shifty than she’s seen him for years: he’s scrubbed up, in newish leggings, with his hair and beard trimmed. He swings the children round, making them whoop and wail. But she can see straight off that he’s got something on his mind. He tells her and Aunty when the kids are in bed. The girl is Nan, daughter of Tom, the baker, of Fobbing. Alice has never got so familiar with this southern end of Essex, down near Havering-atte-Bower, as she once was with the wild northern flats of her childhood, but she knows Fobbing is not far away, maybe fourteen or fifteen miles west of Gaines, one of the many farming villages of Barstable Hundred whose senior men have to attend every session of the assizes at Brentwood, to hear the King’s wishes for them, and the manorial court sessions, too, to know the will of the lords of Essex for them. That’s why he’s been hanging out at the fair that goes with the assizes, then. He’s settling down.

  She can’t believe the soppy, happy look on Wat’s face. It reminds her…

  It takes a moment to come out of the morass of other half-thoughts, in which Chaucer features, and the other black-bearded face, the Duke’s, burning.

  She squeezes Wat’s arm in hers. Aunty’s out in the pantry, clattering around. Looking for cider, Alice supposes. A celebration. ‘How strange that we’ve both ended up back here, isn’t it?’ she ventures a little wistfully. ‘As if nothing that happened out there‘ – she gestures west, back towards London and beyond – ‘was real at all.’

  His eyes are on her now, expressionless, totally attentive. His face has changed. He’s probably shocked that she’s even invoking that past. No one does. But he’s interested, she can also see; more than interested. There’s a brooding darkness in him, too, a morass of memories and crushed hopes and resentments, just waiting to come out if anyone gives him half a chance.

  His face twists. ‘No point remembering,’ he says shortly. ‘Is there? We’re here now. Best make the best of it, that’s all.’

  But Alice nags on; she can’t let go. ‘But do you think you can ever forget? Really?’ She almost wants him to say yes; to tell her that the past goes away. It might help her to learn to live in the present, if she sees that he can.

  He doesn’t. He narrows his eyes. He turns so he’s fully facing her, and puts both arms on her shoulders. ‘No,’ he says grimly. ‘Well, I never have, anyway. The past’s
still there, always, somewhere inside, isn’t it? I dream about it every night. And not just Italy, the hills, the freedom, the golden light…It smelled of rosemary, you know, wherever you went, and of thyme. But that’s not what I dream about. It’s him: Richard Lyons, the richest man in England, humiliating me. Punching me down in front of my men, disrespecting me, telling me to get lost. After all I’d done for him. I was done for after that. Shamed. But in my dream, sometimes, it comes out right. I’m chasing him down the street, down Cheapside, running so fast it feels as though I’m flying, and there’s a sword in my hand, and people cheering me on. He’s running for his life. I’m gaining on him…’

  His face sags. ‘And then I wake up.’

  Here.

  ‘I know,’ Alice says. ‘I dream about the Duke like that.’

  They look at each other, a look too deep for words. But what can they do?

  It’s only after they’ve all gone away again, leaving just Aunty, grumbling away about the priest upstairs (‘Eating us out of house and home, and for what?’ ‘For their lessons, that’s what,’ Alice answers firmly, sending the children slowly and miserably up the stairs to their books and their tutor, as Aunty mutters, ‘What do they need Latin for? Bloody priests. English is good enough for me. Always has been…’), that she has time to think about her current predicament again.

  She’s managed a dish of eggs at dinner. But she’s gone outside and been sick since. She’s still dizzy all the time too. And she’s tired, so tired; she’s had to drag herself out of bed this morning, and she dozes off at every opportunity. She sits staring into the fire in the kitchens, half listening to Aunty going through the pantry and buttery, privately counting the days since her last bleeding, back a good week before she went to London. Six weeks ago tomorrow.

  There’s no doubt. Not really.

  The flames leap and vanish.