Soon she’ll have to find the courage to tell Aunty; tell the children, too, and Wat.
She tries to think that through calmly. She’s finding it hard to force herself into admitting, even in her private thoughts, that there could be a child growing in her belly. But she has to start. It won’t be so bad, she thinks, folding her hands over her stomach, terrified of it yet protecting it at the same time. They’ll all be happy, her family. They’re good people. They love her. They’ll help her hide the baby, keep it safe; they’ll work something out, between themselves. They might tell Will it’s another of Aunty’s foundlings. They might tell Will it’s Wat’s eldest, with Nan. It’s not as if Alice hasn’t done something like this before – hidden her babies. It’s not as if she doesn’t know how. It’s not as if she isn’t a fighter.
She can’t tell Chaucer. She won’t see him again.
She lets her eyes lose focus, lost in the flames. A thought pops unbidden into her head. Lewis, she’ll call him, if, God grant, he makes it into this world; if he’s a boy. Chaucer once told her it means ‘famous warrior’, in French. He’d like that: his son a famous warrior. The name will keep the child safe; keep enemies at bay.
Because God knows he’ll need to fight well, this helpless new little life she’s going to bring into the world. He’s going to need every scrap of cunning and aggression she can instil in him. Because he won’t be raised as Will’s child. He’s not going to have the same life as Alice’s other children – who, for all the threadbare, carefree life they’re leading today, do, at least, now have money waiting for them, and a titled father, and a future, of sorts. The hard-faced Essex county leaders will wrinkle their noses at Alice, of course; that’s to be expected. But they’ll all come sniffing at the money she’s earned for her sins. So John and Joan and Jane will, at some point, she imagines, probably be asked to marry the children of one of the Sir Johns – Gildesburgh the parliamentarian, or Sewale the sheriff, or Bampton the ex-sheriff. Which isn’t quite becoming princes, but isn’t to be sniffed at.
But this little Lewis – if he lives – he’s not going to be part of the rich. He’s going to be part of the poor: of the army of disgruntled, discontented Wats and Aunties teeming through the land, listening to hedge-priests, pinning up letters on roadside trees, dreaming of rebellion and a fairer ordering of things. The long-ago world they talk about, before the Mortality; before even that. Before the lords and the priests and the lawyers carved everything up, wrote it down in French, and cut out the rest. The ancient Law of Winchester, Wat calls it; the Book of Domesday. Aunty’s hedge-priests want to bring it back. Some hope. She’ll throw her child what scraps she can, of course she will. But still, it’s clear: he’ll be one of the ones who struggle.
It clears her mind to think that. It shows her clearly what she’s been beginning to see ever since she came back here, knowing she couldn’t leave. The pieces of the puzzle in her mind shift and take on new shapes: whom she should count herself with; whom she should value. As the mother of this unborn child, she’ll be one of the have-nots again, or as good as. She’d better brush up her fighting skills, for Lewis’s sake.
‘Aunty,’ Alice calls, sitting up straighter. ‘Do you still want any help writing those letters?’
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘For now is the time to beware,’ Alice writes, in big clear letters. The child kicks inside her. Lewis. She sighs and looks up.
There’s iron in the earth, and snow on the ground outside, and Christmas is coming, but nothing stops Wat building. He’s making a farmstead down the road from here. He and his wife-to-be are going to become Alice’s tenants. Men from Fobbing have been coming, even before the summer was out and the harvest in, to help the locals and men from the roads whom Alice and Aunty have drafted in dig foundations, and fill them in with flinty mix, and put together the timber frames. Wat’s been back for good since the instant Johnny Tyler’s crops were in, down in Kent, directing the work on the new house and barns.
‘You didn’t need to go to so much trouble,’ Alice says sometimes, looking up from her letters as his men pass. ‘You could have shared our farm buildings.’
But she doesn’t really mean it. The calm of pregnancy has set in (even if it doesn’t stop her dreams), and Wat pats her swelling belly every time he passes her and the children, who gather around, softly marvelling, stroking her, feeling the unborn child kick and play inside her. Alice can’t think where the money for all this building’s come from, if it’s not from years of highway theft; but she doesn’t ask. Perhaps miracles can be achieved, if you’re just calling in favours after years of doing right by village people. Because village people are good people; they stand manfully together; they do right by each other. And anyway, if Wat’s to take her child and raise him, just down the hill, on the other side of the stream from her, she wants Wat and his wife to be living as comfortably as they can.
Besides, she likes the non-stop procession of men through Gaines. Men from Fobbing, men from Henney and the next-door village of Bocking, north Essex people Aunty knew, and has given a few weeks’ work to, and townsmen, craftsmen of one sort or another, from Brentwood. Alice likes the tramp of feet, and the smell of broth and bread, and the deep voices. It makes her feel alive.
They sing as they work, the men. They sing the songs of an England systematically robbed from the top for as long as they can remember, misruled and mismanaged for years now, decades, ever since the Mortality robbed them of innocence and justice. They hoist the joists up, from shoulder to shoulder, yelling, ‘Now lechery is without shame, and gluttony is without blame,’ and, bitterly comparing the lords’ bullying might with the peasants’ forgotten rights in this topsy-turvy state, ‘Might is right, light is night, fight is flight.’ And Alice can think of nothing that could chime more perfectly with her own quiet bitterness than that melancholy bass chorus in the morning mist.
For everyone who’s a part of this remote manor is coalescing and unifying, though not in the quiet, orderly, loving way that an earlier Alice might once have imagined. It’s their hatreds (and their guilts) that are starting to bind them together.
Everyone has his secret, and everyone’s secret fuels his anger. If Wat, for instance, almost howls with resentment against the thieving noblemen of an evening, it may be partly out of guilt that he’s concealed so much from his family-to-be about his own past thieving, whether abroad, in London, in the ports of the south, or down in Kent. It may equally be that Aunty Alison feels guilty that, by keeping the tilery up at Henney for herself, she once, long ago, stole the birthright of the baby Alice; and it may be that, even though she’s done right by Alice ever since, this is what makes her so full-throated in her rage against the lordly robbers, who take so much more than she ever did, yet never feel so much as a pang. Alice may well still feel guilty that she once quietly got Wat sacked from his post with Richard Lyons and ruined his prospects. She’s doing right by him now, so she can afford to shut out that thought. But it probably makes her more vociferous than she might otherwise have been in her condemnation of the misrule of the Duke and his latest circle of advisers.
(Strangely enough, Alice has never felt guilty for dancing into court on the take in the first place; for having, once upon a time, been right at the heart of the corruption against which these men sing their songs of anger. If it hadn’t been her, someone else would surely have come along and done the same thing, wouldn’t they? She’s only ever been a little person, she tells herself. It isn’t her fault if England started going to the dogs. It’s theirs – the thieving lords’ fault, the cunning lawyers’. The Duke’s. And they’re the ones who should pay.)
Who knows what private guilts the men from the road are hiding as they come in singing their angry songs? After a lifetime of the blithe hunt for money that the Mortality ushered in – a bribe here, an overcharging there, a swindling somewhere else; or a glib lie, or a dishonest marriage, or a quiet pocketing of some trifle – everyone probably has something on his conscience.
Even Alice’s children perhaps feel guilty (in their way) that they’ve grown up wanting to know their father, but that, when he finally appeared, they couldn’t love him; or that they aren’t fulfilling the destiny they learned up north should be theirs, to become lords and ladies. If they do have these feelings, however, they remain obscure to those around them. No one asks.
Everyone is busy, this autumn, not just with building Wat a house, but with turning their backs on their own secrets, and pasts, and private regrets and evasions and dishonesties. Everyone wants to find someone else to blame for whatever wrongs have been done in the past. They tell themselves, and each other, that they’re hunting for justice. They tell themselves they want the truth.
Truth is the old way. Truth dates back to the time when your word was your bond, and you didn’t need papers in a language you couldn’t understand to compel you to act honestly. Truth is what governed England in the time of Alfred, in the days of Winchester: truth, and the men of the village. Englishmen could live by truth again, if there was nothing, and no one, standing in their way.
Truth is more necessary than ever, because confusions and corruptions are growing so fast. Even God has become doubtful, for the Church of Rome has split in two. There’s a mad pope in Rome, and a French pope in Avignon, and, even though the English acknowledge the mad Roman pope, because he’s not French, no one knows who really has God’s spiritual authority, or should receive the tithes and taxes taken for the Church; the belief is seeping into every heart that neither of these false foreign popes is the man.
As for the war that’s ruining England, back in the spring, at the last Parliament, the King promised not to bring out his begging bowl again for at least another eighteen months. But now there’s more talk of a French invasion, and another.
Parliament being called, this November, up at Northampton (the Duke being too unpopular to dare to try calling the legislature to London). The begging bowl’s out again. And the lords will soon be wanting the people to pay again.
‘Mam,’ Johnny says.
Alice is humming one of the workmen’s angry songs, as softly as a lullaby, as she writes. His voice, still treble, most of the time, breaks through hers.
‘Mm,’ she answers, not looking up.
‘Mam, not that song again,’ Johnny says plaintively. ‘Please.’
She looks up.
He’s sitting on the hearthstone, with his nearly mannish bony knees up against his chin, and his arms wrapped round his legs. He’s been sitting there for hours, she realises. And, for all his new height, he’s the picture of childish dejection.
The line she’s been repeating goes ‘envy reigneth with trea-son, and sloth is always in sea-son.’ It’s true, she’s had it on her mind all day. She may have been singing it all day. That might be annoying, if you were in a mood to be annoyed.
‘What’s up with you?’ she says, not especially sympathetically.
‘Bored,’ he says. ‘Bored of that song. Bored of…oh, everything.’ Unexpectedly, his eyes fill with baby tears. Furiously he blinks them away.
‘Well, go and do something,’ she says carelessly. ‘Help Wat’s men or something.’
‘Do a bit more singing out there, you mean?’ Johnny says, and she can hear anger in his voice now. ‘And bang at a bit of wood?’
She looks curiously at him. She can’t think what’s got into him.
‘You could write a letter for me,’ she says, trying to please. ‘If you like.’
She’s taken over Aunty’s letter-writing, and made the old woman’s scrawls into art. These letters are supposed to be read by travellers, or men in taverns, or men outside churches. They don’t have a specific instruction to deliver, a ‘go here’ or ‘do that’. They offer only general inspiration. They say: ‘Be angry’, or ‘Be aware’, or just ‘Beware’.
Alice addresses the letters to, and signs them from, the working men whose discontents she’s tapping: Piers Plowman, Jack Trueman, Jack Carter, Jack Miller, John Nameless. Sometimes she allows herself to imagine Chaucer, with secret laughter in his eyes, writing at his own table, as she turns out her vague, but stirring, poems to the nobility of the sons of earth, with God at their back.
Jakke Trewman giveth you to understande that falsnes and gyle have regned to long, and trewthe has bene sette under a lokke, and falsnes regneth.
Trewthe shal help you, she writes, day after day.
Be ware or be woeful…
Now is the tyme.
Usually Johnny enjoys all this. At least she thinks he does, because he’s hardly left his mother’s side in weeks and months, except when she sends him out to pin her letters on trees on the highway. Usually he comes back in, pink-faced and exhilarated, chanting, ‘Jack the Miller grinds small, small, small!’ And he laughs in delight when she (or someone else) calls back the answering catchphrase: ‘The King’s son of Heaven shall pay for all!’
But not today. Even the offer of writing his own letter hasn’t cheered him up this time. He just shakes his head, and slumps lower against his knees.
‘Well, do you want to read to me?’ she asks in the end.
Perhaps it’s just since the priest went last week that Johnny’s got so fractious. It hasn’t taken long for Aunty to win the campaign she was waging against the priest teaching the kids Latin, the language of ‘clerks and con-men’, as Aunty puts it (she has equally scathing things to say about French, the language of ‘liars and lawyers’). What finally did for the scared little priest was coming into the laundry and finding Aunty pinching diamond marks into the pleats of his sheets. She’d been saying, for weeks, with grim satisfaction and nasty little nods, ‘Diamonds…the mark of death, they say.’ He stared at her, open-mouthed. He was gone by dawn.
If Alice is aware that it was illogical for her to have let the priest go and the children’s education stop – to be saying goodbye to the world of the elite, and turning her face against the Gildesburghs and the Bamptons and the Sewales, where her children’s best prospects lie, while embracing the interests of the angry men of the fields and the road, and to be bringing the children whose advancement she’s claimed all her life to be working for back into the rustic hardscrabble of Essex – she hasn’t let the thought in. She hasn’t found a new tutor. She’s done with priests, she thinks. Aunty was right.
But now, for a moment, she wonders whether she hasn’t made a mistake.
‘Come on,’ she says with a little laugh, trying to jolly his gloom away. ‘Tell me. What’s biting you?’
He takes a deep breath. He lifts his chin off his knees. ‘I wish you’d leave off those letters, that’s all,’ he says.
Then he stops, and bites his lip, and looks down.
She stares. ‘But why?’ she says, in bafflement. ‘I thought you liked…’
Timidly, he looks back up, as if he’s been expecting her to sound crosser, and is trying to work out whether to trust her. ‘I just don’t see why you’d want to write them,’ he finally confides in a rush. ‘Or sing those songs.’ There’s a pleading softness on his face now that almost hurts her, it’s so transparently loving. ‘Because we’re not serfs, are we? You’re the Lady of Gaines. And I’m a knight. And I’m not a bad swordsman, and I was doing all right at my French, and Latin, till Aunty…’ He blinks again, and hurries on. ‘I mean, do we actually want the Law of Winchester, mam? You and me? Isn’t all that just what old village men go on about when they’re drunk?’
‘Oh, Johnny,’ she says.
What he’s just said is honest enough to make her uncomfortable, though she’s not going to show him that. Later, she thinks, she’ll talk to him about how the greatest lords – she may even say the Duke’s name – think they can take and take and no one will resist; and explain that this is what makes it important to stand together and show the Duke when enough is enough. But for now the best she can manage is a shrug she does her best to make nonchalant. She says, ‘It’s more complicated than you realise,’ and, ‘You’re too young to und
erstand it all yet.’ Appeasingly, she smiles. But she isn’t really surprised when he unfolds himself to his full scrawny height, gives her a disappointed look, and mooches out.
‘They’re talking about a new poll tax,’ Wat says, back from Brentwood market, with bags of dowels and big eyes. ‘In the Parliament.’
Aunty sniffs. She’s stepped out of the kitchen, as soon as she heard the clop of hoofs, to meet him. She’s left the door ajar. Alice is inside, listening.
‘Well, we’ve been there before,’ she says with calm hatred. ‘Those bloody swine.’
Everyone in Essex is following the Parliament, even though it’s so far away. The Speaker of the Commons this time is their own county’s man: Sir John Gildesburgh. And everyone’s afraid of a new tax. So news travels.
‘No,’ Wat says, urgently. ‘This isn’t like before. They want eight times as much next year as they got last time. They want £160,000. That’s five groats a head.’
The carpenters stop their door-hanging. The tapping falls silent at the windows. The yard goes quiet as all the peasant freemen start calculating how they can possibly pay out an extra two or three weeks’ wages for every person in their household to the King, next year, on top of the ten per cent of their income they already pay the Church, and as well as the great tithes – two-thirds of the value of their crops and cattle – and the lesser tithes on everything else from wool to flax to leeks to apples to cheese to chickens to bees and honey. Half of them have houses stuffed with waifs and strays: war widows, old people, grown-up children who can’t afford to marry. They’ll have to stump up the same amount for each and every one of them. They live on barley bread and cheese as it is. Their worsteds are in rags. Here at Gaines is the only place they ever sniff meat.
If anyone in this yard is reassured by anything, in this bleak moment, it’s the knowledge that at least they’re not serfs. It will be even worse for the serfs, who pay even more, out of even less, to the lords who own them.
Vanora Bennett Page 48
