Vanora Bennett

by The People's Queen (v5)

  Doubtfully, Aunty shakes her head. But she doesn’t seem able to speak to Mary Sewale. ‘Janey, Joanie,’ she croaks, ignoring the woman and picking up the baby. ‘Get me a bucket and a cloth. Move.’

  The baby only stirs once Aunty’s started dabbing away at the encrusted dirt with the warm water. Once clean, Aunty picks it – her – up, leaving the swaddling bands, streaked with glistening mucus and liquid brown, on the table, and holds the bluish scrap of flesh close. ‘Cold as ice,’ she says, to no one in particular, as the baby starts to whimper.

  At the first gurgle from the child, Mary Sewale sits down, rather suddenly, on the table. But Johnny’s at her side, guiding her solicitously back down to the safer perch of the bench.

  It’s only now that Alice sees what she can do. What she must do, if she wants Johnny, who’s avoiding her gaze, as if he holds her personally responsible for every outrage committed by the men, to forgive her for her part in starting this.

  With a pang, she realises, that’s all she does want from life. Her world, which once encompassed kings and palaces, has shrunk to no more than the size and shape and urgency of that desire. It’s simple; it may always have been this simple, if only she’d realised. She wants her son to be able to look at her again with that innocent look that goes beyond trust. That’s enough. Would be enough. If it’s not too late…if she hasn’t spoiled everything, for ever.

  I didn’t know, a voice inside her implores Johnny. I told them not to hurt anyone. Don’t blame me for this.

  But she knows that’s not good enough. Not any more. Not for these accusing wraiths, standing so quietly around her kitchen, staring. Not for her son.

  Hastily, she passes little Lewis to Janey, who’s hovering beside her.

  ‘Give that baby here,’ she says, turning to Aunty and holding her arms out for the Sewale infant. It’s suddenly blindingly obvious. Mistress Sewale’s been scared out of her wits, running for her life. She’ll have no milk.

  As Alice puts the small stranger to her breast, feeling the unfamiliar ways of this new body, and the chill in those miserable little limbs, she looks up, almost humbly, over her shoulder, at Johnny.

  Below her the baby starts searching excitedly for the nipple; finding it, she closes her eyes and clings on, sucking painfully for all she’s worth.

  Johnny’s standing beside Mistress Sewale, who’s staring at her baby with painful urgency now, willing her to take milk and live, just beginning to believe she might. For the first time in days, Johnny’s actually looking straight at Alice. And a bit, just a bit, of trust, or hope, or something close, is back in his eyes.

  Doubtfully, Johnny whispers: ‘This isn’t what you wanted, is it, mam? This isn’t what you meant…them…to do?’

  It’s evening. The barns are filling up fast. Johnny’s spent half the day carrying bedding and water and food around the barns with his sisters, as more bedraggled female strangers, with smashed faces and slashed clothes and horror stories, have crept out of the woods. All of them wives, or widows, or children, or servants of one or another of the officials Wat was going to put out of action. We heard it was quiet here, they say, before they start weeping. Aunty’s stone-faced with them, and all but silent in front of Alice and Johnny and the girls, too; she senses they’ve shifted ground, and doesn’t want to hear. But she’s sweet with the kids, at least; all those staring-eyed, slack-jawed, silent gentry children whose noses are running, and whose heads are splitting, and who can’t sleep without screaming.

  It’s the first time all day that Alice and Johnny have had a moment to speak.

  Johnny looks so grown-up, Alice thinks, yearning to take this burden off his shoulders, the burden she’s created. He looks so tired.

  ‘I had no idea, no idea,’ Alice says weakly, shaking her head. ‘They’ve all gone mad.’

  It’s true, in a way. She really can’t imagine Wat or his men doing the terrible, bloody things she’s heard the women talk about today. She wishes, now – with desperate, guilty sincerity – that she’d never egged him on.

  But it’s a lie, too, that she had no idea. She knows that, too, even as Johnny sighs his resigned acceptance and puts a hesitant hand on her arm. However much she now wishes she’d never given Wat any of that clever-clever advice about destroying every last trace of tax paperwork and the top half-dozen men in each county, she did say those things. She did egg him on. She just never thought how it would actually be. She’s guilty of everything that’s happening, because she should have known it would end like this, in horror. She’s gone too far, again, despite all those resolutions she made at Chaucer’s, in that other life. Chosen the wrong side, the wrong friends; damaged her children and herself. And it’s too late for regrets.

  FORTY

  ‘We must attack,’ says Mayor Walworth.

  The lords around the golden-haired boy-King are slumped, hunched, bundles of fear. But there’s nothing soft about Walworth’s pale eyes. They flash like steel.

  The rebels have settled down for the night, most of them, right outside the Tower, where this Council meeting is being held, on St Katherine’s Square. You can hear the catcalls and the drunken songs and the demands through the window. They want to know what the Chancellor’s been spending the money on for the past five years. They want to see the King. Or else.

  Walworth raises his voice over the shouts from outside. ‘We wait till midnight,’ he says. ‘We come out down four different streets. We attack. They’re drunk now. They’ll be asleep. And there’s scarcely one in twenty of them with a proper weapon. We slaughter the whole sixty thousand of them, like pigs.’

  Walworth’s supposed to be from the servile classes; he’s supposed to fear blood. But he has interests to protect, no less than any lord, and a family, and pride. He’s standing tall, strung tight as a bowstring – an avenging angel. He’s the only one.

  The boy with the golden hair, whom they’re all addressing, looks interested. But the assembled lords, the nation’s experienced fighting arm, the muscle and brawn and sinew of England, only mumble and shake their heads. Archbishop Sudbury is no longer the Chancellor; he’s resigned. But he’s in fear of his life now he’s trapped here, surrounded by those men who want his head. His skin is grey with fear; his hands tremble. Sir Robert Hales, the treasurer, so fine and bold before, is paralysed too. But then he’s another one whose blood the crowd wants.

  ‘Sire, if you can appease them by fair words, that would be the better course,’ advises the Earl of Salisbury uneasily. He can’t meet Walworth’s eyes.

  The boy isn’t sure. He glances questioningly at the Mayor. Young Richard has been up a turret this evening, observing the revellers. He can’t see why he couldn’t go and talk to them. He can’t really see, either, why he shouldn’t go and kill them now. Nor does he especially trust Salisbury, that dried-up old stick, whom his mother always laughs at; whom his mother married, for a while, long ago, then left when her first husband Thomas Holland reappeared.

  But Salisbury has a long and glorious past in France. He was at Poitiers. He helped negotiate Brétigny. He’s the senior soldier here, and a nobleman. He should know best – better than a merchant, anyway. Still, the King would like Walworth to go on arguing for attack. ‘Walworth?’ he says. His voice squeaks between man and child. Perhaps it’s the squeak that does it.

  Walworth thins his lips and bows. ‘Very well,’ he says coldly. ‘If you command it, sire, I will remain inactive.’

  So the criers go out at first light, telling whoever wants to know that the King will ride out of London to Mile End fields, and there grant the requests of anyone who wishes to speak to him. Everyone between the ages of fifteen and sixty must leave the City to meet the King there at seven of the bell.

  It starts well. The City begins to empty out as the innocents still excited by a meeting with the King march back east, under Aldgate and into the fields. The King rides out and meets the simple souls.

  But this is not the happy ending it might seem, for n
ot everyone has left London for the Mile End meeting.

  Wat Tyler and John Ball are among those who don’t bother. They have bigger fish to fry.

  Within an hour of the King leaving they’re inside the Tower. Their men are tousling the hair of the defeated, dejected guards, and jumping on Princess Joan’s bed, and raiding the larders, and hunting down enemies.

  They’re dragging out poor old Archbishop Sudbury from his chapel, protesting, in his thin goaty voice, that he’s done nothing wrong, right to the block, and bashing off his head with an axe blunted from too much use on metal yesterday. The first of eight blows only wounds his neck. He puts up his hand to feel the wound. He says: The hand of God. The second blow cuts off his fingers.

  Sir Robert Hales’ head is chopped off too; that’s Hob Robber gone. They find the Duke of Lancaster’s physician, a Brother William, and behead him – a token of intent for when they find the Duke himself.

  Only a few nobles are lucky. The Duke’s son, Henry of Derby, dresses up as a soldier and gets away with his life. Princess Joan is kissed by a drunk rebel and faints. But she manages to get away by boat, and makes it to the Royal Wardrobe building right at the other end of the City shoreline before collapsing.

  Chaucer doesn’t bother going to Mile End either.

  He ventures out once, at dawn, to check on St Helen’s. Five minutes there, five minutes back. All quiet. All safe.

  In hope, he watches the crowd stream out for their seven o’clock meeting with the King, enjoying the rhythm of those feet thudding through the gate and away. During a long and wakeful night, he’s almost decided several times that he must go to Walworth and volunteer to serve with him against the rebels. But that resolution has left him too sick with fear to sleep. Only the news, at sunrise, of the royal meeting unglues his eyes and cleanses him of the scratchy foreboding that’s been gripping his body. Perhaps, if that goes well, he won’t need…

  An hour or so later, with foreboding, he watches many of the rebels stream back.

  And then the bloodletting that the King has accidentally permitted begins.

  Chaucer doesn’t see a lot of it, at first, because he doesn’t, after all, arm himself and rush out to find Walworth. The dread comes back. He stays at home, listening. Getting the lie of the land before venturing out, he tells himself (though he knows, really, that he’s just hiding from his duty).

  At least, from the safety of his window, he hears everything. Everyone does. There are whispers from window to window, for hours more, explaining the latest screams and crashes, the latest plumes of smoke.

  There’s a mob wandering around with heads on sticks, gone Charing way, towards Westminster. They’ve nailed Sudbury’s red mitre on to his head.

  They’re allowed, some people whisper. The King’s agreed: Sudbury was a traitor. Hales too. No, whisper others; it’s the peasants who are the traitors. No one knows who’s right and wrong any more. Even the King, hiding out at the Royal Wardrobe with his mother, watching the disembodied heads bob past, and the chanting rebels, may not be sure.

  Then it gets too confused. No one can understand the mobs any more. It’s just wild cries, and draggings, and the crashing of glass. The windows of Aldgate Street bang shut. The talk stops.

  All the same, Chaucer steels himself to go out again at midday to make sure Elizabeth is safe. And, as soon as he’s out, he feels strangely calmer. Just going into the street, being active, is less terrifying than sitting inside, alone, feeling a victim, listening, watching…waiting.

  Yet his heart is still beating many times faster and louder than usual. The atmosphere of threat is palpable. First it’s too quiet, just him walking over broken glass, in sinister sunlight, through the no man’s land of a city without law. And suddenly, without warning, it’s too noisy: screams, a torrent of arms and shouts and blows. These aren’t even the big fights; these are private questions: a hasty settling of scores, feuds, and business problems, while no one’s paying attention. A smash and grab, netting a silver candlestick or cup. Moments to be forgotten with all speed, afterwards.

  Within minutes of venturing out, for instance, Chaucer comes across a band of burly Kentishmen obeying the orders of Sir Robert Allen, the fishmonger: evicting another younger fishmonger. ‘My house,’ Allen’s yelling as the man’s dragged kicking out of the door, with pots and pans hurtling after him and a wife still screaming fit to bust somewhere inside. There’s a torn-up lease at Allen’s feet. ‘Not yours. Don’t forget it. And don’t come back.’

  Human nature at its worst, Chaucer thinks wryly. But he’s almost cheered by the familiar, petty sight confronting him. This is just everyday spite and opportunism, not the terrifying work of the Devil that the incomers seem to be bent on. Still, he makes himself very small. He knows Allen won’t want anyone to have seen him do this.

  On Bishopsgate, once he’s checked that the gates of St Helen’s are still stoutly barred and the walls unattacked, Chaucer breathes so much more easily that he decides not to go straight home.

  The flicker of courage he’s found burning in himself is strangely exhilarating. He doesn’t want to wall himself in again just yet. He’s happier out here, where there’s no time or space to think; where everything is action, one foot in front of the other. Perhaps he will, after all, try and find Walworth; it’s easier to be brave out here than cowering at home. But where? Walworth will be with the King. And, though nothing is certain any more, the last Chaucer heard, from his window, was that the King was at the Royal Wardrobe, right across the City. As he thinks, he’s already sneaking off west down Catte Street, across Broad Street and Coleman Street and Chepe Wards, towards Cheapside, the market zone, the centre of everything, flattening himself against walls and in doorways, just in case, whenever he hears the sound of running, or the smash of wood and glass that signals looters.

  It’s only after he’s branched off Catte Street down past the mercers’ mansions of Milk Street, thinking that if all goes on being relatively quiet he might brave the conduit on Cheapside and drink some water – he’s as dry as a desert – that he sees the real violence consuming the City today.

  There are excited screams up ahead, where Milk Street meets Cheapside, and the great rumble of a crowd.

  It’s almost welcome, the sound of people, after all his tiptoeing around. And Chaucer’s confident enough by now of his ability to melt back into the brickwork to keep moving forward.

  He’s safe enough, he realises, as he inches up. They’re all too busy shouting to take any notice of him. It’s deafening, on Cheapside.

  It takes him a minute to see what’s going on through the shifting of shoulders. The men are dragging victims up from Bread Street, in grand Vintry Ward, on the south of Cheapside. The cobbles and slabs of Cheapside are dark and glistening. There’s a pile of bodies, lying still, nearby.

  They have no heads, he realises with a sudden rush of nausea. The bodies end in brown and red at the neck. Separately, there are heads staring out, dead-eyed, wild-haired, from underfoot, between people’s legs, where they’ve rolled.

  They’re executing them, here. Chaucer hears the thwack of metal through flesh…a groan…though it might be just his imagination. He doesn’t really know, any more, what he’s hearing, and what he’s just making up.

  ‘Who,’ he whispers, or maybe shouts, at the white-faced woman peeping out from a half-shuttered window upstairs. She’s got the view.

  ‘Flemings,’ she mouths back.

  He knows. He breathes out. Then it’s just another bit of private score-settling, he thinks; violence against Flemings always is, in London. The Flemish merchant families are too well-off, and too favoured by the Crown, to be safe in the City. No wonder the London mob’s gone hunting them down in Vintry Ward. They set fire to Walworth’s brothel in Southwark this morning, too; he’s heard that. They chased the Flemish tarts into the fishponds.

  It’s horrible, this; nauseating. Just the smell of the blood is turning his stomach. He’ll go home in a minute
. He’s had enough. But at least, he reassures himself, it’s the same stuff: just Londoners released from the rule of law into bloody Carnival, giving free rein to their most savage instincts.

  ‘Thirty-five of them, hiding,’ the woman shouts, and suddenly, because the noise is shifting, he can hear the roughness of her voice. ‘In St Martin in the Vintry, rich bastards.’

  She doesn’t say more. She’s seen something Chaucer can’t, from up there. She turns, as if her head’s been pulled by an invisible string. At the same time, a murmur goes up across the bloody junction, which swells to a roar.

  Chaucer’s eyes swivel towards the sound too.

  The crowd’s yelling, ‘Wat! Wat! Wat!’ and for a moment, as it shifts and sways, a stringy bareheaded man with his hair all over the place and wild eyes comes into view, muscling a prisoner twice his size forward towards the block, pulling him by his beard. The victim’s face is blackened and swollen over what were once fine merchant clothes: a long gown with some sort of damask figuring. He’s hopping on one leg, dragging the other painfully behind him.

  Then the crowd tightens again, and the vision is lost.

  Chaucer looks up. So that’s Wat Tyler, and some of this crowd must be Essex men. But seeing the rebel leader he’s heard so much about with his own eyes isn’t the reason the knot in his stomach is tightening. Something’s bubbling up inside – some combination of names and memories. He can’t quite grasp it, yet. But it’s already making him feel so sick with dread that he thinks he might vomit.

  ‘Lyons,’ the woman mouths down at him, jerking her head towards the centre of the crowd.