The King’s Concubine: A Novel of Alice Perrers (5 page)

“No!” The terrible image drove me to cry out as if I had been pricked on the arm with one of Countess Joan’s well-sharpened pens. “Take me with you!” I pleaded. “I have served you well. I would serve you again, at Court.” I almost snatched at her gold-embroidered sleeve.

“I think not.” She did not even bother to look at me.

“But I would escape from here.” I had never said it aloud before, never put it into words. How despairing it sounded. How hopeless, but in that moment I was overwhelmed by the enormity of all that I lacked, and all that I might become if I could only encompass it.

“Escape? And how would you live?” An echo of Sister Goda’s words that were like a knife against my heart. “Without resources you would need a husband. Unless you would be a whore. A chancy life, short and brutish. Not one I would recommend. Better to be a nun.” She strode from the room, out into the courtyard, where she settled herself in her litter, and as I reached to deposit the monkey on the cushions and close the curtains, my services for her complete, I heard her final condemnation. “You’ll never be anything of value in life. So turn your mind from it.” Then with a glinting smile she clicked her fingers at her tire-woman. “Give her the Barbary, Marian. I expect it will give her some distraction—and I begin to find it a nuisance.…”

And the creature was thrust out of the litter, back into my arms.

Indignation rose hot and slick in my throat. I considered mimicking the gesture I had seen the louts in the town employ when challenged by their elders and betters, graphic and disgracefully expressive in its lewdness, and would have done so if Sister Goda’s eye had not fallen on me. As it was, I curtsied in a fine parody of deference, clutching the monkey—that scrabbled and fussed with no notion of its abandonment—to my flat chest.

Thus in a cloud of dust Countess Joan was gone with her dogs and hawk and all her unsettling influences. It was as if she had never set her pretty feet on the cold convent paving for even an hour, much less three weeks. It was like the end of a dream with the coming of day, when the light shatters the bright pictures. Fair Joan was gone to snare her prince at Westminster and I would never meet her again.

I would soon forget her. She meant as little to me as I to her.

But I did not forget! Countess Joan had applied a flame to my imagination. When it burned so fiercely that it was almost a physical hurt, I wished with all my heart I could quench it, but the fire never left me, and still it smolders, even today, when I have achieved more than I could ever have dreamed of. The venal hand of ambition had fallen on me, grasping my shoulder with a death grip of lethal strength, and refused to release me.

I am worth more than this,
I determined as I knelt with the sisters at Compline.
I
will
be of value! I
will
make something of my life!

I lost the Book of Hours, of course. Its value was far too great for such a creature as I was. It was taken from me. As for the monkey, Mother Abbess ordered it to be taken to the Infirmary and locked in a cellar. I never saw it again.

Considering its propensity to bite, I was not sorry.

Chapter Two

M
y crude, impassioned plea to persuade Countess Joan to be the instrument of my escape from the Abbey had, I was compelled to admit, failed miserably. When I achieved it, it was not by my own instigation. It came as a lightning bolt from heaven.

“Put this on. And this. Take this. Be at the Abbey gate in half an hour.”

The garments were thrust into my arms by Sister Matilda, Mother Abbess’s chaplain.

“Why, Sister?”

“Do as you’re told!”

I had been given a thin woolen kirtle, its color unrecognizable from much washing, and a long sleeveless overgown in a dense brown, reminiscent of the sludge that collected on the riverbank after stormy weather. It too had seen better days on someone else’s back, and was far too short, exhibiting, as I had feared, my ankles. As I scratched indelicately, a more immediate fear bloomed. I had inherited the fleas as well as the garments. A hood of an indeterminate gray completed the whole.

But why? Was I being sent on an errand? Anticipation shivered over my skin. Even if it was for only an hour, I felt the excitement of
escape. The days of my transformation from novice to nun loomed, like the noxious, overflowing contents of the town drain after heavy rainfall.

“Where am I going?” I asked the wagon master to whom I was directed, a dour man with a bad head cold and an overpowering smell of rancid wool. Sister Faith, keeper of the Abbey gate, had done nothing but point in his direction and close the door against me. The soft snick of the latch, with me on the outside, was far sweeter than any singing of the Angelus.

“Where I’m instructed to take you,” he growled, spitting into a gutter already swimming with filth and detritus from the day’s market dealings.

“And where is that?” I stood beside a wagon loaded with bales of wool to be transported to London.

“To the house of Janyn Perrers.”

“Who is he?”

“A man of means.” The wagon master hawked and spat. “On the backs of those who have nothing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pawnbroker. Moneylender.” He sneered. “Bloodsuckers to a man. Leeches who’ll drain you dry.”

“Is he English?” The name did not seem so.

“A foreign bastard! From Lombardy! All grasping buggers are from Lombardy.”

“And where does he live?”

“London.”

He sniffed and spat again. He was a man of few words and no manners, but at least I now knew more than I had. So this was not an errand of an hour’s duration, but something quite different. Anticipation blazed into exhilaration, racing through me like the fever that had laid the Abbey low the previous year.

“Pull me up, then,” I ordered.

“Tha’s a feisty moppet, and no mistake!” he said, but he grasped my hand in his enormous one and hauled me up onto the bales, where I settled myself as well as I could.

“Why?” I asked when the oxen lumbered forward. The wagon master
grunted, head cocked. “Why am I going to this man’s house? Does he know I am coming?”

He shrugged. “Is tha’ to ask questions all the road to London?”

“But I want to know…!” Happiness tingled through me, to my fingertips.

“God help th’man who weds you, mistress.…”

“I’m not going to be married! I have it on authority that no one will have me.”

“And why’s that, then?”

“Too ugly!”

“God help you, mistress. A man don’t need to look too often at the wench he weds.”

I did not care. I tossed my head.
London!
“If I wed, my husband will look at me.”

“Feisty!”

He cracked his whip over the heads of the oxen to end the conversation, leaving me to try to fill in the spaces. To my mind there was only one possible reason for my joining the household of this Janyn Perrers, moneylender: to work as a maidservant. My services had been bought. Enough gold had changed hands to encourage Mother Abbess to part with her impoverished novice, who would bring nothing of fame or monetary value to the Abbey. As the wagon jolted and swayed, I imagined the request that had been made.

A strong, hardworking, biddable girl to help run the house.

I hoped Mother Abbess had not perjured herself.

I twitched and shuffled, impatient with every slow step of the oxen.

“What is London like?” I asked.

The wagon master swigged ale from a leather bottle as if he did not hear. I sighed and gave up. I did not care. I was going to
London
. The name bubbled through my blood as I clung to the lumbering wagon. Freedom was as sweet and heady as fine wine.

The noisome, overcrowded squalor of London shocked me. The environs of Barking Abbey, bustling as they might be on market day, had not prepared me for the crowds, the perpetual racket, the stench of
humanity packed so close together. But equally the city fascinated me: I did not know where to look next. At close-set houses in streets barely wider than the wagon, where upper stories leaned drunkenly to embrace one another, blocking out the sky. At shop frontages that displayed the wares, at women who paraded in bright colors. At scruffy urchins and bold prostitutes who carried on a different business in the rank courts and passageways. It was a new world, both frightening and seductive: I stared and gawped, as naive as any child from the country.

“Here’s where you get off.”

The wagon lurched and I was set down, directed by a filthy finger that pointed at my destination, a narrow house taking up no space at all, but rising above my head in three stories. I picked my way through the mess of offal and waste in the gutters to the door. Was this the one? It did not seem to be the house of a man of means. I knocked.

A woman, far taller than I, thin as a willow lath with her hair scraped into a pair of metallic cylindrical cauls on either side of her gaunt face, as if she were encased in a cage, opened it. “Well?”

“Is this the house of Janyn Perrers?”

“What’s it to you?”

Her gaze flicked over me, briefly. She made to close the door. Forsooth, I could not blame her: I saw myself through her eyes. My borrowed overgown had collected a multitude of creases and any amount of woolen fiber. I was not an attractive object. But this was where I had been sent, where I was expected. I would not have the door shut in my face.

“I have been sent!” I said, slapping my palm boldly against the wood.

“What do you want?”

“I am Alice,” I said, remembering, at last, to curtsy.

“If you’re begging, I’ll take my brush to you.…”

“I’m sent by the nuns at the Abbey,” I stated with a confidence I did not feel.

The revulsion in her stare deepened, and the woman’s lips twisted like a hank of rope. “So you’re the girl. Are you the best they could manage?” She flapped her hand when I opened my mouth to reply that yes, I supposed I was the best they could offer, since I was the only
novice. “Never mind. You’re here now, so we’ll make the best of it. But in future you’ll use the door at the back beside the privy.”

And that was that.

I had become part of a new household.

And what an uneasy household it was. Even I, with no experience of such, was aware of the tensions from the moment I set my feet over the threshold.

Janyn Perrers: master of the house, pawnbroker, moneylender, and bloodsucker. His appearance did not suggest a rapacious man, but then, as I rapidly learned, it was not his word that was the law within his four walls. Tall and stooped, with not an ounce of spare flesh on his frame, and a foreign slur to his English usage, he spoke only when he had to, and then not greatly. In his business dealings he was unnervingly painstaking. Totally absorbed, he lived and breathed the acquisition and lending at extortionate rates of gold and silver coin. His face might have been kindly, if not for the deep grooves and hollow cheeks more reminiscent of a death’s head. His hair, or lack of, some few greasy wisps around his neck, gave him the appearance of a well-polished egg when he removed his felt cap. That was rare, as if he regretted his loss. I could not guess his age, but he seemed very old to me, with his uneven gait and faded eyes. His fingers were always stained with ink, his mouth too when he forgot and chewed his pen.

He nodded to me when I served supper, placing the dishes carefully on the table before him: It was the only sign that he noted a new addition to his household. This was the man who now employed me and would govern my future.

The power in the house rested on the shoulders of Damiata Perrers, the sister, who had made my lack of welcome patently clear. The Signora. There was no kindness in her face. She was the strength, the firm grip on the reins, the imposer of punishment on those who displeased her. Nothing happened within that house without her knowledge or permission.

There was a boy to haul and carry and clean the privy, a lad who said little and thought less. He led a miserable existence, but his face
was closed to any offers of communication. He gobbled his food with filthy fingers and bolted back to his own pursuits in the nether regions of the house. I didn’t learn his name.

Then there was Master William Greseley, who was and was not of the household, since he spread his services farther afield, an interesting man who attracted my attention but ignored me with a remarkable determination. He was a clerk, a clever individual with black hair and brows, sharp features much like a rat, and a pale face as if he never saw the light of day, a man with as little emotion about him as one of the flounders brought home by Signora Damiata on market day. He ate and slept and noted down the business of the day. Ink might stain Master Perrers’s fingers, but I swore that it ran in Master Greseley’s veins. He wrote a fine hand and could guide a quill up and down the columns of figures, counting with impressive acumen. He disregarded me to the same extent that he was deaf to the vermin that scuttled across the floor of the room in which he kept the books and ledgers of money lent and reclaimed. I did not like him. There was a coldness to him that I found unpalatable.

And then there was me. The maidservant who undertook all the work not assigned to the boy. And some that was.

Thus my first introduction to the Perrers family. And since it was a good score of miles from Barking Abbey, it was not beyond my tolerance.

“
God help th’man who weds you, mistress…!”

“I’m not going to be married!”

My vigorous assertion returned to mock me. Within a sennight I found myself exchanging vows at the church door.

Given the tone of her language, Signora Damiata was as astonished as I, and brutally forthright when I was summoned to join brother and sister in the parlor at the rear of the house, where, by the expression on the lady’s face, Master Perrers had just broken the news of his intent.

“Blessed Mary! Why marry?” she demanded. “You have a son, an heir, learning the family business in Lombardy. I keep your house. You want a wife at your age?” Her accent grew stronger, the syllables hissing over one another.