The People's Queen (13 page)

Alice is not always perfectly statesmanlike. The flash of rage she's having that her idea has had such a disappointing response is too vivid to allow measured self-criticism. She doesn't ask herself questions such as: Was this, really, the best moment? Is Edward truly in a state to take in talk of debt today?

Instead, she thinks: Is this all I am to him, after all these years? Someone whose voice he can just ignore? A servant, a nurse, a bloody pair of hands?

Then, mastering herself a little, she moves on to: Well, if he doesn't want to listen, it's not the end of the world. He'd agree all right if he had a sensible bone left in his body. He'd be jumping at the idea.

Finally, taking a deep breath, Alice tells herself that it's up to her to help him make the right decision.

She says, briskly rushing him on, in tones that suggest she'll brook no nonsense, 'Lord Latimer agrees with you - that taking out this loan could be the solution to several problems at the same time.'

Edward answers, 'Latimer...a good man, Latimer. Very good.' But he sounds a little fretful now. He's looking around. He's beginning to understand that the massage is over, the bandage tied. There'll be no more till the morning.

That's assent enough, Alice judges. There's no need to feel exasperated with him. He's agreed.

'You're tired...we'll get you into bed,' she says, much more gently. He nods. His eyes are drooping - a child deprived of a treat.

She heaves him up. He stands, helpless, with his arm limp over her shoulder. When she begins to walk, in tiny steps, he shuffles along with her to the bed.

'So shall I tell Latimer to prepare the papers you want drawn up? And send him to you in the morning?' she says as they move.

He nods. He's forgotten the whole conversation already, she can see. He just wants to be stroked and comforted and tucked into bed.

She blows kisses all the slow tiptoeing way to the door, gentle kisses, as if to a baby. His eyes are shut long before she gets there.

But once she's out on the other side, she picks up her skirts and runs, as fast as she can, down the corridor, feeling the power in her legs, pushing her up and away, rejoicing as she goes in the quickness of her breath and the pink on her cheeks and the heat of the blood coursing through her. She can't help herself. After hours of going so slow, she has to celebrate being young and alive.

And she has to find William Latimer, fast.

The candlelight is reflected in his eyes.

The servant has gone.

The lean tanned face is showing its deep lines. Lord Latimer's smile is a lion's casual snarl, eyes half-closed with sheer pleasure, head stretching luxuriously back on the neck, a beast of prey feeling the power of himself. He must have been a devil with the women in his time. 'It doesn't stop here, you know,' he's saying. Quietly - half-growl, half-purr. 'Or it needn't. If you wanted to go further.'

She stays still. What can he mean? They've solved every problem already, haven't they?

But there's always further to go. There's always a refinement. She's always known that. So Alice raises her eyebrows just a self-possessed fraction. It won't do to look naive.

'You mean...' she says. Not quite a question. She folds her hands and waits.

The candle flickers on the table between them. Latimer looks around without moving his head, just a flicker of eyes - he has an old soldier's stillness about him - but there are no open doors or windows in this room bare of hangings. He puts his elbows on the table. He leans forward until his eyes are burning so close to Alice that they seem to separate and float, four golden-green circles over very white teeth, bared. He breathes, 'The debt he'll be buying. Lyons. The discounted debt...'

Alice waits. His excitement is catching. She's no longer as composed as she would have liked to be. She can feel her body leaning forward, closer and closer, until her face is nearly touching his - as if they're lovers, about to kiss. Her heart beats faster.

'...fifty marks for every hundred borrowed from the Crown.'

Alice says, in a monotone, 'Yes.'

'Imagine if you were to buy those debt papers on from Lyons. Pay a bit more. Sixty marks, say. He'd be glad of the profit...'

'Yes...' Be patient, Alice tells herself. It doesn't do to sound mystified.

'Then, once they were your bonds, you'd cash them in at the King's treasury...'

'Yes,' Alice says, nostrils flaring, already scenting the beginning of the answer.

'...at face value.'

Alice stops breathing. It seems a long time before she realises her body has stopped obeying her, and tells her chest to expand and take in air, and let it out.

She says, and she no longer cares that her voice is trembling, 'You mean - I'd buy something for sixty marks, and exchange it for a hundred marks straight from the treasury?'

Doubling my money, or just about. Though Latimer would want a cut.

He nods. 'We'd split the profit.'

The candle flickers, but neither of them notices any more. All Alice can see is those golden orbs, dancing before her eyes.

After a long silence, she says, flat-voiced again, 'How?'

But she knows. The three hundred people of the royal household are divided into two layers, the upper one of which, the
domus magnificencie
, numbers more than a hundred people, and centres on the King's chamber. It's run by Latimer. It's Latimer who formally controls access to the royal presence. It's Latimer who chooses the chamber staff of knights and esquires of the body, the King's closest attendants (apart from Alice). He's also in charge of the steward who's in charge of the
domus providencie
, the lower part of the household, that teeming mass of people inhabiting kitchens and butteries and pantries and spiceries and stables, and of the money kept and doled out to the traders and farmers who supply the court, as well as to the King's creditors, by the lower royal purse: the cofferer, the comptroller, and the man in charge of royal finance, the treasurer. Sir Richard Scrope: unruly hair, big bony knees and elbows, flaking skin on a brow furrowed from the counting of coin, a man with anxious, short-sighted eyes.

Somewhere very close to Alice, the white teeth flash again.

'I'm the chamberlain,' Latimer says through his grin. 'I can make it all right with Scrope. He's not a man for trouble.'

'Him...yes...anything for a quiet life,' Alice agrees, for the sake of saying something pleasant - but almost absentmindedly. She has blood drumming through her head, a great fast tattoo of it. She's thinking.

They'll...They'd make fortunes doing this. If they did it. She and Latimer would be rich beyond their wildest dreams.

But...it would also undo so much of the good that the deal she's dreamed up between King and merchants is supposed to bring to Edward, and the merchants, and the Duke of Lancaster, and the whole realm of England. She and Latimer (and probably Lyons, because, realistically, he'd find out, soon enough, and they'd have to cut him in too, wouldn't they?) would be taking at least some of the money meant for the war.

She'd be stealing from Edward, who loves her.

She'd be breaking faith with her new ally, his son, whose protection she wants.

But, then again, they almost certainly wouldn't ever find out. No one ever does, unless you're very unlucky.

And how rich she'd be.

As she ponders, a picture forms behind her eyes. Edward, lying back against his cushions, his beard damp and combed into wet grey seaweed strands, blissfully unaware of her quiet disgust at the sore on his ankle, just enjoying the smell of the lavender oil she's massaging into it, snorting and grunting like an old animal, and not even bothering to listen as she explains how he could save his finances.

The ingratitude of him, she thinks.

And another picture. Edward, exhausted, eyes closing despite himself, and the trusting way he leans his weight on her as she shuffles him to the bed. He doesn't realise that he's so heavy, even now, in his touching helplessness, that she never quite knows if she'll be able to find the strength to heave him forward.

Or perhaps he just doesn't care.

For a moment, she's overwhelmed by the vision of the selfishness of old age that comes to her. Perhaps he'd be just as carelessly grateful to anyone young and willing, anyone who'd make him feel, for a moment here and a moment there, that he could push back the darkness and grab an extra hour or two of life.

It doesn't matter to him that she's the one beside him, she thinks, with a spike of silent rage. Letting him borrow her vigour and energy. Anyone would do.

'What do you think?' she hears.

She's been so lost in her thoughts - the will-I, won't-I whirligig - that she hasn't realised she's dropped her eyes till, recognising the suppressed impatience in Latimer's voice, she darts them quickly back up to his. A guilty thing surprised.

She shakes her head.

For once, she doesn't care if there's indecision on her face or in her voice. There's indecision in her heart too.

'I don't know,' she says.

Latimer's no fool. She can see, from the velvet look he gives her, that he's following her thoughts.

He purrs, 'My dear. You must think of yourself a little, you know.'

There's a longer silence. She wanted to be told that. She wanted to be cajoled. Still, Alice feels her face grow thoughtful - sullen, almost.

She looks down again. But she hears every word he says next.

'You have to think of your own future. This' - he pauses, giving them both time to hear the unspoken word,
he
- 'isn't going to last for ever, you know.'

She mutters, 'But the war...that money was going to help with the war...'

But Latimer must hear doubt, or insincerity, in that. He caps her: '...which will never be won if Duke John is leading it. There's no point in more war, with him.'

She looks straight at him now. She's beginning to lose the numbness she's felt for all these long moments with Latimer's eyes on her, a paralysis brought on by even contemplating this giant stride towards fully fledged dishonesty. She keeps thinking, instead, about how rich she'll be if she says yes. It's strange what a warming thought that is; how damp her skin, how fast her pulse. He nods encouragingly. His eyes are dancing, inviting her to laugh with him.

'A good peace is better for England than a bad war, isn't it?' he adds, scenting victory, suddenly almost jocular with relief. 'Honestly? And far cheaper, too.'

She'll be rich.

The silence yawns on. His hazel-gold eyes are on hers.

Both of them are almost surprised when Alice laughs, and takes a deep breath, and says, in her firmest, most resolute voice, 'Yes.'

SEVEN

Fortune's Wheel

Alice doesn't sleep well, that first night at Sheen. She tosses and turns. She's up before dawn. She's uneasy enough about what she's said to Lord Latimer that she makes her excuses to Edward, before he's even properly awake, gets his permission, and rides off, back through London, east to Essex.

She needs to talk to Aunty.

When Alice was only a girl, delivering tiles to St Albans with her old Aunty Alison on the cart (she can still hear old Aunty's indulgent voice saying, 'You've been a good girl, show you a bit of the world, why not?'), she saw a picture in stained glass in the church window there that she's kept in her heart all her life.

It's a picture you see all over the place. There are a lot of other people in post-Mortality England who are obsessed with the goddess Fortune and her wheel. She features in the rose window of churches all over the land.

There's nothing very Christian about Fortune, of course. But the priests turn a blind eye to the goddess's inconvenient paganness, because she packs in the crowds at Mass. To the brave, and to the chancers, and the gamblers, and the opportunists, Fortune represents hope: that effortless climb to the top of the wheel. But what she also represents - the capricious destruction of the greedy, later on - suits the gloomy, doomy mood of everyone else.

You see envy in the narrow eyes of every stay-at-home who doesn't dare venture out to try his luck in the rough new game of life, these days. Anyone who isn't making a quick fortune wants anyone who is to get his come-uppance quick. So thinking of the punishment Fortune has waiting at the end of the wheel she spins pleases the dourest of congregations in the churches, looking bitterly up at the rose windows, as much as the promise of hope pleases the people with dreams in their hearts.

What the congregation sees in the window: Fortune, that temptress, that slut, smiles temptingly down, in jewel-bright light, luring people on to take a chance, to jump on her wheel, to make their name, to get rich quick.

And this is what happens next to the humans whirling round their little bubbles of coloured glass, chancing a dance with the goddess: once she's hooked someone in, you'll see her willing victim on her left, clinging to the turning wheel as it moves upwards, clockwise. This happy human figure with everything still to come has sun-kissed hair flying down and back as it floats effortlessly towards the top, with the prideful little word
regnabo
, which Alice likes to translate as 'I'm going to have it all', floating above their prideful little head.

Above Fortune's head, hanging on at the very top of the turning wheel, is a second little human figure who's happier still. This one crows,
regno
, 'I'm at the top!' in the same cramped black letters.

But it's the other side that most interests the losers in the congregation, because the wheel that has brought those human figures up keeps turning, and down they go again.

It's the terror on the face of the little figure to Fortune's right that these people like to gloat over, the terror of someone being whirled back downwards by the wheel, realising it's all over, that day of glory, never to return, and howling, 'I'm finished',
regnavi.
Best of all is the abjectness of the last little person, right at the bottom, dropping off the wheel, being trampled under Fortune's careless feet. 'Sum sine regno,' it whimpers. 'I've been left with nothing.'

Quite right too, says the congregation, through smugly pursed lips. Pride goes before a fall.

Alice remembers looking up at the first of these great glowing stained-glass temptations she ever saw, and saying to Aunty, a bit defiantly, in the way of children trying to find words for a serious idea, but still afraid they'll be laughed at for being naive, 'I don't see why you have to be destroyed by Fortune's wheel. Why can't you just get off when you've got where you want - stop at the top?'

And she remembers Aunty laughing, but kindly, in that way she's always had, of seeming peacefully to know what's what, without even trying, and answering, 'I know just what you mean, dear. The great trick to life is knowing when to stop.'

Alice must already have known, even back then, when she first saw Fortune, when she was, what, nine or ten, that she would try and hitch a lift on the wheel, too, as soon as she possibly could. She must already have been thinking out how.

But she couldn't have guessed how soon her chance would come.

It came on another uncertain day, back in Essex, and Alice a quick girl of eleven or so chasing Johnny and Wat and Tom through a cloud of cow-parsley, and everyone whooping and red-faced and light with laughter, when one of the boys - Wat, maybe, whoever was up ahead - stopped. So they all stopped. They were good like that - took their cues from each other, got the hint as quick as they could, a wink here, a nod there. They trusted each other, all old Alison's brood of waifs and strays, being brought up together, as if they were real brothers and sisters. So now they hunched down in the ditch beside him, stilling their breath, ragged and sharp-eyed, looking to see what he'd seen.

And there they were, a whole family of newcomers, leading horses back from the stream to the road, a lanky mother, complaining in an undertone, a henpecked-looking husband nodding his head and patting hopelessly at the air with his hands, five daughters, walking in order of size, the oldest only a bit smaller than Alice, but all with the same air of yawning discontent, and, still astride on a pony tied by a string to the manservant's nag, a little boy, half-asleep, nodding from side to side with the animal's movement. All in clothes without a tear or a mend in them. And every horse oat-fed and bright and fat as a barrel.

Sometimes it only takes a moment. From the moment Alice stepped out through the tall weeds and, smoothing down her rags, said, in her cheeriest voice, addressing the complaining mother, whom she guessed would be likeliest to respond, 'Need any help, lady?' her future was settled.

The Champagnes let her, and the other dancing-eyed urchins, take them home to the tilery. But it was only her they saw. And when they got home, Aunty Alison took one look at the cut of their clothes and saw them right. Told Alice to mind the little boy, show him the wooden toys on the shelf, make herself useful; got the other kids measuring out drinks and cutting hunks of bread, quickly now. Over a cooling draught of ale, the mum, dusting down the stool she was sitting on with a rag before putting her genteel behind down, told Aunty everything: how they'd left London to inspect the manor she'd inherited from an uncle, who'd died in the latest bout of the Mortality, last year. How lost they'd got with no one to guide them. How they couldn't have asked for directions; they'd feared for their lives in the fleapit inn they'd stopped at last night as it was. Those eyes, staring. It was out Sudbury way, where they were going. She'd been happy enough to bed down at the kiln for the night, the mum. A few fleas in the rushes were nothing to worry about, compared to the eyes of the men out there. The dad was happy too, too. But, oh, how those smeary-faced girls had whined and complained, sniffling and turning away from their food as if it would poison them, looking round with hunted eyes at the thick walls and low roof.

'Never seen anything like it in my life,' Aunty muttered, winking at her own brood, when the little boy, pulled away from the toy Wat had brought him because his mum wanted him and his sisters to wash in the stream, started stamping his feet and shrieking the place down. 'Never been said no to, that one, that's for sure.' Then, as it turned out, the kid wouldn't have anyone but Alice take him to wash. Alice had had him roaring with laughter a minute before, playing with Wat's toy, snuffling, 'Giddyup giddyup!' as she made the imaginary farmer fall off his carved wooden horse. 'Want
her
!' he was howling, and Alice felt old Alison's eyes suddenly thoughtful on her back as she skipped the boy energetically off, away from his grey-faced, relieved parents. She could tell what Alison was thinking. She'd had the same thought already. Alice was the best of old Alison's kids, the sharpest of anyone at spotting whatever it was in the weed-grown manor houses and crumpled Mortality cottages the kids spent their days exploring that might fetch a good price, the best too at remembering what might be useful where, and to whom, and sidling up to the right person on market day to sing out, 'Wasn't it you looking for fire-irons?' or 'Didn't you say you wanted a cook-pot?' So it was natural she'd see this chance as quickly as Alison. She'd heard enough, not just from Alison, but also from the various uncles and cousins who came down from London to take away the tiles to whichever abbey or priory had put in an order, or to take on the other things the kids found, or to leave behind a new child picked up on their travels (old Alison had a soft heart for kids left, as she'd once been, to fend for themselves; and even orphans must be worth something now, with people so desperate for children). Alice had grown up with the knowledge that the streets of London were paved with gold.

She was back with the freshly washed, angelically sleepy toddler in time to hear Aunty Alison's voice, in the twilight, putting her own thought into words: 'You want someone to look after some of them for you, and my Alice, she's a good girl.' They were two of a kind, her and Aunty Alison. And Aunty, who was always telling her there was more to life than a tilery in Essex, that there was a whole world out there, just waiting to be discovered, was winking at her now, winking and grinning, as if she'd struck lucky.

She had. The next morning she was off with the family; Alice leading the little boy's pony, and ignoring the familiar eyes watching from behind the cow-parsley, and not letting herself see the thin boy-arms of Tom and Ham and Wat and Johnny and Jack waving goodbye, because she didn't want to feel sad, and she was already too busy making herself indispensible to these new friends - daisy chains for the girls, stolen apples for the little boy, bright sweet nothings for the mum and dad. She was seizing the moment.

Of course the Champagnes were bitterly disappointed when they actually saw their manor - another of the weed-shrouded ruins Alice knew so well, with its villeins long gone, off hunting higher wages somewhere. She could have told them how it would be before they started, but she was twelve, old enough to know hard truths weren't her business. So she cooed and comforted instead. She trapped them a hare to roast on a little spit. By the end of another week, when the Champagnes, already eager to forget their embarrassingly naive dream of sudden landed wealth, were sighing with relief at the sight of London on the horizon, they still had Alice with them. 'Look,' she was saying to little Tommy Champagne, managing not to look astonished herself at the great wall rearing up ahead, or the gate, or the soldiers. 'Home soon now.'

She'd always thought she would climb high. It had only ever been a question of time, and opportunity.

When, weeping, the silver-haired Master Champagne put his wife into the grave a year later, then turned to Alice the capable maidservant and wept into her hair, and stroked it, and kissed her shoulder, she didn't hesitate for a moment. She knew at once what she'd do. Even if she'd thought that you might only love - truly love - once in your life, and her true love certainly wasn't dear wrinkly old Master Champagne, whose egg always went down his front in a forgetful yellow trail, she also knew there'd be no harm in him. He'd do for now.

A good man he turned out, too, in the rest of his short time in this vale of tears. He let her be the sturdy, independent sort of person she was. He laughed at her stories. In return for her good humour at sharing a bed with a spindle-shanked, grey-skinned old husband, he also became a more willing giver of ribbons from the fair than his daughters remembered him having been before. Also of new robes, not just the old mistress's altered in the details, and (as Alice's knowledge of what she might ask for increased) embroidery silks, and finally even French lessons, so she could act the lady rather than the baker's wife with Master Champagne's well-heeled clients.

Master Champagne loved the idea of his wife chatting in French with the gentry so much that he never said a cross word, or had an ugly thought, either, about the merry friendship Alice had had in those months before he passed away with the curly-haired young French master from Hainault. Young Jean Froissart was glad enough to earn some extra pennies as he set himself up in England, just by spending an afternoon in the City every week or two, chatting to a nice-looking girl so eager to learn; it all worked out well for everyone. As old Aunty Alison always said, 'Pick up whatever you can by the wayside; you never know when it might come in handy.'

The French lessons paid off, all right, though maybe not as Tom Champagne expected. Or Alice, either, come to that.

Eight months after their marriage, he left behind the fuss and bustle of earthly life. He died straining on the chamber pot in the night, an indignity that Alice tactfully tidied up, when she woke up in the morning to find him cold on the floor, before calling for the servants. The poor old dear, she thought, opening the windows, having rearranged him, and wiped him down, and covered and hidden the pot; how he'd hate to have been seen like that. The French lessons were swapped for widow's weeds. But a certain Master Perrers of Hainault, who'd advanced the Champagne family some money so their baking business could be expanded, and thus been part of the discussions with the lawyers that marked the settlement of the estate, had been as impressed by the young widow's few words of elegantly pronounced French as he had by her sudden fortune (or so he said). Master Perrers, a plump lover of the pleasures of the table, who could be reduced to ecstatic groans by a good description of a rich sauce or a fine wine, was old enough, and foolish enough, to enjoy Alice's flattering suggestion that he might be related to the gentry family of Perrers who'd once bought tiles from the kiln. Not that she'd told him, exactly, that this was her connection with that noble family; she couldn't recall exactly, but she just might have teased him with the idea that those Perrerses were distant cousins of her own, for it pleased him so to think she might have a drop of gentry blood in her, and how would he, as a foreigner, ever know the difference? It did no harm. In any event, what with one thing and another, Master Perrers quickly stepped into the baker's shoes, and married her at the church door forty days after Tom Champagne's funeral. Bar a change of address and a different set of servants and the need to go visiting if she wanted to see little Tommy or the rest of the 'children' of her first marriage (the eldest of the girls now grown-up enough to take over the care of the little boy, while an aunt tried to find the daughters husbands), her new life with a different rich, indulgent, older merchant soon became all but indistinguishable from before. Once you got out of the gutter, the Alice of those days was given to thinking, once you didn't have to rush about emptying chamber pots or stealing from ruins any more to keep body and soul together, pleasing people became a much simpler question of vocabulary. Before, in the old house, it had been frisky bed-accented French, all oui, monseigneur, and oh la la, the muscles on the man, morning noon and night, with happy little whiffles of pleasure back from him. Now all she needed to make a new man happy was to talk recipes - the grander and more full of expensive ingredients the better. How intently he listened. How carefully he repeated it all back, imagining every flavour with brain and tongue, and grunting with joy: 'Cream
and
nutmeg
and
cinnamon
and
pepper? Baked
in
the peacock's juices? Gnn-h!'