The People's Queen (20 page)

He winks. She doesn't think anyone else has seen. It makes her smile inside.

She can hear them whisper behind her, then start to mutter, as she sweeps out.

'Bloody marvellous,' Wat says, coming up for air from his tankard of ale. There is scum on his upper lip. 'You were incredible. And there was me thinking, I'm done for this time. Until you showed up.'

They clink cups. He winks. She's grinning like a lunatic, too, drinking him in.

They've already cautiously skirted the question of her status. 'You cleaned up good then,' Wat said, nodding a few times, and then, jerking his head down to her skirts: 'Yellow suits you. Nice bit of stuff, that.' He hasn't said, exactly, that he knows her to be Edward's concubine; but it's obvious, from something in the restraint and respect of him, that he knows. They're waiting to go through some of the lesser stuff before they start on that conversation. They need some jokes they can be sure they share first.

They're in a dark corner in the back of the tavern, in the empty space in the day between sext and the dinner hour. No one is listening as Wat drops his voice and mutters through what got him into trouble. It seems he's worked for Richard Lyons ever since he came back from the wars...

Before that, Wat has also been telling her, he'd gone from fighting in France for the Duke's older brother, the Prince, back in the day, to the altogether more cheerful robber-baron life of a mercenary in the Free Companies rampaging through Burgundy and Normandy and Champagne and Languedoc and Savoy and the Italian states. Those were the days, he's said reminiscently, out with the King of the Companies, Seguin de Badefol, leaping on some rich merchant or other from Toulouse or La Riolle or Bergerac: 'And never a day that passed without some bit of something falling into our laps to make us richer and happier. It was all ours...all just there for the taking. The peasants of Auvergne brought supplies to our castle, wheat and flour and fresh bread and hay for the horses and good wine and beef and mutton and fat lambs and poultry. We ate like kings. And when we rode out the country trembled at the sight of us.'

Alice knows those stories. The routiers and condottieri of the Free Companies, who fight the wars of whichever prince will pay their fees, and amuse themselves in between times, are said to commit every kind of crime: from eating meat in Lent to slitting open pregnant women to kill their unborn and unbaptised children. The countryside of the southern lands is supposed to be full of their victims: a sea of vagabonds - priests without parishes; destitute peasants; artisans looking for work. 'So you', Alice says, 'were one of the famous sons of iniquity...' The Pope calls them that when they rob churches. But the Pope also uses them regularly. Alice knows she sounds a little breathless. She can't altogether keep the admiration out of her voice. If she'd been a man, she thinks, she might have done exactly the same thing as Wat, to better herself fast.

Wat winks and, with the feel of a foreigner, says, with rolling r's and suddenly spread-out hands, '
Perfidi e sceller-atissimi...
yeah, that's us.' Knowledgeably, he adds, 'If God Himself were a soldier, he'd be a robber.'

So Wat was doing very nicely for himself, until he got into a spot of bother with a man in Mantua. He doesn't say what bother, just touches the side of his damaged nose - meaning a secret - and winks. He had to leave in a hurry and escape home. Leave it all behind: the houses, the lands, the horses, the good clothes, the bags of treasure. 'Still, that's the way it works,' he adds philosophically. 'Easy come, easy go. Plenty more where that came from to be found here, if you only know where to look.'

They look at each other, and grin, remembering Aunty's favourite phrase. It's Alice who starts saying it, though Wat joins in. 'The streets of London are paved with gold, if you only know where to look!'

Back in England, Wat says, when the laughing's done, he couldn't have hoped for a better master than Master Lyons. He's done all kinds of jobs for Lyons in his time, but the latest job has been the best. Lyons, it turns out, has been using his new customs inspection job, which he asked Alice earlier this year to help him secure, to employ large numbers of heavies - under Wat's control - at the south coast ports. Officially, ostensibly, they're there to check on wrongdoing during the loading and unloading of cargoes. But of course there's other stuff going on too, on the side.

Sometimes they take cash bribes. (This is where Wat's come unstuck just now. One of his men picked on the wrong sort - some merchant with an inflated sense of his own honesty, and a bigger gang of heavies than Wat could lay hands on at that moment.) But that's not the only extra deal Lyons has going on. This is the part of Wat's story that most interests Alice. The most important job-on-the-side has been to confiscate and impound a huge proportion of the foreign foodstuffs imported by the big three London merchants, the grocers. Lyons is stockpiling the pepper and the spices entering England - grocers' imports. It's an indirect trade attack, not on Walworth the fishmonger, but certainly on his two closest allies in the City, Brembre and Philpot. Wat doesn't know why Lyons has gone for this, not for sure, but it stands to reason Lyons will try and sell the goods himself, later on, at an inflated price, having cornered the market.

Lyons is always two or three tricks ahead of the rest. You never quite know, with Lyons, where things are going. At first Alice just thinks, with dawning understanding: So he's taking on the grocers. I see. His war with Walworth and his men is hotting up. Next she thinks, with more resentment than she'd have expected against her City business partner, so charming yet so violently coloured, so orange and pink and purple, the man whose business she's been out doing today: He never told
me
about that. Shouldn't he have?

'Penny for them,' Wat says, still the same boy, tiptilted nose, sunsplotches, aware of her mood, even if he now has this coarser, uglier, stranger's version of his face, and she realises she's been sitting in silence, she doesn't know for how long, wondering about Lyons.

She laughs, a bit uneasily. 'Oh, just thinking,' she says, feeling her own intonations go back to a time before she spoke French, or knew courtiers. 'You never bloody well know with Richard Lyons...what he's up to. Do you?'

He grins back, but glassily. He doesn't know. He doesn't care, either, she sees, as long as Lyons pays. He's too happy-go-lucky to bother his head with complications.

Perhaps she should feel the same way.

She tries the same kind of big bland grin. 'Ah well. He's loyal. He got you out today,' she says resignedly. Resentment prickles. 'Or at least, I did.'

She sees Wat's sudden regret at having turned the conversation only to himself. How many chances will he get in life to sit drinking with the King of England's mistress?

'You saved my bacon,' he says hastily. 'I know that.' He's drinking her in again with those cheery dancing eyes. He's practised that merry roguish look over the years, she realises. He uses it to fob off trouble. He goes on: 'Not good at fine words, but you know I'm grateful.' Rather shyly, he adds, in a slower voice, 'I don't know what to ask you about your life. I mean, a lot I know already...' He flaps a helpless hand at her rich clothes.

How easy to know about her life, she realises, suddenly sympathetic again. She's famous (or infamous). They make up songs about her in the taverns of London. What can he possibly ask that he doesn't already know?

'Don't know everything, though. How did you...' He hesitates, looking a boy again. '...meet...him?'

Her laugh is short and without much humour. Before she speaks next, she understands with surprise that what she's been feeling, as Wat speaks, is envy.

She's been envying the freedom and straightforwardness of his life: here one day, somewhere else the next, always someone new to shake down, and always a tomorrow to wake up to.

What can she tell Wat about all her yesterdays? A little caustically, she answers, 'Well, obviously, I was always going to end up with some rich old man. Not much else to do, if you're a girl.' And he nods. She can see him imagining that. Not liking the idea much, perhaps. She can even see him sympathising, a little. But not pitying her. Neither of them does pity.

He says, 'I suppose not.'

She misses out the merchant husbands. Wat saw the first one, for a few hours, when the lost, footsore Champagne family stopped that first night at the tilery, once they'd got themselves properly lost in Essex, looking for the manor that some distant relative's death in the Mortality had brought them. He'll have worked out that she married the dad, surely? And that the manor was a hopeless ruin, and that she became a London baker's wife? He can sketch the rest in for himself. She misses out Froissart, too, the French teacher Tom Champagne hired, coming across her again as a comely widow, the resumed French lessons now she had her own money, the cheerful lovemaking now she was her own mistress. Not that little Jean Froissart really wanted her, not for ever. He was in love, by then, once he'd been made the Queen's official chronicler, with the great idea of chivalry, the romance of ladies and knights and impossible quests. And, like everyone else at court, he was at least halfway to being in love with the Queen his employer. He couldn't stop talking about her. The Queen, so beautiful; the Queen, so loving; the Queen, so good. The Queen, fifty if she was a day by then. But she'd given him, a town boy, a job at court. No wonder he loved her. Alice Perrers was ever only an interruption to him, a bit of reality before he went back to his dreams and his stories. Still, Jean knew Alice had her way to make in the world, like him, and he was a generous lad. He got Alice her first taste of court. He took her to a tournament. 'I want you to speak to the Queen in your French,' he said excitedly beforehand. 'I want you to tell her I taught you everything you know. She will be so impressed.'

Alice discards all that, now. 'Someone took me to a joust,' she says calmly, remembering sitting over the street on the ladies' platform as the men charged below, but remembering, better, Queen Philippa's great wrinkled moon of a face, the kindly look in those faded blue eyes, and the gratitude when Alice noticed her little shiver of pain and came forward to attend to her. 'And the Queen took a fancy to me. It was a bit of luck really. One of her sons had got one of her ladies-in-waiting knocked up. There was a vacancy. She gave me the place.'

Wat nods, meditatively, and whistles through his teeth. 'Like you say,' he says, looking at her with slow admiration. 'Your lucky day.'

It's as if all those years since they last talked have been a dream. There are ways she'll never be able to trust anyone as she can trust Wat. They know each other too well to need pretence. They can talk.

Her prickles vanish. She finds herself telling him more, or beginning to: more private things. She tells him about meeting William of Windsor soon after she got to court (though not the shiver when she first felt his quiet blue eyes on her; not the tumultuous feelings that had so astonished her. She thinks Wat will understand other things better). A knight from Northumberland, she says; done well in France. Just back from Ireland with the King's son Lionel of Ulster, the one who died.

'You'd have done well to marry
him
,' Wat says. 'Been a lady. Gone north.'

'But,' she says, and she realises she's never really talked about this to anyone, since the difficult time when she was deciding what to do. Never had cause. It makes her uneasy. 'Then, the King...'

'Yeah,' Wat says sympathetically. 'You chose different. Course you did. Anyone would, in your shoes.' He laughs. He has a friendly, uncomplicated laugh. It draws her in.

She sees she doesn't need to tell him the rest - the details. He understands the important stuff anyway. Just as well, too, maybe. As old Alison always said, best keep mum unless you need to talk.

She breaks the companionable silence that follows by asking: 'Have you ever come across the others?'

He shakes his head. Not really. He says, 'I heard Johnny's in Kent. Has a bit of land and a family. But...no one else.'

The words open up an uncrossable gulf between Johnny, who with Wat used to be her favourite of the nearly 'brothers', and her. She imagines Johnny with peasant children, and a weathered, simple face. None of Wat's deadpan intelligence in that other man's eyes. She thinks: I won't be looking Johnny up.

She says, 'You know I've moved Aunty Alison to live with me?'

She's startled when Wat replies, calmly, 'At Gaines. 'Course.'

'You knew?' she asks. 'Did you?'

He nods. 'Been there, in't I? Couple of times. Saw the kids and all.' His calm face opens. 'Growing up good, they are, all three of them. Nice boy. The little girl. Joan, Jane? The younger one? Got spirit. And she's the dead spit of you.'

There's a glow on both their faces when they leave the Dancing Bear. The jug is empty. There's a glow in Alice's heart too. It's been good to find this man, who's so like kin. She's happy Fortune's sent him her way again.

Before they part, she gives him money: quite a lot of it, in a leather purse that clinks with gold. He weighs it in his hand, raises his eyebrow, then, impulsively, kisses her. She says, 'Now don't get ideas,' and wags a finger in his face. 'There's no more where that came from, not for you. And we'd best not meet, either.'

He nods. He's Lyons' hit-man. He lives in the shadows. Being known to know each other could compromise them both. 'I was thinking that myself,' he says.

But it's not good enough, that. She sees his uncertain look. Neither of them have words, or behaviour, that adequately express feelings, those unnecessary luxuries. 'But we can always get in touch if we need to,' she adds, in a half-question. 'Can't we? Through Aunty?'

He nods again. He looks happier with that. 'She'll know where to find me,' he promises thickly. 'She always will. Good old Aunty.' He reaches a hand out to her shoulder. He pats it. He can't bring himself to say goodbye. 'Till next time,' he says, finally, and she sees tears in his eyes.